April 2014 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

White House, spy agencies deny NSA exploited 'Heartbleed' bug
by jim bell 15 Apr '14

15 Apr '14

White House, spy agencies deny NSA exploited 'Heartbleed' bug photoSecurity experts warn there is little Internet users can do to protect themselve\WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House and U.S. intelligence agencies said on Friday neither the National Security Agency nor any other part of the government were aware before this month of the "Heartbleed" bug, denying a report that the spy agency exploited the glitch in widely used Web encryption technology to gather intelligence. The White House, the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued statements after Bloomberg reported that the NSA was aware of the bug for at least two years and exploited it in order to obtain passwords and other basic information used in hacking operations. The Bloomberg report cited two unnamed sources it said were familiar with the matter. The Heartbleed bug is considered one of the most serious Internet security flaws to be uncovered in recent years. "Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before April 2014 are wrong," White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement. "This administration takes seriously its responsibility to help maintain an open, interoperable, secure and reliable Internet," Hayden added. Bloomberg was not immediately available to comment. The discovery of Heartbleed by researchers with Google Inc and a small security firm, Codenomicon, prompted the U.S. Homeland Security Department to advise businesses on Tuesday to review their servers to see if they were using vulnerable versions of widely used software known as OpenSSL. OpenSSL is used to encrypt email and other communications and to protect the websites of big Internet companies, including Facebook Inc, Google Inc and Yahoo Inc. The bug, disclosed Monday, allows hackers to steal data without a trace. NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said in a separate statement: "NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL, the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability, until it was made public in a private-sector cybersecurity report." Hayden said the federal government relies on OpenSSL to protect the privacy of users of government websites and other online services. "If the federal government, including the intelligence community, had discovered this vulnerability prior to last week, it would have been disclosed to the community responsible for OpenSSL," Hayden added. Hayden said that when U.S. agencies discover a new vulnerability in commercial and open-source software, "it is in the national interest to responsibly disclose the vulnerability rather than to hold it for an investigative or intelligence purpose." Such vulnerabilities are known as "zero-day" flaws because the software developers have had zero days to fix them. In December, a five-member advisory panel convened to review electronic surveillance policy urged the White House to sharply curtail the use of undisclosed flaws and stop undercutting encryption standards. The panel included former White House cybersecurity advisor Richard Clarke. In late February, a senior White House official said the Obama administration was intensively studying both issues. The administration statements issued on Friday confirmed that the review had already "reinvigorated an interagency process for deciding when to share vulnerabilities" on a case-by-case basis. The activities of the NSA have come under sharp scrutiny since former agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked numerous documents exposing expansive U.S. surveillance efforts. Even before Snowden's emergence, former officials, including Clarke, told Reuters that offensive and spying considerations had dominated inside the NSA, causing it to withhold information instead of warning the public about new flaws. Clarke told Reuters Friday that the NSA had not known of Heartbleed. The U.S. government warned banks and other businesses on Friday to be on alert for hackers seeking to steal data exposed by the bug, as a German programmer who volunteered with OpenSSL took responsibility for inadvertently launching the security crisis. (Additional reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

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Home-made communications and security technology
by John Preston 15 Apr '14

15 Apr '14

Given the enormous complexity of modern technology (100+ KLOC software projects, 1+ billion transistor CPUs, etc.) I view security failures to be an inevitability: the attack surface is rich for exploitation by enemies, and bugs and errors constantly emerge due to both man and machine. That said, I do not think it unwise to consider it a prerequisite for the most paranoid-level technologies that they be easily understandable and scrutinisable by individual people. Hence, I have an interest in pen-and-paper ciphers, simple wireless communications systems for Morse, voice, and data, and simple computers. Is this something other people think is a sensible or important line of inquiry? Do these technologies and the people using them exist? Are there movements advocating this approach? Thank you.

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a speech
by dan＠geer.org 14 Apr '14

14 Apr '14

Perhaps of relevance here. APT in a World of Rising Interdependence invited address, NSA, 26 March 2014 http://geer.tinho.net/geer.nsa.26iii14.txt --dan

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Re: [cryptome] Re: snowman news
by John Young 13 Apr '14

13 Apr '14

Dear Maligned Ethicist Machet, Your fee for complaining about star *ucking has been transmitted to Hettinga's offshore dark pool of smegma. We appreciate your disclosing this private banking arrangement to encourage others to reap the benefits of advertising online the ancient love scribble scratched on rubber tree trunks, on kindergarten desktops, on unisex toilet stalls and distributed by porous-sheathed onion routers to mind*uck horny espionage pornsters posting and ogling kiddie-selfies for entrapment bonuses. Underarmored in *uck cpunks tees. @20Committee At 01:17 PM 4/13/2014, you wrote: >have not been more disappointed by star *ucking in i dont know when > >hardens my resolve to never align with any mother *ucker > >only align with ethics

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Re: snowman news
by John Young 13 Apr '14

