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Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

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Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#101

Post by tptacek »

periodontal wrote: post #99
tptacek wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It is vitally important for NSA not to call attention to their crypto backdoor --- remember, this was inserted in 2012 --- and external tampering with the PKRNG in a VPN device is a smoking gun that Dual_EC is not a benign standard (still a plausible claim in 2012), but rather a surreptitious key escrow mechanism. No. It is not at all plausible that NSA backdoored ScreenOS in 2012 in order to rekey their backdoor…

The backdoor possibility was known in 2007 and the standard included a way to set your own constants (which no one used, true, but just because it was true for Dual EC in general). I disagree that following the standard on that point and creating your own would be a smoking gun that the standard is malicious. Rather, it could be a smoking gun that this implementation was. If the tampering would likely be detected any…

The fact that you could use Dual EC to implement a backdoor was known in 2007, but it wasn't taken especially seriously; Schneier, for instance --- long a critic of elliptic curve crypto --- publicly cast doubt on it.

It is certainly not the case that any part of the US Government acknowledged anything hinky about Dual EC in 2012. The notion that Dual EC was a cryptographic standards backdoor would have been one of the more closely guarded secrets in the entire government.

Virtually everything we now know about Dual EC is a result of the Snowden disclosures and the followup work people like Bernstein and Lange did in the wake of those disclosures. When analyzing stuff like this, it's important not to project knowledge we have now back before we had it.

Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#102

Post by kbenson »

jacquesm wrote: post #57
kabdib wrote: post #38

I'll bet you ten dollars there are more backdoors, better hidden than the ones they found. Say, with Underhanded C style coding. An additional ten bucks says that Cisco and the top handful of consumer appliances also contain such backdoors. I hope the folks at Juniper are checking their toolchains, build machines and repositories for signs of similar attack. Of course, enough time has elapsed that they may need to es…

> I hope the folks at Juniper are checking their toolchains, build machines and repositories for signs of similar attack. I hope they figure out who planted it there and that they change their hiring/code review policies to make sure that such a thing can not happen again. Firewalls should be tamper-proof to the point where they simply refuse to operate at all if the code has been messed with after it leaves the prem…

Which is DRM, right? Which is fine, but it needs to be DRM in control of the owner, not the supplying company. There's all sorts of evils in the world to worry about, so we shouldn't be too quick to get away from one that we run into the arms of another. There are, not coincidentally, parallels with terrorism and the security state.

Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#103

Post by beagle3 »

Retric wrote: post #96
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree that surveillance is "fairly useless". Obviously, there are times when keeping a watch on potentially dangerous people is going to pay off. How many times, I can't say. The problems begin when we have a process-bound bureaucracy rather than a group of smart people, each acting on hunches and excellent information. Bureaucracies can be composed of smart people yet act stupidly. Also, there are politic…

In fiction hunches work well, in the real world there far less valuable. In terms of mass shootings Muslims are far from the most common profile. Seung-Hui Cho aged 23 for example killed 32 people and wounded 17 in VT on April 16, 2007. Jeffrey Weise, a 16-year-old killed 10 in Red Lake, Minnesota. 21 died at Columbine. Go though: http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-rampages/ they don't really fit just 1…

Actually, there's a recurring theme among the non-muslim ones: Age 15-25 and taking antidepressants. The only reference I can find on a quick google is ZeroHedge ("The conspiracy site without the conspiracies"), but I've actually looked at some of the references in the past: It's not random.

[0] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-17/antidepressants-sci...

Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#104

Post by pbsd »

tptacek wrote: post #98
anologwintermut wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of using the NIST recommended curve points it uses self-generated basis points and then takes the output as an input to FIPS/ANSI X.9.31 PRNG, which is the random number generator used in ScreenOS cryptographic operations." Looks like they feed the output through a standard CPRNG. Assuming it's true, that pretty much breaks the DUAL_EC attack because you can't use the output of the final CPRNG to recover the…

I wonder if that's going to be demonstrated to be a true statement, and further whether the tampering Juniper discovered will have disabled that second step.

