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Re: Dollar Value of a Datamined "Free" Service User?
by Snehan Kekre 27 Feb '15

27 Feb '15

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: cypherpunks Digest, Vol 20, Issue 36 Time (GMT): Feb 26 2015 17:05:36 From: cypherpunks-request(a)cpunks.org To: cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of cypherpunks digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Dollar Value of a Datamined "Free" Service User? (Ryan Carboni) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2015 04:18:51 -0800 From: Ryan Carboni To: cpunks Subject: Re: Dollar Value of a Datamined "Free" Service User? Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" The marginal cost of providing an additional account to the average user is pretty cheap. It is my understanding that the business models of most "cloud" companies is to provide a little free service to get users accustomed to their UIs, so that they would purchase a business license or equivalent. Dropbox does not make it's money through data mining or advertising. Correct me if I'm wrong.

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Democratic judiciaries and internet protocols both embed racial profiling
by Nicolas Bourbaki 26 Feb '15

26 Feb '15

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 A packet sent by an American or European should be given no greater privileges then a packet sent by someone from the middle east. Those holding dual citizenry (one being of their locale and the other a product of the internet' stateless generation) will not find this question odd. But to end racial profiling in the protocol (example [1]) questioning the rationale of stateful civil liberties is also required. Initially this argument will seem a moral one but there are practical reasons to consider. The increasingly globalised society is doing little to stem the threat of terrorism while at the same time increasing the call for more equal rights. Together this warrants questioning the justification and benefits of discriminatory rights. ## Justification A primary tool for the arbitration of discriminatory surveillance policies are secret courts. One justification for secret courts is the protection of sources and methods. Any investigation into an on-going threat requires some form of secrecy. Terrorism is one such threat. But this is not the only on-going threat that courts handle. We should consider whether the vanilla judicial systems cannot already handle this requirement. Existing courts must also handle on-going threats and have to do so while considering how the utilisation of secrecy for greater security, and perhaps more efficient investigation, balances against the risk to social contracts that define liberties and rights. With each justification for protection of methods when investigation terrorism threats we can ask if these were any different for investigations into the racketeering ring of, say, Al Capone. Clearly such investigations would be more efficient when perpetrators can be swept off into secret prisons on the signature of a secret judge. Existing courts already provide some room for discretionary secrecy. The prosecution can determine which evidence they disclose to the courts or wider public. In many nations there is also room for disclosure only to the judge while avoiding exposure to the wider public record. Finally parallel construction [2] is a questionable but often used method for protecting both sources and methods. Further, some exposure of methods provides an early feedback to individuals that they can get caught. Whereas when the means to find criminals are unknown and the criminals themselves are whisked off into secrecy this benefit is completely lost. Another justification for secret courts may be risk of spys within the court itself. With intent to obtain influence or at least advanced warning of investigative activity. But are our judiciaries less equipped to handle this threat than when it comes from state sponsored intelligence agencies? If anything the threat is diminished because the architecture and premise of terrorist institutions is much more decentralised than state intelligence. Terrorist institutions are one partly of memetics. The violent form of "grumpy cat" [3]. Within societies threatened by their ideologies the appeal reaches only a few in like mind. Unlike your 3-letter-agency-of-choice they lack the appeal to mount sufficient infiltration of any local judiciary. Further, the centralisation of all terrorist based investigation in the form of a handful of secret courts may be one of the few reasons left consider the threat of infiltration. Whereas if public courts were used this threat would be diffused as is the case with investigations into other national or international on-going threats. Therefore... **The justification for nationalist or racial rights may be efficiency alone. But at what cost?