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Who we are up against
by Zenaan Harkness 07 Mar '16

07 Mar '16

For those who have not yet read of this, it's a must to comprehend. Lest ye doubt humans are rightly labelled 'sheep'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment Something uplifting to counterbalance: > http://thesaker.is/submarines-in-the-desert-as-my-deepest-gratitude-to-you/ (Thank you very much Alex.) And some comedy: http://thesaker.is/scotts-collection-of-russian-humor-hilarious-must-read/ Regards, Zenaan

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participation in sensor networks
by dan＠geer.org 06 Mar '16

06 Mar '16

Most everyone I know is participating in sensor networks beginning with carrying smartphones. Let us assume, for the moment, this is with their eyes wide open as to the possible extent of such networks' implications. Here's another one, http://www.nauto.com, which I mention as the recording of license plates and everything else in the surround, not just the driver's performance envelope, now comes to consumer gear which, undoubtedly, insurance rates will soon reflect and, in the fullness of time, subpoenas will seek. There are a bejillion other technologies of like import coming and coming soon. Those (of us) who opt-out will face price discrimination and, quite likely, participation discrimination on an accelerating pace; look to Sweden's stance on cash money for an example (banks no longer accept cash deposits, as I understand it). The question here is perhaps obvious: Will you opt out and suffer the consequences thereof? --dan

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Re: [Cryptography] EFF amicus brief in support of Apple
by grarpamp 06 Mar '16

06 Mar '16

On 3/6/16, Perry E. Metzger <perry(a)piermont.com> wrote: > I'm a practical person. I want systems that work, not that provide > some sort of philosophical warm fuzzies. > Economies of scale are real things. It is nice for a hundred million > people to be able to download patches to their systems automatically > without even having to think about it or understand what a patch is > It is nice for people to be able to download a > game or a to-do application without having to personally audit Open and secure does not preclude any of these things. > Where's the evidence for your assertion? What is your potential when you're chained to a wall? With open, possibility is a right of others, with closed, you forclose it upon them, and likely to serve yourself. That may be part of the potential. > If you look at Android vs. > iOS, iOS, with its much more restrictive environment, seems (as a > practical matter) to be more secure. iOS/Android haven't even hit 10 years old and neither they nor their underlying platforms truly have openness in their core ethos so they can't really be contrasted against each other in the suggested way. > What you're suggesting is impossible. There is no way any of us The general reply is that the overall model of open and all these related things simply hasn't had enough time to develop, execute, and be evaluated in a world that has only known closed. However one thing is of absolute certainty: believing that getting off the rock is impossible... will never get you off the rock.

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Re: [Cryptography] EFF amicus brief in support of Apple
by grarpamp 06 Mar '16

06 Mar '16

On 3/6/16, Ray Dillinger <bear(a)sonic.net> wrote: > It is possible that a profit center can be identified outside The profit center, and moreover even change for good in other areas, is the Boards and Officers of Apple, Google, Microsoft and so on... standing up and offering additional value... "Hey world, we are now going fully open hardware and software and integrating security and right to privacy models into all our products. Join us." These are the biggest corporations on Earth, and it's time for the grand experiment of open, secure, and private to begin. It's not insane, it's new.

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Re: [Cryptography] EFF amicus brief in support of Apple
by grarpamp 06 Mar '16

06 Mar '16

> It's time we stopped believing that there's something magic about open > source software. > There's no way the average person can build their own software from > source [...] forcing your 80 year old grandfather who used to be a chef to audit a > few million lines of source code, compile them, and load them onto > his phone before he can make a phone call isn't going to help No. See, those are the real problems... mindset. You all who say this type of talk are disbelieving apologists still trying to advance control, profit, babysitting, trust us we know better, etc... over others. No one is asserting that opensource is currently better or magic. However, when a billion humans around the world *may* look at and even participate in the hw and sw if they wanted to, versus only 25 people locked in the coderoom of a megacorp whose primary raison d etre is by definition making money... the possible odds that it *could* be better and even a solution to everything as you say... are in fact better. Because it's open, not closed. And even if that doesn't happen, then with opensource there are *still* just 25 talented people involved in and hacking on it... openly, not closed. Nor do I see you offering to personally help those grandfathers around you get their phone / cpu up and running when they understand *why* they want to use the open hw and sw, but come asking some human they know who can help the details. Or setting up some local collectives that do so openly for fun.

