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Elcomsoft is claiming that the WPA protocol is dead, just because they can speed up brute-force cracking by 100 times using a hardware accelerator. Why exactly is this news? Yes, weak passwords are weak—we already know that. And strong WPA passwords are still strong. This seems like yet another blatant attempt to grab some press attention with a half-baked cryptanalytic result.
The Hackers Choice has released a tool allowing people to clone and modify electronic passports.
The problem is self-signed certificates.
A CA is not a great solution:
Using a Certification Authority (CA) could solve the attack but at the same time introduces a new set of attack vectors:
- The CA becomes a single point of failure. It becomes the juicy/high-value target for the attacker. Single point of failures are not good. Attractive targets are not good.
Any person with access to the CA key can undetectably fake passports. Direct attacks, virus, misplacing the key by accident (the UK government is good at this!) or bribery are just a few ways of getting the CA key.
- The single CA would need to be trusted by all governments. This is not practical as this means that passports would no longer be a national matter.
- Multiple CA’s would not work either. Any country could use its own CA to create a valid passport of any other country. Read this sentence again: Country A can create a passport data set of Country B and sign it with Country A’s CA key. The terminal will validate and display the information as data from Country B.This option also multiplies the number of ‘juicy’ targets. It makes it also more likely for a CA key to leak.
Revocation lists for certificates only work when a leak/loss is detected. In most cases it will not be detected.
So what’s the solution? We know that humans are good at Border Control. In the end they protected us well for the last 120 years. We also know that humans are good at pattern matching and image recognition. Humans also do an excellent job ‘assessing’ the person and not just the passport. Take the human part away and passport security falls apart.
EDITED TO ADD (10/13): More information.
People have been asking me to comment about Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account being hacked. I’ve already written about the security problems with “secret questions” back in 2005:
The point of all these questions is the same: a backup password. If you forget your password, the secret question can verify your identity so you can choose another password or have the site e-mail your current password to you. It’s a great idea from a customer service perspective—a user is less likely to forget his first pet’s name than some random password—but terrible for security. The answer to the secret question is much easier to guess than a good password, and the information is much more public. (I’ll bet the name of my family’s first pet is in some database somewhere.) And even worse, everybody seems to use the same series of secret questions.
The result is the normal security protocol (passwords) falls back to a much less secure protocol (secret questions). And the security of the entire system suffers.
EDITED TO ADD (9/25): Ed Felten on the issue.
Seems that the idea was killed by lawyers under pressure from the credit card industry. Or maybe not; the person who started this rumor has retracted his comments. Or maybe those same lawyers made him retract his comments.
Don’t they know that security by gag order never works, except temporarily?
London’s Oyster card has been cracked, and the final details will become public in October. NXP Semiconductors, the Philips spin-off that makes the system, lost a court battle to prevent the researchers from publishing. People might be able to use this information to ride for free, but the sky won’t be falling. And the publication of this serious vulnerability actually makes us all safer in the long run.
Here’s the story. Every Oyster card has a radio-frequency identification chip that communicates with readers mounted on the ticket barrier. That chip, the “Mifare Classic” chip, is used in hundreds of other transport systems as well—Boston, Los Angeles, Brisbane, Amsterdam, Taipei, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro—and as an access pass in thousands of companies, schools, hospitals, and government buildings around Britain and the rest of the world.
The security of Mifare Classic is terrible. This is not an exaggeration; it’s kindergarten cryptography. Anyone with any security experience would be embarrassed to put his name to the design. NXP attempted to deal with this embarrassment by keeping the design secret.
The group that broke Mifare Classic is from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. They demonstrated the attack by riding the Underground for free, and by breaking into a building. Their two papers (one is already online) will be published at two conferences this autumn.
The second paper is the one that NXP sued over. They called disclosure of the attack “irresponsible,” warned that it will cause “immense damages,” and claimed that it “will jeopardize the security of assets protected with systems incorporating the Mifare IC.” The Dutch court would have none of it: “Damage to NXP is not the result of the publication of the article but of the production and sale of a chip that appears to have shortcomings.”
Exactly right. More generally, the notion that secrecy supports security is inherently flawed. Whenever you see an organization claiming that design secrecy is necessary for security—in ID cards, in voting machines, in airport security—it invariably means that its security is lousy and it has no choice but to hide it. Any competent cryptographer would have designed Mifare’s security with an open and public design.
Secrecy is fragile. Mifare’s security was based on the belief that no one would discover how it worked; that’s why NXP had to muzzle the Dutch researchers. But that’s just wrong. Reverse-engineering isn’t hard. Other researchers had already exposed Mifare’s lousy security. A Chinese company even sells a compatible chip. Is there any doubt that the bad guys already know about this, or will soon enough?
Publication of this attack might be expensive for NXP and its customers, but it’s good for security overall. Companies will only design security as good as their customers know to ask for. NXP’s security was so bad because customers didn’t know how to evaluate security: either they don’t know what questions to ask, or didn’t know enough to distrust the marketing answers they were given. This court ruling encourages companies to build security properly rather than relying on shoddy design and secrecy, and discourages them from promising security based on their ability to threaten researchers.
