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Eighth Movie-Plot Threat Contest Winner

On April 1, I announced the Eighth Movie-Plot Threat Contest:

I want a movie-plot threat that shows the evils of encryption. (For those who don’t know, a movie-plot threat is a scary-threat story that would make a great movie, but is much too specific to build security policies around. Contest history here.) We’ve long heard about the evils of the Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse—terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. (Or maybe they’re terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers; I can never remember.) Try to be more original than that. And nothing too science fictional; today’s technology or presumed technology only.

On May 14, I announced the five semifinalists. The votes are in, and the winner is TonyK:

November 6 2020, the morning of the presidential election. This will be the first election where votes can be cast from smart phones and laptops. A record turnout is expected.

There is much excitement as live results are being displayed all over the place. Twitter, television, apps and websites are all displaying the vote counts. It is a close race between the leading candidates until about 9 am when a third candidate starts to rapidly close the gap. He was an unknown independent that had suspected ties to multiple terrorist organizations. There was outrage when he got on to the ballot, but it had quickly died down when he put forth no campaign effort.

By 11 am the independent was predicted to win, and the software called it for him at 3:22 pm.

At 4 the CEO of the software maker was being interviewed on CNN. There were accusations of everything from bribery to bugs to hackers being responsible for the results. Demands were made for audits and recounts. Some were even asking for the data to be made publicly available. The CEO calmly explained that there could be no audit or recount. The system was encrypted end to end and all the votes were cryptographically anonymized.

The interviewer was stunned and sat there in silence. When he eventually spoke, he said “We just elected a terrorist as the President of the United States.”

For the record, Nick P was a close runner-up.

Congratulations, TonyK. Contact me by e-mail, and I’ll send you your fabulous prizes.

Previous contests.

EDITED TO ADD (6/14): Slashdot thread.

Posted on June 13, 2015 at 12:11 PM • View Comments

The History of Internet Insecurity

The Washington Post has a good two part story on the history of insecurity of the Internet.

Posted on June 12, 2015 at 11:45 AM • View Comments

Duqu 2.0

Kaspersky Labs has discovered and publicized details of a new nation-state surveillance malware system, called Duqu 2.0. It’s being attributed to Israel.

There’s a lot of details, and I recommend reading them. There was probably a Kerberos zero-day vulnerability involved, allowing the attackers to send updates to Kaspersky’s clients. There’s code specifically targeting anti-virus software, both Kaspersky and others. The system includes anti-sniffer defense, and packet-injection code. It’s designed to reside in RAM so that it better avoids detection. This is all very sophisticated.

Eugene Kaspersky wrote an op-ed condemning the attack—and making his company look good—and almost, but not quite, comparing attacking his company to attacking the Red Cross:

Historically companies like mine have always played an important role in the development of IT. When the number of Internet users exploded, cybercrime skyrocketed and became a serious threat to the security of billions of Internet users and connected devices. Law enforcement agencies were not prepared for the advent of the digital era, and private security companies were alone in providing protection against cybercrime both to individuals and to businesses. The security community has been something like a group of doctors for the Internet; we even share some vocabulary with the medical profession: we talk about ‘viruses’, ‘disinfection’, etc. And obviously we’re helping law enforcement develop its skills to fight cybercrime more effectively.

One thing that struck me from a very good Wired article on Duqu 2.0:

Raiu says each of the infections began within three weeks before the P5+1 meetings occurred at that particular location. “It cannot be coincidental,” he says. “Obviously the intention was to spy on these meetings.”

Initially Kaspersky was unsure all of these infections were related, because one of the victims appeared not to be part of the nuclear negotiations. But three weeks after discovering the infection, Raiu says, news outlets began reporting that negotiations were already taking place at the site. “Somehow the attackers knew in advance that this was one of the [negotiation] locations,” Raiu says.

Exactly how the attackers spied on the negotiations is unclear, but the malware contained modules for sniffing WiFi networks and hijacking email communications. But Raiu believes the attackers were more sophisticated than this. “I don’t think their style is to infect people connecting to the WiFi. I think they were after some kind of room surveillance—to hijack the audio through the teleconference or hotel phone systems.”

