UK RFID Passport Cracked
EDITED TO ADD (11/17): Commentary by Bruce Sterling.
Entries Tagged "vulnerabilities"
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Attacking Bank-Card PINs
Research paper by Omer Berkman and Odelia Moshe Ostrovsky: “The Unbearable Lightness of PIN Cracking“:
Abstract. We describe new attacks on the financial PIN processing API. The attacks apply to switches as well as to verification facilities. The attacks are extremely severe allowing an attacker to expose customer PINs by executing only one or two API calls per exposed PIN. One of the attacks uses only the translate function which is a required function in every switch. The other attacks abuse functions that are used to allow customers to select their PINs online. Some of the attacks can be applied on a switch even though the attacked functions require issuer’s keys which do not exist on a switch. This is particularly disturbing as it was widely believed that functions requiring issuer’s keys cannot do any harm if the respective keys are unavailable.
Basically, the paper describes an inherent flaw with the way ATM PINs are encrypted and transmitted on the international financial networks, making them vulnerable to attack from malicious insiders in a bank.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the attack is that you’re only as secure as the most untrusted bank on the network. Instead of just having to trust your own issuer bank that they have good security against insider fraud, you have to trust every other financial institution on the network as well. An insider at another bank can crack your ATM PIN if you withdraw money from any of the other bank’s ATMs.
The authors tell me that they’ve contacted the major credit card companies and banks with this information, and haven’t received much of a response. They believe it is now time to alert the public.
FIDIS on RFID Passports
The “Budapest Declaration on Machine Readable Travel Documents“:
Abstract:
By failing to implement an appropriate security architecture, European governments have effectively forced citizens to adopt new international Machine Readable Travel Documents which dramatically decrease their security and privacy and increases risk of identity theft. Simply put, the current implementation of the European passport utilises technologies and standards that are poorly conceived for its purpose. In this declaration, researchers on Identity and Identity Management (supported by a unanimous move in the September 2006 Budapest meeting of the FIDIS “Future of Identity in the Information Society” Network of Excellence[1]) summarise findings from an analysis of MRTDs and recommend corrective measures which need to be adopted by stakeholders in governments and industry to ameliorate outstanding issues.
EDITED TO ADD (11/9): Slashdot thread.
Skimming RFID Credit Cards
It’s easy to skim personal information off an RFID credit card.
From The New York Times:
They could skim and store the information from a card with a device the size of a couple of paperback books, which they cobbled together from readily available computer and radio components for $150. They say they could probably make another one even smaller and cheaper: about the size of a pack of gum for less than $50. And because the cards can be read even through a wallet or an item of clothing, the security of the information, the researchers say, is startlingly weak. ‘Would you be comfortable wearing your name, your credit card number and your card expiration date on your T-shirt?’ Mr. Heydt-Benjamin, a graduate student, asked.
And from The Register:
The attack uses off-the-shelf radio and card reader equipment that could cost as little as $150. Although the attack fails to yield verification codes normally needed to make online purchases, it would still be potentially possible for crooks to use the data to order goods and services from online stores that don’t request this information.
Despite assurances by the issuing companies that data contained on RFID-based credit cards would be encrypted, the researchers found that the majority of cards they tested did not use encryption or other data protection technology.
And from the RFID Journal:
I don’t think the exposing of potential vulnerabilities of these cards is a huge black eye for the credit-card industry or for the RFID industry. Millions of people won’t suddenly have their credit-card numbers exposed to thieves the way they do when someone hacks a bank’s database or an employee loses a laptop with the card numbers on it. But it is likely that these vulnerabilities will need to be addressed as the technology becomes more mature and criminals start figuring out ways to abuse it.
How to Steal an Election
Good article. (Here is the full article in pdf.)
EDITED TO ADD (11/2): Here are some additional resources. “E-Voting: State by State,” a guide to e-voting vendors, and a review of HBO’s “Hacking Democracy” documentary. Also, a debate from The Wall Street Journal on electronic voting, and an Ars Technica article on current-year problems with electronic voting.
EDITED TO ADD (11/2): Another review of the documentary.
Forge Your Own Boarding Pass
Last week Christopher Soghoian created a Fake Boarding Pass Generator website, allowing anyone to create a fake Northwest Airlines boarding pass: any name, airport, date, flight. This action got him visited by the FBI, who later came back, smashed open his front door, and seized his computers and other belongings. It resulted in calls for his arrest—the most visible by Rep. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts)—who has since recanted. And it’s gotten him more publicity than he ever dreamed of.
