FBI's Exploit Against Tor
The Department of Justice is dropping all charges in a child-porn case rather than release the details of a hack against Tor.
Entries Tagged "FBI"
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Cloudflare's Experience with a National Security Letter
Interesting post on Cloudflare’s experience with receiving a National Security Letter.
News article.
A Comment on the Trump Dossier
Imagine that you are someone in the CIA, concerned about the future of America. You have this Russian dossier on Donald Trump, which you have some evidence might be true. The smartest thing you can do is to leak it to the public. By doing so, you are eliminating any leverage Russia has over Trump and probably reducing the effectiveness of any other blackmail material any government might have on Trump. I believe you do this regardless of whether you ultimately believe the document’s findings or not, and regardless of whether you support or oppose Trump. It’s simple game-theory.
This document is particularly safe to release. Because it’s not a classified report of the CIA, leaking it is not a crime. And you release it now, before Trump becomes president, because doing so afterwards becomes much more dangerous.
MODERATION NOTE: Please keep comments focused on this particular point. More general comments, especially uncivil comments, will be deleted.
Recovering an iPhone 5c Passcode
Remember the San Bernardino killer’s iPhone, and how the FBI maintained that they couldn’t get the encryption key without Apple providing them with a universal backdoor? Many of us computer-security experts said that they were wrong, and there were several possible techniques they could use. One of them was manually removing the flash chip from the phone, extracting the memory, and then running a brute-force attack without worrying about the phone deleting the key.
The FBI said it was impossible. We all said they were wrong. Now, Sergei Skorobogatov has proved them wrong. Here’s his paper:
Abstract: This paper is a short summary of a real world mirroring attack on the Apple iPhone 5c passcode retry counter under iOS 9. This was achieved by desoldering the NAND Flash chip of a sample phone in order to physically access its connection to the SoC and partially reverse engineering its proprietary bus protocol. The process does not require any expensive and sophisticated equipment. All needed parts are low cost and were obtained from local electronics distributors. By using the described and successful hardware mirroring process it was possible to bypass the limit on passcode retry attempts. This is the first public demonstration of the working prototype and the real hardware mirroring process for iPhone 5c. Although the process can be improved, it is still a successful proof-of-concept project. Knowledge of the possibility of mirroring will definitely help in designing systems with better protection. Also some reliability issues related to the NAND memory allocation in iPhone 5c are revealed. Some future research directions are outlined in this paper and several possible countermeasures are suggested. We show that claims that iPhone 5c NAND mirroring was infeasible were ill-advised.
Susan Landau explains why this is important:
The moral of the story? It’s not, as the FBI has been requesting, a bill to make it easier to access encrypted communications, as in the proposed revised Burr-Feinstein bill. Such “solutions” would make us less secure, not more so. Instead we need to increase law enforcement’s capabilities to handle encrypted communications and devices. This will also take more funding as well as redirection of efforts. Increased security of our devices and simultaneous increased capabilities of law enforcement are the only sensible approach to a world where securing the bits, whether of health data, financial information, or private emails, has become of paramount importance.
Or: The FBI needs computer-security expertise, not backdoors.
Patrick Ball writes about the dangers of backdoors.
EDITED TO ADD (9/23): Good article from the Economist.
New Presidential Directive on Incident Response
Last week, President Obama issued a policy directive (PPD-41) on cyber-incident response coordination. The FBI is in charge, which is no surprise. Actually, there’s not much surprising in the document. I suppose it’s important to formalize this stuff, but I think it’s what happens now.
News article. Brief analysis. The FBI’s perspective.
The Security of Our Election Systems
Russia was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded.
The FBI is investigating. WikiLeaks promises there is more data to come. The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack.
If the intelligence community has indeed ascertained that Russia is to blame, our government needs to decide what to do in response. This is difficult because the attacks are politically partisan, but it is essential. If foreign governments learn that they can influence our elections with impunity, this opens the door for future manipulations, both document thefts and dumps like this one that we see and more subtle manipulations that we don’t see.
Retaliation is politically fraught and could have serious consequences, but this is an attack against our democracy. We need to confront Russian President Vladimir Putin in some way politically, economically or in cyberspace and make it clear that we will not tolerate this kind of interference by any government. Regardless of your political leanings this time, there’s no guarantee the next country that tries to manipulate our elections will share your preferred candidates.
Even more important, we need to secure our election systems before autumn. If Putin’s government has already used a cyberattack to attempt to help Trump win, there’s no reason to believe he won’t do it again especially now that Trump is inviting the “help.”
Over the years, more and more states have moved to electronic voting machines and have flirted with Internet voting. These systems are insecure and vulnerable to attack.
But while computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified.
