September 2013 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

[tt] NS 2935: Forget premiums: A peer-to-peer network will cover you
by Eugen Leitl 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from Frank Forman <checker(a)panix.com> ----- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:54:58 +0000 (GMT) From: Frank Forman <checker(a)panix.com> To: Transhuman Tech <tt(a)postbiota.org> Subject: [tt] NS 2935: Forget premiums: A peer-to-peer network will cover you NS 2935: Forget premiums: A peer-to-peer network will cover you http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929354.300-forget-premiums-a-peerto… * 22 September 2013 by Hal Hodson People can now insure one another in peer-to-peer networks and do away with big insurance companies and premiums INSURANCE is an unfortunate fact of life. We pay large premiums to cover ourselves for bad events that often never happen. But there is another way. An online insurance firm called Peercover lets groups of people insure each other on their own terms and at a fraction of the cost. Insurance is the latest financial service to get a shake-up from peer-to-peer (P2P) dynamics. Already, individuals can lend money for a return with interest. Similarly, people wanting to exchange currency can avoid banks and instead use P2P services to find other people looking to make the opposite trade. "The changes in financial services that are happening now are happening more quickly and dramatically than anything we've seen over the last 100 years," says Ron Suber of peer-to-peer loan company Prosper. "Peercover is a great example." P2P insurance is simpler and cheaper than mainstream methods. "People are paying profit and overhead to insurance firms when they pay premiums," says Peercover co-founder Jared Mimms. Peercover groups don't collect premiums. Instead, every individual in the group has a stake - each is both insurer and insuree. The group's founder sets the initial conditions for that group, including what can be insured and the maximum value of an item. The payout for a claim is split between all members but is only made when the majority of the group approve the claim. The amount you pay out is directly proportional to the value of the goods you have insured, as calculated by Peercover's algorithms. Someone insuring a $400 cellphone will pay a larger proportion of a member's claim than someone who is insuring a $100 cellphone, for example. Members who fail to pay are ejected from the group and are no longer covered. The reason all this is possible is, as with other P2P services, because of the rise of new ways to pay online. "The kind of insurance we're interested in wasn't possible a few years ago," says Mimms. "It only became possible because of micropayments." Behind micropayments are breakthroughs such as the virtual currency Bitcoin and the payment network Ripple, which Peercover uses. Both charge an extremely small fee for processing a transaction compared with traditional models such as credit card companies, making payments as low as 20 cents feasible. Initially, Peercover's focus is on building groups to cover small things like cellphones, and what Mimms calls positive insurance. This is where a group pays out when a member reaches an agreed goal, such as giving up smoking. But he has grander visions too, such as health insurance, where large groups of Peercover users could negotiate preferential rates for treatment. "The technology allows for the potential of collective bargaining in the negotiation of healthcare costs in which groups may band together to practise some of the bargaining techniques used by governments and traditional insurance behemoths," Mimms says. Ellen Carney, an insurance industry analyst with research firm Forrester, says Peercover points towards the future of insurance. "It's very clever. This model is at the historical roots of so many insurance companies." She backs the idea that Peercover has the potential to change how health insurance works in the US, although there are obvious regulatory hurdles. "Health insurance in the US has a lot of problems. You could see that this would be an interesting alternative." Richard Carter, CEO of financial software developer Nostrum Group, says that data from sources such as social networks will play a role in a peer-to-peer world. This won't just be in the form of finding friends to go in with on coverage, but to judge unknown group applicants too. "Consumers need to learn that everything they put into the public domain is going to be used to judge them in future, whether they like it or not," Carter says. _______________________________________________ tt mailing list tt(a)postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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How a Crypto ‘Backdoor’ Pitted the Tech World Against the NSA
by Eugen Leitl 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-backdoor/all/ How a Crypto ‘Backdoor’ Pitted the Tech World Against the NSA BY KIM ZETTER09.24.136:30 AM Illustration: alengo/Getty Images In August 2007, a young programmer in Microsoft’s Windows security group stood up to give a five-minute turbo talk at the annual Crypto conference in Santa Barbara. It was a Tuesday evening, part of the conference’s traditional rump session, when a hodge-podge of short talks are presented outside of the conference’s main lineup. To draw attendees away from the wine and beer that competed for their attention at that hour, presenters sometimes tried to sex up their talks with provocative titles like “Does Bob Go to Prison?” or “How to Steal Cars – A Practical Attack on KeeLoq” or “The Only Rump Session Talk With Pamela Anderson.” Dan Shumow and his Microsoft colleague Niels Ferguson titled theirs, provocatively, “On the Possibility of a Back Door in the NIST SP800-90 Dual Ec Prng.” It was a title only a crypto geek would love or get. The talk was only nine slides long (.pdf). But those nine slides were potentially dynamite. They laid out a case showing that a new encryption standard, given a stamp of approval by the U.S. government, possessed a glaring weakness that made an algorithm in it susceptible to cracking. But the weakness they described wasn’t just an average vulnerability, it had the kind of properties one would want if one were intentionally inserting a backdoor to make the algorithm susceptible to cracking by design. For such a dramatic presentation — by mathematicians’ standards — the reaction to it was surprisingly muted. “I think folks thought, ‘Well that’s interesting,’ and, ‘Wow, it looks like maybe there was a flaw in the design,’” says a senior Microsoft manager who was at the talk. “But there wasn’t a huge reaction.” Six years later, that’s all changed. Early this month the New York Times drew a connection between their talk and memos leaked by Edward Snowden, classified Top Secret, that apparently confirms that the weakness in the standard and so-called Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm was indeed a backdoor. The Times story implies that the backdoor was intentionally put there by the NSA as part of a $250-million, decade-long covert operation by the agency to weaken and undermine the integrity of a number of encryption systems used by millions of people around the world. The Times story has kindled a firestorm over the integrity of the byzantine process that produces security standards. