Slashdot Mirror

Andrew Birrell of DEC and Microsoft has a couple of great papers on threaded programming:

• An Introduction to Programming with Threads
• An Introduction to Programming with C# Threads

Google is hard:

Emacs for Win32: (http://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+win32)
Faq: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html
Download: ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/GNU/windows/emacs/ (The faq contains other links that may be faster for you)

LaTex for Win32: (http://www.google.com/search?q=latex+win32)
Faq/Download info: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~fittond/win32latex/win32latex.html

gcc for Win32 (MinGW for this particular answer, there is cygwin and such as well): (http://www.google.com/search?q=gcc+win32)
Info: http://www.mingw.org/

command line utils for Win32: (http://www.google.com/search?q=unix+utils+win32)
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
Includes:
bc, bison, bzip2, diffutils, fileutils, findutils, flex, gawk, grep, gsar110, gzip, indent, jwhois, less, m4, make, patch, recode, rman, sed, shellutils, tar, textutils, unrar, wget, which

To answer your question, my windows machine does just fine when I want to use the unix utilities that I love, not real sure why yours can't, other than googling is hard.

For the record, all of the above web pages were basically the first result from google, I guess I'm feeling Lucky today.

It is not possible for a program to analyze another program and find all the bugs; see halting problem .

Wrong. It is quite possible to analyze a program and find all the bugs that violate the language constraints (null pointers, buffer overflows, etc.). That's what program verification is for. For some programs, you can't tell whether a bug condition will occur, so you treat that as a bug.

Automated program verification is a good idea that went away because C and C++ have such ambiguous semantics. It's hopeless for those languages. The "pointer equals array" concept alone makes it very tough, because the language has no idea how big an array is. Worst idea in the language, and the root cause of buffer overflows.

Good verifiers were written for Pascal (I headed one of those projects), a good one was written for Java (at DEC, just before DEC went under), and Microsoft is working on one for C#.

Here's some historical video of Engelbart in action (thanks Lisa!):
http://www.lisarein.com/videos/oreilly/etech2003/a lankay/alankay-2of6-mres.mov

Doug Engelbart was also largely influenced by JCR Licklider:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/licklider.html
Read his seminal papers titled 'Man-Machine Symbiosis' and 'The Computer as a Communication Device':
http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-rep orts/abstracts/src-rr-061.html

wrong categorization

Concur and mourn.

This was one of the infrastructure attack methods used in 'Terminal Compromise'. It's the information technology world's version of the neutron bomb.

Updated 20 February 2003

18 February 2003

To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Subject: Citibank tries to gag crypto bug disclosure
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:57:34 +0000
From: Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk>

Citibank is trying to get an order in the High Court today gagging public disclosure of crypto vulnerabilities:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_g ag.pdf

I have written to the judge opposing the order:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_r esponse.pdf

The background is that my student Mike Bond has discovered some really horrendous vulnerabilities in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs used to identify customers to cash machines:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-560 .pdf

These vulnerabilities mean that bank insiders can almost trivially find out the PINs of any or all customers. The discoveries happened while Mike and I were working as expert witnesses on a `phantom withdrawal' case.

The vulnerabilities are also scientifically interesting:

http://cryptome.org/pacc.htm

For the last couple of years or so there has been a rising tide of phantoms. I get emails with increasing frequency from people all over the world whose banks have debited them for ATM withdrawals that they deny making. Banks in many countries simply claim that their systems are secure and so the customers must be responsible. It now looks like some of these vulnerabilities have also been discovered by the bad guys. Our courts and regulators should make the banks fix their systems, rather than just lying about security and dumping the costs on the customers.

Curiously enough, Citi was also the bank in the case that set US law on phantom withdrawals from ATMs (Judd v Citibank). They lost. I hope that's an omen, if not a precedent ...

