November 2013 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

"Reforms" to NSA spying
by Jim Bell 04 Nov '13

04 Nov '13

A few days ago I read of 'reforms' being proposed to NSA spying on phone and internet metadata, along the lines of requiring the government to obtain some sort of warrant to get data from the phone companies, etc. Progress? I doubt it. Looks to me like the government knows it's going to lose control of the data, and probably there are no requirements that such phone co's keep 'all' the data. I predict that any proposed new bill will contain requirements that the phone co's record 'all' of the data the government might want, and keep it for an extended period of time. The government knows that if no such requirement is put into law, phone co's will compete for customers by offering ever-more-complete privacy. Soon enough, no phone company will store metadata, or they will store it in such a way that it will be useless for government purposes. Jim Bell http://news.yahoo.com/big-us-tech-firms-calls-reform-snooping-161145013.htm

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NSA - What for.
by Juan Garofalo 04 Nov '13

04 Nov '13

What's the purpose of all the US spying? It obviously is not directed against 'terrists' since the only real terrorist out there are the american military sacks of shit and their accomplices. There are no 'foreign' terrorists who want to attack the US. If 'terrists' really existed, we'd be seeing real terrorist attacks in US cities every week. But there are none. So, are they spying on ordinary american subjects? What for? I mean, what actual benefit are they getting from that? They are the ones who caught DPR. But are they going to use their 'secret' information to put in jail every 'criminal' in the US? Or are they spying on behalf of american business, stealing industrial secrets and information from the competitors of american industries? Or are they mostly a useless bureaucracy that only steals and stores data, not doing anything else, at least for the time being? Preparing to transform the US from a covert totalitarian shithole into an overt totalitarian shithole? Or? J.

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Re: [liberationtech] Obfuscation / Network Steganography Research
by Griffin Boyce 04 Nov '13

04 Nov '13

Lucas Dixon wrote: > Hi, > > I'm trying to put together a good reading and person list for what is > currently known on network steganography (in particular, network > traffic obfuscation) I'd recommend checking out these selected papers in anonymity: http://freehaven.net/anonbib/ Two papers in particular: Traffic Analysis Attacks on a Continuously-Observable Steganographic File System (Troncoso, et al 2007) http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/troncoso-ih2007.pdf StegoTorus: A Camouflage Proxy for the Tor Anonymity System (Weinberg, et al 2012) http://freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/ccs2012-stegotorus.pdf There are several that briefly talk about stego, but right now there haven't been that many devoted to the topic. best, Griffin -- Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. PGP: 0xD9D4CADEE3B67E7AB2C05717E331FD29AE792C97 OTR: saint(a)jabber.ccc.de -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys(a)stanford.edu.

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[Bitcoin-development] Electrum version 1.9
by Thomas Voegtlin 04 Nov '13

04 Nov '13

Electrum version 1.9 is now released. This version connects to multiple servers, and it also checks the SSL certificates of servers it knows. Please note that the BIP32 features are postponed (to version 2.0), due to the discussions about mnemonic seed format. Here is the changelog: # Release 1.9 * The client connects to multiple servers in order to retrieve block headers and find the longest chain * SSL certificate validation (to prevent MITM) * Deterministic signatures (RFC 6979) * Menu to create/restore/open wallets * Create transactions with multiple outputs from CSV (comma separated values) * New user interface for text mode, named "stdio" (does not use curses) * Plugins are no longer tied to the qt GUI, they can reach all GUIs * Proxy bugs have been fixed ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Android is increasing in popularity, but the open development platform that developers love is also attractive to malware creators. Download this white paper to learn more about secure code signing practices that can help keep Android apps secure. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=65839951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development(a)lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development

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private fiber security, large IPsec deployments [was: PRISM too much trouble? Get MUSCULAR]
by coderman 04 Nov '13

04 Nov '13

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 11:35 AM, Gregory Foster <gfoster(a)entersection.org> wrote: > ... According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, > NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records > every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks ... > The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a > project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the > agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ. From undisclosed > interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying > entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry > information between the data centers... encryption between sites would eliminate the risk above on private fiber. you can easily accomplish this today via various means. (some businesses already VPN over private dedicated fiber) if you wanted to protect every host in every data center end-to-end would you go with IPsec or OpenVPN or other? what is the largest IPsec deployment on record? (transport, not tunnel mode) how would you handle key management / key exchange for such a system?