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which approved Dual_EC_DRBG and the standard, is now facing a crisis of confidence, having been forced to re-open the standard for public discussion, while security and crypto firms scramble to unravel how deeply the suspect algorithm infiltrated their code, if at all. On Thursday, corporate giant RSA Security publicly renounced Dual_EC_DRBG, while also conceding that its commercial suite of cryptographic libraries had been using the bad algorithm as its default algorithm for years. But beneath the flames, a surprising uncertainty is still smoldering over whether Dual_EC_DRBG really is backdoored. The Times, crypto experts note, hasn’t released the memos that purport to prove the existence of a backdoor, and the paper’s direct quotes from the classified documents don’t mention any backdoor in the algorithm or efforts by the NSA to weaken it or the standard. They only discuss efforts to push the standard through committees for approval. Jon Callas, the CTO of Silent Circle, whose company offers encrypted phone communication, delivered a different rump session talk at the Crypto conference in 2007 and saw the presentation by Shumow. He says he wasn’t alarmed by it at the time and still has doubts that what was exposed was actually a backdoor, in part because the algorithm is so badly done. “If [NSA] spent $250 million weakening the standard and this is the best that they could do, then we have nothing to fear from them,” he says. “Because this was really ham-fisted. When you put on your conspiratorial hat about what the NSA would be doing, you would expect something more devious, Machiavellian … and this thing is just laughably bad. This is Boris and Natasha sort of stuff.” Indeed, the Microsoft presenters themselves — who declined to comment for this article — didn’t press the backdoor theory in their talk. They didn’t mention NSA at all, and went out of their way to avoid accusing NIST of anything. “WE ARE NOT SAYING: NIST intentionally put a back door in this PRNG,” read the last slide of their deck. The Microsoft manager who spoke with WIRED on condition of anonymity thinks the provocative title of the 2007 presentation overstates the issue with the algorithm and is being misinterpreted — that perhaps reporters at the Times read something in a classified document showing that the NSA worked on the algorithm and pushed it through the standards process, and quickly took it as proof that the title of the 2007 talk had been right to call the weakness in the standard and algorithm a backdoor. But Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research, says that regardless of the lack of evidence in the Times story, he discounts the “bad cryptography” explanation for the weakness, in favor of the backdoor one. “Bad cryptography happens through laziness and ignorance,” he says. “But in this case, a great deal of effort went into creating this and choosing a structure that happens to be amenable to attack. “What’s mathematically creative [with this algorithm] is that when you look at it, you can’t even prove whether there is a backdoor or not, which is very bizarre in cryptography,” he says. “Usually the presence of a backdoor is something you can prove is there, because you can see it and exploit it…. In my entire career in cryptography, I’ve never seen a vulnerability like this.” National Security Agency headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo: Wikipedia It’s not the first time the NSA has been accused of installing backdoors. Crypto trapdoors, real and imagined, have been part of NSA lore for decades. In some ways the current controversy echoes the long-ago debate over the first U.S. Data Encryption Standard in the 1970s. The NSA was widely suspected of weakening DES to make it more crackable by the agency by tinkering with a table of numeric constants called an S-Box and shortening the algorithm’s key length. In 1994, though, the NSA was exonerated when it turned out that the agency had actually changed the S-Box numbers to harden DES against a code-breaking technique that had been known only within NSA at the time. In 1995, another case came up that seemed to confirm suspicions about the NSA. The Baltimore Sun reported that year that the NSA had inserted a backdoor into cryptographic machines made by the respected Swiss company Crypto AG, apparently substantiating longstanding rumors to that effect. Then in 1999, Microsoft inadvertently kicked off another controversy when it leaked its internal name for a cryptographic signing key built into Windows NT. The key was called _NSAKEY, spawning speculation that Microsoft had secretly given the agency the power to write and sign its own updates to Windows NT’s crypto engine. Microsoft said this was incorrect, that the key was an internal Microsoft key only and that it was called “_NSAKEY” because the NSA was the technical reviewing authority for U.S. export controls. The key was part of Microsoft’s compliance with U.S. export laws. Suspicions about the NSA and backdoors were lingering in 2006 when Shumow and Ferguson began looking at Dual_EC_DRBG after NIST approved it for inclusion in a standard (.pdf). The standard discussed four federally sanctioned random number generators approved for use in encrypting government classified and unclassified-but-sensitive communication. Each of the four algorithms was based on a different cryptographic design family. One was based on hash functions, one on so-called HMAC (hash-based message authentication code), one on block ciphers and the fourth one was based on elliptic curves. The NSA had been pushing elliptic curve cryptography for a number of years, and it publicly championed the last one — Dual_EC_DRBG — to be included in the standard. Elliptic curve algorithms are based on slightly different mathematics than the more common RSA algorithm, and the NSA believes they’re the future of cryptography, asserting that elliptic curve algorithms are smaller, faster and offer better security. But as Shumow and Ferguson examined the properties of the elliptic curve random number generator in the standard, to determine how to incorporate it into the Windows operating system, a couple of strange things stood out. First, the random number generator was very slow – two to three orders of magnitude slower than another algorithm in the standard. Second, it didn’t seem to be very secure. “There was a property [in it] that seemed to make the prediction-resistance of the algorithm not what you would necessarily want it to be,” the Microsoft manager says. In non-geek speak, there was a weakness that made the random number generator not so random. Good random number generation is at the core of encryption, and a weak RNG can undo the entire encryption system. Random number generators play a role in creating cryptographic keys, in opening secure communications between users and web sites and in resetting passwords for email accounts. Without assured randomness, an attacker can predict what the system will generate and undermine the algorithm. Shumow and Ferguson found that the obstacles to predicting what the random number generator would generate was low. It wasn’t a catastrophic problem, but it seemed strange for a security system being promulgated by the government. Then they noticed something else. The standard for implementing the algorithm included a list of constants – static numbers – that were used in the elliptic curve on which the random number generator was based. Whoever generated the constants, which served as a kind of public key for the algorithm, could have generated a second set of numbers at the same time – a private key. Anyone possessing that second set of numbers would have what’s known in the cryptography community as “trapdoor information” – that is, they would be able to essentially unlock the encryption algorithm by predicting what the random number generator generated. And, Shumow and Ferguson realized, they could predict this after seeing as few as 32 bytes of output from the generator. With a very small sample, they could crack the entire encryption system used to secure the output. “Even if no one knows the secret numbers, the fact that the backdoor is present makes Dual_EC_DRBG very fragile,” cryptographer Bruce Schneier wrote at the time, in a piece for WIRED. “If someone were to solve just one instance of the algorithm’s elliptic-curve problem, he would effectively have the keys to the kingdom. He could then use it for whatever nefarious purpose he wanted. Or he could publish his result, and render every implementation of the random-number generator completely insecure.” No one knew who had produced the constants, but it was assumed that because the NSA had pushed the algorithm into the standard, the agency had generated the numbers. The spy agency might also, then, have generated a secret key. Schneier called it “scary stuff indeed,” but he