_____
Abstract

We present an attack on hardware security modules used by retail banks for the secure storage and verification of customer PINs in ATM (cash machine) infrastructures. By using adaptive decimalisation tables and guesses, the maximum amount of information is learnt about the true PIN upon each guess. It takes an average of 15 guesses to determine a four digit PIN using this technique, instead of the 5000 guesses intended. In a single 30 minute lunch-break, an attacker can thus discover approximately 7000 PINs rather than 24 with the brute force method. With a $300 withdrawal limit per card, the potential bounty is raised from $7200 to $2.1 million and a single motivated attacker could withdraw $30{50 thousand of this each day. This attack thus presents a serious threat to bank security.

-- Mike Bond and Piotr Zielinski

Decimalisation table attacks for PIN cracking

February 2003

-----

From: Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk>
To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Subject: Yet another failure of commercial cryptographic equipment
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 17:52:13 +0000

I gave a talk at Cambridge yesterday in which I described a new and interesting family of attacks on cryptographic equipment. These attacks defeat machines such as the Racal RG7000 and the IBM 4758/CCA which are commonly used to protect the PINs and keys used in automatic teller machines.

The paper is available online at:

http://research.microsoft.com/~aherbert/volume63.p df [4.8MB] (link appears to be broken)

as pages 27-30 in the PDF. [HTML below]

I got a fax yesterday informing me that an application is to be brought in the High Court, it seems by Citibank, on Thursday 20th February for `relief in relation to the protection of information which they accept as being confidential and which ought not to be in the public domain.'

I hope that no English court would go so far as to censor already published material. However, one just can't tell these days ...

Protocol Analysis, Composability and Computation

Ross Anderson, Michael Bond
University of Cambridge, England

Security protocols early days

The study of security protocols has been associated with Roger Needham since 1978, when he published the seminal paper on the subject with Mike Schroeder [1]. The problem they investigated was how to distribute cryptographic keys in a network of computers. One solution is to have an authentication service with which all the principals share a key; then if Alice wants to chat with Bob (for example) she can call the service and get two encrypted messages containing the same session key one encrypted under the key she shares with the service so she can read it, and one encrypted under the key Bob shares with the service so Bob can read it. She can now send the second of these to Bob to establish secure communication. The mechanism that Needham and Schroeder designed for this evolved into Kerberos, which is now part of Windows and is probably the most widely used of all authentication protocols.

Security protocols are now embedded in a great many applications, but it is common to find unexpected bugs in them. For example, many banks used to encrypt each customers PIN using a key known to their ATMs and write it on the ATM card magnetic strip. The idea was to provide a limited service when the network was down. Years later, a villain discovered that the account number and the encrypted PIN were not linked: he could make up a bank card with his own encrypted PIN but someone elses account number, and loot their account. He went on to steal a lot of money, and once in prison wrote a manual telling everyone else how to do it too. The banks had to spend millions on changing their systems.

Clarifying the assumptions

Researchers started to gnaw away at the protocols described in the literature and found fault with essentially all of them. The failure to bind protocol elements was one frequent problem; another was that old messages could be replayed. In the case of the original Needham-Schroeder protocol, for example, the freshness of the key generated by the server was guaranteed to only one of the principals. This was not necessarily an attack, as its inventors only claimed to protect honest insiders from dishonest outsiders. However, it led to a debate about the assumptions underlying security protocol design. Do we protect only against outsiders, or against insiders? Against the malicious, or the merely careless? For example, if we use timestamps to guarantee protocol freshness, are we vulnerable to principals who carelessly let their clocks run slow? Do we only consider an attacker to have won if he can impersonate an authorised principal, or do we need to stop people abusing the protocol mechanisms to perform a service denial attack?

The early attacks led to a second seminal paper, which Roger wrote with Mike Burrows and Martin Abadi in 1989 [2], and which introduced a logic of authentication. This enables an analyst to formalise the assumptions and goals of a security protocol, and to attempt to prove its correctness. When a proof cannot be found, the place at which one gets stuck often shows where an attack can be mounted. This style of analysis turned out to be very powerful, and a large literature quickly developed in which the BAN Logic and other formal tools were developed and extended to tackle a range of problems in protocol design.

One of the remarkable things about the study of security protocols is that they have not become a solved problem. One might think that managing the objects associated with authenticating users over a network passwords, keys and the like was a fairly compact problem which would have been done to death within a few years. However, the more we dig, the more we find.