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Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps
by Eugen Leitl 03 Nov '13

03 Nov '13

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and… Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps Like a super strain of bacteria, the rootkit plaguing Dragos Ruiu is omnipotent. by Dan Goodin - Oct 31 2013, 3:07pm CET BLACK HAT HACKING Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock Three years ago, security consultant Dragos Ruiu was in his lab when he noticed something highly unusual: his MacBook Air, on which he had just installed a fresh copy of OS X, spontaneously updated the firmware that helps it boot. Stranger still, when Ruiu then tried to boot the machine off a CD ROM, it refused. He also found that the machine could delete data and undo configuration changes with no prompting. He didn't know it then, but that odd firmware update would become a high-stakes malware mystery that would consume most of his waking hours. In the following months, Ruiu observed more odd phenomena that seemed straight out of a science-fiction thriller. A computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting. His network transmitted data specific to the Internet's next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled. Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed. Further investigation soon showed that the list of affected operating systems also included multiple variants of Windows and Linux. "We were like, 'Okay, we're totally owned,'" Ruiu told Ars. "'We have to erase all our systems and start from scratch,' which we did. It was a very painful exercise. I've been suspicious of stuff around here ever since." In the intervening three years, Ruiu said, the infections have persisted, almost like a strain of bacteria that's able to survive extreme antibiotic therapies. Within hours or weeks of wiping an infected computer clean, the odd behavior would return. The most visible sign of contamination is a machine's inability to boot off a CD, but other, more subtle behaviors can be observed when using tools such as Process Monitor, which is designed for troubleshooting and forensic investigations. Another intriguing characteristic: in addition to jumping "airgaps" designed to isolate infected or sensitive machines from all other networked computers, the malware seems to have self-healing capabilities. "We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows system CD," Ruiu said. "At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we're using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of the sudden the search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it to search for their keys." Over the past two weeks, Ruiu has taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus to document his investigative odyssey and share a theory that has captured the attention of some of the world's foremost security experts. The malware, Ruiu believes, is transmitted though USB drives to infect the lowest levels of computer hardware. With the ability to target a computer's Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and possibly other firmware standards, the malware can attack a wide variety of platforms, escape common forms of detection, and survive most attempts to eradicate it. But the story gets stranger still. In posts here, here, and here, Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: "badBIOS," as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps. Bigfoot in the age of the advanced persistent threat At times as I've reported this story, its outline has struck me as the stuff of urban legend, the advanced persistent threat equivalent of a Bigfoot sighting. Indeed, Ruiu has conceded that while several fellow security experts have assisted his investigation, none has peer reviewed his process or the tentative findings that he's beginning to draw. (A compilation of Ruiu's observations is here.) Also unexplained is why Ruiu would be on the receiving end of such an advanced and exotic attack. As a security professional, the organizer of the internationally renowned CanSecWest and PacSec conferences, and the founder of the Pwn2Own hacking competition, he is no doubt an attractive target to state-sponsored spies and financially motivated hackers. But he's no more attractive a target than hundreds or thousands of his peers, who have so far not reported the kind of odd phenomena that has afflicted Ruiu's computers and networks. In contrast to the skepticism that's common in the security and hacking cultures, Ruiu's peers have mostly responded with deep-seated concern and even fascination to his dispatches about badBIOS. "Everybody in security needs to follow @dragosr and watch his analysis of #badBIOS," Alex Stamos, one of the more trusted and sober security researchers, wrote in a tweet last week. Jeff Moss—the founder of the Defcon and Blackhat security conferences who in 2009 began advising Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on matters of computer security—retweeted the statement and added: "No joke it's really serious." Plenty of others agree. "Dragos is definitely one of the good reliable guys, and I have never ever even remotely thought him dishonest," security researcher Arrigo Triulzi told Ars. "Nothing of what he describes is science fiction taken individually, but we have not seen it in the wild ever." Been there, done that Triulzi said he's seen plenty of firmware-targeting malware in the laboratory. A client of his once infected the UEFI-based BIOS of his Mac laptop as part of an experiment. Five years ago, Triulzi himself developed proof-of-concept malware that stealthily infected the network interface controllers that sit on a computer motherboard and provide the Ethernet jack that connects the machine to a network. His research built