also said at the time that it made no sense as a backdoor, since it was so obvious to anyone who looked at the algorithm and standard that there was this flaw in it. As a result, developers of web sites and software applications wouldn’t use it to help secure their products and systems, he said. But in fact, many developers did use it. The U.S. government has enormous purchasing power, and vendors soon were forced to implement the suspect standard as a condition of selling their products to federal agencies under so-called FIPS certification requirements. Microsoft added support for the standard, including the elliptic curve random-number generator, in a Vista update in February 2008, though it did not make the problematic generator the default algorithm. Asked why Microsoft supported the algorithm when two of its own employees had shown it to be weakened, a second Microsoft senior manager who spoke with WIRED said that while the weakness in the algorithm and standard was “weird” it “wasn’t a smoking gun.” It was more of an “odd property.” Microsoft decided to include the algorithm in its operating system because a major customer was asking for it, because it had been sanctioned by NIST, and because it wasn’t going to be enabled as the default algorithm in the system, thus having no impact on other customers. “In fact it is nearly impossible for any user to implement or to get this particular random number generator instantiating on their machines without going into the guts of the machine and reconfiguring it,” he says. Other major companies, like Cisco and RSA, added it as well. NIST in fact provides a lengthy list of companies that have included it in their libraries, though the list doesn’t say which companies made it the default algorithm in their library or which products have been developed that invoke the algorithm. A Cisco spokesman told WIRED that the algorithm was implemented in its standard crypto library around mid-2012, a library that is used in more than 120 product lines, but the algorithm is not the default, and the default algorithm cannot be changed by users. The company is currently completing an internal audit of all of its products that leverage the NIST standard. RSA, however, made the algorithm the default in its BShare toolkit for Java and C developers until this week when it told WIRED that it was changing the default following the renewed controversy over it. The company sent an advisory to developer customers “strongly” urging them to change the default to one of a number of other random number generator algorithms RSA supports. RSA also changed the default on its own end in BSafe and in an RSA key management system. The company is currently doing an internal review of all of its products to see where the algorithm gets invoked in order to change those. RSA actually added the algorithm to its libraries in 2004 or 2005, before NIST approved it for the standard in 2006 and before the government made it a requirement for FIPS certification, says Sam Curry, the company’s chief technology officer. The company then made it the default algorithm in BSafe and in its key management system after the algorithm was added to the standard. Curry said that elliptic curve algorithms were all the rage at the time and RSA chose it as the default because it provided certain advantages over the other random number generators, including what he says was better security. “Cryptography is a changing field. Some algorithms go up and some come down and we make the best decisions we can in any point in time,” he says.”A lot of the hash-based algorithms were getting struck down by some weaknesses in how they chose numbers and in fact what kind of sample set they chose for initial seeding. From our perspective it looked like elliptic curve would be immune to those things.” Curry says the fact that the algorithm is slower actually provides it with better security in at least one respect. “The length of time that you have to gather samples will determine the strength of your random number generation. So the fact that it’s slower sometimes gives it a wider sample set to do initial seeding,” he says. “Precisely because it takes a little longer, it actually winds up giving you more randomness in your initial seeding, and that can be an advantage.” Despite the renewed controversy over the algorithm and standard, Microsoft managers say they still don’t think the weaknesses constitute an intentional backdoor. Callas agrees. He thinks it is simply bad cryptography that was included in the standard to round-out the selection so that there would be at least one elliptic curve algorithm in the standard. But one advantage to having the algorithm supported in products like Vista — and which may be the reason the NSA pushed it into the standard — is that even if it’s not the default algorithm for encryption on a system, as long as it’s an option on the system, an intruder, like the NSA, can get into the system and change the registry to make it the default algorithm used for encryption, thereby theoretically making it easy for the NSA to undermine the encryption and spy on users of the machine. Schneier says this is a much more efficient and stealth way of undermining the encryption than simply installing a keystroke logger or other Trojan malware that could be detected. “A Trojan is really, really big. You can’t say that was a mistake. It’s a massive piece of code collecting keystrokes,” he said. “But changing a bit-one to a bit-two [in the registry to change the default random number generator on the machine] is probably going to be undetected. It is a low conspiracy, highly deniable way of getting a backdoor. So there’s a benefit to getting it into the library and into the product.” To date, the only confirmation that the algorithm has a backdoor comes in the Times story, based on NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, which the Times and two other media outlets saw. “[I]nternal memos leaked by a former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, suggest that the NSA generated one of the random number generators used in a 2006 NIST standard — called the Dual EC DRBG standard — which contains a back door for the NSA,” the Times wrote. An editorial published by the Times this weekend re-asserted the claim: “Unbeknown to the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a ‘back door’ into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its technology.” But all of the quotes that the Times published from the memos refer to the NSA getting the standard passed by an international standards body; they do not say the NSA intentionally weakened the algorithm and standard, though the Times implies that this is what the memos mean by tying them to the 2007 presentation by Shumow and Ferguson. NIST has denied any knowledge of a backdoor and has also denied that the NSA authored its standard. The institute has, however, re-opened the standard for public comment as a result of the controversy and “strongly” urged against using the algorithm in question until the matter could be resolved. The public comments period will close Nov. 6. Even without more explicit confirmation that the weaknesses in the algorithm and standard constitute a backdoor, Kocher and Schneier believe they do. “It is extraordinarily bad cryptography,” says Kocher. “If you look at the NSA’s role in creating standards [over the years] and its general cryptographic sophistication, none of it makes sense if there isn’t a backdoor in this.” Schneier agrees and says the NSA has done too many other things for him to think, when he sees government-mandated crypto that’s weak, that it’s just by accident. “If we were living in a kinder world, that would be a plausible explanation,” he says. “But we’re living in a very malicious world, it turns out.” He adds that the uncertainty around the algorithm and standard is the worst part of the whole matter. “This is the worst problem that the NSA has done,” Schneier says. “They have so undermined the fundamental trust in the internet, that we don’t know what to trust. We have to suspect everything. We’re never sure. That’s the greatest damage.”