** ## Benefits and Cost For most the foundational documents of their country of origin are held in almost religious regard. As in religion these documents are subject to interpretation even though the indoctrinated claim they are timelessly impervious to it. They are social contracts. The cost benefit analysis weighed tacitly by judges when permitting secrecy is a consideration of the social contract a given case may effect. They collectively change that contract through their actions. This subjectivity is both a risk and a necessity. I once asked a rabbi why kosher laws do not allow Jews to eat a chicken and cheese sandwich? What the Bible forbids is boiling a "kid" in its mothers milk. I've rarely enjoyed boiled sandwiches and never heard of chicken milk. The Rabbi explained something to the effect "God gave the law to man for the rabbinate to change and interpret. The kosher laws are as much about how behaviour is perceived as it is about what God commands. Someone on the other side of the room may just see you eating meat and cheese together. This would encourage the wrong understanding of that law." Interpretation is a slippery slope. Yet, at least Judaic law acknowledges the social contract and that perception is important. Where as our governments, through secrecy, negate even the possibility or interpretation or consideration of perception. With our collective identity and social threats becoming ever globalised the result of enforcing an absolute interpretation is ignorance of sovereignty (see drone warfare) and increasing rejection of equal rights. With these acts the state in turning from a conduit that fosters individuality into one that reinforces homogeneity. With the risk that the meme will increasingly hold more weight than the rationale. I have been lucky enough to have lived in countries that know how much they suck at war so the Americanism "War on ..." always seems strange. Yet the "War on Drugs" or "War on Poverty" are efforts that this society perceives as a collective will because of shared equality. If we want the War on Terror to be perceived as a collective issue globally we will need to start with endowing the "other" with equality. Those that frame this debate in the context "Liberty versus Security"... **It is easy to confuse Privilege for Liberty.** ## Racial Profiling I'm certain there is reason to question these arguments yet I believe they give some reason for debate. (i) The public judiciary already has many of the tools required to handle current threats. (ii) Centralization into secret courts creates its own vulnerability and its own justification. (iii) Necessity for efficiency ignores the cost to social contracts in a globalised context. (iv) Secrecy makes impossible consideration of equal rights in a global context and removes the possibility to account for perception. (v) Secrecy removes a feedback that informs civil behaviour in societies. Along with the judiciary there is a parallel of discriminatory profiling within the field of engineering. Our protocols have been built for such profiling. I do not feel alone in questioning whether the current stewards of the internet shouldn't be replaced with those of government agency from which the internet was born. Balkanisation is increasingly being seen as a solution, not the threat. Yet we protest while boringly waiting for some form of acknowledgement of responsibility from the IETF to change the protocols. In our digital world the concern for how protocols support and make discrimination possible will seem less distant. Rather than congratulate ourselves for dejecting a member of the NSA from the Crypto Forum Research Group we should be more disturbed by the inability of the IETF to acknowledge any responsibility for the ethics in the protocols. - -- 1. "GeoIP is a threat to democracy" https://cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2014-July/005037.html 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction 3. https://startpage.com/do/search?cat=pics&query=grumpy+cat -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJU75vTAAoJEHi6xtksL8/uwC8P/0PkrdsbZzo4qcosdVeNC9Ei sroo0ohyICt34uxeEpTisdWxv0GKPVFGqSDBAYfvRwc1+Ko6YnEeDlqb3+TNktTE GIzZAwslb3LJx09IERh6xMbdMkkXl2iw9qkRmvDK56Txk5B9HNY3bR/xBFN9oi4x mzOx8uN39xLxnUAff8071wkAzepZXVT6TC1gIq/95Vqrt8cP8C5oP+q04jHnxSev X+B18+3ytQvlbbRMVu3BPfDd8/PBdga6jdvnDIaVclM6Olagw1hwHv5IgXIA6edP 5UGc5v+uadYknVabDN/bQXqo9rYLAbwgAJgbaGPemdFLOl6mnsIaGiQCrKa/C2wm m1GX6D/kna3bUVHm6pZ+W0A7c9ERMLgDjItrCApUdXGgU2c770shxkQZVyWwUY5g G4fhpk9PgEeouZVRtHVjSw2cAhhsTNVaWWotJ3UPL9n6Soxtu68wNV/hQUhsEAHO NPCTV6LZVjaN11jZi+2JhLVe2w+4d6GNQjSkm1C1cs7XHqZ2P0Z4R6oigU8n6PIx aEZGvvhRct3PUodshOqQUwV1Ml4nUTEn6diJvDkHxW5YN2XHfJIv3zLo4tMQ6fF8 DV+uUSBl+arNKe/ehmxN+G550JVoQnOLUOcihNeCqFqWBCtlsWnP4vgRFFfl79iH EyI9rZP34J/yJMOJK/h/ =rYE3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Dollar Value of a Datamined "Free" Service User?
by Ryan Carboni 26 Feb '15