off of work by John Heasman that demonstrated how to plant hard-to-detect malware known as a rootkit in a computer's peripheral component interconnect, the Intel-developed connection that attaches hardware devices to a CPU. It's also possible to use high-frequency sounds broadcast over speakers to send network packets. Early networking standards used the technique, said security expert Rob Graham. Ultrasonic-based networking is also the subject of a great deal of research, including this project by scientists at MIT. Of course, it's one thing for researchers in the lab to demonstrate viable firmware-infecting rootkits and ultra high-frequency networking techniques. But as Triulzi suggested, it's another thing entirely to seamlessly fuse the two together and use the weapon in the real world against a seasoned security consultant. What's more, use of a USB stick to infect an array of computer platforms at the BIOS level rivals the payload delivery system found in the state-sponsored Stuxnet worm unleashed to disrupt Iran's nuclear program. And the reported ability of badBIOS to bridge airgaps also has parallels to Flame, another state-sponsored piece of malware that used Bluetooth radio signals to communicate with devices not connected to the Internet. "Really, everything Dragos reports is something that's easily within the capabilities of a lot of people," said Graham, who is CEO of penetration testing firm Errata Security. "I could, if I spent a year, write a BIOS that does everything Dragos said badBIOS is doing. To communicate over ultrahigh frequency sound waves between computers is really, really easy." Coincidentally, Italian newspapers this week reported that Russian spies attempted to monitor attendees of last month's G20 economic summit by giving them memory sticks and recharging cables programmed to intercept their communications. Eureka For most of the three years that Ruiu has been wrestling with badBIOS, its infection mechanism remained a mystery. A month or two ago, after buying a new computer, he noticed that it was almost immediately infected as soon as he plugged one of his USB drives into it. He soon theorized that infected computers have the ability to contaminate USB devices and vice versa. "The suspicion right now is there's some kind of buffer overflow in the way the BIOS is reading the drive itself, and they're reprogramming the flash controller to overflow the BIOS and then adding a section to the BIOS table," he explained. He still doesn't know if a USB stick was the initial infection trigger for his MacBook Air three years ago, or if the USB devices were infected only after they came into contact with his compromised machines, which he said now number between one and two dozen. He said he has been able to identify a variety of USB sticks that infect any computer they are plugged into. At next month's PacSec conference, Ruiu said he plans to get access to expensive USB analysis hardware that he hopes will provide new clues behind the infection mechanism. He said he suspects badBIOS is only the initial module of a multi-staged payload that has the ability to infect the Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, and Linux operating systems. Dragos Ruiu Julia Wolf "It's going out over the network to get something or it's going out to the USB key that it was infected from," he theorized. "That's also the conjecture of why it's not booting CDs. It's trying to keep its claws, as it were, on the machine. It doesn't want you to boot another OS it might not have code for." To put it another way, he said, badBIOS "is the tip of the warhead, as it were." “Things kept getting fixed” Ruiu said he arrived at the theory about badBIOS's high-frequency networking capability after observing encrypted data packets being sent to and from an infected laptop that had no obvious network connection with—but was in close proximity to—another badBIOS-infected computer. The packets were transmitted even when the laptop had its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards removed. Ruiu also disconnected the machine's power cord so it ran only on battery to rule out the possibility it was receiving signals over the electrical connection. Even then, forensic tools showed the packets continued to flow over the airgapped machine. Then, when Ruiu removed the internal speaker and microphone connected to the airgapped machine, the packets suddenly stopped. With the speakers and mic intact, Ruiu said, the isolated computer seemed to be using the high-frequency connection to maintain the integrity of the badBIOS infection as he worked to dismantle software components the malware relied on. "The airgapped machine is acting like it's connected to the Internet," he said. "Most of the problems we were having is we were slightly disabling bits of the components of the system. It would not let us disable some things. Things kept getting fixed automatically as soon as we tried to break them. It was weird." It's too early to say with confidence that what Ruiu has been observing is a USB-transmitted rootkit that can burrow into a computer's lowest levels and use it as a jumping off point to infect a variety of operating systems with malware that can't be detected. It's even harder to know for sure that infected systems are using high-frequency sounds to communicate with isolated machines. But after almost two weeks of online discussion, no one has been able to rule out these troubling scenarios, either. "It looks like the state of the art in intrusion stuff is a lot more advanced than we assumed it was," Ruiu concluded in an interview. "The take-away from this is a lot of our forensic procedures are weak when faced with challenges like this. A lot of companies have to take a lot more care when they use forensic data if they're faced with sophisticated attackers."

