Entries Tagged "hacking"

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Attributing the DNC Hacks to Russia

President Barack Obama’s public accusation of Russia as the source of the hacks in the US presidential election and the leaking of sensitive e-mails through WikiLeaks and other sources has opened up a debate on what constitutes sufficient evidence to attribute an attack in cyberspace. The answer is both complicated and inherently tied up in political considerations.

The administration is balancing political considerations and the inherent secrecy of electronic espionage with the need to justify its actions to the public. These issues will continue to plague us as more international conflict plays out in cyberspace.

It’s true that it’s easy for an attacker to hide who he is in cyberspace. We are unable to identify particular pieces of hardware and software around the world positively. We can’t verify the identity of someone sitting in front of a keyboard through computer data alone. Internet data packets don’t come with return addresses, and it’s easy for attackers to disguise their origins. For decades, hackers have used techniques such as jump hosts, VPNs, Tor and open relays to obscure their origin, and in many cases they work. I’m sure that many national intelligence agencies route their attacks through China, simply because everyone knows lots of attacks come from China.

On the other hand, there are techniques that can identify attackers with varying degrees of precision. It’s rarely just one thing, and you’ll often hear the term “constellation of evidence” to describe how a particular attacker is identified. It’s analogous to traditional detective work. Investigators collect clues and piece them together with known mode of operations. They look for elements that resemble other attacks and elements that are anomalies. The clues might involve ones and zeros, but the techniques go back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The University of Toronto-based organization Citizen Lab routinely attributes attacks against the computers of activists and dissidents to particular Third World governments. It took months to identify China as the source of the 2012 attacks against the New York Times. While it was uncontroversial to say that Russia was the source of a cyberattack against Estonia in 2007, no one knew if those attacks were authorized by the Russian government—until the attackers explained themselves. And it was the Internet security company CrowdStrike, which first attributed the attacks against the Democratic National Committee to Russian intelligence agencies in June, based on multiple pieces of evidence gathered from its forensic investigation.

Attribution is easier if you are monitoring broad swaths of the Internet. This gives the National Security Agency a singular advantage in the attribution game. The problem, of course, is that the NSA doesn’t want to publish what it knows.

Regardless of what the government knows and how it knows it, the decision of whether to make attribution evidence public is another matter. When Sony was attacked, many security experts—myself included­—were skeptical of both the government’s attribution claims and the flimsy evidence associated with it. I only became convinced when the New York Times ran a story about the government’s attribution, which talked about both secret evidence inside the NSA and human intelligence assets inside North Korea. In contrast, when the Office of Personnel Management was breached in 2015, the US government decided not to accuse China publicly, either because it didn’t want to escalate the political situation or because it didn’t want to reveal any secret evidence.

The Obama administration has been more public about its evidence in the DNC case, but it has not been entirely public.

It’s one thing for the government to know who attacked it. It’s quite another for it to convince the public who attacked it. As attribution increasingly relies on secret evidence­—as it did with North Korea’s attack of Sony in 2014 and almost certainly does regarding Russia and the previous election—­the government is going to have to face the choice of making previously secret evidence public and burning sources and methods, or keeping it secret and facing perfectly reasonable skepticism.

If the government is going to take public action against a cyberattack, it needs to make its evidence public. But releasing secret evidence might get people killed, and it would make any future confidentiality assurances we make to human sources completely non-credible. This problem isn’t going away; secrecy helps the intelligence community, but it wounds our democracy.

The constellation of evidence attributing the attacks against the DNC, and subsequent release of information, is comprehensive. It’s possible that there was more than one attack. It’s possible that someone not associated with Russia leaked the information to WikiLeaks, although we have no idea where that someone else would have obtained the information. We know that the Russian actors who hacked the DNC­—both the FSB, Russia’s principal security agency, and the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence unit—­are also attacking other political networks around the world.

In the end, though, attribution comes down to whom you believe. When Citizen Lab writes a report outlining how a United Arab Emirates human rights defender was targeted with a cyberattack, we have no trouble believing that it was the UAE government. When Google identifies China as the source of attacks against Gmail users, we believe it just as easily.

Obama decided not to make the accusation public before the election so as not to be seen as influencing the election. Now, afterward, there are political implications in accepting that Russia hacked the DNC in an attempt to influence the US presidential election. But no amount of evidence can convince the unconvinceable.

