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SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

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Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#161

Post by mikedilger »

snackematician wrote: post #31
vermilingua wrote: post #6

To be clear: is this suggesting that it is currently entirely unsafe to update any operation-critical equipment? It seems that now that the PoC is out in the wild, it will be a matter of days/hours before someone hits a major contributor to the major Linux distros; and all package managers begin to fail.

Sibling comments have discussed how this affects Debian, Ubuntu, and opensuse -- any Arch users know how this affects us? Seems like official repos should be fine but what about packages from the AUR?

My /etc/pacman.d/gnupg/gpg.conf had this line:

  keyserver hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#162

Post by acqq »

baby wrote: post #159
acqq wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does defend you against a lot of attacks that would still endanger the system. Think denial of service attacks for exemple. If you believe that, then read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20313787

Not sure what's yur point

The way I read it: In practice it's easy to DOS the server even if it's written in that language for which was here claimed to have a property of protecting from DOS. Especially due to the pooor scalability of it.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#163

Post by mirimir »

yegortimoshenko wrote: post #149
tptacek wrote: post #76

I'd like to gingerly suggest that this is not the way a project that has deliberately set as its adversaries hostile world governments should respond to a trivial, predictable† vandalism attack. Rather, if they're serious about what they're doing – Hansen, in a related document, talks about the "good advice" he gave to dissidents in Venezuela about using GnuPG – they should thank whoever did this. This attack apparen…

Can confirm, I've reported a similar attack [1], along with a few other vulnerabilities, and also published exploit tools. I ended up getting legal threats from two people that I see frequently posting to sks-devel@ mailing list. Additionally, Robert (GnuPG maintainer who wrote this Gist) has attacked [2] another person who wrote a proof-of-concept filesystem on top of SKS that was intended to highlight how broken th…

> I have not seen a single open source community that would treat full disclosure with such contempt.

So what are the acceptable limits of this "full disclosure"?

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#164

Post by ethbro »

kasey_junk wrote: post #154
ethbro wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, if I am suffering from a brain injury and no one in the last 30 years has seen fit to build anything other than a health clinic in my town, I'm probably pretty happy there's a nurse practitioner available. Let's not make the perfect the enemy of the good. And with all respect to the professionals in the field, casting operational stones at a technically valid solution seems... myopic.

The professionals are trying very hard to tell you it’s not a technically valid solution. The math on public key encryption is not the issue, it’s operationalizing it. Openpgp is a disaster there. Note I’m not a professional in this field but I occasionally drink with them.

In what way is this not a solvable problem?

From the article, the only issues seem to be (1) poor SDLC practices leading to toxic, frozen code, (2) the difficulty in performing protocol / standard upgrades on a decentralized network.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#165

Post by reshie »

stingraycharles wrote: post #96
tptacek wrote: post #76

I'd like to gingerly suggest that this is not the way a project that has deliberately set as its adversaries hostile world governments should respond to a trivial, predictable† vandalism attack. Rather, if they're serious about what they're doing – Hansen, in a related document, talks about the "good advice" he gave to dissidents in Venezuela about using GnuPG – they should thank whoever did this. This attack apparen…

I use GPG quite a bit. I sign my git commits with it, occasionally use it to securely transfer files with people, and appreciate to have everything coupled with my Yubikey. What are reasonable alternatives to this right now? If I’m not using the keyservers, it’s not that bad, right?

its just a means of public key visibility and a nice service with automated importing and searchable. i have known some to give their keys on their site or service page though. remember you can upload just about any info on keys servers similar emails name; the key string is "key" though. this poisoning seems to be for the key server itself so you may not get the server you are looking for.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#166

Post by tptacek »

rkeene2 wrote: post #119
faho wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, and to sign commits or emails? To encrypt files?

To sign or encrypt emails you could use S/MIME. It is much more widely supported than PGP for signing and encrypting emails as well.

S/MIME is even worse than PGP. Don't use it.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#168

Post by yegortimoshenko »

mirimir wrote: post #163
yegortimoshenko wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm, I've reported a similar attack [1], along with a few other vulnerabilities, and also published exploit tools. I ended up getting legal threats from two people that I see frequently posting to sks-devel@ mailing list. Additionally, Robert (GnuPG maintainer who wrote this Gist) has attacked [2] another person who wrote a proof-of-concept filesystem on top of SKS that was intended to highlight how broken th…

> I have not seen a single open source community that would treat full disclosure with such contempt. So what are the acceptable limits of this "full disclosure"?

I should have said "any disclosure": EFail was coordinated (6 months notice [1]) and yet GnuPG officially downplayed the risk [2], launched #effail counter-campaign and blamed researchers for bad disclosure [3].

With regards to any of the existing SKS exploits specifically: even if any of them were to undergo coordinated disclosure, it wouldn't have helped: trollwot has been available for 5 years, both keyserver-fs and sks-exploit -- for more than a year. Embargoes don't last that long. All three tools still work.

What GnuPG Project effectively tries to do is to stop people from writing about any security problems period, especially those that are hard to fix.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/tqbf/2ef6bce7d16e9d3e76d790fd99c9618...

[2]: https://twitter.com/gnupg/status/995936684213723136

[3]: https://twitter.com/gnupg/status/996856990818283521

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#169

Post by ComodoHacker »

CameronNemo wrote: post #105
ComodoHacker wrote: post #65

>Any time GnuPG has to deal with such a spammed certificate, GnuPG grinds to a halt. So the SKS software is only a part of the problem. Another part is GnuPG, which is unable to deal with a public key with many signatures attached. GnuPG is written in C (not OCaml) and seems to be well maintained. Looks like fixing it can be an effective mitigation against this attack. Or do I miss something?

Not sure how you could fix an OpenPGP client for this case without changing how the keyservers function.

Optimize to handle 150K signatures in reasonable time.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#170

Post by mirimir »

yegortimoshenko wrote: post #168
mirimir wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have not seen a single open source community that would treat full disclosure with such contempt. So what are the acceptable limits of this "full disclosure"?

I should have said "any disclosure": EFail was coordinated (6 months notice [1]) and yet GnuPG officially downplayed the risk [2], launched #effail counter-campaign and blamed researchers for bad disclosure [3]. With regards to any of the existing SKS exploits specifically: even if any of them were to undergo coordinated disclosure, it wouldn't have helped: trollwot has been available for 5 years, both keyserver-fs a…

OK, makes sense. And damn, 10 years is >>> a year.

So then, as a mere user, I gotta ask how so much of the Linux ecosystem -- and indeed, so much of the open-source ecosystem -- came to depend on such a fragile thing as the SKS keyserver network. That's kinda mind-blowing.

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