Entries Tagged "hacking"

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Practical TEMPEST Attack

Four researchers have demonstrated a TEMPEST attack against a laptop, recovering its keys by listening to its electrical emanations. The cost for the attack hardware was about $3,000.

News article:

To test the hack, the researchers first sent the target a specific ciphertext—­in other words, an encrypted message.

“During the decryption of the chosen ciphertext, we measure the EM leakage of the target laptop, focusing on a narrow frequency band,” the paper reads. The signal is then processed, and “a clean trace is produced which reveals information about the operands used in the elliptic curve cryptography,” it continues, which in turn “is used in order to reveal the secret key.”

The equipment used included an antenna, amplifiers, a software-defined radio, and a laptop. This process was being carried out through a 15cm thick wall, reinforced with metal studs, according to the paper.

The researchers obtained the secret key after observing 66 decryption processes, each lasting around 0.05 seconds. “This yields a total measurement time of about 3.3 sec,” the paper reads. It’s important to note that when the researchers say that the secret key was obtained in “seconds,” that’s the total measurement time, and not necessarily how long it would take for the attack to actually be carried out. A real world attacker would still need to factor in other things, such as the target reliably decrypting the sent ciphertext, because observing that process is naturally required for the attack to be successful.

For half a century this has been a nation-state-level espionage technique. The cost is continually falling.

Posted on February 23, 2016 at 5:49 AM • View Comments

Underage Hacker Is behind Attacks against US Government

It’s a teenager:

British police have arrested a teenager who allegedly was behind a series of audacious—and, for senior U.S. national security officials, embarrassing—hacks targeting personal accounts or top brass at the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security Department, the White House and other federal agencies, according to U.S. officials briefed on the investigation.

[…]

The prominent victims have included CIA Director John Brennan, whose personal AOL account was breached, the then FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, and James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence.

This week, the latest target became apparent when personal details of 20,000 FBI employees surfaced online.

By then a team of some of the FBI’s sharpest cyber experts had homed in on their suspect, officials said. They were shocked to find that a “16-year-old computer nerd” had done so well to cover his tracks, a U.S. official said. a

Not really surprised, but underscores how diffuse the threat is.

Posted on February 18, 2016 at 6:02 AM • View Comments

Large-Scale FBI Hacking

As part of a child pornography investigation, the FBI hacked into over 1,300 computers.

But after Playpen was seized, it wasn’t immediately closed down, unlike previous dark web sites that have been shuttered” by law enforcement. Instead, the FBI ran Playpen from its own servers in Newington, Virginia, from February 20 to March 4, reads a complaint filed against a defendant in Utah. During this time, the FBI deployed what is known as a network investigative technique (NIT), the agency’s term for a hacking tool.

While Playpen was being run out of a server in Virginia, and the hacking tool was infecting targets, “approximately 1300 true internet protocol (IP) addresses were identified during this time,” according to the same complaint.

The FBI seems to have obtained a single warrant, but it’s hard to believe that a legal warrant could allow the police to hack 1,300 different computers. We do know that the FBI is very vague about the extent of its operations in warrant applications. And surely we need actual public debate about this sort of technique.

Also, “Playpen” is a super-creepy name for a child porn site. I feel icky just typing it.

Posted on February 9, 2016 at 6:25 AM • View Comments

NSA's TAO Head on Internet Offense and Defense

Rob Joyce, the head of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group—basically the country’s chief hacker—spoke in public earlier this week. He talked both about how the NSA hacks into networks, and what network defenders can do to protect themselves. Here’s a video of the talk, and here are two good summaries.

Intrusion Phases

  • Reconnaissance
  • Initial Exploitation
  • Establish Persistence
  • Install Tools
  • Move Laterally
  • Collect Exfil and Exploit

The event was the USENIX Enigma Conference.

The talk is full of good information about how APT attacks work and how networks can defend themselves. Nothing really surprising, but all interesting. Which brings up the most important question: why did the NSA decide to put Joyce on stage in public? It surely doesn’t want all of its target networks to improve their security so much that the NSA can no longer get in. On the other hand, the NSA does want the general security of US—and presumably allied—networks to improve. My guess is that this is simply a NOBUS issue. The NSA is, or at least believes it is, so sophisticated in its attack techniques that these defensive recommendations won’t slow it down significantly. And the Chinese/Russian/etc state-sponsored attackers will have a harder time. Or, at least, that’s what the NSA wants us to believe.

Wheels within wheels….

More information about the NSA’s TAO group is here and here. Here’s an article about TAO’s catalog of implants and attack tools. Note that the catalog is from 2007. Presumably TAO has been very busy developing new attack tools over the past ten years.