It seems to be a true statement: Dual EC is used to seed a X9.31 generator with 3DES, where 8 bytes are the initial seed V, and the remaining 24 are K (cf. [1]). I don't see any other usage of Dual EC other than to self-test and to seed X9.31.

Oddly, you can disable the Dual EC seeding with the flag 'one-stage-rng'. But not the other way around.

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cavp/documents/rng/931rngext...

Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#105

Post by kabdib »

kbenson wrote: post #102
jacquesm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope the folks at Juniper are checking their toolchains, build machines and repositories for signs of similar attack. I hope they figure out who planted it there and that they change their hiring/code review policies to make sure that such a thing can not happen again. Firewalls should be tamper-proof to the point where they simply refuse to operate at all if the code has been messed with after it leaves the prem…

Which is DRM, right? Which is fine, but it needs to be DRM in control of the owner, not the supplying company. There's all sorts of evils in the world to worry about, so we shouldn't be too quick to get away from one that we run into the arms of another. There are, not coincidentally, parallels with terrorism and the security state.

I would love an attestation system. For instance, the firewalls around a store's credit card info (even if this data isn't stored, but tokenized, it's still damned useful) should sing like a canary if their configuration or firmware are hacked.

Attestation is sort of like DRM with policies that you decide.

Note that many of these devices have significant complexity in hardware. Lots of things that state-level actors can do to your hardware, on the order of:

- see packet starting with a known signature

- over-write the rest of that packet with interesting stuff, and transmit

Something at this level would be really hard to find.

Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#106

Post by kbenson »

acd wrote: post #44

This also highlights why it would be better to use opensource firewalls such as Openbsd instead of proprietary ones! If you care about your security then you need to be able to inspect the code that protects your assets. Distributed open source firewall vs propritary firewall with backdoors.

Not that OpenBSD hasn't had its own scares[1]. If you find those allegations feasible, even if you don't believe they are true in this instance, then you should not necessarily consider open source and/or free security software as more secure than commercial software.

1: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/12/did_the_fbi_p...

Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#107

Post by periodontal »

tptacek wrote: post #101
periodontal wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backdoor possibility was known in 2007 and the standard included a way to set your own constants (which no one used, true, but just because it was true for Dual EC in general). I disagree that following the standard on that point and creating your own would be a smoking gun that the standard is malicious. Rather, it could be a smoking gun that this implementation was. If the tampering would likely be detected any…

The fact that you could use Dual EC to implement a backdoor was known in 2007, but it wasn't taken especially seriously; Schneier, for instance --- long a critic of elliptic curve crypto --- publicly cast doubt on it. It is certainly not the case that any part of the US Government acknowledged anything hinky about Dual EC in 2012. The notion that Dual EC was a cryptographic standards backdoor would have been one of t…

I agree that the oracle of hindsight can often lead us astray.

However, in 2007, it wasn't just known that you could implement a backdoor, but how to do so. This of course means that any constants generated after this point could not be given the benefit of the doubt since anyone could launch this attack (and I think you'll grant me that all major intelligence services knew how to create and use a similar backdoor after 2007). And while USG did not acknowledge a backdoor, there was real, public doubt about the constants: Schneier's article in Wired was titled (notwithstanding Betteridge) "Did NSA put a Secret Backdoor in New Encryption Standard?"

Those in the standard were of unknown status, but even 2007 Schneier had the appropriately conservative cryptographer response and recommended "not to use Dual_EC_DRBG under any circumstances."

The pieces were there in 2012 for anyone that noticed a new Dual EC dependency being added, but I agree that the knowledge was not well-known enough (though it saddens me that a VPN manufacturer didn't know to avoid it 5 years later).

I still hold to the statement that rekeying Dual EC in 2012 is not a smoking gun on the standard, but more suggestive of an opportunistic attacker using the known mechanism for how to embed such a backdoor. If detected, it's obvious it's a backdoor, but that's not an indictment on the standard's constants (in fact, if you could otherwise attribute the attack to NSA, it's a tiny bit of evidence that either there is no standard backdoor or that USG don't want to use it in this case).