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Re: Meet “badBIOS,” the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps
by brian carroll 03 Nov '13

03 Nov '13

naive perhaps, though would it be possible to transmit such 'radio code' via a small transmitter, say at short range in another building, that could send a stream of infecting code into a building (and thus the infection could begin outside the USB framework), such as via a small programmed microcontroller with radio antenna, either networked or running autonomously (or would this be a pirate radio issue, closed-in on quickly by HAMs monitoring misuse of spectrum). further, if this radio broadcast of code were possible, one-way or bidirectional, what would prevent this from scaling city or region wide if a transmitter were overtaken and sending out signals to computers en masse, to reprogram firmware, targeting via equipment statistics or OS/hardware demographics. just wondering if software-defined radio may be a context for hacking computers beyond the peripherals directly attached to the computers, such that a different security situation, boundary, or perimeter may exist yet not be accounted for or protected against.

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Re: [Cryptography] [RNG] on RNGs, VM state, rollback, etc.
by Theodore Ts'o 02 Nov '13

02 Nov '13

On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 08:12:00AM -0400, John Kelsey wrote: > This gets back to the threat model discussion. If your attacker is > watching you from the outside as you generate your key, then > interacting with stuff over the local net won't help you much. (You > may get a bit or two of entropy from the attacker not being able to > know exactly which clock-tick you were on when the interrupt was > serviced, but not much.). If he's not watching you then, you can > rule out a whole category of attackers. Yes, absolutely. For example, if you assume that the attacker has network taps at Fort Meade and in a phone closets of companies like AT&T, they are very likely not going to be able to watch your LAN traffic. OTOH, if they have physical access to your LAN such that they can drop an agent close to your computer that can monitor all of the packets hitting your computer, we have to ask how are they doing this? If they can someone break into your local ethernet switch remotely, then you might be in a world of hurt (although usually switches generally don't have enough of general purpose CPU that this is likely). If you posit a "black bag" job where they physically break into your house, and replace your ethernet switch, then they could presumably place a keyboard bug on your keyboard, or otherwise physically tamper with your computer, install audio/video surveillance equipment in an HVAC duct, etc. --- and then you're either doing something really black hatish, or I have a tin foil hat to sell to you, or possibly both. :-) My challenge as someone who is designing things like a general purpose /dev/random is that it's challenging to determine which assumptions about the threat environment might make sense in a large set of hypothetical scenarios, and which do not. I can imagine scenarios where the adversary is on a public network --- say, at a University dorm network --- who might be able to watch interpacket network arrival times, but who probably can't make a lot of assumptions about HDD completion drive times --- and the user might want to generate a securely long-term public key for their ssh host key or for GPG. I'm less willing to accept as a valid threat model one where the adversary has near-total control over _all_ entropy sources, *and* can divine the state of the prng, but has no other access to the system so they can't break root in other ways, *and* where if you can't prove that you can make the prng secure again, it's somehow horrible and your rng is not robust (and that the authors of said paper should deserve lots of citations so they can get a suitably high impact score on their way to achieving tenure :-). But maybe there are scenarios where such a threat environment is actually realistic. I'm certainly willing to hear someone try to give me an example of such a threat environment; it would probably be quite educational. - Ted _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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threat-model clarification
by brian carroll 02 Nov '13