We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers’ spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines’ and systems’ resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can’t guarantee their security online.
Longer term, we need to return to election systems that are secure from manipulation. This means voting machines with voter-verified paper audit trails, and no Internet voting. I know it’s slower and less convenient to stick to the old-fashioned way, but the security risks are simply too great.
There are other ways to attack our election system on the Internet besides hacking voting machines or changing vote tallies: deleting voter records, hijacking candidate or party websites, targeting and intimidating campaign workers or donors. There have already been multiple instances of political doxing publishing personal information and documents about a person or organization and we could easily see more of it in this election cycle. We need to take these risks much more seriously than before.
Government interference with foreign elections isn’t new, and in fact, that’s something the United States itself has repeatedly done in recent history. Using cyberattacks to influence elections is newer but has been done before, too most notably in Latin America. Hacking of voting machines isn’t new, either. But what is new is a foreign government interfering with a U.S. national election on a large scale. Our democracy cannot tolerate it, and we as citizens cannot accept it.
Last April, the Obama administration issued an executive order outlining how we as a nation respond to cyberattacks against our critical infrastructure. While our election technology was not explicitly mentioned, our political process is certainly critical. And while they’re a hodgepodge of separate state-run systems, together their security affects every one of us. After everyone has voted, it is essential that both sides believe the election was fair and the results accurate. Otherwise, the election has no legitimacy.
Election security is now a national security issue; federal officials need to take the lead, and they need to do it quickly.
This essay originally appeared in the Washington Post.
Tracking the Owner of Kickass Torrents
Here’s the story of how it was done. First, a fake ad on torrent listings linked the site to a Latvian bank account, an e-mail address, and a Facebook page.
Using basic website-tracking services, Der-Yeghiayan was able to uncover (via a reverse DNS search) the hosts of seven apparent KAT website domains: kickasstorrents.com, kat.cr, kickass.to, kat.ph, kastatic.com, thekat.tv and kickass.cr. This dug up two Chicago IP addresses, which were used as KAT name servers for more than four years. Agents were then able to legally gain a copy of the server’s access logs (explaining why it was federal authorities in Chicago that eventually charged Vaulin with his alleged crimes).
Using similar tools, Homeland Security investigators also performed something called a WHOIS lookup on a domain that redirected people to the main KAT site. A WHOIS search can provide the name, address, email and phone number of a website registrant. In the case of kickasstorrents.biz, that was Artem Vaulin from Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Der-Yeghiayan was able to link the email address found in the WHOIS lookup to an Apple email address that Vaulin purportedly used to operate KAT. It’s this Apple account that appears to tie all of pieces of Vaulin’s alleged involvement together.
On July 31st 2015, records provided by Apple show that the me.com account was used to purchase something on iTunes. The logs show that the same IP address was used on the same day to access the KAT Facebook page. After KAT began accepting Bitcoin donations in 2012, $72,767 was moved into a Coinbase account in Vaulin’s name. That Bitcoin wallet was registered with the same me.com email address.
Another article.
Lawful Hacking and Continuing Vulnerabilities
The FBI’s legal battle with Apple is over, but the way it ended may not be good news for anyone.
Federal agents had been seeking to compel Apple to break the security of an iPhone 5c that had been used by one of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists. Apple had been fighting a court order to cooperate with the FBI, arguing that the authorities’ request was illegal and that creating a tool to break into the phone was itself harmful to the security of every iPhone user worldwide.
Last week, the FBI told the court it had learned of a possible way to break into the phone using a third party’s solution, without Apple’s help. On Monday, the agency dropped the case because the method worked. We don’t know who that third party is. We don’t know what the method is, or which iPhone models it applies to. Now it seems like we never will.
The FBI plans to classify this access method and to use it to break into other phones in other criminal investigations.
Compare this iPhone vulnerability with another, one that was made public on the same day the FBI said it might have found its own way into the San Bernardino phone. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University announced last week that they had found a significant vulnerability in the iMessage protocol. They disclosed the vulnerability to Apple in the fall, and last Monday, Apple released an updated version of its operating system that fixed the vulnerability. (That’s iOS 9.3you should download and install it right now.) The Hopkins team didn’t publish its findings until Apple’s patch was available, so devices could be updated to protect them from attacks using the researchers’ discovery.
This is how vulnerability research is supposed to work.
Vulnerabilities are found, fixed, then published. The entire security community is able to learn from the research, and—more important—everyone is more secure as a result of the work.
The FBI is doing the exact opposite. It has been given whatever vulnerability it used to get into the San Bernardino phone in secret, and it is keeping it secret. All of our iPhones remain vulnerable to this exploit. This includes the iPhones used by elected officials and federal workers and the phones used by people who protect our nation’s critical infrastructure and carry out other law enforcement duties, including lots of FBI agents.
