Pete Loshin wrote:

Now, clearly there are lots of opinions on FV's system, but if people like Sameer and Rich Salz (e.g., who have reputations as knowledgeable and aware) are going to trash FV it would mean a lot more to many readers if they could state more specifically what it is about FV that doesn't work (or that doesn't work as well as, say, SSL or CyberCash or Open Market's approaches).

I sent a description of an attack against FV based on replacing or hacking winsock to cypherpunks last night. This attack seems to meet Borenstein's criteria of being as automated and implementable on a mass scale as their keyboard snooping attack. So far I have not seen any response from FV. --Jeff -- Jeff Weinstein - Electronic Munitions Specialist Netscape Communication Corporation jsw@netscape.com - http://home.netscape.com/people/jsw Any opinions expressed above are mine.

I'm way behind on my email, but someone suggested privately that I should respond to Jeff's mail, so I've bumped it to the top of the queue: Excerpts from mail.cypherpunks: 30-Jan-96 Re: No FV supporters? Jeff Weinstein@netscape. (903*)

I sent a description of an attack against FV based on replacing or hacking winsock to cypherpunks last night. This attack seems to meet Borenstein's criteria of being as automated and implementable on a mass scale as their keyboard snooping attack. So far I have not seen any response from FV.

Sorry for the delay. I don't think your attack against FV works anywhere nearly as well as our attack against software-encrypted credit card numbers, as I'll explain below. I should also apologize for the fact that I couldn't resist in pointing out lots of little problems with your proposed attack, and that I'm responding to your plan in the order you described it. This means that we don't get to the really major flaw in your strategy towards the end, so what comes at first will seem like nitpicking. Excerpts from mail.cypherpunks: 30-Jan-96 Re: FV Demonstrates Fatal F.. Jeff Weinstein@netscape. (2739*)

It would not be much harder than the demonstrated keyboard attack to create a hacked version of winsock that would implement an attack against First Virtual. If the attacker had a list of web pages that accept FV payments it would be very easy to collect the ID numbers.

A list of stores? First of all, this attack is already amazingly focused. Our DLL to implement the attack on credit cards is 16K, and doesn't need to target any specific buyers, sellers, or programs. The more complex the attack & the bigger the software, the more likely it is to be noticed. But this is just a minor nit. Read on.

There is no need to attack the large datastream of keyboard input when the search can be easily narrowed. Since FV doesn't use encryption the attack could easily be implemented in winsock, making it independent of any client software.

What's really funny (to me, at least) here and in a lot of other aspects of the cypherpunk reaction to FV is the continuing assumption that the choice of FV vs encryption is an either/or thing. Combine FV's Virtual PIN mechanism with transport encryption and you've indiputably got something that's a LOT safer than just using credit cards with encryption, and a bit safer than our current system, too. But I know, the correct focus here is FV's current system. So read on. At this point in your attack, you skip a step: You don't explain how you correlate the FV ID to email address. This means that your attack will ONLY work for systems where the user is always using the same PC to web browse and read his mail. In practice, even if this is true 99% of the time, the remaining 1% would probably cause your attack to be detected pretty quickly if deployed on a large, automated scale. But, for the sake of argument, let's imagine that it's true 100% of the time. Read on.

A version that infected the win95 IP stack could be quite effective. The list of FV accepting sites would be easily obtainable via a query of altavista. Since the infected system is on the internet and has to periodically send its results to the attacker, it could download an updated list of FV pages at the same time.

Seems to me your "not much harder" claim is starting to break down here, with an automated virus spreading itself all over the net and downloading lists from altavista weekly. And the amount of net traffic you're generating may make this attack a lot more quickly detected than ours. (In fact, I imagine that if the folks at AltaVista or Lycos noted thousands of identical searches focused on merchants accepting First Virtual, they'd probably contact us, more out of concern for their own load management than anything else.) But still, read on -- we're finally coming to the good part.