26 Feb '15

The marginal cost of providing an additional account to the average user is pretty cheap. It is my understanding that the business models of most "cloud" companies is to provide a little free service to get users accustomed to their UIs, so that they would purchase a business license or equivalent. Dropbox does not make it's money through data mining or advertising. Correct me if I'm wrong.

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Belarus just banned Tor and other censorship circumvention tools
by Anton Nesterov 25 Feb '15

25 Feb '15

"11. If government inspection find Internet resources or anonymity tools (proxy servers, anonymous networks like Tor, and so on), which can be used to get access for Internet resources with limited access, they should add identifier of that Internet resources or anonymity tools to the list of limited access." http://pravo.by/main.aspx?guid=12551&p0=T21503059&p1=1&p5=0 text (Russian) -- https://nesterov.pw GPG key: 0CE8 65F1 9043 2B11 25A5 74A7 1187 6869 67AA 56E4 https://keybase.io/komachi/key.asc

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Re: [Cryptography] trojans in the firmware
by grarpamp 25 Feb '15

25 Feb '15

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 8:53 PM, Jerry Leichter <leichter(a)lrw.com> wrote: > On Feb 24, 2015, at 2:24 AM, Ryan Carboni <ryacko(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> Fighting against a nation state using equipment you cannot design >> yourself or anyone you know could design... don't. > But in fact you can't design or manufacture *everything*. Do you > need control of your chips all the way back to mining the sand? Aren't there really only a couple ways to solve this? A) Somewhat similar to the IAEA, everyone pick their own trusted and knowledgeable people, then assemble everyone's people together with orders: 1) Respect whatever soverign secrets you see [profits, design advantages, etc] 2) Just tell us what we want to know [do the chips that come out of the fab equal the designs that went into it, and are those designs free of trust issues] This is complicated by needing to insert yourself into those legacy areas, as well as verify essentially that of B below. B) Contact your favorite billionaires and pitch the case for a truly open fab. And yes, that could include starting from ... > Do you need control of your chips all the way back to mining the > sand? [...] build a computer out of [...] simple logic gates > JK-flipflops Since that tech is already discovered, it would just be an open rapid physical rebuild of history from transistor to today. Maybe that would take 10 years of dedicated work to create a trusted fab that matches todays tech and can replicate itself. And if you think about it, it could be a profitable venture because if you did it right, you'd be able to openly and certifiably create trusted Orange Book / CC style hardware... something governments, large entities and even users have always wanted but haven't been able to obtain in affordable quantites and purposes. This may be easier because there's no legacy to remediate. And there's no reason you couldn't manufacture private chips too, the only restriction being that terms that would compromise the fab are not allowed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Energy_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computer_System_Evaluation_Criteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing_base http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware

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Re: [Cryptography] trojans in the firmware
by grarpamp 25 Feb '15