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Bitcoin: A Miner Problem
by grarpamp 06 Mar '16

06 Mar '16

http://qntra.net/2016/03/a-miner-problem/ That the notion of "a majority of Bitcoin nodes" is void of content, That a cartel of Bitcoin miners is deliberately and systematically withholding blocks for an interval of about 20 minutes to a half hour, so as to ensure themselves a (significant) advantage over any would-be competitors. That neither above item makes sense or could long survive without the other

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The rewards of frenzied comsec-shopping should be a pardon for Snowden
by John Young 06 Mar '16

06 Mar '16

NY Times surmises NSA does not want to reveal its crypto cracking capabilities, that the FBI hopes unskilled users will make exploitable mistakes implementing, that DoD hopes to exploit holes, doubt and errors rather than see them corrected, that hackers and corporations expect to continue to sell 0-days for high prices, that Obama staff has mixed views of weak and strong comsec, that the US hacks both friends and foes, engages in cyber defense and offense, all this feeding opportunistic and obliging media fanning flames with anonymous sources, secret briefings, revolving door job offers of op-eds, essays, speeches, testimonies and spy-approved tattle-tales. Essential to crypto fire-storm is fueling a fire-sale Snowden 0-day attribution. The rewards of this frenzied comsec-shopping should be a pardon for Snowden, along with a life-time free travel in search of anywhere crypto is not needed, just his word comms are good to go naked.

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Once again: Tor timing attacks and a Tor confession
by Georgi Guninski 06 Mar '16

06 Mar '16

Searching the web for "tor timing attacks" (without quotes) returns too many hits. Short summary and PoC is at [1]. At [2] Tor (and/or DoD) confess: > The Tor design doesn't try to protect against an attacker who can see > or measure both traffic going into the Tor network and also traffic > coming out of the Tor network. NSA and the like definitely can "see" traffic almost everywhere, so Tor doesn't protect against the NSA, right? (some people learnt this the hard way). IMHO the first fucking thing Tor must do is to make the user click at least three times on the above disclaimer. Trying to make the rant on topic: Is it theoretically possible at all to make low latency anonymity of sufficiently decent quality? [1] http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2014/Mar/414 PoC: End-to-end correlation for Tor connections using an active timing attack [2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/one-cell-enough

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Unredacted SecureDrop 0.3.4 audit report
by Steve Kinney 06 Mar '16