Here's a statement that I think we might disagree on: I believe that no one in 2012 that knew why the provenance of the constants could be a problem would have allowed Dual EC in the codebase in any form. This is why I believe the incremental chance of detection from changing the constants was small and why it'd be worth it to avoid attribution.

That said, I've stated my positions and see no need to continuing pressing legitimate points of disagreement. I just wanted to understand your position.

Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#108

Post by Retric »

beagle3 wrote: post #103
Retric wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fiction hunches work well, in the real world there far less valuable. In terms of mass shootings Muslims are far from the most common profile. Seung-Hui Cho aged 23 for example killed 32 people and wounded 17 in VT on April 16, 2007. Jeffrey Weise, a 16-year-old killed 10 in Red Lake, Minnesota. 21 died at Columbine. Go though: http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-rampages/ they don't really fit just 1…

Actually, there's a recurring theme among the non-muslim ones: Age 15-25 and taking antidepressants. The only reference I can find on a quick google is ZeroHedge ("The conspiracy site without the conspiracies"), but I've actually looked at some of the references in the past: It's not random. [0] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-17/antidepressants-sci...

Not really the page I linked had ~10 people age 40+:

  age 36 SEPT. 28, 2012 Andrew Engeldinger 6 killed, 2 injured 
  age 43 APRIL 2, 2012 7 killed, 3 injured: Oakland
  age 41 OCT. 12, 2011 Scott Dekraai, 8 killed, 1 injured: Seal Beach, Calif.
  age 34 AUG. 3, 2010 Omar S. Thornton, 6 killed, 11 injured: Tucson, Ariz.
  age 45 FEB. 12, 2010 Amy Bishop 45: 3 killed, 3 wounded: Huntsville, Ala.
  age 39 November 5, 2009 Nidal Malik Hasan: fatally shooting 13 people and injuring more than 30
Sure, you could say it's mostly 14-45 but that's true for most criminals and not that useful. And even just on that page there is Gian Luigi Ferri, age 55 JULY 1, 1993

Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#109

Post by beagle3 »

Retric wrote: post #108
beagle3 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there's a recurring theme among the non-muslim ones: Age 15-25 and taking antidepressants. The only reference I can find on a quick google is ZeroHedge ("The conspiracy site without the conspiracies"), but I've actually looked at some of the references in the past: It's not random. [0] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-17/antidepressants-sci...

Not really the page I linked had ~10 people age 40+: age 36 SEPT. 28, 2012 Andrew Engeldinger 6 killed, 2 injured age 43 APRIL 2, 2012 7 killed, 3 injured: Oakland age 41 OCT. 12, 2011 Scott Dekraai, 8 killed, 1 injured: Seal Beach, Calif. age 34 AUG. 3, 2010 Omar S. Thornton, 6 killed, 11 injured: Tucson, Ariz. age 45 FEB. 12, 2010 Amy Bishop 45: 3 killed, 3 wounded: Huntsville, Ala. age 39 November 5, 2009 Nidal Ma…

Do you know why they listed these specifically? All the title says is "here are some of the deadliest ..."

Even if you don't subscribe to the "more than once a day" statistic (which does include gang violence), it's still "about once a week" in 2015 for non-gang completely-innocent random victims -- and yet, this page lists only about 5 a year.

Re: Secret Code Found in Juniper's Firewalls Shows Risk of Government Backdoors

#110

Post by niels_olson »

kbenson wrote: post #100
jdp23 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent point. The whole episode is very instructive. On Sunday the New York Times quoted "law enforcement sources" as saying that she had made postings on her stream. The story got a huge amount of coverage and even came up during Tuesday's Republican debate. On Wednesday, FBI Director Comey described the reporting as "grabled" and clarified that no, it was just private messages -- and the Times (and others) rewro…

I wish we had something that tracked news articles and noted when they changed without either an inline note about the change or an update at the end. It would be like the snopes of news journalism, and we could get some really interesting statistics from that with regard to the journalistic integrity of different sources. There's a large population of people that could do with some good evidence to force them to be…

It would be like, like a wiki, but before the admins go off the reservation.
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