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SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

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Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#51

Post by snazz »

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?

I don’t think the AUR has a concept of package signing—a PKGBULD will often download a tarball from somewhere and any signing is ad-hoc. The official repositories use their own key ring (which is distributed without a key server).

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#52

Post by tptacek »

cyphar wrote: post #18
clarkmoody wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of Internet actors (human or machine) owning cryptographic identities in a distributed system is a good one. I don't think we should stray from this approach. From your Matthew Green link: > If PGP went away, I estimate it would take the security community less than a year to entirely replace (the key bits of) the standard with something much better and modern. It would have modern crypto and authentication,…

> What alternate projects are people excited about that are solving the problem of distributed cryptographic identity and messaging? I would argue Matrix is a good contender. The Matrix project is working on secure messaging, and they have a lot of really cool solutions for key distribution and federated communication. "Distributed cryptographic identity" is a slightly hard concept to pin down. In Matrix this is stil…

The best replacement to PGP would be a messaging network with opt-in, poorly supported encryption?

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/9avyen/sad_state_o...

I don't know what it is with people and Matrix. It seems like a good project, hamstrung by its overzealous cheering section.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#53

Post by tptacek »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #48

PGP and SKS are two entirely different technologies, and issues with SKS should not justify writing off PGP. "Efail" is a very stupid "vulnerability" used to smear PGP by jerks with ulterior motives.

Efail was one of the best crypto breaks of 2018, accepted into both Usenix Security (a top-tier academic venue) and BHUSA (the top tier industry venue), and virtually universally lauded by actual cryptography engineers and researchers.

What you've said here is false, a personal attack on the researchers, and absolutely unacceptable on HN. Take this stuff somewhere else.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#55

Post by ComodoHacker »

xvilka wrote: post #50

A bit more[1] on consequences of this attack, gist from the same author. [1] https://gist.github.com/rjhansen/f716c3ff4a7068b50f2d8896e54...

Wow, there's much more:

>Special criticism goes to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which paid Micah Lee to publish premade attack tools to exploit these design misfeatures in the keyserver network

...

>January of last year — January 16, 2018 — one user threatened to do what pretty much happened this week.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#56

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

tptacek wrote: post #53
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #48

PGP and SKS are two entirely different technologies, and issues with SKS should not justify writing off PGP. "Efail" is a very stupid "vulnerability" used to smear PGP by jerks with ulterior motives.

Efail was one of the best crypto breaks of 2018, accepted into both Usenix Security (a top-tier academic venue) and BHUSA (the top tier industry venue), and virtually universally lauded by actual cryptography engineers and researchers. What you've said here is false, a personal attack on the researchers, and absolutely unacceptable on HN. Take this stuff somewhere else.

Efail was a symptom of bad PGP implementations in email clients, not a flaw in PGP. It was overblown trash designed to bring fame to the "discoverers" at the expense of the reputation of PGP and its authors. If you think that this statement doesn't belong here, you can take it up with the mods, a group which spending lots of time on HN does not qualify you for.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#57

Post by snackematician »

Valodim wrote: post #41
snackematician wrote: post #38

The suggested mitigation (editing `gpg.conf` and `dirmngr.conf`) doesn't seem to work for me. In particular I created `~/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf` with a line for the `keys.openpg.org` keyserver (and don't have a `~/.gnupg/gpg.conf`), but `gpg --refresh-keys` still uses `hkps://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net` which the gnupg Info (section 3.2 Dirmngr options) says is the default.

Did you `killall dirmngr`? :)

Thanks that solved my issue :)

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#58

Post by cyphar »

tptacek wrote: post #52
cyphar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What alternate projects are people excited about that are solving the problem of distributed cryptographic identity and messaging? I would argue Matrix is a good contender. The Matrix project is working on secure messaging, and they have a lot of really cool solutions for key distribution and federated communication. "Distributed cryptographic identity" is a slightly hard concept to pin down. In Matrix this is stil…

The best replacement to PGP would be a messaging network with opt-in, poorly supported encryption? https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/9avyen/sad_state_o... I don't know what it is with people and Matrix. It seems like a good project, hamstrung by its overzealous cheering section.

> opt-in

Device cross-signing (from my understanding, the last must-have feature before e2ee is considered ready to be the default) is very close to being merged now that Matrix 1.0 is out. Yes, it took several years to get there, but I think its fair to say that the e2ee design now looks much better than anything else available (and had to solve many more technical problems than [for instance] Signal, due to the needs of federation).

> poorly supported

There are many unmaintained Matrix clients (this is what the top comment of your link points out). Personally I'd prefer if they stopped advertising them on matrix.org, because all of the newer clients either do or will support e2ee.

> hamstrung by its overzealous cheering section

Given that it seems to be the only project that provides modern e2ee in a way where your data is actually controlled by you without a central authority, I'm surprised that so few people are cheering them on.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#59

Post by tptacek »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #56
tptacek wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Efail was one of the best crypto breaks of 2018, accepted into both Usenix Security (a top-tier academic venue) and BHUSA (the top tier industry venue), and virtually universally lauded by actual cryptography engineers and researchers. What you've said here is false, a personal attack on the researchers, and absolutely unacceptable on HN. Take this stuff somewhere else.

Efail was a symptom of bad PGP implementations in email clients, not a flaw in PGP. It was overblown trash designed to bring fame to the "discoverers" at the expense of the reputation of PGP and its authors. If you think that this statement doesn't belong here, you can take it up with the mods, a group which spending lots of time on HN does not qualify you for.

Adding a personal attack against me doesn't make your bogus, amoral argument any more acceptable.

Re: SKS Keyserver Network Under Attack

#60

Post by heavenlyblue »

koolba wrote: post #9
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.

Yes this seems like it's going to range from very bad to outright terrible. In particular if the issue propagates prior to patching something like gpg as the package managers would be locked out from updates. Every time there's an article about IoT security there's a discussion about lack of (security) updates and an upcoming Armageddon. Interestingly it'll be those devices that do not update that are immune to this…

>> immune to this type of thing.

The _only_ type of thing that they are immune to. This is like saying “a car with a broken engine is the safest car in the world - it never moves!”.

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