25 Feb '15

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Kay Rydyger <kay.rydyger(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > > The question was [... firmware spies] > The answer is [...] to encrypt data. No, reading bits from platters or the bus is a partial analysis of the whole firmware question. It's already been suggested in links how firmware can hook the users unencrypted boot binaries through to the users kernel. For that matter, a modified boot chain could be stored in the service area. A user would have to use SecureBoot, TPM, IOMMU, TXT, GELI and perhaps other things, all of them properly, having no holes, together, right now, at least three of which they are unlikely to have ubiquitous access to until a couple hardware generations or personal refresh cycles into the future. An ideal full solution for which is yet to come. Not to mention needing to install it all cleanly (from BTW, an install image which has no reproducible build and no cryptographic chain back to the insecure unsigned source repo anyways). But yeah, let's talk circular instead of about possible actually coding defense in depth such as maybe blocking the most common easiest path a malicious opcode will likely take to irrepairably infect clean hardware in the first place... through the drivers ... > There is no threat to freebsd ... because at least Unix is said to be immune to threat... http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories.html http://www.openbsd.org/errata56.html http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=linux+kernel&search_… > Weaknesses of this measure are remote and highly costly for the > attacker. If one is such a person of interest It's already been talked how this tech will be integrated into everyday run of the mill malware. And how users will be subject to infected drives via second purchase, inheritance (both from other people and from other operating systems), use of hosting services, trading, booting CD's, etc. Persistant malware in users boot chains is nasty, users don't have to be of interest or be targeted, the code doesn't care, grandma's surfbox could get it. Please learn to email... trim the original to the minimum needed for context, reply inline below, and stop copying 400 line digests with meaningless digest subject lines out to everyone on the list. On whenever, someone else wrote: > Since the chip holding the firmware has > leads through which it is loaded with the firmware, > is it not possible to disable or burn (with laser) or cut > just the leads through which the chip is WRITTEN to > (in order to re-program it)? Depends on the design. The hacking links or docs from the drive/chip vendors would be more helpful there.

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Fwd: [Cryptography] Why the Internet could be the next “failed state”
by grarpamp 25 Feb '15

25 Feb '15

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Paul Ferguson <fergdawgster(a)mykolab.com> Date: Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 9:58 PM Subject: [Cryptography] Why the Internet could be the next “failed state” To: Cryptography Mailing List <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 I encourage you to read this very thought-provoking article on the "state of the Internet" insofar as security, inclusiveness, and usability is concerned. Well worth the read. And also very interesting opinion (apropos?) as to where we are as a society right now in the evolution of the Internet, a crossroads where our daily personal & professional lives meet: "If you think the Internet can go on being just like it is, here's some bad news." "...the Internet might soon look less like 1970s New York and more like 1990s Mogadishu: warring factions destroying the most fundamental of services, 'security zones' reducing or eliminating free movement, and security costs making it prohibitive for anyone but the most well-funded operations to do business without becoming a 'soft target' for political or economic gain." http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/fear-in-the-digital-c… - - ferg - -- Paul Ferguson VP Threat Intelligence, IID PGP Public Key ID: 0x54DC85B2 Key fingerprint: 19EC 2945 FEE8 D6C8 58A1 CE53 2896 AC75 54DC 85B2 "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas." - Herman Melville -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iF4EAREIAAYFAlTtOkQACgkQKJasdVTchbIdpwEAkmxxKO0Buzun3yW6k7SRDXPr 2/ENJW5l07th7f/adwAA/j7wodKw29nHFTW4EUARSbyZBiNfAGNTAfstFrT5oV3h =75sd -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography

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I Spy With My Little Eye
by grarpamp 25 Feb '15

25 Feb '15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0HDxoTmQe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o2djiZOxyA

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Fwd: [Cryptography] trojans in the firmware
by grarpamp 23 Feb '15