02 Nov '13

(was: Re: Meet "badBIOS") additional clarification regarding my last post... https://cpunks.org//pipermail/cypherpunks/2013-November/001957.html i did not thoroughly think through my explanation and a large gap exists in reasoning, and so want to provide additional explanation about how it could be possible to defeat existing security measures via this approach +------+ attacker ---> | SCIF | +------+ basically the idea of a boundary or wall around a SCIF, even if acoustically and electromagnetically shielded, is proposed possible to bypass via resonance and-or also quantum effects if they were to function in a similar way so even though a boundary could exist for EM and sound, that separates what is outside from what is inside, it is proposed that an attacker could potentially move through this boundary and still interact with interior equipment via acoustic and electromagnetic principles what was missing from the explanation was that this attack could occur within a context of 'other dimensions' or additional dimensionality, versus 4D of space-time that is presumably standardized for the basic security evaluation [4D] ---> [otherD] ---> [4D] in other words, what is proposed is that resonance could occur outside of only a 4 dimensional context, as part of the larger nested circuitry of the cosmos, and bypass the bounded "physics" of limited 4D space-time and its rules, to reemerge on the inside of the SCIF security perimeter, in a context accessed by electromagnetism and sound (as these may be connected with, interdimensionally) f l a t l a n d ...................... +------+ attacker ---> | SCIF | +------+ in other words, this is to recontextualize the SCIF in the realm of multiple dimensions beyond space-time, that hierarchically could exist in N-dimensions, which is proposed to correlate with a state of absolute truth like Flatland the novel, higher dimensions may exist unseen due to parameters or limits, and thus beyond imagination, unless somehow accessing keys to the threshold condition, the structure connecting layers (note: relation of electromagnetism, sound; the aether) so while an attack against a SCIF could be defeated by electromagnetic and acoustic shielding that would not allow such emissions to escape in 4D, seemingly, this condition may not exist within higher dimensions that can bypass the secure boundary, threshold, 'wall' f l a t l a n d ...................... (otherD)--------. | | | | | v | +------+ attacker ---> | SCIF | +------+ if an attacker, for instance, had equipment that could access this higher dimensionality, likely using acoustic and electromagnetic technology to do so, it may involve a circuit that exists outside 4 dimensional space-time, and moves through a higher-dimensionality to breach the protective barrier, reemerging on the other side of the wall, inside the SCIF, via acoustic and EM effects, such as resonance or perhaps quantum-correlations due to entanglement of matter, energy, information f l a t l a n d ...................... (otherD) (attacker) | | v +------+ secure ---> | SCIF | +------+ likewise, a true security threat could today exist that in this way appears entirely *invisible* because it is functioning beyond normal perception in a 4D context which is actually nested within higher dimensionality and thus omniscient-like observation, surveillance, if not political meddling and exploitation could occur from beyond the normal realm of perception, via similar means yet remain officially unaccounted for and unacknowledged, though be the actual context for events that are occurring, which tends towards a Matrix red pill or blue pill situation in other words, the attackers could be invisible and have the advantage of different physics, and be siphoning data and information from other dimensionality yet basically remain unseen or removed from immediate interactions, though rely on avatar-like secondary relations as part of a management scheme, in a realm as if "make believe" note: in this context, "binary computation" could relate to dimensionality and in this way: mathematics in 4D could be differently patterned in higher dimensions if not solvable via unseen correlations (math based on patterns, dimensionality effecting their functionality, how the patterns relate, 'compute', via structures) attacker [4D] ==> [otherD] ---> SCIF: ==> [4D] equipment thus, even in the four dimensional context, if this could be circumvented to defeat the security barrier or wall of the SCIF, a principle that is interdimensional such as resonance could appear on both side of this boundary and yet not pass through it in 4D space-time, instead the attack would leave this realm, move into a higher dimensionality and reappear elsewhere in 4D, within acoustic and electromagnetic principles that involve pairing or matching can that be remotely correlated, as with entangled objects and acoustic resonance sound/em [4D] ==> [otherD] ---> SCIF: ==> [4D] sound/em thus to clarify: the 'magic flute' of some unknown technology would access other dimensionality via its acoustic or other principles, and perhaps this is also potentially ~natural or automatic- and could reappear on the other side of the boundary, via this] resonance or entanglement, even while the SCIF is designed to protect against any such outside/inside interactions, because it goes beyond 4D spacetime and involves interdimensional circuits of connection, seemingly fundamentally involving information itself as this connects to matter and energy structurally (perhaps in some ways related to information and its hypothesized ability to escape a blackhole) (such structures are what CERN could be dealing with in the unmentionable Da Vinci Code realm, where the recontextualization of dark matter and dark energy could involve bridging into higher dimensionality) i.e. the hack is literally "out of this world" & back or could start in higher dimensionality from the start or be coordinated across the dimensional boundary by a shared-identity group attacker in multiple dimensions, e.g. agents in 4D coordinated with higher dimensionality where the stealth attacks could be multipronged, ~magical. of ceiling cat voyeurism involving higher dimensionality Š « Ȑ

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Re: Meet ?badBIOS, ? the mysterious Mac and PC malware that jumps airgaps
by Softy 01 Nov '13

01 Nov '13

> > > perhaps i misunderstand it, though must 'resonance' > > be audibly acoustic, and would a SCIF actually defend > > against "vibrations" at all frequencies. > the question highlights how ill-suited the 'spy agencies' are for conducting asymmetric anything. Unless they had a Brain inside think of a mechanism and explain it to an Engineer to propose to a Facilities Security Manager who obtained confirmation from a Director, they would be vulnerable. For instance, TEMPEST security - every SCIF has it because inside it was well documented/implemented. SEISMIC security - no SCIF*** is isolated from seismic vibrations modulated with data. So, to ex-filtrate data, have those passing circus elephants stomp their feet in predetermined patterns. Or make one of those "Dune" style thumpers. The worms in this case being .... ? *** I'm suppose some very few SCIFs are vibration isolated for various reasons, but not as an exfil channel. -daniel

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