Since 1992, Roger has hosted a protocols workshop every Easter. Early events dwelled on matters of authentication and logic, but by the mid-90s, the growing interest in electronic commerce was yielding papers on mechanisms for micropayments, bets, streaming media, mobile communications and electronic voting. Later years brought work on PKI, trust management and copyright enforcement. More and more problems come along as more and more businesses reinvent themselves online; threat models have also become more realistic, with dishonest insiders displacing the mythical evil hacker on the Internet.

Dishonest insiders, and the composition problem

Over the last two years, we have been exploring exactly how one might re-engineer cryptography to cope with dishonest insiders. One conclusion is that the analysis of security protocols must be extended to application programming interfaces. This is because the crypto keys used in authentication and payment protocols are often kept in separate hardware security processors, or at least in cryptographic libraries, to which access can be restricted using physical or logical mechanisms. However, an interface has to be exposed to the application program, which will occasionally be suborned whether by a corrupt insider, or by malware. How much harm can be done, and how can we limit it?

Protecting protocols was hard enough, and yet the typical protocol consists of 35 messages exposed to manipulation. The API of a modern crypto library or hardware cryptoprocessor may contain 30500 callable functions, many with a range of options. This provides a very rich and complex environment for mischief.

Attacks often involve using two separate mechanisms provided by the cryptoprocessor for different purposes, each of which could be innocuous by itself but which combine to cause trouble. For example, it is common to compute a customer PIN by encrypting the account number with a PIN derivation key: the cryptoprocessor then returns the PIN encrypted with a PIN storage key, so that the application has no access to its clear value. So far, so good. Then there is another transaction that can be used to encrypt a communications key under the terminal key loaded in an ATM. Here things start to go wrong, as the cryptoprocessor does not distinguish between a terminal key and a PIN derivation key; it considers them both to be of the same type. The upshot is that an attacker can supply the device with an account number, claiming that it is a communications key, and ask for it to be encrypted under the PIN derivation key.

Attacks like this extend protocol analysis all the way to the composition problem the problem that connecting two systems that are secure in isolation can give a composite system that leaks. This had previously been seen as a separate issue, tackled with different conceptual tools.

Differential protocol analysis

We are now working on the second generation of API attacks, which exploit the application syntax supported by the cryptographic service. These attacks are even more powerful, and at least as interesting from the scientific point of view. PIN generation provides a neat example here too. In more detail, the standard PIN computation involves writing the result of the encryption as a hex string and decimalising it. As some banks like to let customers change their PIN to a more memorable number, there is a provision to add an offset to give the PIN that the customer actually enters: Account number: 8807 0123 4569 1715 PIN derivation key: FEFE FEFE FEFE FEFE Encrypted account number: A2CE 126C 69AE C82D Natural (decimalised) PIN: 0224 Offset: 6565 Customer PIN: 6789

The typical implementation requires the programmer to send the cryptoprocessor the account number, a table describing the decimalisation (here, 0123 4567 8901 2345) and the offset. The processor returns the PIN, encrypted under the PIN storage key. The designers do not seem to have realised that a crooked programmer can manipulate the decimalisation table and the offset as well as the account number. A multitude of attacks follow. For example, one can send in an account number with a decimalisation table of 1111...11 to find out the ciphertext corresponding to a clear PIN of 1111, and then with a decimalisation table of 0111...11 to see if there is a zero in the first four digits of the encrypted account number (if so, the PIN, and thus the ciphertext output, will be different). By manipulating the decimalisation table further, he can get all the digits in the PIN, and by then playing with the offset he can get their order. In total, the attack requires only 1525 unprivileged cryptoprocessor transactions to discover the PIN on a single target account.

This second type of attack takes protocol analysis into yet another realm: that of differential attacks. Over the last ten years, a number of techniques have been invented for attacking cryptographic systems by bombarding them with inputs with chosen differences.

For example, in differential cryptanalysis, one analyses the changes in the output of the encryption algorithm; while with differential power analysis, one measures changes in the current consumption or electromagnetic emissions of the equipment. Now we have examples of how consecutive runs of a protocol can leak information if the inputs are suitably chosen. The resulting differential protocol analysis appears to be very powerful against application-level crypto.