Attacking the e-mail verification step of the FV system could also be accomplished via a hacked winsock. A bit of POP3 aware code in the winsock could intercept the verification messages and keep the e-mail client from ever seeing them. It could automatically generate "Yes" responses for all such messages.

OK, so you're only interested in POP3 mail tools? That's wonderful, but there's also systems that use IMAP, systems that use raw SMTP to locally resident message stores, and many odder things. There's also people who get their mail through AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc. There's people who live on a PC or Mac, but who read mail on a UNIX system (e.g. many Delphi and Netcom users). You're not going to catch all of them. Moreover, even if you say "that's fine, we only need some of them", your attack is now dead in the water. Why? Because you have no way of telling, in your attack virus, what kind of technology is going to be used to read mail. This means that your attack will inevitably, and quickly, hit some people who DO receive the mail. Our fraud department will be quickly notified (when the user answers "fraud" to our query, a human sees it right away) and we'll be off to the races, collecting clues. It will be work tracking it down, but we'll have a good shot in identifying the attack and producing a program that helps users spot it on their system (the moral equivalent of an anti-viral program) in less time than it would take you to even suspect that the attack FV outlined had taken place in the world of software-encrypted credit cards. Your attack would be caught by us relatively quickly because our model is based not on a single fail-safe piece of security software, but on *process* security. The overall process is multifaceted, with many checks and balances. What if, for example, I go to someone else's machine and use their web browser to buy something using MY First Virtual ID? Your attack will capture my ID and allow you to try to use it, but the email confirmation will go elsewhere, quite possibly to an uninfected machine. When reproduced on a mass scale, this kind of thing will be noticed pretty fast. In contrast, credit cards are a one-way payment mechanism -- the number (and sometimes some other info typed in close proximity) is basically all you need. Just steal that without getting noticed and the crime is done.

I believe that FV is just as vulnerable to these types of attacks as any of the encryption based credit card schemes, if not more so. The thing that really protects FV is that it can only be used to buy bit, not real goods, and the bad guys don't generally care about stealing bits. This is also what makes FV not generally useful to people who want to shop over the internet.

Actually, you're a bit behind the times. We removed that restriction from our system a couple of months ago. There still aren't many people using our system for physical goods, mostly because of our 91-day fund holding period, but we have gotten the green light from our financial partners to waive that for qualified, established merchants, once we make a few technical changes behind the scenes. The fact is that our original restriction against physical goods was never designed to protect against fraud. Rather, it was a conscious attempt to do two things: 1) bound the risk our bank perceived in being the first bank ever to explicitly agree to handle an Internet-based payment system (this was mid-1994, remember), and 2) to focus the attention of our prospective users on the situations that were in fact reasonably well-suited to an economic model in which consumers had the explicit option of refusing payment. Some of our sellers very quickly realized that no matter what we said, it was straightforward to use our system for physical goods, shipping them only after the consumer said "yes", and we eventually changed our terms and conditions to reflect that reality. The 91 day hold, on the other hand, WAS designed to protect against fraud -- from the *merchant* side, which is why we have no qualms about waiving it for qualified merchants. Now, actually, I want to commend you. This is as close as I've ever seen anyone come to constructing a plausible automated attack on FV. The IP stack is a very clever attack vector, and I honestly can't claim to have anticipated it. However, I do think that the flaw in your approach reinforces my belief in the importance of multi-layered defenses. In fact, a multi-layered security strategy is the ONLY defense against vulnerabilities you haven't thought of yet. That's the real reason why ANY scheme based on one-way instruments like credit card numbers is particularly hard to make secure. -- Nathaniel -------- Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@fv.com> Chief Scientist, First Virtual Holdings FAQ & PGP key: nsb+faq@nsb.fv.com

Nathaniel Borenstein wrote:

I should also apologize for the fact that I couldn't resist in pointing out lots of little problems with your proposed attack, and that I'm responding to your plan in the order you described it. This means that we don't get to the really major flaw in your strategy towards the end, so what comes at first will seem like nitpicking.