This is the trade-off we have to consider: do we prioritize security over surveillance, or do we sacrifice security for surveillance?
The problem with computer vulnerabilities is that they’re general. There’s no such thing as a vulnerability that affects only one device. If it affects one copy of an application, operating system or piece of hardware, then it affects all identical copies. A vulnerability in Windows 10, for example, affects all of us who use Windows 10. And it can be used by anyone who knows it, be they the FBI, a gang of cyber criminals, the intelligence agency of another country—anyone.
And once a vulnerability is found, it can be used for attack—like the FBI is doing—or for defense, as in the Johns Hopkins example.
Over years of battling attackers and intruders, we’ve learned a lot about computer vulnerabilities. They’re plentiful: vulnerabilities are found and fixed in major systems all the time. They’re regularly discovered independently, by outsiders rather than by the original manufacturers or programmers. And once they’re discovered, word gets out. Today’s top-secret National Security Agency attack techniques become tomorrow’s PhD theses and the next day’s hacker tools.
The attack/defense trade-off is not new to the US government. They even have a process for deciding what to do when a vulnerability is discovered: whether they should be disclosed to improve all of our security, or kept secret to be used for offense. The White House claims that it prioritizes defense, and that general vulnerabilities in widely used computer systems are patched.
Whatever method the FBI used to get into the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone is one such vulnerability. The FBI did the right thing by using an existing vulnerability rather than forcing Apple to create a new one, but it should be disclosed to Apple and patched immediately.
This case has always been more about the PR battle and potential legal precedent than about the particular phone. And while the legal dispute is over, there are other cases involving other encrypted devices in other courts across the country. But while there will always be a few computers—corporate servers, individual laptops or personal smartphones—that the FBI would like to break into, there are far more such devices that we need to be secure.
One of the most surprising things about this debate is the number of former national security officials who came out on Apple’s side. They understand that we are singularly vulnerable to cyberattack, and that our cyberdefense needs to be as strong as possible.
The FBI’s myopic focus on this one investigation is understandable, but in the long run, it’s damaging to our national security.
This essay previously appeared in the Washington Post, with a far too click-bait headline.
EDITED TO ADD: To be fair, the FBI probably doesn’t know what the vulnerability is. And I wonder how easy it would be for Apple to figure it out. Given that the FBI has to exhaust all avenues of access before demanding help from Apple, we can learn which models are vulnerable by watching which legal suits are abandoned now that the FBI knows about this method.
Matt Blaze makes excellent points about how the FBI should disclose the vulnerabilities it uses, in order to improve computer security. That was part of a New York Times “Room for Debate” on hackers helping the FBI.
Susan Landau’s excellent Congressional testimony on the topic.
FBI vs. Apple: Who Is Helping the FBI?
On Monday, the FBI asked the court for a two-week delay in a scheduled hearing on the San Bernardino iPhone case, because some “third party” approached it with a way into the phone. It wanted time to test this access method.
Who approached the FBI? We have no idea.
I have avoided speculation because the story makes no sense. Why did this third party wait so long? Why didn’t the FBI go through with the hearing anyway?
Now we have speculation that the third party is the Israeli forensic company Cellebrite. From its website:
Support for Locked iOS Devices Using UFED Physical Analyzer
Using UFED Physical Analyzer, physical and file system extractions, decoding and analysis can be performed on locked iOS devices with a simple or complex passcode. Simple passcodes will be recovered during the physical extraction process and enable access to emails and keychain passwords. If a complex password is set on the device, physical extraction can be performed without access to emails and keychain. However, if the complex password is known, emails and keychain passwords will be available.
My guess is that it’s not them. They have an existing and ongoing relationship with the FBI. If they could crack the phone, they would have done it months ago. This purchase order seems to be coincidental.
In any case, having a company name doesn’t mean that the story makes any more sense, but there it is. We’ll know more in a couple of weeks, although I doubt the FBI will share any more than they absolutely have to.
This development annoys me in every way. This case was never about the particular phone, it was about the precedent and the general issue of security vs. surveillance. This will just come up again another time, and we’ll have to through this all over again—maybe with a company that isn’t as committed to our privacy as Apple is.
EDITED TO ADD: Watch former NSA Director Michael Hayden defend Apple and iPhone security. I’ve never seen him so impassioned before.
EDITED TO ADD (3/26): Marcy Wheeler has written extensively about the Cellebrite possibility
FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List
The FBI just added two members of the Syrian Electronic Army to its cyber most-wanted list.
I had no idea that the FBI had a cyber most-wanted list.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.