The most important thing we can do right now is deter any country from trying this sort of thing in the future, and the political nature of the issue makes that harder. Right now, we’ve told the world that others can get away with manipulating our election process as long as they can keep their efforts secret until after one side wins. Obama has promised both secret retaliations and public ones. We need to hope they’re enough.

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.

EDITED TO ADD: The ODNI released a declassified report on the Russian attacks. Here’s a New York Times article on the report.

And last week there were Senate hearings on this issue.

EDITED TO ADD: A Washington Post article talks about some of the intelligence behind the assessment.

EDITED TO ADD (1/10): The UK connection.

Posted on January 9, 2017 at 5:53 AM • View Comments

Hacking and the 2016 Presidential Election

Was the 2016 presidential election hacked? It’s hard to tell. There were no obvious hacks on Election Day, but new reports have raised the question of whether voting machines were tampered with in three states that Donald Trump won this month: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The researchers behind these reports include voting rights lawyer John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, both respected in the community. They have been talking with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but their analysis is not yet public.

According to a report in New York magazine, the share of votes received by Clinton was significantly lower in precincts that used a particular type of voting machine: The magazine story suggested that Clinton had received 7 percent fewer votes in Wisconsin counties that used electronic machines, which could be hacked, than in counties that used paper ballots. That is exactly the sort of result we would expect to see if there had been some sort of voting machine hack. There are many different types of voting machines, and attacks against one type would not work against the others. So a voting anomaly correlated to machine type could be a red flag, although Trump did better across the entire Midwest than pre-election polls expected, and there are also some correlations between voting machine type and the demographics of the various precincts. Even Halderman wrote early Wednesday morning that “the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked.”

What the allegations, and the ripples they’re causing on social media, really show is how fundamentally untrustworthy our hodgepodge election system is.

Accountability is a major problem for US elections. The candidates are the ones required to petition for recounts, and we throw the matter into the courts when we can’t figure it out. This all happens after an election, and because the battle lines have already been drawn, the process is intensely political. Unlike many other countries, we don’t have an independent body empowered to investigate these matters. There is no government agency empowered to verify these researchers’ claims, even if it would be merely to reassure voters that the election count was accurate.

Instead, we have a patchwork of voting systems: different rules, different machines, different standards. I’ve seen arguments that there is security in this setup ­ an attacker can’t broadly attack the entire country ­ but the downsides of this system are much more critical. National standards would significantly improve our voting process.

Further investigation of the claims raised by the researchers would help settle this particular question. Unfortunately, time is of the essence ­ underscoring another problem with how we conduct elections. For anything to happen, Clinton has to call for a recount and investigation. She has until Friday to do it in Wisconsin, until Monday in Pennsylvania and until next Wednesday in Michigan. I don’t expect the research team to have any better data before then. Without changes to the system, we’re telling future hackers that they can be successful as long as they’re able to hide their attacks for a few weeks until after the recount deadlines pass.

Computer forensics investigations are not easy, and they’re not quick. They require access to the machines. They involve analysis of Internet traffic. If we suspect a foreign country like Russia, the National Security Agency will analyze what they’ve intercepted from that country. This could easily take weeks, perhaps even months. And in the end, we might not even get a definitive answer. And even if we do end up with evidence that the voting machines were hacked, we don’t have rules about what to do next.

Although winning those three states would flip the election, I predict Clinton will do nothing (her campaign, after all, has reportedly been aware of the researchers’ work for nearly a week). Not because she does not believe the researchers ­- although she might not -­ but because she doesn’t want to throw the post-election process into turmoil by starting a highly politicized process whose eventual outcome will have little to do with computer forensics and a lot to do with which party has more power in the three states.

But we only have two years until the next national elections, and it’s time to start fixing things if we don’t want to be wondering the same things about hackers in 2018. The risks are real: Electronic voting machines that don’t use a paper ballot are vulnerable to hacking.

Clinton supporters are seizing on this story as their last lifeline of hope. I sympathize with them. When I wrote about vote-hacking the day after the election, I said: “Elections serve two purposes. First, and most obvious, they are how we choose a winner. But second, and equally important, they convince the loser ­- and all the supporters ­- that he or she lost.” If the election system fails to do the second, we risk undermining the legitimacy of our democratic process. Clinton’s supporters deserve to know whether this apparent statistical anomaly is the result of a hack against our election system or a spurious correlation. They deserve an election that is demonstrably fair and accurate. Our patchwork, ad hoc system means they may never feel confident in the outcome. And that will further erode the trust we have in our election systems.