All for demonstrating a known and obvious vulnerability in airport security involving boarding passes and IDs.
This vulnerability is nothing new. There was an article on CSOonline from February 2006. There was an article on Slate from February 2005. Sen. Chuck Schumer spoke about it as well. I wrote about it in the August 2003 issue of Crypto-Gram. It’s possible I was the first person to publish it, but I certainly wasn’t the first person to think of it.
It’s kind of obvious, really. If you can make a fake boarding pass, you can get through airport security with it. Big deal; we know.
You can also use a fake boarding pass to fly on someone else’s ticket. The trick is to have two boarding passes: one legitimate, in the name the reservation is under, and another phony one that matches the name on your photo ID. Use the fake boarding pass in your name to get through airport security, and the real ticket in someone else’s name to board the plane.
This means that a terrorist on the no-fly list can get on a plane: He buys a ticket in someone else’s name, perhaps using a stolen credit card, and uses his own photo ID and a fake ticket to get through airport security. Since the ticket is in an innocent’s name, it won’t raise a flag on the no-fly list.
You can also use a fake boarding pass instead of your real one if you have the “SSSS” mark and want to avoid secondary screening, or if you don’t have a ticket but want to get into the gate area.
Historically, forging a boarding pass was difficult. It required special paper and equipment. But since Alaska Airlines started the trend in 1999, most airlines now allow you to print your boarding pass using your home computer and bring it with you to the airport. This program was temporarily suspended after 9/11, but was quickly brought back because of pressure from the airlines. People who print the boarding passes at home can go directly to airport security, and that means fewer airline agents are required.
Airline websites generate boarding passes as graphics files, which means anyone with a little bit of skill can modify them in a program like Photoshop. All Soghoian’s website did was automate the process with a single airline’s boarding passes.
Soghoian claims that he wanted to demonstrate the vulnerability. You could argue that he went about it in a stupid way, but I don’t think what he did is substantively worse than what I wrote in 2003. Or what Schumer described in 2005. Why is it that the person who demonstrates the vulnerability is vilified while the person who describes it is ignored? Or, even worse, the organization that causes it is ignored? Why are we shooting the messenger instead of discussing the problem?
As I wrote in 2005: “The vulnerability is obvious, but the general concepts are subtle. There are three things to authenticate: the identity of the traveler, the boarding pass and the computer record. Think of them as three points on the triangle. Under the current system, the boarding pass is compared to the traveler’s identity document, and then the boarding pass is compared with the computer record. But because the identity document is never compared with the computer record—the third leg of the triangle—it’s possible to create two different boarding passes and have no one notice. That’s why the attack works.”
The way to fix it is equally obvious: Verify the accuracy of the boarding passes at the security checkpoints. If passengers had to scan their boarding passes as they went through screening, the computer could verify that the boarding pass already matched to the photo ID also matched the data in the computer. Close the authentication triangle and the vulnerability disappears.
But before we start spending time and money and Transportation Security Administration agents, let’s be honest with ourselves: The photo ID requirement is no more than security theater. Its only security purpose is to check names against the no-fly list, which would still be a joke even if it weren’t so easy to circumvent. Identification is not a useful security measure here.
Interestingly enough, while the photo ID requirement is presented as an antiterrorism security measure, it is really an airline-business security measure. It was first implemented after the explosion of TWA Flight 800 over the Atlantic in 1996. The government originally thought a terrorist bomb was responsible, but the explosion was later shown to be an accident.
Unlike every other airplane security measure—including reinforcing cockpit doors, which could have prevented 9/11—the airlines didn’t resist this one, because it solved a business problem: the resale of non-refundable tickets. Before the photo ID requirement, these tickets were regularly advertised in classified pages: “Round trip, New York to Los Angeles, 11/21-30, male, $100.” Since the airlines never checked IDs, anyone of the correct gender could use the ticket. Airlines hated that, and tried repeatedly to shut that market down. In 1996, the airlines were finally able to solve that problem and blame it on the FAA and terrorism.