Those meetings are talks about Iran’s nuclear program, which we previously believed Israel spied on. Look at the details of the attack, though: hack the hotel’s Internet, get into the phone system, and turn the hotel phones into room bugs. Very clever.

Posted on June 12, 2015 at 6:18 AM • View Comments

Race Condition Exploit in Starbucks Gift Cards

A researcher was able to steal money from Starbucks by exploiting a race condition in its gift card value-transfer protocol. Basically, by initiating two identical web transfers at once, he was able to trick the system into recording them both. Normally, you could take a $5 gift card and move that money to another $5 gift card, leaving you with an empty gift card and a $10 gift card. He was able to duplicate the transfer, giving him an empty gift card and a $15 gift card.

Race-condition attacks are unreliable and it took him a bunch of tries to get it right, but there’s no reason to believe that he couldn’t have kept doing this forever.

Unfortunately, there was really no one at Starbucks he could tell this to:

The hardest part—responsible disclosure. Support guy honestly answered there’s absolutely no way to get in touch with technical department and he’s sorry I feel this way. Emailing InformationSecurityServices@starbucks.com on March 23 was futile (and it only was answered on Apr 29). After trying really hard to find anyone who cares, I managed to get this bug fixed in like 10 days.

The unpleasant part is a guy from Starbucks calling me with nothing like “thanks” but mentioning “fraud” and “malicious actions” instead. Sweet!

A little more from BBC News:

A spokeswoman for Starbucks told BBC News: “After this individual reported he was able to commit fraudulent activity against Starbucks, we put safeguards in place to prevent replication.”

The company did not answer questions about its response to Mr Homakov.

More info.

Posted on May 26, 2015 at 4:51 PM • View Comments

More on Chris Roberts and Avionics Security

Last month, I blogged about security researcher Chris Roberts being detained by the FBI after tweeting about avionics security while on a United flight:

But to me, the fascinating part of this story is that a computer was monitoring the Twitter feed and understood the obscure references, alerted a person who figured out who wrote them, researched what flight he was on, and sent an FBI team to the Syracuse airport within a couple of hours. There’s some serious surveillance going on.

We know a lot more of the back story from the FBI’s warrant application. He had been interviewed by the FBI multiple times previously, and was able to take control of at least some of the planes’ controls during flight.

During two interviews with F.B.I. agents in February and March of this year, Roberts said he hacked the inflight entertainment systems of Boeing and Airbus aircraft, during flights, about 15 to 20 times between 2011 and 2014. In one instance, Roberts told the federal agents he hacked into an airplane’s thrust management computer and momentarily took control of an engine, according to an affidavit attached to the application for a search warrant.

“He stated that he successfully commanded the system he had accessed to issue the ‘CLB’ or climb command. He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane during one of these flights,” said the affidavit, signed by F.B.I. agent Mike Hurley.

Roberts also told the agents he hacked into airplane networks and was able “to monitor traffic from the cockpit system.”

According to the search warrant application, Roberts said he hacked into the systems by accessing the in-flight entertainment system using his laptop and an Ethernet cable.

Wired has more.

This makes the FBI’s behavior much more reasonable. They weren’t scanning the Twitter feed for random keywords; they were watching his account.

We don’t know if the FBI’s statements are true, though. But if Roberts was hacking an airplane while sitting in the passenger seat…wow, is that a stupid thing to do.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

But Roberts’ statements and the FBI’s actions raise as many questions as they answer. For Roberts, the question is why the FBI is suddenly focused on years-old research that has long been part of the public record.

“This has been a known issue for four or five years, where a bunch of us have been stood up and pounding our chest and saying, ‘This has to be fixed,'” Roberts noted. “Is there a credible threat? Is something happening? If so, they’re not going to tell us,” he said.

Roberts isn’t the only one confused by the series of events surrounding his detention in April and the revelations about his interviews with federal agents.

“I would like to see a transcript (of the interviews),” said one former federal computer crimes prosecutor, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If he did what he said he did, why is he not in jail? And if he didn’t do it, why is the FBI saying he did?”

The real issue is that the avionics and the entertainment system are on the same network. That’s an even stupider thing to do. Also last month, I wrote about the risks of hacking airplanes, and said that I wasn’t all that worried about it. Now I’m more worried.