This essay previously appeared in the Washington Post.

EDITED TO ADD: Green Party candidate Jill Stein is calling for a recount in the three states. I have no idea if a recount includes forensic analysis to ensure that the machines were not hacked, but I doubt it. It would be funny if it wasn’t all so horrible.

Also, here’s an article from 538.com arguing that demographics explains all the discrepancies.

Posted on November 25, 2016 at 10:00 AM • View Comments

Using Wi-Fi to Detect Hand Motions and Steal Passwords

This is impressive research: “When CSI Meets Public WiFi: Inferring Your Mobile Phone Password via WiFi Signals“:

Abstract: In this study, we present WindTalker, a novel and practical keystroke inference framework that allows an attacker to infer the sensitive keystrokes on a mobile device through WiFi-based side-channel information. WindTalker is motivated from the observation that keystrokes on mobile devices will lead to different hand coverage and the finger motions, which will introduce a unique interference to the multi-path signals and can be reflected by the channel state information (CSI). The adversary can exploit the strong correlation between the CSI fluctuation and the keystrokes to infer the user’s number input. WindTalker presents a novel approach to collect the target’s CSI data by deploying a public WiFi hotspot. Compared with the previous keystroke inference approach, WindTalker neither deploys external devices close to the target device nor compromises the target device. Instead, it utilizes the public WiFi to collect user’s CSI data, which is easy-to-deploy and difficult-to-detect. In addition, it jointly analyzes the traffic and the CSI to launch the keystroke inference only for the sensitive period where password entering occurs. WindTalker can be launched without the requirement of visually seeing the smart phone user’s input process, backside motion, or installing any malware on the tablet. We implemented Windtalker on several mobile phones and performed a detailed case study to evaluate the practicality of the password inference towards Alipay, the largest mobile payment platform in the world. The evaluation results show that the attacker can recover the key with a high successful rate.

That “high successful rate” is 81.7%.

News article.

Posted on November 18, 2016 at 6:40 AM • View Comments

Hacking Password-Protected Computers via the USB Port

PoisonTap is an impressive hacking tool that can compromise computers via the USB port, even when they are password-protected. What’s interesting is the chain of vulnerabilities the tool exploits. No individual vulnerability is a problem, but together they create a big problem.

Kamkar’s trick works by chaining together a long, complex series of seemingly innocuous software security oversights that only together add up to a full-blown threat. When PoisonTap—a tiny $5 Raspberry Pi microcomputer loaded with Kamkar’s code and attached to a USB adapter—is plugged into a computer’s USB drive, it starts impersonating a new ethernet connection. Even if the computer is already connected to Wifi, PoisonTap is programmed to tell the victim’s computer that any IP address accessed through that connection is actually on the computer’s local network rather than the internet, fooling the machine into prioritizing its network connection to PoisonTap over that of the Wifi network.

With that interception point established, the malicious USB device waits for any request from the user’s browser for new web content; if you leave your browser open when you walk away from your machine, chances are there’s at least one tab in your browser that’s still periodically loading new bits of HTTP data like ads or news updates. When PoisonTap sees that request, it spoofs a response and feeds your browser its own payload: a page that contains a collection of iframes—a technique for invisibly loading content from one website inside another­that consist of carefully crafted versions of virtually every popular website address on the internet. (Kamkar pulled his list from web-popularity ranking service Alexa‘s top one million sites.)

As it loads that long list of site addresses, PoisonTap tricks your browser into sharing any cookies it’s stored from visiting them, and writes all of that cookie data to a text file on the USB stick. Sites use cookies to check if a visitor has recently logged into the page, allowing visitors to avoid doing so repeatedly. So that list of cookies allows any hacker who walks away with the PoisonTap and its stored text file to access the user’s accounts on those sites.

There’s more. Here’s another article with more details. Also note that HTTPS is a protection.

Yesterday, I testified about this at a joint hearing of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, and the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade—both part of the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the US House of Representatives. Here’s the video; my testimony starts around 1:10:10.

The topic was the Dyn attacks and the Internet of Things. I talked about different market failures that will affect security on the Internet of Things. One of them was this problem of emergent vulnerabilities. I worry that as we continue to connect things to the Internet, we’re going to be seeing a lot of these sorts of attacks: chains of tiny vulnerabilities that combine into a massive security risk. It’ll be hard to defend against these types of attacks. If no one product or process is to blame, no one has responsibility to fix the problem. So I gave a mostly Republican audience a pro-regulation message. They were surprisingly polite and receptive.

