Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

threatpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 62 posts

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#51

Post by xnull »

tptacek wrote: post #45
nullc wrote: post #44

Then where are the fixes? They spend untold billions per year... their visible bugfix output is very low, including in low level cryptographic domains that you might expect them to be power-houses. The claim makes me think either that they're lying about sharing what they find (either intentionally or via institutional stupidity); or they're really inept and not finding much at all compared to much less well funded O…

Bug volume in crypto is also very low, and the "fixes" to major crypto bugs tend to take the form of entirely new constructions... which users are not happy to get from NSA (this was a problem even in the 1970s!) So I'm not sure this is a valid critique.

Bug volume in crypto is extremely high. How many developers reuse IVs in stream ciphers? How many blindly use AES or somesuch other symmetric library and then build in no authentication whatsoever? How many antequated implementations of RSA are used in practice today (see recent Bleichenbacher flaw in NSS)? How many times are poor chaining modes for block ciphers chosen? How many implementations of [anything] fail on side cases (elliptic curves) or massively leak through side channels? How many DH-family protocols miss checks for identity inputs?

The answer is a lot.

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#52

Post by tptacek »

xnull wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bug volume in crypto is also very low, and the "fixes" to major crypto bugs tend to take the form of entirely new constructions... which users are not happy to get from NSA (this was a problem even in the 1970s!) So I'm not sure this is a valid critique.

Bug volume in crypto is extremely high. How many developers reuse IVs in stream ciphers? How many blindly use AES or somesuch other symmetric library and then build in no authentication whatsoever? How many antequated implementations of RSA are used in practice today (see recent Bleichenbacher flaw in NSS)? How many times are poor chaining modes for block ciphers chosen? How many implementations of [anything] fail on…

You and I mean different things by "crypto vulnerabilities". I took the parent comment to mean things like the RC4 biases; like I said, things for which the "fix" would involve entirely new algorithms or constructions. An example of this kind of NSA disclosure would be the DES s-boxes.

Crypto software implementation vulnerabilities are very common, but the kinds of things you're talking about are most often found in obscure and/or serverside software. Look at the tempo at which bugs like the NSS e=3 bug are released; it's like once or twice a year.

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#53

Post by tptacek »

xnull wrote: post #47
tptacek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People believe a lot of weird stuff about vulnerability prices. For instance, any time a post hits HN about someone getting a $500 bounty for an XSS, there's always a post or two saying that's a rip-off compared to the tens of thousands of dollars it would fetch on the black market --- as if single-site XSS vulnerabilities with a half-life measured in minutes were worth huge amounts of money.

Oh we're not talking trivial bugs or single-site XSS. Disappointed that 'mediocre' vulns got interpreted in this thread as 'trivial'. Mediocre doesn't mean trivial, extremely scoped or useless. Mediocre means that it is for sensitive but not widely deployed software, for widely deployed software on default config but is post-auth or is not reliable, or it is reliable and yiels high auth but requires pairing with anot…

A post-auth MySQL bug sold for five figures?! Why? How does anyone make money with that bug?

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#54

Post by xnull »

tptacek wrote: post #52
xnull wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bug volume in crypto is extremely high. How many developers reuse IVs in stream ciphers? How many blindly use AES or somesuch other symmetric library and then build in no authentication whatsoever? How many antequated implementations of RSA are used in practice today (see recent Bleichenbacher flaw in NSS)? How many times are poor chaining modes for block ciphers chosen? How many implementations of [anything] fail on…

You and I mean different things by "crypto vulnerabilities". I took the parent comment to mean things like the RC4 biases; like I said, things for which the "fix" would involve entirely new algorithms or constructions. An example of this kind of NSA disclosure would be the DES s-boxes. Crypto software implementation vulnerabilities are very common, but the kinds of things you're talking about are most often found in…

I think implementation bugs are within the spirit of OP, especially provided the NSA claims to have provided an implementation fix for Heartbleed.

The sorts of bugs I'm talking about exist in client and popular software. As far as tempo is concerned this year alone has given us BERserk, gotofail, Android Master Key, OpenSSL fork(), Bitcoin's use of P256, GNUTLS X.509 parsing bug, the OpenSSL compiler optimization+processor family randomness bug, and others.

If we were to entertain OP's point maybe there would be a faster tempo if the NSA were helping out. :)

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#55

Post by tptacek »

xnull wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and I mean different things by "crypto vulnerabilities". I took the parent comment to mean things like the RC4 biases; like I said, things for which the "fix" would involve entirely new algorithms or constructions. An example of this kind of NSA disclosure would be the DES s-boxes. Crypto software implementation vulnerabilities are very common, but the kinds of things you're talking about are most often found in…

I think implementation bugs are within the spirit of OP, especially provided the NSA claims to have provided an implementation fix for Heartbleed. The sorts of bugs I'm talking about exist in client and popular software. As far as tempo is concerned this year alone has given us BERserk, gotofail, Android Master Key, OpenSSL fork(), Bitcoin's use of P256, GNUTLS X.509 parsing bug, the OpenSSL compiler optimization+pro…

Sure, if this is what we mean by the kinds of cryptography bugs NSA is a powerhouse at, I'm sure they could be leaking more of them to industry.