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feedback, re: [8]
by brian carroll 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

> On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 9:10 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote: > > > are you the fuckhead who BSOD my computer > > and took it down after my first cypherpunks post? > > > > (if you are you better watch out- you're in trouble...) > > You sound paranoid. There is really no need for that. > I personally tried to read some of your missives but > had to skip them due to lack of time. > Paranoid, no. having personal experience of locked psychiatric wards and snakeoil, i know the domain and this is not that. grounded observations here. my independent research has been messed around with for a decade plus, this includes heavy surveillance, now ubiquitous. several projects shut down or sabotaged due to active, hostile yet "kids gloves" interference, given origin. ex. political agenda shuts power off to apartment to stop basic research into new computing system, threatens destruction of tools (NAS) needed to prototype AMS (Asperger Management System). message: "stop or equipment will be fried!" NAS and router already backdoored, NAS ghosted from beginning anyway, hive of activity, manufactured for sabotage. so have to stop and move onto plan Z^n. under siege for years. existence as if held hostage within illegal prison of hidden dictator. unwanted truth, its uncanny ability to rattle megastructures of power. ping the biased networks, learn its programmatic malfunctioning. private group using constitution as shield to illegally attack citizens, then wrongly expecting to be able to hide behind it for their own defense, no such boundary. mistakenly thought refraining from saying what was actually on my mind would be keeping it ~classy on cypherpunks :L that is: no advisement of will-writing, death sentences, deballing, cutting tongues out, hanging by nutsack, fingers cut off, eyes gouged out-- nothing about war, takedown of vital public equipment, nor role of legal state murder. though i wanted the perpetrators to realize the horror that awaits them. perhaps too understated- i.e. they are cursed with extreme and increasingly misfortune as a result of their actions. the error-rate will be going way up for those involved. unbearable pressure. the nightmare of hostile metaphysical code. context for computer attack: under heavy noise assault for 19 months, ranging from harassment and abuse to long periods of sustained noise torture. water remotely turned down in shower, 70+ times. VOC toxic fume attacks, bombs of laundry detergents and chemicals, deteriorating nervous system, debilitating. those involved denying their actions, trying to frame as crazy, force suicide. noisemaking devices in the walls, remote switches to control water valves. internet-connected. apartment the bizarre context of embassy psychological trickery. events directly connected to ruling ideology, power politics. my equipment thoroughly surveilled. multi-level honeypot, manufactured to spy and to break. completely monitored. whomever subverted my system in PC takedown due to active retaliatory censoring (against crypto-ideas) walked into a trap. even while i cannot figure it out, it is indicated the perpetrators are KNOWN. this event oddly sequenced with local CIA matched reference, power outage to apartment and immediately back on. a second power blip recurs in the morning, coinciding with computer attack. seemingly signaling hidden observer. the computer attack- DOS shell occasionally appears and vanishes upperleft upon login. disembodied close-window [x] checkbox sometimes appears upperleft of screen, as if virus or trojan, along with lower right MS red signage warning of unidentifiable security threat at time of kernel panic, locking down windows in pause, cascading into BSOD shutdown. clean installing OS, new BIOS, nothing stops it, as if occurring outside OS and motherboard control. occurs after one hour, as if strategically deployed or unlocked bug to sabotage computing system that cannot be repaired by software or disk overwrites. so my equipment is ruined. it had bug exploits before, though now it cannot be used at all as a research tool. this is active hostile censorship. destruction of property. imagine if this is what 'crypto' is allowing the state to do to its citizens, by ideological design. circuit faults as failsafes to stop public communications via subversion, oversight of an illegal dictatorial state and its methods, using these 'secret weapons' against the constitution: freedom of thought, ideas, free expression. now what if those at the NSA or CYBERCOMMAND are attacking citizens not aligned with the ruling exploitative political agenda- the state as enemy. (important to distinguish the context for remote hostile actions localized, the reliance on 'virtual power' and allowing such functioning, versus ~securing its basis in actual grounded power. also, dependence on masks and hiding to get away with these exploits, cheating, stealing, subterfuge and sabotage, etc.) there is a definite aspect of aggression and bullying, to the point of torture, and destruction of peoples' lives that has somehow been normalized by detachment of the population from its representation within the state, via short-circuits. that is realism for me. sanity. and my perspective of these events. that someone would write off-list at the exact moment i begin first attempts at repair then triggered a thoroughly muted response, not getting into the fact that people die for doing these things. it is not all virtual and remote. it can be extremely close-up and involve brutal events and unimaginable pain and anguish. yet these same mediocre oppressors seem not to believe there is anything to fear anymore. there, balanced the psychic equilibrium. thanks. ⚕

