Tag: Cyber Security

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Apple’s Data Stewardship Questioned, Again

Matt Green has a good writeup of the confusion associated with Apple’s decision to relocate Chinese users’ data to data centres in China. He notes:

Unfortunately, the problem with Apple’s disclosure of its China’s news is, well, really just a version of the same problem that’s existed with Apple’s entire approach to iCloud.

Where Apple provides overwhelming detail about their best security systems (file encryption, iOS, iMessage), they provide distressingly little technical detail about the weaker links like iCloud encryption. We know that Apple can access and even hand over iCloud backups to law enforcement. But what about Apple’s partners? What about keychain data? How is this information protected? Who knows.

This vague approach to security might make it easier for Apple to brush off the security impact of changes like the recent China news (“look, no backdoors!”) But it also confuses the picture, and calls into doubt any future technical security improvements that Apple might be planning to make in the future. For example, this article from 2016 claims that Apple is planning stronger overall encryption for iCloud. Are those plans scrapped? And if not, will those plans fly in the new Chinese version of iCloud? Will there be two technically different versions of iCloud? Who even knows?

And at the end of the day, if Apple can’t trust us enough to explain how their systems work, then maybe we shouldn’t trust them either.

Apple is regarded as providing incredibly secure devices to the public. But as more and more of the data on Apple devices is offloaded to Apple-controlled Cloud services it’s imperative that the company both explain how it is securing data and, moreover, the specific situations under which it can disclose data it is stewarding for its users.

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Aside

2018.1.17

Blew away over 10K emails that were collecting dust in one of my main accounts. My goal over the next few months is to remove the mass majority of old email that serves no purpose. Doing so will both free up some space (not that I really need it) while also cutting down on the possible deleterious effects of having the account in question getting hacked and contents selectively modified and/or leaked.

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Anti-Virus and Windows Vista

From Ben Farthi:

In my role as the head of Microsoft security, I personally spent many years explaining to antivirus vendors why we would no longer allow them to “patch” kernel instructions and data structures in memory, why this was a security risk, and why they needed to use approved APIs going forward, that we would no longer support their legacy apps with deep hooks in the Windows kernel — the same ones that hackers were using to attack consumer systems. Our “friends”, the antivirus vendors, turned around and sued us, claiming we were blocking their livelihood and abusing our monopoly power! With friends like that, who needs enemies? They just wanted their old solutions to keep working even if that meant reducing the security of our mutual customer — the very thing they were supposed to be improving.

Anti-virus programs remain a problem in terms of the attack surface they can open up. This surface, combined with the failure of many products to effectively identify and act on malware signatures, means that consumers tend to put far too much trust in products that often function poorly at best.

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Meltdown/Spectre Explained To The Public

Robert Graham has helpfully explained what the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities mean for most end-users. In short: patch now and things should be ok. But chipmakers and OS vendors are going to have to rethink some baseline ways of doing business.

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WordPress Supply Chain Attacks

Per Wordfence there are four reasons for supply-chain (i.e. plugin-based) attacks on WordPress installations:

The first reason is simply scale. According to w3techs, WordPress powers 29.2% of all websites – a massive user base to go after. In addition, at the time of this writing there were 53,566 plugins available for download in the official WordPress.org plugin repository. That is a lot to work with on both fronts.

Secondly, the WordPress.org plugin directory is an open, community-driven resource. According to the plugin guidelines page, “It is the sole responsibility of plugin developers to ensure all files within their plugins comply with the guidelines.” This means that while there is a small team tasked with managing the plugin repository and another small team focused on security, ultimately users rely on plugin developers to keep them safe.

Thirdly, most WordPress sites are managed pretty casually. Making a change to a website at a larger company might include code review, testing and a formal change control process. But that’s probably not happening consistently, if at all, on most smaller websites. In addition, many site owners don’t monitor their WordPress sites closely, which means malware can often remain in place for many months without being discovered.

Lastly, the WordPress plugin repository has a huge number of abandoned plugins. When we looked back in May, almost half of the available plugins hadn’t been updated in over two years. This represents a great opportunity for ne’er do wells looking to con unsuspecting plugin authors into selling something they created years ago and have moved on from.

The aforementioned points outline why acquiring and infecting WordPress plugins is a reasonable way of penetrating WordPress installs. However, I think that Wordfence is missing the most important reason that such attacks succeed: few actual users of WordPress are technically component to monitor what, exactly, their plugins are doing. Nor are the shared hosting services particularly good at identifying and alerting technically-illiterate users that their sites are compromised and what the site owners need to do to remediate the intrusion.