Posted on May 19, 2015 at 8:00 AM • View Comments

Admiral Rogers Speaking at the Joint Service Academy Cyber Security Summit

Admiral Mike Rogers gave the keynote address at the Joint Service Academy Cyber Security Summit today at West Point. He started by explaining the four tenets of security that he thinks about.

First: partnerships. This includes government, civilian, everyone. Capabilities, knowledge, and insight of various groups, and aligning them to generate better outcomes to everyone. Ability to generate and share insight and knowledge, and to do that in a timely manner.

Second, innovation. It’s about much more than just technology. It’s about ways to organize, values, training, and so on. We need to think about innovation very broadly.

Third, technology. This is a technologically based problem, and we need to apply technology to defense as well.

Fourth, human capital. If we don’t get people working right, all of this is doomed to fail. We need to build security workforces inside and outside of military. We need to keep them current in a world of changing technology.

So, what is the Department of Defense doing? They’re investing in cyber, both because it’s a critical part of future fighting of wars and because of the mission to defend the nation.

Rogers then explained the five strategic goals listed in the recent DoD cyber strategy:

Build and maintain ready forces and capabilities to conduct cyberspace operations;
Defend the DoD information network, secure DoD data, and mitigate risks to DoD missions;
Be prepared to defend the U.S. homeland and U.S. vital interests from disruptive or destructive cyberattacks of significant consequence;
Build and maintain viable cyber options and plan to use those options to control conflict escalation and to shape the conflict environment at all stages;
Build and maintain robust international alliances and partnerships to deter shared threats and increase international security and stability.

Expect to see more detailed policy around these coming goals in the coming months.

What is the role of the US CyberCommand and the NSA in all of this? The CyberCommand has three missions related to the five strategic goals. They defend DoD networks. They create the cyber workforce. And, if directed, they defend national critical infrastructure.

At one point, Rogers said that he constantly reminds his people: “If it was designed by man, it can be defeated by man.” I hope he also tells this to the FBI when they talk about needing third-party access to encrypted communications.

All of this has to be underpinned by a cultural ethos that recognizes the importance of professionalism and compliance. Every person with a keyboard is both a potential asset and a threat. There needs to be well-defined processes and procedures within DoD, and a culture of following them.

What’s the threat dynamic, and what’s the nature of the world? The threat is going to increase; it’s going to get worse, not better; cyber is a great equalizer. Cyber doesn’t recognize physical geography. Four “prisms” to look at threat: criminals, nation states, hacktivists, groups wanting to do harm to the nation. This fourth group is increasing. Groups like ISIL are going to use the Internet to cause harm. Also embarrassment: releasing documents, shutting down services, and so on.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to stop attackers from getting in; we need to think more about how to get them out once they’ve gotten in—and how to continue to operate even though they are in. (That was especially nice to hear, because that’s what I’m doing at my company.) Sony was a “wake-up call”: a nation-state using cyber for coercion. It was theft of intellectual property, denial of service, and destruction. And it was important for the US to acknowledge the attack, attribute it, and retaliate.

Last point: “Total force approach to the problem.” It’s not just about people in uniform. It’s about active duty military, reserve military, corporations, government contractors—everyone. We need to work on this together. “I am not interested in endless discussion…. I am interested in outcomes.” “Cyber is the ultimate team sport.” There’s no single entity, or single technology, or single anything, that will solve all of this. He wants to partner with the corporate world, and to do it in a way that benefits both.

First question was about the domains and missions of the respective services. Rogers talked about the inherent expertise that each service brings to the problem, and how to use cyber to extend that expertise—and the mission. The goal is to create a single integrated cyber force, but not a single service. Cyber occurs in a broader context, and that context is applicable to all the military services. We need to build on their individual expertises and contexts, and to apply it in an integrated way. Similar to how we do special forces.

Second question was about values, intention, and what’s at risk. Rogers replied that any structure for the NSA has to integrate with the nation’s values. He talked about the value of privacy. He also talked about “the security of the nation.” Both are imperatives, and we need to achieve both at the same time. The problem is that the nation is polarized; the threat is getting worse at the same time trust is decreasing. We need to figure out how to improve trust.

Third question was about DoD protecting commercial cyberspace. Rogers replied that the DHS is the lead organization in this regard, and DoD provides capability through that civilian authority. Any DoD partnership with the private sector will go through DHS.