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Belgacom Hack (EN translation)
by coderman 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

http://cryptome.org/2013/09/belgacom-hack-en.htm / http://blog.cyberwar.nl/2013/09/belgacom-on-brink-of-catastrophe.html """ On the brink of catastrophe (2013-09-21) Ping. It's Friday the 13th. Around 11 o'clock in the morning, the IT consultants that Belgacom employs at its largest customers in the private and public sector receive a message. The message doesn't say much, except for an urgent request to cancel all appointments of that forenoon. An "emergency conference call" will take place instead. The news that is brought in that call makes the IT consultants gasp for breath. A piece of malicious software has been found on the network of BICS, a daughter company of Belgacom. It is hard to grasp even for well-informed insiders. The BICS network is so wide and deep that it is promptly clear to everybody that this is not just a Belgian problem. This problem is at least of European proportions. Because whoever controls BICS, controls the communication of a large part of the world. "This could have been larger than 9/11", says one source who closely followed the case. Without a grain of irony. The pressure on the teams of the Dutch digital defender Fox-IT, that started cleaning up together with an army of Belgacom employees last weekend, was enormous. It was their second attempt, various sources confirm. A first attempt to remove the villainous software from the infected computers at Belgacom in the last weekend of August was cancelled. "At the time, not all conditions were met required to remove everything at once", it was said. Some computers turned out to run the alternative operating system Linux, known of the penguin logo, not Windows. "The risk was too big that we could not remove everything at once. In that case you should not touch it. Or the adversary will know that the virus has been found", states someone politically involved. Strict conditions The investigation of the hacking started on July 19th, when Belgacom went to court. During their work, investigators at the intelligence services, police and justice were very wary of a leak about the entire operation. In early September they informed the Belgian cabinet on strict conditions: the list of attendees of that meeting was kept closely. If a politician would have wanted to reveal the news before the malware was dealt with, the investigators would press charges for breach of confidentiality of the investigation. "We could not risk everything going wrong due to someone talking", it is said. Belgacom was not infected with some common viruses, but with very professional malware that costed lots of money to develop. "We had to re-invent ourselves to do this", an investigator said. "In other investigations there is a fixed idea of where you're going, but in in this case it was continuously starting over because it was so difficult to get a grasp of the malware". Gradually it became clear that the hackers are not only interested in the communications in the Middle-East, where BICS holds a solid position via South-African minority shareholder MTN. "They have been looking around and took what they could", state sources involved in the investigation. They are clear about one thing: the attack originated from the United States. "We determine that by the signature of the malware, but especially by where the trails lead. They partially run through the UK. We think the US is the main destination. And the past weeks at the US Embassy, you notice some embarrassment when you request exchange of information." Yesterday, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported that the UK intelligence service GCHQ (Government Communications Headquartes) are responsible for the attacks. It based that claim on slides disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The news that GCHQ is behind the Belgacom attack is a surprise to at least the services working on the affair. The malware could do anything The malware at Belgacom actually consists of a complex system of complementary viruses. They are all connected. If a problem is imminent or if they are detected, they can signal each other. "It is somewhat like a human virus, which also mutates continuously", states someone involved who monitors the situation for his service. "For example, one part is responsible for searching and storing information, while another part is continuously looks for pathways to the internet to transfer information. Other pieces of code are responsible for circumventing firewalls, or carry out surveillance. If someone detects the hacking or attempts to remove a part of it, the virus that is acting as a guard promptly signals the other parts. Because you don't know what the malware is capable of, everything can go horribly wrong at the last step." The cost of the entire detection and cleaning operation is correspondingly high. Fox-IT, the Dutch cyber security/defence company that is commissioned by Belgacom to first make inventory of the problems and then solve them, is a familiar name. "For the first two weeks they estimated the costs to be one million euro", states a well-placed source. And then adds that the entire operation lasted ten weeks. Moreover, Fox-IT did not expect that, at a certain point, it had to allocate all of its employees to this case. A price tag of over five million euro, then? "It won't be far off." But what was so terrifying about this cyber attack? And why the panic that something would go wrong? Telephone data about conversations with countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria that disappear, how could that have such an impact? They are 'just' stolen phone data, right? The involved expert sitting opposite us, looks dead serious. There is drama in his voice, but considering the contents of what he says, that is not unjustified. "This was highly performing malware and it was present in the nerve centre of communications. Anything that a highly privileged network operator of Belgacom could do, this system could do as well. I don't have to make a drawing of it? It had all the keys, all the passwords and full control. We must dare to classify this as a big crisis. This could have been a catastrophe. And people don't seem to realize." Sensitive customers Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to make that drawing. BICS calls itself a "wholesale carrier". Two words, four syllables, but behind it is a network that spans the