Josh Wieder

Below, I've included what would have been the first post in a series of posts I wrote about the  badBIOS  controversy in October 2013. I found the evidence in support of badBIOS to be unconvincing and I was concerned by how popular badBIOS became despite those obvious shortcomings. This wasn't a situation where an overexcitable press ran with a story that turned out to be inaccurate; the most early and adamant believers in  badBIOS  weren't reporters, they were ITSEC professionals. How were so many of us publicly duped by what was essentially a conspiracy theory? This post doesn't address badBIOS directly. However, badBIOS was presumed to somehow involve the manipulation of computers using acoustic transmissions. This post provides some historical context behind a strain of computer science research in this field and shows how commonly held beliefs about the feasibility of these attacks were generally inaccurate at the time of writing. In future posts I would ha...

When UNIX co-progenitor and super-smarty-pants Ken Ritchie was given a Turing Award, he provided a warning to those within ear shot. Admins and developers often find it satisfactory to review the source code of applications to determine maliciousness. And to a certain extent, this works out all right. Over time we have built a series of expectations of where to expect naughty code based on our experience. We have also chosen to trust other types of tools that we use during this process. We discriminate. But there's no reason that bad stuff *has* to be in the applications that we expect to find it in. Yes, the clever among us know that compilers can be bad. But we check the source of our compilers and find no bad stuff, and so we assume we are safe. We do, though, compile the compiler, don't we? Well, alright then some megalomaniac at Intel or somewhere far upstream decided to embed badness in the embedded distro compilation software. We can still look at the binary of com...

The Details This is a bit of an old story, but I've found to my unpleasant surprise that the issues surrounding the story are not widely understood or known. Here's the gist: leaks from the US intelligence service have explicilty confirmed that the NSA targets systems administrators that have no ties to terrorism or extremist politics . If you are responsible for building and maintaining networks, the NSA will place you under surveillance both personally or professionally; they will hack your email, social network accounts and cell phone. The thinking behind this alarming strategy is that compromising a sysadmin provides root-level access to systems that enable further surveillance; hack an extremist's computer, and you track just that extremist. Hack a sysadmin's computer, and you can track thousands of users who may include extremists among them (its a strategy that is remarkably similar to the targeting of doctors in war zones ). Five years ago such a lead paragr...

I received a notification from a large security auditing firm that of the ciphers currently available, only RC4 ciphers will be considered PCI compliant. My assumption based on the notification is that this move is intended as a rejection of CBC (Cipher Block Chaining). Well, that's fine as far as I am concerned. CBC has some serious issues as implemented in SSL v3 / TLS v1.0. In a nutshell, you can time responses for applications using the block cipher to get ranges of possible data in SSLv3 and partial payload decryption in TLS. So-called "stream" ciphers like RC4 are immune to this particular attack vector. You don't get private keys from the attack, its by no means a fast attack (minimum of three hours), and you need access to monitor the session . Further, patches for CBC exist to over-ride the timing exploit (for example the NSS libraries used by Mozilla have been patched). I will save debunking the man in the middle hysteria for a later post. What frustrate...

Phil Zimmerman of PGP Encryption fame is launching a new project, Silent Circle -  The idea is an application suite complete with encrypted VOIP, email and IM. Exciting stuff! Lets hope it works out better than Hushmail !

Latest Update from Basement Dweller News: A great primer on random number generation from a few smart cookies at Intel, by way of IEEE: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/behind-intels-new-randomnumber-generator/0 On a very related note, let's keep our eyes on systemic issues with encryption keys in the wild: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/064.pdf I have yet to formalize an opinion as to the validity of any systemic key issues intrinsic to RSA (because I was a "D" math student I have to wait for the grown-ups to weigh in on these Deep Thoughts. I would like to see larger keys in use standardized and don't see any good reason not to) A compelling critique of the survey, urging for additional data before judgment is reached: http://dankaminsky.com/2012/02/14/ronwhit/