23 Feb '15

> http://www.recover.co.il/SA-cover/SA-cover.pdf Since the firmware rules over everything, all the spare sectors for block reallocation must be considered too, not just the service areas. Then there is the per sector CRC space that could perhaps be reutilized if CRC is implemented as software function. Kernel options to permit only your approved list of opcodes and block all else by default would seem useful to have. > http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35661.pdf Again, look at the list of Unix operating systems and file systems. These guys are calling Unix out by name, and soon the common script kid will be too. Unix is under attack and this stuff can't be ignored as "too rare and/or hard and/or low market share to be relavent" anymore. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 12:10 PM Subject: Re: [Cryptography] trojans in the firmware FYI -- CMU has been hacking disk drive firmware since the 1990's for "smart disks" and "performance"; UCSD has been hacking flash drive firmware more recently. I believe that DARPA has also openly solicited for disk drive/flash drive firmware hacking capabilities. Both CMU & UCSD are hotbeds of NSA recruitment activity. We now know that in NSA parlance "smart" anything = "spying" anything; e.g., "smart disks" = "spying disks"; "smart phones" = "spying phones", etc. BTW, hiding stuff in a flash memory stick is even easier than in a hard drive. This is because flash memory is so unreliable, that there is typically a huge percentage of unused space; the cheaper the flash memory, the smaller the fraction of usable reliable memory space. So it wouldn't be at all surprising to find that your 32GB flash drive is really constructed from 64GB chips, and that 50% of the device is unavailable for use. It is highly unlikely that _all_ of this unused space is unreliable, so this leaves plenty of room for NSA lurking. But even if the device were 100% reliable, noticing that only 50% was actually in use would be unremarkable, given the typical degree of unreliability of these types of devices. For these reasons, it is critical for flash memory devices to _open up_ their API's, so that the raw memory (with all of its warts) can be inspected and verified. http://www.wired.com/2015/02/nsa-firmware-hacking/ How the NSA’s Firmware Hacking Works and Why It’s So Unsettling By Kim Zetter 02.22.15 8:09 pm One of the most shocking parts of the recently discovered spying network Equation Group is its mysterious module designed to reprogram or reflash a computer hard drive’s firmware with malicious code. The Kaspersky researchers who uncovered this said its ability to subvert hard drive firmware—-the guts of any computer—-“surpasses anything else” they had ever seen. The hacking tool, believed to be a product of the NSA, is significant because subverting the firmware gives the attackers God-like control of the system in a way that is stealthy and persistent even through software updates. The module, named “nls_933w.dll”, is the first of its kind found in the wild and is used with both the EquationDrug and GrayFish spy platforms Kaspersky uncovered. It also has another capability: to create invisible storage space on the hard drive to hide data stolen from the system so the attackers can retrieve it later. This lets spies like the Equation Group bypass disk encryption by secreting documents they want to seize in areas that don’t get encrypted. Kaspersky has so far uncovered 500 victims of the Equation Group, but only five of these had the firmware-flashing module on their systems. The flasher module is likely reserved for significant systems that present special surveillance challenges. Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team, believes these are high-value computers that are not connected to the internet and are protected with disk encryption. Here’s what we know about the firmware-flashing module. How It Works Hard drive disks have a controller, essentially a mini-computer, that includes a memory chip or flash ROM where the firmware code for operating the hard drive resides. When a machine is infected with EquationDrug or GrayFish, the firmware flasher module gets deposited onto the system and reaches out to a command server to obtain payload code that it then flashes to the firmware, replacing the existing firmware with a malicious one. The researchers uncovered two versions of the flasher module: one that appears to have been compiled in 2010 and is used with EquatinoDrug and one with a 2013 compilation date that is used with GrayFish. The Trojanized firmware lets attackers stay on the system even through software updates. If a victim, thinking his or her computer is infected, wipes the computer’s operating system and reinstalls it to eliminate any malicious code, the malicious firmware code remains untouched. It can then reach out to the command server to restore all of the other malicious components that got wiped from the system. Even if the firmware itself is updated with a new vendor release, the malicious firmware code may still persist because some firmware updates replace only parts of the firmware, meaning the malicious portions may not get overwritten with the update. The only solution for victims is to trash their hard drive and start over with a new one. The attack works because firmware was never designed with security in mind. Hard disk makers don’t cryptographically sign the firmware they install on drives the way software vendors do. Nor do hard drive disk designs have authentication built in to check for signed firmware. This makes it possible for someone to change the firmware. And firmware is the perfect place to conceal malware because antivirus scanners don’t examine it. There’s also no easy way for users to read the firmware and manually check if it’s been altered. The firmware flasher module can reprogram the firmware of more than a dozen different hard drive brands, including IBM, Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. “You know how much effort it takes to land just one firmware for a hard drive? You need to know specifications, the CPU, the architecture of the firmware, how it works,” Raiu says. The Kaspersky researchers have called it “an astonishing technical accomplishment and is testament to the group’s abilities.” Once the firmware is replaced with the Trojanized version, the flasher module creates an API that can communicate with other malicious modules on the system and also access hidden sectors of the disk where the attackers want to conceal data they intend to steal. They hide this data in the so-called service area of the hard drive disk where the hard disk stores data needed for its internal operation. Hidden Storage Is the Holy Grail The revelation that the firmware hack helps store data the attackers want to steal didn’t get much play when the story broke last week, but it’s the most significant part of the hack. It also raises a number of questions about how exactly