entire globe and the beating heart of which is located in our capital, Brussels. BICS provides the hardware infrastructure that carries internet traffic, phone conversations, text messages and mobile data of telecom companies and government institutions. And the more sensitive the customer, the more likely he is the end up at BICS. The daughter company of Belgacom markets itself with the argument that they never ever look at what travels over its cables. "We provide the cables for you, and you just send whatever you want over them", is what it basically boils down to. A glance at the list of BICS' customers makes one dizzy. The financial transport center Swift, Electrabel, bpost, Belgocontrol, they are all connected to BICS. The NATO in Evere, the European Commission and Parliament, SHAPE, the Supreme Headquerters Allied Powers Europe, in Bergen; BICS, BICS, BICS. Even the headquarters of the NATO Allied Air Command, in Ramstein, Germany, from where the 2011 air attacks on Libya where coordinated, depends on BICS. Among the military, it is pointed out that military communications has an extra layer of security; but that pointing-out happens with a degree of humility that is very unusual to the military. "Every organisation, not just the government, must now begin to wonder whether it is dependent of one single provider, of one single network. And specially how well it is secured itself", states someone who was at the front row of the affair. "Belgacom, that is critical infrastructure. How can Belgium keep running without it? Those are the questions that we must ask now. Because the organisation responsible for the attack has in fact the capability to completely disrupt Belgacom and BICS." A different source confirms, reluctantly, the doom scenarios: "You can't think of it. It would be larger than 9/11. The planes would pretty much fall out of the sky." As a figure of speech? "Hm, yeah." Lifeline A governmental source points out the consequences of even a limited disruption of phone communications and internet. "If a crisis occurs, what is the first thing a human does? Grasp their phone. Imagine that that lifeline is lost. Not just for you, but also for the emergency services, hospital, the fire department...? And for the police? At first glance it isn't, because they use the Astrid network [a Belgian national radio communications network intended for emergency services]. But that network only works apart from BICS for local communications. For interregional communications it is just as dependent on BICS as the rest. Hence, it is no coincidence that police chief Catherine De Bolle started looking for a backup for the communications system of the federal police on that Friday the 13th, just before the big cleaning operation would have started. How long would it take before Belgacom was up and running again after a destructive cyber attack, is unclear. "But it is clear that we are not prepared to counter this type of attacks right now", states a high-ranking source. "That awareness must finally start to grow. I am very apprehensive for the feeling of relief that I already observe in some people. 'Ah well, that has been nicely dealt with. It's over.' It's not, mind you. Whoever doesn't realise, this week, that it is urgent, will never get it. Playing things down now is dangerous." After De Standaard brought the news of large-scale hacking at Belgacom, it turned out that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the cabinet of the prime minister had been hacked. "And this is merely the top of the iceberg", states a source who was involved in the problems at Belgacom. Because telecom is one thing, but there are many other critical sectors that are the fundament of a country. Transportation, for example. Trains, trams, busses, highways, airplanes, everything involves computer networks and everywhere one should be cautious for cyber attacks. The energy supply is another critical fundament. And last but not least: the banking sector of a country. Luxembourg has already contacted the Belgian cyberservices [?] to obtain more information about the malware that hit Belgacom. Awareness Besides budgets and well-paid IT personnel, the remedy against the growing cyberthreat will be found in improved awareness. "Belgium wants to invest in knowledge and innovation, but if one sector is vulnerable to espionage, it is that one. Just as many computers of the global diplomatic network of Foreign Affairs have post-its one them with the passwords, many small companies are slacking in their security", a cyber specialist states. "And if you dare ask whether their Chinese interns are thoroughly screened, they look at you as if you're from another planet." Whether the gravity of the situation is apparent to everyone, is doubtful. In official communications, Belgacom states that it currently has no evidence of impact on its customers or their data. Understandly, the company does not want to trigger hysteria, but it sounds like down-playing nonetheless. "What should we write then?", states spokesman Jan Margot in his response. "The infection was at dozens of computers in our own system. They have been cleaned together with the entire network." BICS too doesn't say much about it. "There are no indications of an impact on the telecomnetwork of BICS", it states in a press release. "A number of our IT systems are integrated in the infrastructure of Belgacom and are affected in that way, but that remained outside the network that carries customer traffic." "That's all put rather euphemistically", according to the investigators involved. "But you cannot accuse them of lying. A lot of thought went into every comma of the communication." Joke Did Belgium become the joke of de European mainland as a result of the compromise of Belgacom? Intelligence services are continuously in contact with each other and exchange information. For the image of our country, the past week has been anything but stellar, but it is emphasised nonetheless that in such contacts it is often also about personal relations between people. "Moreover, all countries have problems and everyone tries to rise above them." What about ethics? Isn't it schizophrenic that our country, Belgium, receives information about threats that the US or others have stolen from us? "That is the eternal paradox", a recipient of such information states. Diplomatically it is the hardest. But if you receive information about a serious threat such as terrorism, you cannot ignore it. Then you have different things on your mind. """