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#56

Post by scintill76 »

venomsnake wrote: post #41
sliverstorm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your argument is "If the NSA is any good, they must know about every vulnerability in the world before the private sector- otherwise they are incompetent"?

With the amount of money they spend, I would suggest that the US taxpayer should get some value out of it. So while not every - at least a lot.

Right. I agree it's not reasonable to expect any one entity to know every possible vulnerability in the world. But with all the money and brains they have, how huge this particular target was (for both defensive and offensive purposes), and how high the stakes are (as they remind us whenever we challenge them), you'd think they'd have static code analysis flagging these kinds of things the moment they're checked in to a public repository of any notoriety, fuzzers running 24/7, "shadow" code review against things like OpenSSL by their best hackers, etc., at which point it does almost become incompetence that they either don't have that, or it failed. At least, I'm wondering what all that money is for.

No, it doesn't really prove incompetence, but on the other hand "we released a trivial patch for an issue the private sector already found and fixed"* doesn't prove competence either, or inspire any sympathy from me. These are the types of people who trot out imagery like "cyber Pearl Harbor" when they're telling us why they need to be granted more power to protect us, yet their go-to public example of fixing a critical vulnerability in the national digital infrastructure is laughably irrelevant.

* Depending on what time of day it was, the official fix may or may not have been publicly released when NSA did whatever they're claiming they did.

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#57

Post by sarciszewski »

xnull wrote: post #48
sarciszewski wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've contacted independent brokers before, many of whom allegedly resell primarily to "the US government". When asked about hypothetical Tor 0day, they quoted a price of $150,000 before their 20% broker fee. So I'm not sure that 6 figures for most trivial vulnerabilities fits the market. (And obviously, I don't have such a 0day to sell, so I can't prove that they would actually pay up.)

Six digits sounds about right for a Tor bug for one target depending on the specifics. The RCE bug used by the FBI recently against the Tor Firefox Bundle would have cost something similar, though the payload suspended the process where it could have resumed silently. It's not clear where that exploit was developed (my gut says in house but who knows?)

IIRC someone analyzed the payload and compared it to a Meterpreter and saw a lot of similarities. Could have been provided (hacked together?) by the person who sold the vuln.

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#58

Post by sarciszewski »

justanother wrote: post #12

So they share a "vast majority," but still keep many to themselves because they don't think anyone else is persistent enough to find them ("How likely are others to find it?"), in addition to telling a lie about developing the fix for Heartbleed. Nothing new here.

Wasn't that developed by Adam Langley? (Google employee.)

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#59

Post by xnull2guest »

tptacek wrote: post #53
xnull wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh we're not talking trivial bugs or single-site XSS. Disappointed that 'mediocre' vulns got interpreted in this thread as 'trivial'. Mediocre doesn't mean trivial, extremely scoped or useless. Mediocre means that it is for sensitive but not widely deployed software, for widely deployed software on default config but is post-auth or is not reliable, or it is reliable and yiels high auth but requires pairing with anot…

A post-auth MySQL bug sold for five figures?! Why? How does anyone make money with that bug?

It's worth five figures to the buyer if they can make five figures or more of value from it.

Not speculating about nation states here but 'groups': making good money from post-Auth MySql RCE not totally absurd - Amazon, Rackspace, HP, Heroku and Jelastic all offer MySql-as-a-service, where you are given low privilege (maintained, geo-redundant, etc) account access to shared MySql instance. If there's more than five digits of business value stored in that database then a five digit exploit makes sense.

Or think about any of the (poorly written) bitcoin services out there that use some default phpAdmin creds for a database that also hosts their vault.

Re: NSA Director Says Agency Shares Vast Majority of Bugs It Finds

#60

Post by SwellJoe »

sliverstorm wrote: post #37
scintill76 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, this is going to sound like I'm determined to find a reason to hate the NSA, but.. this doesn't make them look good either. It's the most accessible and widely-deployed memory disclosure bug of recent years, if not ever. Surely there are at least 1000 vulnerable (at the time) servers they'd specifically love to have this window into, for intelligence on the "bad guys." Surely they know the "bad guys" would love t…

So your argument is "If the NSA is any good, they must know about every vulnerability in the world before the private sector- otherwise they are incompetent"?

I don't believe the NSA are incompetent. I believe they are malevolent, in that they prioritize spying on American citizens (indirectly, of course) over finding and fixing these kinds of vulnerabilities. They expend vastly more on spying, cataloging, and archiving information about people than they do on figuring out when the software that runs the Internet is vulnerable.

If they are to exist on the taxpayer dime, they should serve the taxpayer first and foremost. They like to brag about this kind of thing, because it makes them look good (and maybe allows them to believe they are "good people", as I often see folks who defend the NSA say of them) but it isn't actually their priority, and it is not something they have a history of doing.

For example, this is the kind of thing the NSA actually spends significant money on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

That same money would have employed a number of excellent security researchers, and the tools they need to help make the Internet a safer, more secure place, for all Americans.

In short, this kind of article is misdirection, and people in our industry should not be snowed by those tactics. We should know better, based on their historical behavior.

Post reply on HN