Fourth question: How will DoD reach out to corporations, both established and start-ups? Many ways. By providing people to the private sectors. Funding companies, through mechanisms like the CIA’s In-Q-Tel. And some sort of innovation capability. Those are the three main vectors, but more important is that the DoD mindset has to change. DoD has traditionally been very insular; in this case, more partnerships are required.

Final question was about the NSA sharing security information in some sort of semi-classified way. Rogers said that there are lot of internal conversations about doing this. It’s important.

In all, nothing really new or controversial.

These comments were recorded—I can’t find them online now—and are on the record. Much of the rest of the summit was held under Chatham House Rules. I participated in a panel on “Crypto Wars 2015” with Matt Blaze and a couple of government employees.

EDITED TO ADD (5/15): News article.

Posted on May 14, 2015 at 1:12 PM • View Comments

Detecting QUANTUMINSERT

Fox-IT has a blog post (and has published Snort rules) on how to detect man-on-the-side Internet attacks like the NSA’s QUANTUMINSERT.

From a Wired article:

But hidden within another document leaked by Snowden was a slide that provided a few hints about detecting Quantum Insert attacks, which prompted the Fox-IT researchers to test a method that ultimately proved to be successful. They set up a controlled environment and launched a number of Quantum Insert attacks against their own machines to analyze the packets and devise a detection method.

According to the Snowden document, the secret lies in analyzing the first content-carrying packets that come back to a browser in response to its GET request. One of the packets will contain content for the rogue page; the other will be content for the legitimate site sent from a legitimate server. Both packets, however, will have the same sequence number. That, it turns out, is a dead giveaway.

Here’s why: When your browser sends a GET request to pull up a web page, it sends out a packet containing a variety of information, including the source and destination IP address of the browser as well as so-called sequence and acknowledge numbers, or ACK numbers. The responding server sends back a response in the form of a series of packets, each with the same ACK number as well as a sequential number so that the series of packets can be reconstructed by the browser as each packet arrives to render the web page.

But when the NSA or another attacker launches a Quantum Insert attack, the victim’s machine receives duplicate TCP packets with the same sequence number but with a different payload. “The first TCP packet will be the ‘inserted’ one while the other is from the real server, but will be ignored by the [browser],” the researchers note in their blog post. “Of course it could also be the other way around; if the QI failed because it lost the race with the real server response.”

Although it’s possible that in some cases a browser will receive two packets with the same sequence number from a legitimate server, they will still contain the same general content; a Quantum Insert packet, however, will have content with significant differences.

It’s important we develop defenses against these attacks, because everyone is using them.

EDITED TO ADD (5/14): Detection for QI was recently released for Bro, Snort and Suricata.

Posted on May 4, 2015 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

Hacker Detained by FBI after Tweeting about Airplane Software Vulnerabilities

This is troubling:

Chris Roberts was detained by FBI agents on Wednesday as he was deplaning his United flight, which had just flown from Denver to Syracuse, New York. While on board the flight, he tweeted a joke about taking control of the plane’s engine-indicating and crew-alerting system, which provides flight crews with information in real-time about an aircraft’s functions, including temperatures of various equipment, fuel flow and quantity, and oil pressure. In the tweet, Roberts jested: “Find myself on a 737/800, lets see Box-IFE-ICE-SATCOM, ? Shall we start playing with EICAS messages? ‘PASS OXYGEN ON’ Anyone ? :)” FBI agents questioned Roberts for four hours and confiscated his iPad, MacBook Pro, and storage devices.

Yes, the real issue here is the chilling effects on security research. Security researchers who point out security flaws is a good thing, and should be encouraged.

But to me, the fascinating part of this story is that a computer was monitoring the Twitter feed and understood the obscure references, alerted a person who figured out who wrote them, researched what flight he was on, and sent an FBI team to the Syracuse airport within a couple of hours. There’s some serious surveillance going on.

Now, it is possible that Roberts was being specifically monitored. He is already known as a security researcher who is working on avionics hacking. But still…

Slashdot thread. Hacker News thread.

EDITED TO ADD (4/22): Another article, this one about the debate over disclosing security vulnerabilities.

Posted on April 21, 2015 at 5:26 AM • View Comments

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.