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interesting collisions for 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a
by coderman 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

are there any?

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Attack Driven Defense - infosec rant [was: What is Intel(R) Core™ vPro™ Technology Animation]
by coderman 23 Sep '13

23 Sep '13

i really can't emphasize this enough: robust defense is based on realistic threats, and realistic threats are identified via attackers' perspective. i've been diving down this rabbit hole since before i challenged covert FLTINFOWARCEN members* to "get as blackhat on this motherfucker as you can" during an ad hoc challenge at DEF CON 13. i started down this path when i realized that robust peer to peer systems must protect each node to the highest degree required by any participant. it's the opposite of pandering to the "lowest common denominator". on the plus side, once you have addressed security for the "most stringent requirement" all other systems and peers enjoy the benefit of this elevated level of protection. the bad news is that attacks continue to improve, and i'm no where near satisfied in my ability to protect my own systems against the capabilities myself and my peers have at their disposal. the vast majority of infosec is useless bullshit, the vast majority of infosec conferences are pandering crap; the whole industry (educational/professional/military) is shit, if we're being honest. there is a great talk, fuck you to thinkst.com for blocking it, which covers these failings at just a conference level, with parallels to the industry as a whole: http://207.198.103.187:8081/infosuck-talk_about_talks.pdf sha256: ce836410fdc638066bf6aedec0e1d6f2ce66fb46329c5f92336e42a671272e55 i've never taken an infosec position, for these reasons, among others, and i don't plan to start. quality (and by extension, information security) should be a given, a "built-in" feature of any product, with the investment necessary to achieve it. anything less is bullshit; infosec should not exist! my $0.02 best regards, * hacker friends and i ran a challenge: here's the root password. we're running unencrypted 802.11b wifi, there's a $100 bill in the case. get in - you get money and the hardware! everyone failed, despite two interesting 0day attacks. (we ran IPsec with custom out-of-band keying seeded by VIA C5P hardware entropy generators with our own custom rngd.) after being unable to compromise our setup, $fed handed me a card. i still remember the latin translation adorning his card, which seems particular appropos given revelations this year: "let them hate us, so long as they fear us." On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 3:36 PM, coderman <coderman(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Jeffrey Walton <noloader(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> ... >> Do you just snatch the source code and intellectual property, or do >> you use it as a springboard into other things? (I've never really >> thought about it). > > > for better or for worse (mostly better) these systems have made their > way into release package builds and production deployment processes. > > i'm speaking in generalities here, for various reasons, but common > trajectories include: > - obtaining the private keys or http auth passwords for access to > source code repositories. > - obtaining ssh private keys for access to other systems, e.g. remote > build hosts or even production hosts. > - obtaining kerberos/ldap/http/* auth credentials for bug reporting > systems, release code signing, or other facilities. > - obtaining access to datacenter or operations automation: cfengine, > chef, puppet, etc. these are really useful ;) > - obtaining test automation tools and other "QA" hooks with elevated > access and fewer controls. > - privilege escalation on the CI host which in turn is often > whitelisted and useful as further pivot. > - providing example usage for invocation of and command line > parameters for custom internal software. > - providing excellent watering hole "infection vector" for technical > staff in an org. e.g. taking over engineering workstations. > > > from here you've got everything you need to infiltrate an entire organization. > > the source code provides "hard coded" keys/passwords or pointers to > files where interesting bits lay, > > the conduit to engineering systems which grant access to public facing > services and data stores, > > the credentials and access for all operational concerns, > > the org is your oyster...