Trying to get individual users to more carefully monitor how their plugins work is a fool’s errand. What’s needed is for hosts to provide a community service and actively not just identify hijacked plugins (and sites) but, also, provide meaningful remediation processes. User education and alerts aren’t enough (or even moderately sufficient): companies must guide site owners through the process of cleaning their sites. Otherwise malware campaigns aimed at WordPress will persist and grow over time.

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Security Planner by the Citizen Lab

From the Citizen Lab:1

Security Planner is an easy-to-use platform with tested, peer reviewed recommendations for staying safe online. With just a few clicks, Security Planner tailors straightforward recommendations based on someone’s digital habits and the technology they use. Recommendations are presented with clear language, making it easier to decide if they are right for someone. Our goal is to put people in a position to move from learning to action.

…

Our recommendations are developed by a peer review committee of experts from universities, nonprofits, and the private sector. The committee has decades of combined experience in digital security and produces recommendations that balance objectivity, accountability, and accessibility. This approach ensures that no private company can exercise influence over the products or services that we recommend. Security Planner is also overseen by an advisory board whose members include some of the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital security space.

Security Planner is a free tool that is designed to help everyone answer, and solve, their questions about online security. Check it out!

  1. In the interests of full disclosure, I’m an employee of the Citizen Lab though was only minimally involved in this particular project. ↩
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Review: Security Engineering

Anderson has successfully synthesized an incredibly diverse set of literature and, as a result, the book is useful for any person who is involved in security. The first section of the book outlines different threat models, offers accessible ways to develop and implement security designs, and also addresses issues of economics, psychology, and basic security issues that must be considered from the outset of security planning. Because different threat situations are raised throughout the book the reader will learn to appreciate the value of adopting comprehensive threat planning. This approach is not meant to drive a ‘secure everything’ mentality but to encourage readers to reflect on, and understand, what is actually being protected, why it is being protected, and what it is being protected from. As a result, a manager or team lead not invested in the day-to-day securing of a principle can have intelligent and critical discussions with their security staff, ensuring that principles are properly identified and resources assigned to ensure desired levels of threat protection. For staff involved in implementing policy, reading this first section may help to couch concerns in a language that is better understood by management. It will also let those same staff members more precisely plan and implement policies that are handed down from higher levels in an organizational framework. 

In the second section of the book, Anderson addresses a series of ‘topic areas’ such as multilateral security, banking and bookkeeping, monitoring and metering, security printing and seals, API attacks, copyright, telecom security, and more. In each section he leaves the reader with an excellent topical understanding of the historical issues these areas have encountered, how issues in various sections often relate to one another, and where and why errors in judgement have been made. The regular demonstrations of security failures – often due to side channel attacks – operate as powerful reminders that adequate policies that precisely identify how fault situations unfold are (arguably) amongst the most important elements of any security policy. It also demonstrates how what appear to be robust systems can be made to be quite brittle, thus emphasizing the need to think about how to develop effective defence in depth policies. This section is essential reading for both the actual implementers of security as well as whomever is making purchasing decisions on behalf of organizations. With the rapid growth of the ‘security industry’ and ever-increasing number of vendors that are invested in selling their latest products/snake oil, this section provides the reader with tools needed to critically interrogate products and make better purchasing and implementation decisions. 

The final section is, arguably, most needed by mid- to high-level organizational planners. Civil issues are raised – how does security/surveillance impact individuals’  rights? – as are step-by-step methodological systems for establishing threat patterns in relation to larger organizational concerns (e.g. profitability, consumer loyalty and trust). It also includes suggested practices for addressing potential security errors introduced in the generation of a digital or coded product, and how to establish an environment conducive to ensuring product- and process-based integrity, authenticity, and security. The final section is particularly needed for anyone looking into compliance seals and assurances. Anderson outlines the positive and deficient aspects of external audits, and also identifies how auditing systems have been gamed by nation-state actors and the reasons behind such gaming. While some organizations may be more concerned about receiving seals for bureaucratic purposes, for the agency that is concerned about the actual security value of the seals, this section provides much-needed resources to understand the nature of seal and certification systems. 

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Quite often, security books will emphasize a particular line of attack and bypass the broader conceptual systems underlying the incursion. This book largely takes the opposite track, focusing first on the conceptual deficiencies and the intellectual demands of designing secure systems. It then proceeds to outline attacks that often use the systems’ logic to the attackers advantage. As a result, the reader will leave with a critical appreciation of the concepts and implementations of security. The emphasis on the conceptual conditions of security mean that the book will continue to age well, with readers being able to apply what is learned in this book to their work for years to come. 