13 Apr '14

Great that Snowden is getting another chance to speak for himself, as available on an awfully restricted technical tube-like forum -- so far only talking head shots at the venues where he has been beamed in from who knows where, scripted by who knows who from his burgeoning team of handlers, now joined by EU polopportunists. It would be even greater if if Snowden himself released or at least displayed documents beside his head or encouraged the withholders to do so as the surcharge for their exclusive rigging of ever fewer releases. Head shotting and paneling by and about Snowden seems to have substituted for release of documents needed for us to reach our own conclusions. Entertainment over information. Oh well, that condescension is how media, politicians and governments manipulate us ignorant consumers of produce. Thanks for keeping us alert to EU produce. Regards, John At 07:22 PM 4/7/2014, you wrote: >http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/snowden-to-address-europ >e-rights-watchdog/story-fni0xqlk-1226877345106 > >Snowden testifies: >Council of Europe Live video link: Tuesday, 12 noon GMT: >http://webtv.coe.int/index.php?CategoryID=56763&SubCategoryID=56776 >Link will be active 30 minutes before event.

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Re: [tor-talk] [cryptography] The Heartbleed Bug is a serious vulnerability in OpenSSL
by grarpamp 13 Apr '14

13 Apr '14

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 2:29 PM, Christopher J. Walters <cwal989(a)comcast.net> > > It makes me wonder if the NSA was involved in inserting this bug into > OpenSSL clients and servers. That would be 2+ years of amazing win on NSA part [1]. Any unlikely impropriety would come out soon. More likely reality... opensource people are busy and good humans and coding mistakes happen. Hopefully the general buzz around NSA/security/crypto/decentral will result dedicating more permanent resource to things like protocol devel and replacements, and auditing of key underlying software code. You really need to be asking if and how the giant for-profit corps that use opensource for free are giving back. $50k a year donated to fund an independant developer pool from the OSS community to sit on the teams of your favorite code projects of choice as auditors is nothing to a companies like that, a dream gig for the dev, a win for project, and good company PR. How often do you see @ge.com @chase.com @ibm.com, etc on developer/donation lists... you need to ask those type of @'s if, how, and why not. [1] And pretty dumb of any attacker to not simply quietly watch, analyse and exploit the committed output of any critical project... no insertion, cost, or risk necessary to do that.

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Re: [cryptome] Re: snowman news
by John Young 13 Apr '14

13 Apr '14

The Polk Award plaques have concealed cavity transmitters, so our Google glasses indicate. Back-up. we palmed a sliver RFID in GG's wide mouthed molar, another in Miranda's steely butt, Poitras's panoptic camera, Gellman's top-sekret OTR widget, MacAskill's brogue-decrytor (we saw him plant a 0-day craw deep inside James Ball's kisser). Our totally undoctored vids and transcripts are at Amazon, Utah, Four Eyes, RU, CN, BR, all of them on the same transceiving thieving pipe, each with a twinned JPmorgan, Goldman Sachs fiber, so reports ourr splitter at Ross Anderson's lab in Oxbridge-Cheltenham, centroid of the universe's gobbling inadvertencies. The fake one underskinned in Markus Kuhn's vestigal tail. Real one infected at Vatican, eternal cloud of the pipe of pipes. ----- On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 4:48 PM, John Young <jya(a)pipeline.com> wrote: > Great that Snowden is getting another chance to speak for himself, speaking of speaking directly, i hear one fine JYA got to mingle with the leakers? how hard did you press for a mass doc drop, John? i would have donated toward such a bribe... looks like an interesting crowd! (who has .vid transcripts?) best regards, #JustALittleJealous c.f.: http://cryptome.org/greenwald-miranda-young.jpg

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"How I obtained the private key for www.cloudflarechallenge.com"
by rysiek 13 Apr '14

13 Apr '14

Hi there, https://gist.github.com/epixoip/10570627 -- Pozdr rysiek

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NTRU Prime implementation
by coderman 13 Apr '14

13 Apr '14

reification requested! http://blog.cr.yp.to/20140213-ideal.html """ Here's a concrete suggestion, which I'll call NTRU Prime, for eliminating the structures that I find worrisome in existing ideal-lattice-based encryption systems. This suggestion uses a number field of prime degree, so that the only subfield is Q; and uses an irreducible polynomial xp-x-1 with a very large Galois group, so that the number field is very far from having automorphisms. The best CVP dimension seems to be about half the degree; this is optimal for number fields without many real embeddings. (It's hard to create many real embeddings while keeping coefficients small, and if coefficients are large then there are other problems.) This suggestion also chooses its modulus q so that (Z/q)[x]/(xp-x-1) is a field; this simultaneously avoids (1) NTRU's traditional 2-adic structure and (2) the linear splittings used in most recent papers. """

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NSA alleged to have known & used Heartbleed for 2 years
by Gregory Foster 13 Apr '14

13 Apr '14

Bloomberg (Apr 11) - "NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug, Exposing Consumers": http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-used-heartbleed-b… > The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said. gf -- Gregory Foster || gfoster(a)entersection.org @gregoryfoster <> http://entersection.com/

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