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Re: [cryptography] [Cryptography] What is Intel(R) Core™ vPro™ Technology Animation
by coderman 23 Sep '13

23 Sep '13

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Jeffrey Walton <noloader(a)gmail.com> wrote: > ... > Do you just snatch the source code and intellectual property, or do > you use it as a springboard into other things? (I've never really > thought about it). for better or for worse (mostly better) these systems have made their way into release package builds and production deployment processes. i'm speaking in generalities here, for various reasons, but common trajectories include: - obtaining the private keys or http auth passwords for access to source code repositories. - obtaining ssh private keys for access to other systems, e.g. remote build hosts or even production hosts. - obtaining kerberos/ldap/http/* auth credentials for bug reporting systems, release code signing, or other facilities. - obtaining access to datacenter or operations automation: cfengine, chef, puppet, etc. these are really useful ;) - obtaining test automation tools and other "QA" hooks with elevated access and fewer controls. - privilege escalation on the CI host which in turn is often whitelisted and useful as further pivot. - providing example usage for invocation of and command line parameters for custom internal software. - providing excellent watering hole "infection vector" for technical staff in an org. e.g. taking over engineering workstations. from here you've got everything you need to infiltrate an entire organization. the source code provides "hard coded" keys/passwords or pointers to files where interesting bits lay, the conduit to engineering systems which grant access to public facing services and data stores, the credentials and access for all operational concerns, the org is your oyster...

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Charge for Pen Register Service? $600 per target per two months.
by Jim Bell 23 Sep '13

23 Sep '13

The url http://www.tdcaa.com/node/4813 includes the claim, "Additionally, telephone companies typically charge an average of $600 per target to conduct pens [registers]." (Didn't say for how long, but I suppose it's two months.) And, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/millions-paid-prism-compliance/ said, "For example, Cox Communications charges $2,500 for a pen register/trap-and-trace order for 60 days." Imagine how expensive it would be if the NSA got a bill for $600 per two months to conduct a 'pen register' (metadata) on your, and the same charge covering everyone else's, phone. I'd suggest to the phone co. that they charge that $600 per two months, then take $200 of that and give me the whizziest, unlimited-service around the world, the bestest service that I could possibly want, and make a $400 profit to boot! Myself, I'd be far more comfortable if my metadata was being sold to the NSA if my full cell-phone bill was paid-for by them! In fact, at those prices, I'd want a second phone, too! (Does this make me a sell-out?!?) Interesting guide to telecoms to comply with the law: http://www.kelleydrye.com/publications/client_advisories/0134/_res/id=Files… I wonder if anybody has implemented a 'metadata-killer': An app, perhaps, for a smartphone which accesses a 'telephone remailer': A (friendly) MITM (Man in the Middle) which can be called, and will automatically forward the call based on encrypted-number data, and maintain the connection to the target phone number. It would make collection of metadata much more difficult. Companies which do internet phone calls would be obvious candidates for that function. (Skype, Ooma, etc.) Jim Bell

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Re: [cryptography] [Cryptography] What is Intel(R) Core™ vPro™ Technology Animation
by coderman 23 Sep '13

23 Sep '13

On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Jeffrey Walton <noloader(a)gmail.com> wrote: > ... > Painting with a broad brush, part of the solution is a remote > administration board that can''t be removed. Cf, Fujitsu LOM (Lights > Out Management), HP ILO (Integrated Lights Out) HP RILO (Remote > Integrated Lights Out), Compaq RIB (Remote Insight Board), and Dell > DRAC (Dell Remote Access Card). > > As for who has access, that depends on the quality of the > implementations. > https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-4784. as an attacker, these are my favorite systems, second only to continuous integration servers. remote access subsystems are hard to upgrade, poorly maintained, and provide exceptional access to hosts and systems. (and in fact, abusing a DRAC to get to the CI to then get keys to the kingdom, is a standard approach once you've got a pivot in network) i cannot count the number of times i've seen insecure configurations deployed, either self signed certs, common passwords, insecure ACLs, or all of the above. i can count the number of times i've seen a properly configured RA system with legit PKI and password management: ZERO! the traditional enterprise network is a soft gooey core with a fig leaf perimeter defense. sad realities...

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[tor-talk] Tor mini-hackathon at GNU 30th Anniversary Celebration on 28-29 Sep
by Eugen Leitl 23 Sep '13

23 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from Nick Mathewson <nickm(a)freehaven.net> ----- Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 21:00:35 -0400 From: Nick Mathewson <nickm(a)freehaven.net> To: "tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org" <tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org> Subject: [tor-talk] Tor mini-hackathon at GNU 30th Anniversary Celebration on 28-29 Sep Reply-To: tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org Hi, all! Tor will be one of several fine software projects featured in the featured in the GNU 30th Anniversary Celebration and Hackathon next weekend at MIT. If you like to program, and you're interested in helping with Tor, sign up on the webpage (https://gnu.org/gnu30/celebration) and come on by! I'll be there myself, hoping to spend my time coding and getting people excited about hacking on Tor. Other Tor people in the greater Boston area may come by as well-I hope we can get at least two or three. I don't currently expect to have all of our sub-projects represented, but we'll try to put you in contact with the right people if you want to hack on something else. I'll try to have a list of fun suggested projects for people to work on ahead of the event, ideally on a wiki somewhere. peace, -- Nick Mathewson -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk(a)lists.torproject.org To unsusbscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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