Posted on November 17, 2016 at 8:22 AM • View Comments

Election Security

It’s over. The voting went smoothly. As of the time of writing, there are no serious fraud allegations, nor credible evidence that anyone tampered with voting rolls or voting machines. And most important, the results are not in doubt.

While we may breathe a collective sigh of relief about that, we can’t ignore the issue until the next election. The risks remain.

As computer security experts have been saying for years, our newly computerized voting systems are vulnerable to attack by both individual hackers and government-sponsored cyberwarriors. It is only a matter of time before such an attack happens.

Electronic voting machines can be hacked, and those machines that do not include a paper ballot that can verify each voter’s choice can be hacked undetectably. Voting rolls are also vulnerable; they are all computerized databases whose entries can be deleted or changed to sow chaos on Election Day.

The largely ad hoc system in states for collecting and tabulating individual voting results is vulnerable as well. While the difference between theoretical if demonstrable vulnerabilities and an actual attack on Election Day is considerable, we got lucky this year. Not just presidential elections are at risk, but state and local elections, too.

To be very clear, this is not about voter fraud. The risks of ineligible people voting, or people voting twice, have been repeatedly shown to be virtually nonexistent, and “solutions” to this problem are largely voter-suppression measures. Election fraud, however, is both far more feasible and much more worrisome.

Here’s my worry. On the day after an election, someone claims that a result was hacked. Maybe one of the candidates points to a wide discrepancy between the most recent polls and the actual results. Maybe an anonymous person announces that he hacked a particular brand of voting machine, describing in detail how. Or maybe it’s a system failure during Election Day: voting machines recording significantly fewer votes than there were voters, or zero votes for one candidate or another. (These are not theoretical occurrences; they have both happened in the United States before, though because of error, not malice.)

We have no procedures for how to proceed if any of these things happen. There’s no manual, no national panel of experts, no regulatory body to steer us through this crisis. How do we figure out if someone hacked the vote? Can we recover the true votes, or are they lost? What do we do then?

First, we need to do more to secure our elections system. We should declare our voting systems to be critical national infrastructure. This is largely symbolic, but it demonstrates a commitment to secure elections and makes funding and other resources available to states.

We need national security standards for voting machines, and funding for states to procure machines that comply with those standards. Voting-security experts can deal with the technical details, but such machines must include a paper ballot that provides a record verifiable by voters. The simplest and most reliable way to do that is already practiced in 37 states: optical-scan paper ballots, marked by the voters, counted by computer but recountable by hand. And we need a system of pre-election and postelection security audits to increase confidence in the system.

Second, election tampering, either by a foreign power or by a domestic actor, is inevitable, so we need detailed procedures to follow—both technical procedures to figure out what happened, and legal procedures to figure out what to do—that will efficiently get us to a fair and equitable election resolution. There should be a board of independent computer-security experts to unravel what happened, and a board of independent election officials, either at the Federal Election Commission or elsewhere, empowered to determine and put in place an appropriate response.

In the absence of such impartial measures, people rush to defend their candidate and their party. Florida in 2000 was a perfect example. What could have been a purely technical issue of determining the intent of every voter became a battle for who would win the presidency. The debates about hanging chads and spoiled ballots and how broad the recount should be were contested by people angling for a particular outcome. In the same way, after a hacked election, partisan politics will place tremendous pressure on officials to make decisions that override fairness and accuracy.

That is why we need to agree on policies to deal with future election fraud. We need procedures to evaluate claims of voting-machine hacking. We need a fair and robust vote-auditing process. And we need all of this in place before an election is hacked and battle lines are drawn.

In response to Florida, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 required each state to publish its own guidelines on what constitutes a vote. Some states—Indiana, in particular—set up a “war room” of public and private cybersecurity experts ready to help if anything did occur. While the Department of Homeland Security is assisting some states with election security, and the F.B.I. and the Justice Department made some preparations this year, the approach is too piecemeal.

Elections serve two purposes. First, and most obvious, they are how we choose a winner. But second, and equally important, they convince the loser—and all the supporters—that he or she lost. To achieve the first purpose, the voting system must be fair and accurate. To achieve the second one, it must be shown to be fair and accurate.

We need to have these conversations before something happens, when everyone can be calm and rational about the issues. The integrity of our elections is at stake, which means our democracy is at stake.

This essay previously appeared in the New York Times.

Posted on November 15, 2016 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.