No problem. This is how we find flaws and make systems stronger.

Excerpts from mail.cypherpunks: 30-Jan-96 Re: FV Demonstrates Fatal F.. Jeff Weinstein@netscape. (2739*)

...

It would not be much harder than the demonstrated keyboard attack to create a hacked version of winsock that would implement an attack against First Virtual. If the attacker had a list of web pages that accept FV payments it would be very easy to collect the ID numbers.

A list of stores? First of all, this attack is already amazingly focused. Our DLL to implement the attack on credit cards is 16K, and doesn't need to target any specific buyers, sellers, or programs. The more complex the attack & the bigger the software, the more likely it is to be noticed. But this is just a minor nit. Read on.

A gigabyte drive has lots of corners to hide stuff. A list of the top 1000 first virtual sites would not be very large. On a windows system it could be hidden in the c:\windows\system directory, where a 100k file with an unintelligible name would not seem unusual.

...

There is no need to attack the large datastream of keyboard input when the search can be easily narrowed. Since FV doesn't use encryption the attack could easily be implemented in winsock, making it independent of any client software.

What's really funny (to me, at least) here and in a lot of other aspects of the cypherpunk reaction to FV is the continuing assumption that the choice of FV vs encryption is an either/or thing. Combine FV's Virtual PIN mechanism with transport encryption and you've indiputably got something that's a LOT safer than just using credit cards with encryption, and a bit safer than our current system, too. But I know, the correct focus here is FV's current system. So read on.

At this point in your attack, you skip a step: You don't explain how you correlate the FV ID to email address. This means that your attack will ONLY work for systems where the user is always using the same PC to web browse and read his mail. In practice, even if this is true 99% of the time, the remaining 1% would probably cause your attack to be detected pretty quickly if deployed on a large, automated scale. But, for the sake of argument, let's imagine that it's true 100% of the time. Read on.

You would not send the FV ID to the "bad guys" until you saw a complete FV transaction take place. You remember the ID when you see it, but only send it after seeing the e-mail verification message.

...

A version that infected the win95 IP stack could be quite effective. The list of FV accepting sites would be easily obtainable via a query of altavista. Since the infected system is on the internet and has to periodically send its results to the attacker, it could download an updated list of FV pages at the same time.

Seems to me your "not much harder" claim is starting to break down here, with an automated virus spreading itself all over the net and downloading lists from altavista weekly. And the amount of net traffic you're generating may make this attack a lot more quickly detected than ours. (In fact, I imagine that if the folks at AltaVista or Lycos noted thousands of identical searches focused on merchants accepting First Virtual, they'd probably contact us, more out of concern for their own load management than anything else.) But still, read on -- we're finally coming to the good part.

I guess I didn't explain this well enough. The attacker would do a single altavista query, and then broadcast it via some existing mechanism over the net. Weekly postings to some low volume junk newsgroup would do the trick.

...

Attacking the e-mail verification step of the FV system could also be accomplished via a hacked winsock. A bit of POP3 aware code in the winsock could intercept the verification messages and keep the e-mail client from ever seeing them. It could automatically generate "Yes" responses for all such messages.

OK, so you're only interested in POP3 mail tools? That's wonderful, but there's also systems that use IMAP, systems that use raw SMTP to locally resident message stores, and many odder things. There's also people who get their mail through AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc. There's people who live on a PC or Mac, but who read mail on a UNIX system (e.g. many Delphi and Netcom users).

So I only get half or a third of the millions of people conducting commerce over the internet. If this stuff ever really takes off that will be plenty.

You're not going to catch all of them. Moreover, even if you say "that's fine, we only need some of them", your attack is now dead in the water. Why? Because you have no way of telling, in your attack virus, what kind of technology is going to be used to read mail. This means that your attack will inevitably, and quickly, hit some people who DO receive the mail. Our fraud department will be quickly notified (when the user answers "fraud" to our query, a human sees it right away) and we'll be off to the races, collecting clues. It will be work tracking it down, but we'll have a good shot in identifying the attack and producing a program that helps users spot it on their system (the moral equivalent of an anti-viral program) in less time than it would take you to even suspect that the attack FV outlined had taken place in the world of software-encrypted credit cards.