BoingBoing post.

EDITED TO ADD (2/2): I was talking with Nicholas Weaver, and he said that he found these three points interesting:

  • A one-way monitoring system really gives them headaches, because it allows the defender to go back after the fact and see what happened, remove malware, etc.
  • The critical component of APT is the P: persistence. They will just keep trying, trying, and trying. If you have a temporary vulnerability—the window between a vulnerability and a patch, temporarily turning off a defense—they’ll exploit it.
  • Trust them when they attribute an attack (e,g: Sony) on the record. Attribution is hard, but when they can attribute they know for sure—and they don’t attribute lightly.

Posted on February 1, 2016 at 6:42 AM • View Comments

Integrity and Availability Threats

Cyberthreats are changing. We’re worried about hackers crashing airplanes by hacking into computer networks. We’re worried about hackers remotely disabling cars. We’re worried about manipulated counts from electronic voting booths, remote murder through hacked medical devices and someone hacking an Internet thermostat to turn off the heat and freeze the pipes.

The traditional academic way of thinking about information security is as a triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. For years, the security industry has been trying to prevent data theft. Stolen data is used for identity theft and other frauds. It can be embarrassing, as in the Ashley Madison breach. It can be damaging, as in the Sony data theft. It can even be a national security threat, as in the case of the Office of Personal Management data breach. These are all breaches of privacy and confidentiality.

As bad as these threats are, they seem abstract. It’s been hard to craft public policy around them. But this is all changing. Threats to integrity and availability are much more visceral and much more devastating. And they will spur legislative action in a way that privacy risks never have.

Take one example: driverless cars and smart roads.

We’re heading toward a world where driverless cars will automatically communicate with each other and the roads, automatically taking us where we need to go safely and efficiently. The confidentiality threats are real: Someone who can eavesdrop on those communications can learn where the cars are going and maybe who is inside them. But the integrity threats are much worse.

Someone who can feed the cars false information can potentially cause them to crash into each other or nearby walls. Someone could also disable your car so it can’t start. Or worse, disable the entire system so that no one’s car can start.

This new rise in integrity and availability threats is a result of the Internet of Things. The objects we own and interact with will all become computerized and on the Internet. It’s actually more complicated.

What I’m calling the “World Sized Web” is a combination of these Internet-enabled things, cloud computing, mobile computing and the pervasiveness that comes from these systems being always on all the time. Together this means that computers and networks will be much more embedded in our daily lives. Yes, there will be more need for confidentiality, but there is a newfound need to ensure that these systems can’t be subverted to do real damage.

It’s one thing if your smart door lock can be eavesdropped to know who is home. It’s another thing entirely if it can be hacked to prevent you from opening your door or allow a burglar to open the door.

In separate testimonies before different House and Senate committees last year, both the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA Director Mike Rogers warned of these threats. They both consider them far larger and more important than the confidentiality threat and believe that we are vulnerable to attack.

And once the attacks start doing real damage—once someone dies from a hacked car or medical device, or an entire city’s 911 services go down for a day—there will be a real outcry to do something.

Congress will be forced to act. They might authorize more surveillance. They might authorize more government involvement in private-sector cybersecurity. They might try to ban certain technologies or certain uses. The results won’t be well-thought-out, and they probably won’t mitigate the actual risks. If we’re lucky, they won’t cause even more problems.

I worry that we’re rushing headlong into the World-Sized Web, and not paying enough attention to the new threats that it brings with it. Again and again, we’ve tried to retrofit security in after the fact.

It would be nice if we could do it right from the beginning this time. That’s going to take foresight and planning. The Obama administration just proposed spending $4 billion to advance the engineering of driverless cars.

How about focusing some of that money on the integrity and availability threats from that and similar technologies?

This essay previously appeared on CNN.com.

Posted on January 29, 2016 at 7:29 AM • View Comments

Horrible Story of Digital Harassment

This is just awful.

Their troll—or trolls, as the case may be—have harassed Paul and Amy in nearly every way imaginable. Bomb threats have been made under their names. Police cars and fire trucks have arrived at their house in the middle of the night to respond to fake hostage calls. Their email and social media accounts have been hacked, and used to bring ruin to their social lives. They’ve lost jobs, friends, and relationships. They’ve developed chronic anxiety and other psychological problems. More than once, they described their lives as having been “ruined” by their mystery tormenter.

We need to figure out how to identify perpetrators like this without destroying Internet privacy in the process.

EDITED TO ADD: One of the important points is the international nature of many of these cases. Even once the attackers are identified, the existing legal system isn’t adequate for shutting them down.

Posted on January 27, 2016 at 6:20 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.