It will take us some time to figure out the general lessons to be drawn from attacks like this, the robustness principles that designers should use to avoid them, and the analysis techniques that might assure us of a particular designs soundness. The randomisation of all protocols (another feature of Rogers work) is likely to be important.

Quantitative analysis and multiparty computation

Various researchers have speculated about whether there might one day be a quantitative analysis of protocol security. This might be feasible for PIN processing applications as we can measure the information leakage per transaction in terms of the reduction of entropy in the unknown PIN. This leads in turn to a possible real-world application of an attack previously considered theoretical.

Gus Simmons wrote extensively on covert channels in protocols. One such channel that is always present is the balking channel when one of the principals in a protocol signals something by halting and refusing to continue. This is normally considered unimportant as its information capacity is only a third of a bit per transaction. But with systems designed to cope with large transaction volumes, this need no longer hold. For example, a Trojanned cryptoprocessor could balk when it sees a predetermined PIN. If the PIN length were eight digits, this would be unlikely to hinder normal operation, but at a thousand transactions a second, a programmer could quickly find a number in a typical nine-digit account number range with just this PIN, and open an account for it. Once this kind of problem is appreciated, one can start to look for attacks that involve inducing rare error conditions that cause the cryptoprocessor to abort a transaction. (They exist.)

A third emerging link is between protocol analysis and secure multiparty computation. In application-level crypto we may have several inputs to a computation, some of them coming from an untrusted source, and we have to stop users manipulating the computation to get outputs useful for bad purposes. In the PIN decimalisation example above, one might try to solve the problem by blocking tables such as 1111...11. Yet an attacker can get by with scarcely more work by using two normal-looking tables that differ slightly (another kind of differential attack). We might therefore think that if we cant sanitize the inputs to the computation, perhaps we can authenticate them, and use only those tables that real banks actually use. But building every bank in the world into our trust base is what we were trying to avoid by using cryptography!

Conclusion

The protocol work that started off a quarter of a century ago may have seemed at the time like a minor detail within the larger project of designing robust distributed systems. Yet it has already grown into the main unifying theme of security engineering. Application-level protocols, and especially those from which an attacker can harvest data over many runs, open up new problems. The resulting analysis techniques are set to invade the world of composable security, and the world of multiparty computation. The influence, and the consequences, of Rogers contribution just keep on growing.

References

1. NEEDHAM, R.M. AND SCHROEDER, R.M., Using encryption for authentication in large networks of computers. Comm. ACM, vol. 21, no. 12, pp. 993-999, 1978.

2. BURROWS, M. ABADI, M. AND NEEDHAM, R.M., A logic of authentication, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 18-36, 1990.

Updated 20 February 2003

18 February 2003

To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Subject: Citibank tries to gag crypto bug disclosure
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 09:57:34 +0000
From: Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk>

Citibank is trying to get an order in the High Court today gagging public disclosure of crypto vulnerabilities:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_g ag.pdf

I have written to the judge opposing the order:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/ftp/users/rja14/citibank_r esponse.pdf

The background is that my student Mike Bond has discovered some really horrendous vulnerabilities in the cryptographic equipment commonly used to protect the PINs used to identify customers to cash machines:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/TechReports/UCAM-CL-TR-560 .pdf

These vulnerabilities mean that bank insiders can almost trivially find out the PINs of any or all customers. The discoveries happened while Mike
and I were working as expert witnesses on a `phantom withdrawal' case.

The vulnerabilities are also scientifically interesting:

http://cryptome.org/pacc.htm

For the last couple of years or so there has been a rising tide of phantoms. I get emails with increasing frequency from people all over the world whose banks have debited them for ATM withdrawals that they deny making. Banks in
many countries simply claim that their systems are secure and so the customers must be responsible. It now looks like some of these vulnerabilities have also been discovered by the bad guys. Our courts and regulators should make the banks fix their systems, rather than just lying about security and dumping the costs on the customers.