It’s unclear how this break will affect Transport for London. Cloning takes only a few seconds, and the thief only has to brush up against someone carrying a legitimate Oyster card. But it requires an RFID reader and a small piece of software which, while feasible for a techie, are too complicated for the average fare dodger. The police are likely to quickly arrest anyone who tries to sell cloned cards on any scale. TfL promises to turn off any cloned cards within 24 hours, but that will hurt the innocent victim who had his card cloned more than the thief.
The vulnerability is far more serious to the companies that use Mifare Classic as an access pass. It would be very interesting to know how NXP presented the system’s security to them.
And while these attacks only pertain to the Mifare Classic chip, it makes me suspicious of the entire product line. NXP sells a more secure chip and has another on the way, but given the number of basic cryptography mistakes NXP made with Mifare Classic, one has to wonder whether the “more secure” versions will be sufficiently so.
This essay originally appeared in the Guardian.
Good perspective on Gary McKinnon’s extradition to the United States.
Thieves took a legitimate paper Farecard with $40 in value, sliced the card’s magnetic strip into four lengthwise pieces, and then reattached one piece each to four separate defunct paper Farecards. The thieves then took the doctored Farecards to a Farecard machine and added fare, typically a nickel. By doing so, the doctored Farecard would go into the machine and a legitimate Farecard with the new value, $40.05, would come out.
My guess is that the thieves were caught not through some fancy technology, but because they had to monetize their attack. They sold Farecards on the street at half face value.
The popular media conception is that there is a coordinated attempt by the Chinese government to hack into U.S. computers—military, government corporate—and steal secrets. The truth is a lot more complicated.
There certainly is a lot of hacking coming out of China. Any company that does security monitoring sees it all the time.
These hacker groups seem not to be working for the Chinese government. They don’t seem to be coordinated by the Chinese military. They’re basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they’re just as good as everyone else. As well as the American networks the media likes to talk about, their targets also include pro-Tibet, pro-Taiwan, Falun Gong and pro-Uyghur sites.
The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living. The fame and glory comes from their nationalistic goals. Some of these hackers are heroes in China. They’re upholding the country’s honor against both anti-Chinese forces like the pro-Tibet movement and larger forces like the United States.
And the money comes from several sources. The groups sell owned computers, malware services, and data they steal on the black market. They sell hacker tools and videos to others wanting to play. They even sell T-shirts, hats and other merchandise on their Web sites.
This is not to say that the Chinese military ignores the hacker groups within their country. Certainly the Chinese government knows the leaders of the hacker movement and chooses to look the other way. They probably buy stolen intelligence from these hackers. They probably recruit for their own organizations from this self-selecting pool of experienced hacking experts. They certainly learn from the hackers.
And some of the hackers are good. Over the years, they have become more sophisticated in both tools and techniques. They’re stealthy. They do good network reconnaissance. My guess is what the Pentagon thinks is the problem is only a small percentage of the actual problem.
And they discover their own vulnerabilities. Earlier this year, one security company noticed a unique attack against a pro-Tibet organization. That same attack was also used two weeks earlier against a large multinational defense contractor.
They also hoard vulnerabilities. During the 1999 conflict over the two-states theory conflict, in a heated exchange with a group of Taiwanese hackers, one Chinese group threatened to unleash multiple stockpiled worms at once. There was no reason to disbelieve this threat.
If anything, the fact that these groups aren’t being run by the Chinese government makes the problem worse. Without central political coordination, they’re likely to take more risks, do more stupid things and generally ignore the political fallout of their actions.
In this regard, they’re more like a non-state actor.
So while I’m perfectly happy that the U.S. government is using the threat of Chinese hacking as an impetus to get their own cybersecurity in order, and I hope they succeed, I also hope that the U.S. government recognizes that these groups are not acting under the direction of the Chinese military and doesn’t treat their actions as officially approved by the Chinese government.
This essay originally appeared on the Discovery Channel website.
EDITED TO ADD (7/18): A slightly longer version of this essay appeared in Information Security magazine as part of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum. His half is here.
A new study claims that insiders aren’t the main threat to network security:
Verizon’s 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report, which looked at 500 breach incidents over the last four years, contradicts the growing orthodoxy that insiders, rather than external agents, represent the most serious threat to network security at most organizations.
Seventy-three percent of the breaches involved outsiders, 18 percent resulted from the actions of insiders, with business partners blamed for 39 percent—the percentages exceed 100 percent due to the fact that some involve multiple breaches, with varying degrees of internal or external involvement.
“The relative infrequency of data breaches attributed to insiders may be surprising to some. It is widely believed and commonly reported that insider incidents outnumber those caused by other sources,” the report states.
The whole insiders vs. outsiders debate has always been one of semantics more than anything else. If you count by attacks, there are a lot more outsider attacks, simply because there are orders of magnitude more outsider attackers. If you count incidents, the numbers tend to get closer: 75% vs. 18% in this case. And if you count damages, insiders generally come out on top—mostly because they have a lot more detailed information and can target their attacks better.
Both insiders and outsiders are security risks, and you have to defend against them both. Trying to rank them isn’t all that useful.
A Jura F90 Coffee Machine can be hacked remotely over the Internet.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.