06 Mar '16

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 An independent audit found a substantial deficiency in one of the dependencies of the SecureDrop document submission / management protocol. SecureDrop gave the devs time to fix it before publishing, but so far the issue remains unresolved: Publishing the unredacted SecureDrop 0.3.4 audit report https://freedom.press/blog/2015/12/publishing-unredacted-securedrop- 034-audit-report vs. https://tinyurl.com/hgeyab8 FTA: SecureDrop uses OSSEC, a popular open source host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS). The OSSEC architecture consists of a single central server, called the Manager, which monitors one or more systems. The monitored systems have programs called Agents, which collect a variety of information and forward it to the Manager for analysis and correlation. The Manager and the Agents may communicate with one of two protocols: "syslog" or "secure". The "secure" protocol is a custom crypto protocol based on shared secret keys that are set up during OSSEC deployment. NCC Group reviewed the custom protocol and found two serious issues in its cryptographic design: Protocol messages are encrypted with the shared secret key using Blowfish in CBC mode. Unfortunately, the protocol uses a static initialization vector (IV) to encrypt and decrypt all messages. This essentially reduces CBC mode to ECB mode and fails to achieve semantic security. Protocol messages are not authenticated. Each message includes an MD5 hash of the plaintext payload with the encrypted content, but this is not a strong authenticator. Among other things, it violates Moxie Marlinspike's "Cryptographic Doom Principle". For more detail, see the finding in the unredacted audit report. NCC Group did not take the time to investigate a proof of concept (PoC) attack based on this vulnerability, but that is not surprising given the limited duration of their engagement and the fact that their focus was on SecureDrop, not OSSEC. Nonetheless, these are serious cryptographic design flaws that could lead to a practical attack in the future. We encourage all OSSEC users to examine their current deployments, consider the level of exposure of any OSSEC "secure" protocol traffic to potential adversaries, and make changes accordingly. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJW24ZTAAoJEDZ0Gg87KR0LJHAP/ihVjalG8ZNc8kvIQxgSCRro DtwCzakkNSxPzCSjX28UMhDy2nnBkz6IIBBcMP7A7p40lQHKmRRhg34ceGgk1rOw 1SGrPZWeZCZH+s2T30mGHZDGskpe6tmnlZTajbZ5oEe3qSNW1soRqsYTa3K4vNC6 ezPV28SNIwUaqKZ3JWu1Z+QMnHW6lLsbmIpGmCRByAI5tYOYoxpyXEoxRb4sA9Iq //B1vJgfhkAdE7eES2aVGwAidOfPGUHi6M3mWy5TP912yMUok9YW2kyIqDisBpjr BMJRutGCiK9ih0OFiJig/kcHpENGROQVtD0cAa7mEJhBLUB/Mt4brYHT2+XQFSC6 rpjEBbm4iHr+0mn4JBZC+Op4ImJpU8Bhx26EaDU2t5xVZ3m3GFMTQal7PuMieZS+ 05vKIFHMJhkg0tOS6SqC62wKYuxy9XcvlaUlpXcAfnKn9E3tYXP1P2Ez5Ahuqhml WXiIX+JCbE9nLcvuK6IFUvTvWe62JTP3IXv38vP1tFi7j2OWlnYd5PsVsvJecT/U ibiUb/uw8gdsmLHmcAXEJ/YgWsIC7zOul8ORL7MGwa2rcytOf8i3ckUbA6dGM9iA 6nzM//V/H91DsHicngwZ9+zMQRtm3vmp+biXPsSv+fXGdRhxOGiePbrbeeEuVvqq d67XJxo5T/IpitF2L4j0 =gRP3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: [Cryptography] EFF amicus brief in support of Apple
by grarpamp 05 Mar '16

05 Mar '16

> Bottom line: if FBI/DoJ can strongarm Apple into electronically > signing malware, then we have entered into a truly new imperial > era, where trillion-dollar companies can be rubber-hosed into > misusing their private crypto keys. > > No amount of technology, per se, can prevent this particular > MITM attack. We're now going to have to have multiple keys > from multiple "trusted" sources prior to accepting a firmware > update. Forget visiting Switzerland or the Cayman Islands > for access to $$$; you may now have to physically go there to > get your iPhone securely updated. See this is a problem. All this trust in single entities, singular and closed systems you keep needing to place. Why in the fuck do you keep doing this? You compute hardware should be completely open. You compute software should be completely open. You should fuse your own keys into your own hardware for software builds you reproducibly build sign and install yourself from distributed opensource software. Open designs, open fabs, open products, open source. You are NOT going to solve these problems without it. And quit crying profit... the work of your plumber is all in the open and profitable. Or quality... all quality is currently shit, but at least you stand a chance of seeing the flies on it if it's open. > I'm sure that Microsoft/HP/Dell are looking upon these > proceedings with mixed feelings, as I suspect that they've > *already* provided their code-signing keys to the govt Like all those call and other data... just for the asking, thus retroactive immunity for them, thus rolled up for absorption and enacted by an unaccountable government. > -- perhaps under FISA NSL > -- or perhaps out of a misplaced sense of patriotism. These two are one and the same. > Apple's digital signature is tied to their credible responsibility that software > they sign is theirs Yes it's theirs, which they can fuck you with at any time... because you trusted them, oops. > and in the best interest of their customers and Apple's business. These are in tenacious conflict. > As a minimum the existence of compelled software lays waste to the EULA. Shrinkwrap hardware / software EULAs offer you nothing concrete, trustworthy, or compensatable. All to them, none to you. Negotiated contracts are different but just as tricky.

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