the attackers are pulling this off. Without an actual copy of the firmware payload that gets flashed to infected systems, there’s still a lot that’s unknown about the attack, but some of it can be surmised. The ROM chip that contains the firmware includes a small amount of storage that goes unused. If the ROM chip is 2 megabytes, the firmware might take up just 1.5 megabytes, leaving half a megabyte of unused space that can be employed for hiding data the attackers want to steal. This is particularly useful if the computer has disk encryption enabled. Because the EquationDrug and GrayFish malware run in Windows, they can grab a copy of documents while they’re unencrypted and save them to this hidden area on the machine that doesn’t get encrypted. There isn’t much space on the chip for a lot of data or documents, however, so the attackers can also just store something equally as valuable to bypass encryption. “Taking into account the fact that their GrayFish implant is active from the very boot of the system, they have the ability to capture the encryption password and save it into this hidden area,” Raiu says. Authorities could later grab the computer, perhaps through border interdiction or something the NSA calls “customs opportunities,” and extract the password from this hidden area to unlock the encrypted disk. http://cryptome.org/2014/05/nsa-customs.htm Raiu thinks the intended targets of such a scheme are limited to machines that are not connected to the internet and have encrypted hard drives. One of the five machines they found hit with the firmware flasher module had no internet connection and was used for special secure communications. “[The owners] only use it in some very specific cases where there is no other way around it,” Raiu says. “Think about Bin Laden who lived in the desert in an isolated compound—-doesn’t have internet and no electronic footprint. So if you want information from his computer how do you get it? You get documents into the hidden area and you wait, and then after one or two years you come back and steal it. The benefits [of using this] are very specific.” Raiu thinks, however, that the attackers have a grander scheme in mind. “In the future probably they want to take it to the next level where they just copy all the documents [into the hidden area] instead of the password. [Then] at some point, when they have an opportunity to have physical access to the system, they can then access that hidden area and get the unencrypted docs.” They wouldn’t need the password if they could copy an entire directory from the operating system to the hidden sector for accessing later. But the flash chip where the firmware resides is too small for large amounts of data. So the attackers would need a bigger hidden space for storage. Luckily for them, it exists. There are large sectors in the service area of the hard drive disk that are also unused and could be commandeered to store a large cache of documents, even ones that might have been deleted from other parts of the computer. This service area, also called the reserved are or system area, stores the firmware and other data needed to operate drives, but it also contains large portions of unused space. An interesting paper (.pdf) published in February 2013 by Ariel Berkman, a data recovery specialist at the Israeli firm Recover, noted “not only that these areas can’t be sanitized (via standard tools), they cannot be accessed via anti-virus software [or] computer forensics tools.” http://www.recover.co.il/SA-cover/SA-cover.pdf Berkman points out that one particular model of Western Digital drives has 141 MB reserved for the service area, but only uses 12 MB of this, leaving the rest free for stealth storage. To write or copy data to service area requires special commands that are specific to each vendor and are not publicly documented, so an attacker would need to uncover what these are. But once they do, “[b]y sending Vendor Specific Commands (VSCs) directly to the hard-drive, one can manipulate these [service] areas to read and write data that are otherwise inaccessible,” Berkman writes. It is also possible, though not trivial, to write a program to automatically copy documents to this area. Berkman himself wrote a proof-of-concept program to read and write a file of up to 94 MB to the service area, but the program was a bit unstable and he noted that it could cause some data loss or cause the hard drive to fail. One problem with hiding large amounts of data like this, however, is that its presence might be detected by examining the size of the used space in the service area. If there should be 129 MB of unused space in this sector but there’s only 80 MB, it’s a dead giveaway that something is there that shouldn’t be. But a leaked NSA document that was written in 2006 but was published by Der Spiegel last month suggests the spy agency might have resolved this particular problem. NSA Interns to the Rescue The document (.pdf) is essentially a wish list of future spy capabilities the NSA hoped to develop for its so-called Persistence Division, a division that has an attack team within it that focuses on establishing and maintaining persistence on compromised machines by subverting their firmware, BIOS, BUS or drivers. The document lists a number of projects the NSA put together for interns to tackle on behalf of this attack team. Among them is the “Covert Storage” project for developing a hard drive firmware implant that can prevent covert storage on disks from being detected. To do this, the implant prevents the system from disclosing the true amount of free space available on the disk. http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-35661.pdf “The idea would be to modify the firmware of a particular hard drive so that it normally only recognizes, say, half of its available space,” the document reads. “It would report this size back to the operating system and not provide any way to access the additional space.” Only one partition of the drive would be visible on the partition table, leaving the other partitions—-where the hidden data was stored—-invisible and inaccessible. The modified firmware would have a special hook embedded in it that would unlock this hidden storage space only after a custom command was sent to the drive and the computer was rebooted. The hidden partition would then be available on the partition table and accessible until the secret storage was locked again with another custom command. How exactly the spy agency planned to retrieve the hidden data was unclear from the eight-year-old document. Also unclear is whether the interns ever produced a firmware implant that accomplished what the NSA sought. But given that the document includes a note that interns would be expected to produce a solution for their project within six months after assignment, and considering the proven ingenuity of the NSA in other matters, they no doubt figured it out. _______________________________________________

