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China's Great Cannon

Citizen Lab has issued a report on China’s “Great Cannon” attack tool, used in the recent DDoS attack against GitHub.

We show that, while the attack infrastructure is co-located with the Great Firewall, the attack was carried out by a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design, that we term the “Great Cannon.” The Great Cannon is not simply an extension of the Great Firewall, but a distinct attack tool that hijacks traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses, and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content as a man-in-the-middle.

The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users. Specifically, the Cannon manipulates the traffic of “bystander” systems outside China, silently programming their browsers to create a massive DDoS attack. While employed for a highly visible attack in this case, the Great Cannon clearly has the capability for use in a manner similar to the NSA’s QUANTUM system, affording China the opportunity to deliver exploits targeting any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully utilizing HTTPS.

It’s kind of hard for the US to complain about this kind of thing, since we do it too.

More stories. Hacker News thread.

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Posted on April 13, 2015 at 9:12 AM • View Comments

Alternatives to the FBI's Manufacturing of Terrorists

John Mueller suggests an alternative to the FBI’s practice of encouraging terrorists and then arresting them for something they would have never have planned on their own:

The experience with another case can be taken to suggest that there could be an alternative, and far less costly, approach to dealing with would-be terrorists, one that might generally (but not always) be effective at stopping them without actually having to jail them.

It involves a hothead in Virginia who ranted about jihad on Facebook, bragging about how “we dropped the twin towers.” He then told a correspondent in New Orleans that he was going to bomb the Washington, D.C. Metro the next day. Not wanting to take any chances and not having the time to insinuate an informant, the FBI arrested him. Not surprisingly, they found no bomb materials in his possession. Since irresponsible bloviating is not illegal (if it were, Washington would quickly become severely underpopulated), the police could only charge him with a minor crime—making an interstate threat. He received only a good scare, a penalty of time served and two years of supervised release.

That approach seems to have worked: the guy seems never to have been heard from again. It resembles the Secret Service’s response when they get a tip that someone has ranted about killing the president. They do not insinuate an encouraging informant into the ranter’s company to eventually offer crucial, if bogus, facilitating assistance to the assassination plot. Instead, they pay the person a Meaningful Visit and find that this works rather well as a dissuasion device. Also, in the event of a presidential trip to the ranter’s vicinity, the ranter is visited again. It seems entirely possible that this approach could productively be applied more widely in terrorism cases. Ranting about killing the president may be about as predictive of violent action as ranting about the virtues of terrorism to deal with a political grievance. The terrorism cases are populated by many such ranters­—indeed, tips about their railing have frequently led to FBI involvement. It seems likely, as apparently happened in the Metro case, that the ranter could often be productively deflected by an open visit from the police indicating that they are on to him. By contrast, sending in a paid operative to worm his way into the ranter’s confidence may have the opposite result, encouraging, even gulling, him toward violence.

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Posted on April 10, 2015 at 10:33 AM • View Comments

Lone-Wolf Terrorism

The Southern Poverty Law Center warns of the rise of lone-wolf terrorism.

From a security perspective, lone wolves are much harder to prevent because there is no conspiracy to detect.

The long-term trend away from violence planned and committed by groups and toward lone wolf terrorism is a worrying one. Authorities have had far more success penetrating plots concocted by several people than individuals who act on their own. Indeed, the lone wolf’s chief asset is the fact that no one else knows of his plans for violence and they are therefore exceedingly difficult to disrupt.

[…]

The temptation to focus on horrific groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State is wholly understandable. And the federal government recently has taken steps to address the terrorist threat more comprehensively, with Attorney General Eric Holder announcing the coming reconstitution of the Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee. There has been a recent increase in funding for studies of terrorism and radicalization, and the FBI has produced a number of informative reports.

And Holder seems to understand clearly that lone wolves and small cells are an increasing threat. “It’s something that frankly keeps me up at night, worrying about the lone wolf or a group of people, a very small group of people, who decide to get arms on their own and do what we saw in France,” he said recently.

Jim Harper of the Cato Institute wrote about this in 2009 after the Fort Hood shooting.

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Posted on April 8, 2015 at 10:15 AM • View Comments

Cell Phone Opsec

Here’s an article on making secret phone calls with cell phones.

His step-by-step instructions for making a clandestine phone call are as follows:

  1. Analyze your daily movements, paying special attention to anchor points (basis of operation like home or work) and dormant periods in schedules (8-12 p.m. or when cell phones aren’t changing locations);
  2. Leave your daily cell phone behind during dormant periods and purchase a prepaid no-contract cell phone (“burner phone”);
  3. After storing burner phone in a Faraday bag, activate it using a clean computer connected to a public Wi-Fi network;
  4. Encrypt the cell phone number using a onetime pad (OTP) system and rename an image file with the encrypted code. Using Tor to hide your web traffic, post the image to an agreed upon anonymous Twitter account, which signals a communications request to your partner;
  5. Leave cell phone behind, avoid anchor points, and receive phone call from partner on burner phone at 9:30 p.m.­—or another pre-arranged “dormant” time­—on the following day;
  6. Wipe down and destroy handset.

    Note that it actually makes sense to use a one-time pad in this instance. The message is a ten-digit number, and a one-time pad is easier, faster, and cleaner than using any computer encryption program.

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    Posted on April 7, 2015 at 9:27 AM • View Comments

    TrueCrypt Security Audit Completed

    The security audit of the TrueCrypt code has been completed (see here for the first phase of the audit), and the results are good. Some issues were found, but nothing major.

    From Matthew Green, who is leading the project:

    The TL;DR is that based on this audit, Truecrypt appears to be a relatively well-designed piece of crypto software. The NCC audit found no evidence of deliberate backdoors, or any severe design flaws that will make the software insecure in most instances.

    That doesn’t mean Truecrypt is perfect. The auditors did find a few glitches and some incautious programming—leading to a couple of issues that could, in the right circumstances, cause Truecrypt to give less assurance than we’d like it to.

    Nothing that would make me not use the program, though.

    Slashdot thread.

    Posted on April 3, 2015 at 1:14 PM • View Comments

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    Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.