Live data from Hacker News

Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

krebsonsecurity.com

781–790 of 815 posts

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what's also convenient? 1FA. Which, incidentally, when you store you TOTP secrets with your passwords, is what you have.

I mean, if the password manager’s store is compromised, then sure, okay. But if only the application password is compromised then it’s still 2FA since the attacker cannot authenticate with just the password.

I see what you're saying, but I disagree.

The F in 2FA is factor. Satisfying one login request from one factor (password vault) is 1FA. This is why the second factor is normally something that isn't your password vault (historically your head, now a piece of software): a hardware key, a recovery code, etc.

A slightly more generous interpretation is 1.49A (rounds down), because someone with a reused username/password combination. But if you're using a vault with a sophisticated factor, the venn diagram of "people who have your password," and "people who also have your master password," are pretty tight, except for cases where the provide has been breached (all bets are off).

Don't dispose of the second factor for convenience.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a small, passively cooled x86 box with 6 1GbE ports that I found on AliExpress. Wrote about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/hzvfih/new_router_... It's got a quad-core i5. I run Proxmox and virtualize VyOS as a router, Home assistant, and a couple of other small things like an https reverse proxy for various services that I like to access remotely. Went this route after my old OpenWRT router c…

Does this type of setup support a mesh network with multiple APs and SSIDs, VLANs, etc? I have never seen a PC based all-in-one interface that supports all of these things the way Unifi does...

Not really. These don't make great APs; the wifi radio is in client mode.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: worked for Meraki (now Cisco Meraki) for several years. Generally, halfway decent wireless APs are all targeted at the enterprise market. Consumer hardware is a brutal race to the bottom, as lay consumers aren't qualified to compare options based on anything but price and UI. Ubiquiti was an outlier in trying to bring enterprise features to the consumer market The problem for enthusiasts and small busines…

> having a trustworthy and secured backend. Ubiquiti had a secured backend - their screw-up was not doing MFA on their admin accounts. I would still like if there was an option for a local-only control panel.

Still lots of pitfalls with just MFA. Text/email being the worst and TOTP being somewhat better but not great. A lot of password vaults support storing the TOTP secret so they can generate time based codes which seems reasonable when the vault is 2-3 factor protected (some do IP heuristics, passwords, tokens, PINs, etc). Unfortunately if someone gets access to the vault in it's unencrypted state you're in for a world of hurt.

From a couple years back, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/how-h... (the hackers got remote access to a sysadmins desktop then waited til he mounted TrueCrypt and stole the entire contents)

Even with hardware tokens, if someone gets access to your machine while you're using it they can wait til you authenticate then use the creds proxying requests through your machine so they look legit

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#784
post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if it is awscli creds, then of course there is no MFA.

Exactly, no workflow for terraform or CLI if you have U2F (Yubikey) 2FA.

There's AssumeRoleWithSAML so you can use any IdP

There's tools like aws-okta that can advantage of that to supply short lived credentials which require 2FA

You could also write a service that requires whatever authentication you want and returns the results of STS AssumeRole

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's people not getting it and being plain annoyed by the second factor. YubiKey or Authenticator app on a different device... it's too inconvenient and people often only do it if forced (e.g. banks do this afaik).

Every day I sit at the same desk, at the same computer, logging into the same websites, using 2FA over and over and over and over while sites time out "for my protection". It's a plague. Write a damn desktop app I can run locally, I didn't ask for people from Turkmenistan to be able to login as me, so you could sell me a halfassed web version of something. Joseph Heller predicted 2FA in Catch 22 when he wrote: " Almo…

Honestly Windows does this right with AD, Kerberos, Spnego

You login to a physical machine with a password (the machine is trusted on the network via AD so physical access is one factor and password is a second)

You visit websites and they use SPNEGO to land on Kerberos or NTLM auth which then bootstraps off the fact you're already authenticated to Windows. You never even need to see a login page

It's achievable with macOS and Linux but afaik there's some more configuration to be done. The only place I saw with a setup like that was a bank and it was part of a new technology stack that almost nothing used yet

With that setup there's almost nothing to phish if you can train people to only enter their password into the OS at login. You can pretty much eliminate the possibility of credential sharing but locking logins to certain machines

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#786
post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Note, however, that roaming between APs is a feature of the 802.11 standard; In theory yes, but man do a lot of devices have terrible roaming heuristics. "I can still see beacons so id better stay here even though i havent received a packet in the last minute. Wouldnt want to pay the time cost of associating with that other BSS that has 5X the signal"

Have you tried setting your transmit power low (just enough to get good signal to the places intended, but definitely no more than your devices can trasmit) and increasing the minimum send rate to something reasonable (say 10-40 Mbps, beacons use minimum rate)? It should help high power bad signal (some devices use fixed thresholds) and equalize the beacon vs. data reception quality. I don't think openwrt had data ra…