Curiously enough, Citi was also the bank in the case that set US law on phantom withdrawals from ATMs (Judd v Citibank). They lost. I hope that's
an omen, if not a precedent ...
_____

Abstract

We present an attack on hardware security modules used by retail banks for the secure storage and verification of customer PINs in ATM (cash machine) infrastructures. By using adaptive decimalisation tables and guesses, the
maximum amount of information is learnt about the true PIN upon each guess.
It takes an average of 15 guesses to determine a four digit PIN using this technique, instead of the 5000 guesses intended. In a single 30 minute
lunch-break, an attacker can thus discover approximately 7000 PINs rather than 24 with the brute force method. With a $300 withdrawal limit per card, the potential bounty is raised from $7200 to $2.1 million and a single motivated attacker could withdraw $30{50 thousand of this each day. This attack thus presents a serious threat to bank security.

-- Mike Bond and Piotr Zielinski
Decimalisation table attacks for PIN cracking
February 2003

-----

From: Ross Anderson <Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk>
To: ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Subject: Yet another failure of commercial cryptographic equipment
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 17:52:13 +0000

I gave a talk at Cambridge yesterday in which I described a new and interesting family of attacks on cryptographic equipment. These attacks defeat machines such as the Racal RG7000 and the IBM 4758/CCA which are commonly used to protect the PINs and keys used in automatic teller machines.

The paper is available online at:

http://research.microsoft.com/~aherbert/volume63.p df [4.8MB]

as pages 27-30 in the PDF. [HTML below]

I got a fax yesterday informing me that an application is to be brought in the High Court, it seems by Citibank, on Thursday 20th February for `relief in relation to the protection of nformation which they accept as being confidential and which ought not to be in the public domain.'

I hope that no English court would go so far as to censor already published material. However, one just can't tell these days ...

Protocol Analysis, Composability and Computation

Ross Anderson, Michael Bond

University of Cambridge, England

Security protocols early days

The study of security protocols has been associated with Roger Needham since 1978, when he published the seminal paper on the subject with Mike Schroeder [1]. The problem they investigated was how to distribute cryptographic keys in a network of computers. One solution is to have an authentication service with which all the principals share a key; then if Alice wants to chat with Bob (for example) she can call the service and get two encrypted messages containing the same session key one encrypted under the key she shares with the service so she can read it, and one encrypted under the key Bob
shares with the service so Bob can read it. She can now send the second of these to Bob to establish secure communication. The mechanism that Needham and Schroeder designed for this evolved into Kerberos, which is now part of Windows and is probably the most widely used of all uthentication protocols.

Security protocols are now embedded in a great many applications, but it is common to find unexpected bugs in them. For example, many banks used to encrypt each customers PIN using a key known to their ATMs and write it on the ATM card magnetic strip. The idea was to provide a limited service when the network was down. Years later, a villain discovered that the account number and the encrypted PIN were not linked: he could make up a bank card with his own encrypted PIN but someone elses account number, and loot their account. He went on to steal a lot of money, and once in prison wrote a manual telling everyone else how to do it too. The banks had to spend millions on changing their systems.

Clarifying the assumptions

Researchers started to gnaw away at the protocols described in the literature and found fault with essentially all of them. The failure to bind protocol elements was one frequent problem; another was that old messages could be
replayed. In the case of the original Needham-Schroeder protocol, for example, the freshness of the key generated by the server was guaranteed to only one of the principals. This was not necessarily an attack, as its inventors only
claimed to protect honest insiders from dishonest outsiders. However, it led to a debate about the assumptions underlying security protocol design.
Do we protect only against outsiders, or against insiders? Against the malicious, or the merely careless? For example, if we use timestamps to guarantee protocol freshness, are we vulnerable to principals who carelessly let their clocks
run slow? Do we only consider an attacker to have won if he can impersonate an authorised principal, or do we need to stop people abusing the protocol
mechanisms to perform a service denial attack?

The early attacks led to a second seminal paper, which Roger wrote with Mike Burrows and Martin Abadi in 1989 [2], and which introduced a logic of
authentication. This enables an analyst to formalise the assumptions and goals of a security protocol, and to attempt to prove its correctness. When a proof cannot be found, the place at which one gets stuck often shows where an attack can be mounted. This style of analysis turned out to be very powerful, and a large literature quickly developed in which the BAN Logic
and other formal tools were developed and extended to tackle a range of problems in protocol design.