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Demand for secret messaging apps is rising as Trump takes office

From The Verge:

Marlinspike’s goal isn’t unicorn riches, but unicorn ubiquity. For that, he wants to make encrypted messaging as easy — as beautiful, as fun, as expressive, as emoji-laden — as your default messaging app. His reason: if encryption is difficult, it self-selects for people willing to jump through those hoops. And bad guys are always willing to jump through the hoops. “ISIS or high-risk criminal activity will be willing to click two extra times,” he told me. “You and I are not.”

Marlinspike’s protocol for secure communication is incredibly effective at protecting message content from third party observation. Few protocols are nearly as effective, however, and most chat companies now claim that they offer ‘secure’ communciations. Almost no consumers are situated to evaluate those claims: there are known deficient applications that are widely used, despite the security community having identified and discussed their problems. Encryption isn’t actually going to provide the security that most users think it does so unless the best-of-class protocols are widely adopted.1

The problem of imperfect consumer knowledge is a hard one to solve for, in part because the security community cannot evaluate all claims of encryption. In work that I’ve been involved in we’ve seen simplistic ciphers, hard coded passwords, and similar deficiencies. In some cases companies have asserted they secure data but then fail to encrypt data between smartphone apps and company servers. It’s laborious work to find these deficiencies and it’s cheap for companies to claim that they offer a ‘secure’ product. And it ultimately means that consumers (who aren’t experts in cryptography, nor should they be expected to be such experts) are left scratching their head and, sometimes, just throwing their hands up in frustration as a result of the limited information that is available.

  1. Admittedly, Marlinspike’s goal is to spread his protocol widely and the result has been that the largest chat service in the world, WhatsApp, not provides a robust level of communications security. To activate the protocol in other chat services, such as Google’s Allo or Facebook’s Messenger you need to first set up a private conversation. ↩

 

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Google warns journalists and professors: Your account is under attack

From Ars Technica:

A Google spokesman, citing this overview of the warnings, said it’s possible that the recent flurry may refer to hacking attempts that happened over the past month, as opposed to events that occurred more recently. He said Google officials deliberately delay warnings to prevent those behind the attacks from learning researchers’ sources and methods for detecting the attacks. The delays apply only to attack attempts, rather than cases where attacks result in a successful account takeover.

Phishing and account takeover is a very real threat. Yes, particular persons are sometimes targeted because they are personally identified as ‘high value targets’. However, persons antecendent to them are also targeted because high value targets can be more mindful of possible efforts to phish their credentials, while less mindful about clicking links from friends and family. As a result, the persons who the high value target communicates with may be used as the proxy to attacking the high value target.

Do you know someone who might be a target? Such as a prominent lawyer, business person, or politician? Or just someone who, themselves, would have access to such prominent persons or to sensitive information? If so, then you could be targeted by a sophisticated attacker not because you, yourself, are interesting but because you’re a gateway to those who are.

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ThyssenKrupp secrets stolen in ‘massive’ cyber attack

Per Reuters:

ThyssenKrupp said it waited to publicize the attack while it identified, then cleansed infected systems in one concerted, global action before implementing new safeguards to monitor its computer systems. “It is important not to let the intruder know that he has been discovered,” a spokesman said.

A criminal complaint was filed with police in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and an investigation is ongoing, it said. State and federal cyber security and data protection authorities were kept informed at each stage, as well as Thyssen’s board.

Secured systems operating steel blast furnaces and power plants in Duisburg, in Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr Valley, were unaffected, the company said.

No breaches were found at its marine systems unit, which produces military submarines and warships.

A previous cyber attack caused physical damage to an unidentified German steel plant and prevented the mill’s blast furnace from shutting down properly.

The shift towards automation of critical infrastructure and industry systems means that we can reduce costs of production while (in many cases) improve worker safety by keeping workers away from particularly dangerous areas of manufacturing facilities. At the same time, however, by digitizing functions that were once performed using analogue or network-disconnected systems the attack surface of these facilities increases: whereas once a human insider might have been needed, now an attacker just needs an implanted computer that is on, or can gain access to, the relevent network.

The problems linked to digitizing infastructure and manufacturing systems are not going to improve quickly: attackers are just now really starting to launch targeted attacks, and the investmentments made by companies in their equipment are not going to be just thrown out. That means that many systems and companies will likely remain exposed to possible attack for years, if not decades, barring a significant shift in security culture.