So business is why we have the photo ID requirement in the first place, and business is why it’s so easy to circumvent it. Instead of going after someone who demonstrates an obvious flaw that is already public, let’s focus on the organizations that are actually responsible for this security failure and have failed to do anything about it for all these years. Where’s the TSA’s response to all this?
The problem is real, and the Department of Homeland Security and TSA should either fix the security or scrap the system. What we’ve got now is the worst security system of all: one that annoys everyone who is innocent while failing to catch the guilty.
This essay—my 30th for Wired.com—appeared today.
EDITED TO ADD (11/4): More news and commentary.
EDITED TO ADD (1/10): Great essay by Matt Blaze.
Lousy Home Security Installation
Impressively bad. (Yes, it’s an advertisement. But there are still important security lessons in the blog post.)
1. The keypad is actually the control panel. This particular model is called a Lynx and is manufactured by Honeywell. However, most of the major manufacturers have their own version of an “all-in-one” control panel, siren & keypad (Here is a link to GE’s version). These all-in-one models were designed to simplify installation and are typically part of “free” or low-cost alarm systems. They are all equally useless.
The most important problem with systems like this is the fact that you need to have a delay time in order to open your door and get to the keypad each time you enter your home. So, when a crook breaks in, they also have the same amount of time. If the crook follows the sound of the beeping keypad they will be standing in front of not only the keypad, but the brains of the alarm system. So, rather than punching in a valid code, the crook could simply rip the entire unit off of the wall.
Provided that they rip the panel off of the wall before the alarm sends its first signal, it will never be able to send a signal.
2. If point #1 wasn’t bad enough (or maybe because the installer who put the ‘system’ in realized how useless it was going to be) the power supply for the system is located right beside the keypad/control panel. Unplug the transformer (which is just barely able to stay plugged in as it is) and the alarm loses power. This provides a really convenient way for someone to either accidentally or intentionally unplug the system and wait for the back-up battery to die.
3. Even worse, the phone jack has also been located beside the power supply. The phone jack is the alarm systems only connection to the outside world. If it gets unplugged, the system cannot communicate and a crook would not have to go through the hassle of ripping the panel off of the wall.
Google's Code Search Feature
You can use it to find usernames and passwords, confidential code, buffer overflows, and all sorts of other things. (Another news story here.)
EDITED TO ADD (10/10): More info.
SQL Injection Vulnerabilities
This is a really interesting post about someone finding SQL injection vulnerabilities with Google. His result is that 11.3% of websites are vulnerable to this attack.
Firefox JavaScript Flaw: Real or Hoax?
Two hackers—Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi—have announced a flaw in Firefox’s JavaScript:
An attacker could commandeer a computer running the browser simply by crafting a Web page that contains some malicious JavaScript code, Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi said in a presentation at the ToorCon hacker conference here. The flaw affects Firefox on Windows, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X and Linux, they said.
More interesting was this piece:
The hackers claim they know of about 30 unpatched Firefox flaws. They don’t plan to disclose them, instead holding onto the bugs.
Jesse Ruderman, a Mozilla security staffer, attended the presentation and was called up on the stage with the two hackers. He attempted to persuade the presenters to responsibly disclose flaws via Mozilla’s bug bounty program instead of using them for malicious purposes such as creating networks of hijacked PCs, called botnets.
“I do hope you guys change your minds and decide to report the holes to us and take away $500 per vulnerability instead of using them for botnets,” Ruderman said.
The two hackers laughed off the comment. “It is a double-edged sword, but what we’re doing is really for the greater good of the Internet. We’re setting up communication networks for black hats,” Wbeelsoi said.
Sounds pretty bad? But maybe it’s all a hoax:
Spiegelmock, a developer at Six Apart, a blog software company in San Francisco, now says the ToorCon talk was meant “to be humorous” and insists the code presented at the conference cannot result in code execution.
Spiegelmock’s strange about-face comes as Mozilla’s security response team is racing to piece together information from the ToorCon talk to figure out how to fix the issue.
[…]
On the claim that there are 30 undisclosed Firefox vulnerabilities, Spiegelmock pinned that entirely on co-presenter Wbeelsoi. “I have no undisclosed Firefox vulnerabilities. The person who was speaking with me made this claim, and I honestly have no idea if he has them or not. I apologize to everyone involved, and I hope I have made everything as clear as possible,” Spiegelmock added.
I vote: hoax, with maybe some seeds of real.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.