One of the remarkable things about the study of security protocols is that they have not become a solved problem. One might think that managing the
objects associated with authenticating users over a network passwords, keys and the like was a fairly compact problem which would have been done to death within a few years. However, the more we dig, the more we find.

Since 1992, Roger has hosted a protocols workshop every Easter. Early events dwelled on matters of authentication and logic, but by the mid-90s, the growing interest in electronic commerce was yielding papers on mechanisms for micropayments, bets, streaming media, mobile communications and electronic voting. Later years brought work on PKI, trust management and copyright enforcement. More and more problems come along as more and more businesses reinvent themselves online; threat models have also become more realistic, with dishonest insiders displacing the mythical evil hacker on the Internet.

Dishonest insiders, and the composition problem

Over the last two years, we have been exploring exactly how one might re-engineer cryptography to cope with dishonest insiders. One conclusion is that the analysis of security protocols must be extended to application programming interfaces. This is because the crypto keys used in authentication and payment protocols are often kept in separate hardware security processors, or at least in cryptographic libraries, to which access can be restricted using physical or logical mechanisms. However, an interface has to be exposed to the application program, which will occasionally be suborned whether by a corrupt insider, or by malware. How much harm can be done, and how can we limit it?

Protecting protocols was hard enough, and yet the typical protocol consists of 35 messages exposed to manipulation. The API of a modern crypto library or hardware cryptoprocessor may contain 30500 callable functions, many with a range of options. This provides a very rich and complex environment for mischief.

Attacks often involve using two separate echanisms provided by the cryptoprocessor for different purposes, each of which could be innocuous by itself but which combine to cause trouble. For example, it is common to compute a customer PIN by encrypting the account number with a PIN
derivation key: the cryptoprocessor then returns the PIN encrypted with a PIN storage key, so that the application has no access to its clear
value. So far, so good. Then there is another transaction that can be used to encrypt a communications key under the terminal key loaded in an ATM. Here things start to go wrong, as the cryptoprocessor does not distinguish between a terminal key and a PIN derivation key; it considers them both to be of the same type. The upshot is that an attacker can supply the device
with an account number, claiming that it is a communications key, and ask for it to be encrypted under the PIN derivation key.

Attacks like this extend protocol analysis all the way to the composition problem the problem that connecting two systems that are secure in
isolation can give a composite system that leaks. This had previously been seen as a separate issue, tackled with different conceptual tools.

Differential protocol analysis

We are now working on the second generation of API attacks, which exploit the application syntax supported by the cryptographic service. These attacks are even more powerful, and at least as interesting from the scientific point of view. PIN generation provides a neat example here too. In more detail, the standard PIN computation involves writing the result of the encryption as a hex string and decimalising it. As some banks like to let customers change their PIN to a more memorable number, there is a provision to add an offset to give the PIN that the customer actually enters:
Account number: 8807 0123 4569 1715
PIN derivation key: FEFE FEFE FEFE FEFE
Encrypted account number: A2CE 126C 69AE C82D
Natural (decimalised) PIN: 0224
Offset: 6565
Customer PIN: 6789

The typical implementation requires the programmer to send the cryptoprocessor the account number, a table describing the decimalisation (here, 0123 4567 8901 2345) and the offset. The processor returns the PIN, encrypted under the PIN storage key. The designers do not seem to have realised that a crooked programmer can manipulate the decimalisation table and the offset as well as the account number. A multitude of attacks follow. For example, one can send in an account number with a decimalisation table of 1111...11 to find out the ciphertext corresponding to a clear PIN of 1111, and then with a decimalisation table of 0111...11 to see if there is a zero in the first four digits of the encrypted account number (if so, the PIN, and thus the ciphertext output, will be different). By manipulating the decimalisation table further,
he can get all the digits in the PIN, and by then playing with the offset he can get their order. In total, the attack requires only 1525
unprivileged cryptoprocessor transactions to discover the PIN on a single target account.