This messes with your AP placements though. Depending on your AP placements, you may or may end up with deadspots. You need to be sure that your AP placement is sufficient when taking this strategy. And yes, I take this strategy too.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#787
post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: worked for Meraki (now Cisco Meraki) for several years. Generally, halfway decent wireless APs are all targeted at the enterprise market. Consumer hardware is a brutal race to the bottom, as lay consumers aren't qualified to compare options based on anything but price and UI. Ubiquiti was an outlier in trying to bring enterprise features to the consumer market The problem for enthusiasts and small busines…

> Note, however, that roaming between APs is a feature of the 802.11 standard; you just need to have all your APs on the same layer 2 (802.x) network, and using the same SSID and credentials. No fancy hardware required, and you can even mix and match vendors. Not exactly. There are extensions to pre-authenticate with an AP (802.11r) for truly seamless roaming without packet drop or delay and for AP controlled roaming…

Depends on your definition of "seamless".

The base standard's behavior requires a reassociation to the new cell (i.e. AP i.e. BSSID). This introduces a gap in coverage, but for simple setups like the 5-AP one IgorPortola is talking - I assumed that this was using shared-password auth - the gap's length is functionally 0. 802.11r gets rid of that gap, which is important when using heavier-weight authentication protocols like 802.1x.

(Note that by 802.x in my original I meant not 802.1x, but rather the set of standards including 802.3 (ethernet) and 802.11 (wifi))

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#788
post #7

> “The breach was massive, customer data was at risk, access to customers’ devices deployed in corporations and homes around the world was at risk.” > “They were able to get cryptographic secrets for single sign-on cookies and remote access, full source code control contents, and signing keys exfiltration,” Maybe putting your network control plane in 'the cloud' isn't such a good idea after all... Edit: Just re-read…

> Maybe putting your network control plane in 'the cloud' isn't such a good idea after all...

Sure it isnt. It is extremely bad idea and actually something like the ubiquiti breach is not even strange to me, once you have worked once in "enterprise(tm)" world this doesnt seem like anything strange.

There is just no way to buy a router that communicates with 3rd party servers and to let it access the LAN is a complete no-go (even if I am paying ISP router as a part of the package it is running as bridge just to pass the connection to my router).

I consider router as a first line of defense for inbound traffic and last line of defense for outbound and there is just no way to trust some fishy corporation for this.

And if the corporation is actually promoting cloud access, like Ubiquiti or Google, they are pretty much banned from my shopping list for all times.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#789
post #7

> “The breach was massive, customer data was at risk, access to customers’ devices deployed in corporations and homes around the world was at risk.” > “They were able to get cryptographic secrets for single sign-on cookies and remote access, full source code control contents, and signing keys exfiltration,” Maybe putting your network control plane in 'the cloud' isn't such a good idea after all... Edit: Just re-read…

Was shopping for alternatives to my Ubiquiti last night. Seems like there is nothing good out there. Engenius has shit hardware and a cloud controller. Aruba has a cloud controller AND you have to pay for a license. Cisco makes you pay for a license. TP-Link is cloud-based. WTF. Does anyone have a decent WAP where I can use PoE, deploy like 5 of them and have them support roaming between APs, all managed locally? Is…

Mikrotik.

https://mikrotik.com/

Or something like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?&SearchText=pfsense+wif...

Again, dont expect it to be simple. Be prepared to learn.

Re: Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic”

#790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@c0nsumer My earlier comment was based on a change of policy which happened around 1st March, and any Unleashed quotes as of 1st March (and the two-weeks prior) need to be re-quoted for the new "license per AP" Unleashed model. I've been a bit busy with other work since that bombshell dropped, but if I get a moment I'll try to dig up some pricing. The other thing to note is feature discrepancy between Unleashed and s…

Thanks! I completely glossed over the IPv6 thing... At home I don't get native IPv6 from my ISP, so I just tend to forget about that. Although it would be neat. For me I bought my AP on eBay and just plopped the standalone Unleashed firmware on it and that's all seemed fine. In what I see there's nothing changing? But it sounds like you're running a /much/ larger install.

Actually (and ironically given the context of this thread !) the reason I found out about the policy change was because I was helping someone out who was looking to dump their Ubiquiti kit and realistically it looked like Ruckus was going to be the only sensible option (despite the already unpalatable price premium before the new policy).

As you may or may not be aware, Ruckus have an "all quoted" policy, there is no price list per-se.

At the time I was working on the project (late 2020) Ruckus did have a promotional activity going on where you could buy Unleashed kits at fixed prices without quoting.

However due to various technical questions that were coming up (e.g. IPv6 support) we missed the window and it was uncertain if Ruckus were going to extend the promotion.

Ruckus did extend the promotion, at least initially (Jan-Feb 21') but then they switched to the "license per AP for Unleashed" and the promotion was killed off.

It was at at that point that my friend took the hint and dumped the idea of Ruckus and I went back to my normal work.

If I get a chance I'll try to find out what happens about second-hand kit. My guess would be that if you stay on old firmware there's not much they can do about it. Although whether its desirable or advisable to stay on old firmware is another question, obviously.

Post reply on HN