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Re: [Cryptography] trojans in the firmware
by Peter Gutmann 22 Feb '15

22 Feb '15

Henry Baker <hbaker1(a)pipeline.com> writes: >BTW, what's the point of AES encryption on this pre-p0wned device? More >security theatre? Almost. Its sole use is for very fast "drive erasure", i.e. you change the key and the data on it becomes inaccessible. Have a look at this presentation: http://www.snia.org/sites/default/education/tutorials/2012/spring/security/… which describes what Samsung (and others) are doing, in particular slide 18. The decryption key (DEK) is stored in the drive, and is unlocked using a password (and "authentication key", AK). So to decrypt the drive you extract the encrypted DEK, brute-force the password (AK), and you're in. In any case though it doesn't protect against an attack that occurs when the drive is mounted since it looks like an unencrypted drive at that point (and presumably the AK is hardcoded into a startup script or something similar in order to survive power outages, so you can grab that if you really need it). It's actually hard to see what purpose this "encryption" is serving (the vendors studiously avoid providing a threat model), it doesn't protect live data, it barely protects data at rest (say if you decide to Fedex the contents of your data centre across town), the only thing it really does is allow for fast erasure of contents, and protect against casual snooping of the "buy a batch of drives on ebay and see what's on them" kind. So I guess if ebay is your threat, it's good enough. OTOH a BIOS password set for the drive will do the same thing. As a more general response to "what's the point", regulatory compliance ("our drives were encrypted so we don't have to disclose the 40M credit card breach from last week"), buzzword-compliance, CYA, it's not a bad idea from a marketing point of view. Peter.

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