This second type of attack takes protocol analysis into yet another realm: that of differential attacks. Over the last ten years, a number of techniques have been invented for attacking cryptographic systems by bombarding them with inputs with chosen differences.

For example, in differential cryptanalysis, one analyses the changes in the output of the encryption algorithm; while with differential power analysis, one measures changes in the current consumption or electromagnetic emissions
of the equipment. Now we have examples of how consecutive runs of a protocol can leak information if the inputs are suitably chosen. The resulting differential protocol analysis appears to be very powerful against
application-level crypto.

It will take us some time to figure out the general lessons to be drawn from attacks like this, the robustness principles that designers should use to avoid them, and the analysis techniques that might assure us of a particular
designs soundness. The randomisation of all protocols (another feature of Rogers work) is likely to be important.

Quantitative analysis and multiparty computation

Various researchers have speculated about whether there might one day be a quantitative analysis of protocol security. This might be feasible for
PIN processing applications as we can measure the information leakage per transaction in terms of the reduction of entropy in the unknown PIN. This
leads in turn to a possible real-world application of an attack previously considered theoretical.

Gus Simmons wrote extensively on covert channels in protocols. One such channel that is always present is the balking channel when one of the principals in a protocol signals something by halting and refusing to continue. This is normally considered unimportant as its information capacity is only a third of a bit per transaction. But with systems designed to cope
with large transaction volumes, this need no longer hold. For example, a Trojanned cryptoprocessor could balk when it sees a redetermined PIN. If the PIN length were eight digits, this would be unlikely to hinder normal
operation, but at a thousand transactions a second, a programmer could quickly find a number in a typical nine-digit account number range with just this PIN, and open an account for it. Once this kind of problem is appreciated, one can start to look for attacks that involve inducing rare error conditions that cause the cryptoprocessor to abort a transaction. (They exist.)

A third emerging link is between protocol analysis and secure multiparty computation. In application-level crypto we may have several inputs to a computation, some of them coming from an untrusted source, and we have to
stop users manipulating the computation to get outputs useful for bad purposes. In the PIN decimalisation example above, one might try to solve the problem by blocking tables such as 1111...11. Yet an attacker can get by with scarcely more work by using two normal-looking tables that differ slightly (another kind of differential attack). We might therefore think that if we cant sanitize the inputs to the computation, perhaps we can authenticate them,
and use only those tables that real banks actually use. But building every bank in the world into our trust base is what we were trying to avoid by
using cryptography!

Conclusion

The protocol work that started off a quarter of a century ago may have seemed at the time like a minor detail within the larger project of designing robust distributed systems. Yet it has already grown into the main unifying theme of security engineering. Application-level protocols, and especially those from which an attacker can harvest data over many runs, open up new problems.
The resulting analysis techniques are set to invade the world of composable security, and the world of multiparty computation. The influence, and the consequences, of Rogers contribution just keep on growing.

References

1. NEEDHAM, R.M. AND SCHROEDER, R.M.,
Using encryption
for authentication in large networks of computers. Comm. ACM, vol.
21, no. 12, pp. 993-999, 1978.

2. BURROWS, M. ABADI, M. AND NEEDHAM, R.M.,
A
logic of authentication, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems,
vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 18-36, 1990.

What made the Internet possible was the concept of the catenet (concatenated networks). It didn't matter if you were running X.25, SNA, DECnet or any other proprietary network, you could always use it to transport IP packets. It might not be pretty or efficient, but no one could stop you. The network can drop, duplicate and reorder packets. That's OK, IP was designed for the lowest common denominator. See IEN 48.

If you want to work on Unix itself, rather than just using it, Compaq hires interns to work on parts of Tru64 UNIX. Feel free to mail me at bobbell@zk3.dec.com for more info.

" If you have any problems with this site, please send mail to the Compaq Corporate Research Downloads Team."

Simple isn't it?

Malk-a-mite

I don't like grits or oatmeal, though. :-(

-ysyi@alf.dec.com (the {grit,oatmeal}-disliker)

Tru64 leaves 20 processes for root. I believe the math for the # of processes system-wide (at least on Tru64 UNIX; I believe this applies for other BSD variants as well, although I can't confirm this right at this moment) is maxusers * 8 + 20 . What does this mean? Higher value of maxusers means more processes for the system (although I'm sure it wouldn't matter much to recursive scripts, fork() bombs, etc), among other things calculated by maxusers.