It should be quite easy to determine what protocol a user uses to read their mail from within winsock. If we want to limit it to pop3 users, we could just keep track of connections to port 110. As noted before, if they don't use pop we don't target them.

Your attack would be caught by us relatively quickly because our model is based not on a single fail-safe piece of security software, but on *process* security. The overall process is multifaceted, with many checks and balances. What if, for example, I go to someone else's machine and use their web browser to buy something using MY First Virtual ID? Your attack will capture my ID and allow you to try to use it, but the email confirmation will go elsewhere, quite possibly to an uninfected machine. When reproduced on a mass scale, this kind of thing will be noticed pretty fast. In contrast, credit cards are a one-way payment mechanism -- the number (and sometimes some other info typed in close proximity) is basically all you need. Just steal that without getting noticed and the crime is done.

With the explosive growth of internet connected PCs, I think that the number of people who "surf" and read e-mail on different machines is dwindling rapidly. I am happy to skip those old guard of the internet and concentrate on the newbies who only have one computer and one account.

...

I believe that FV is just as vulnerable to these types of attacks as any of the encryption based credit card schemes, if not more so. The thing that really protects FV is that it can only be used to buy bit, not real goods, and the bad guys don't generally care about stealing bits. This is also what makes FV not generally useful to people who want to shop over the internet.

Actually, you're a bit behind the times. We removed that restriction from our system a couple of months ago. There still aren't many people using our system for physical goods, mostly because of our 91-day fund holding period, but we have gotten the green light from our financial partners to waive that for qualified, established merchants, once we make a few technical changes behind the scenes.

The fact is that our original restriction against physical goods was never designed to protect against fraud. Rather, it was a conscious attempt to do two things: 1) bound the risk our bank perceived in being the first bank ever to explicitly agree to handle an Internet-based payment system (this was mid-1994, remember), and 2) to focus the attention of our prospective users on the situations that were in fact reasonably well-suited to an economic model in which consumers had the explicit option of refusing payment. Some of our sellers very quickly realized that no matter what we said, it was straightforward to use our system for physical goods, shipping them only after the consumer said "yes", and we eventually changed our terms and conditions to reflect that reality. The 91 day hold, on the other hand, WAS designed to protect against fraud -- from the *merchant* side, which is why we have no qualms about waiving it for qualified merchants.

Well this means that an attack against First Virtual would be more interesting.

Now, actually, I want to commend you. This is as close as I've ever seen anyone come to constructing a plausible automated attack on FV. The IP stack is a very clever attack vector, and I honestly can't claim to have anticipated it. However, I do think that the flaw in your approach reinforces my belief in the importance of multi-layered defenses. In fact, a multi-layered security strategy is the ONLY defense against vulnerabilities you haven't thought of yet. That's the real reason why ANY scheme based on one-way instruments like credit card numbers is particularly hard to make secure. -- Nathaniel

I still think that someone could construct an attack against the current FV system using the techniques I've described. It would be more complicated to construct than the keyboard attack but that has been proven time and again not to be a barrier. Someone who could construct the Morris worm or the year ago IP spoofing attacks could do it. I think that you may have to rethink some of your assumptions that were valid back when you designed the system, but are no longer given the current growth and changing demographics of the internet. I'd really like to see some effort spent on closing some of the more gaping holes in the underlying systems. Why should it be so easy for one program to snoop on the keystrokes directed to another? Why should it be so easy for a program downloaded from the net to patch a part of the operating system? --Jeff -- Jeff Weinstein - Electronic Munitions Specialist Netscape Communication Corporation jsw@netscape.com - http://home.netscape.com/people/jsw Any opinions expressed above are mine.