And as for your Linux comment... does Linux even reserve a number of processes for root? It's been a little while since I messed with this stuff on Linux, but AFAIK, Linux would be the first one to bomb out on this. Perhaps I misunderstood or assumed too much from your comment, so explaining to me what you meant (and not what I understood it as) would help.

I'll wait for your reply while I freeze some insects with an upside-down aircan.

-ysyi@alf.dec.com (the confused)

Also, I'm not saying AdvFS is the greatest thing since Air Cans(tm), or 3M Cloth(tm)s, or lighters with Adult-Proof Safety(tm). And I realize that there can be some troubles down the road; however, with a competant administrator with enough experience (and I'm not talking just negative experience), a "compatible" hardware configuration, and good software support, AdvFS can be worthwhile -- while in the wrong hands it can be a disaster. Just like sliced bread, for example: in the right hands, it can be a lifesaver, but in the wrong ones, it can, well.. be worse than unsliced bread.

I am in no way or shape saying that you (or your setup) do or do not match that criteria, since I know nothing about you or your configuration. These are simply my opinions, and no one pays me to say what I say, think what I think, or eat what I eat.

-ysyi@alf.dec.com

$ sizer -v
I love you!
$

Ok, well, not the output I wanted, but you get the point. Or I would hope. Well, anyways... I don't care anymore.

A similar issue ran / runs with "Solaris" and "SunOS". Solaris 2.x's (or 7, 8, 31337, whatever) uname reports "SunOS", yada yada.

The guy that said "I'm suprised that you still run OSF" probably just wanted to have something to argue about, be a smartass about, or whatever; who knows (or cares).

-ysyi@alf.dec.com (The Uncaring(tm), yet Still Replying(tm))

Also, AdvFS does not need to be defragmented every day; try editing the crontab.

-ysyi@alf.dec.com (aka "The dude from DEC")

My post was simply to inform that utilities do exist, since again, you stated that they did not.

-ysyi@alf.dec.com

Try reading the man pages for verify and salvage. AdvFS does not need fsck.

-ysyi@alf.dec.com

Anyone designing/reviewing an authenticeation scheme, should start with reading basic background info, like Pr udent engineering practice for cryptographic protocols" and related papers.

Once you have set up your design, review it, using proper tools for authentication logic. Start with BA N logic. Although old, it will catch most serious glitches. Then consider using some of the more complex tools available, like GNY.

Even the most sophisticated ciphers won't help if your protocol design is flawed. (original Kerberos was vulnerable to replay attacks). A clean protocol does not have to be complex. The wide mouthed frog protocol only uses three messages.

Remember freshness. A l/p scheme should at least have some form of challenge/response funcionality added to it. This does not have to be visible (add complexity) to the user. See a simple c/r scheme used by PHPlib (check the source).

Ok, I trailed off from the question, but anyone interested in authentication, and haven't already read academic papers on the subject, should check out the works of Burrows and friends.

Anyone designing/reviewing an authenticeation scheme, should start with reading basic background info, like Pr udent engineering practice for cryptographic protocols" and related papers.

Once you have set up your design, review it, using proper tools for authentication logic. Start with BA N logic. Although old, it will catch most serious glitches. Then consider using some of the more complex tools available, like GNY.

Even the most sophisticated ciphers won't help if your protocol design is flawed. (original Kerberos was vulnerable to replay attacks). A clean protocol does not have to be complex. The wide mouthed frog protocol only uses three messages.

Remember freshness. A l/p scheme should at least have some form of challenge/response funcionality added to it. This does not have to be visible (add complexity) to the user. See a simple c/r scheme used by PHPlib (check the source).

Ok, I trailed off from the question, but anyone interested in authentication, and haven't already read academic papers on the subject, should check out the works of Burrows and friends.

can be found at ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/digital/sim/ . The UNIX binaries you can find there actually include C compiler source code so you could see what changed.