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Domain: lightbluetouchpaper.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to lightbluetouchpaper.org.
Stories · 12
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SRI/Cambridge Opens CHERI Secure Processor Design
An anonymous reader writes with some exciting news from the world of processor design: Robert Watson at Cambridge (author of Capsicum) has written a blog post on SRI/Cambridge's recent open sourcing of the hardware and software for the DARPA-sponsored CHERI processor — including laser cutting directions for an FPGA-based tablet! Described in their paper The CHERI Capability Model: Reducing Risk in an age of RISC, CHERI is a 64-bit RISC processor able to boot and run FreeBSD and open-source applications, but has a Clang/LLVM-managed fine-grained, capability-based memory protection model within each UNIX process. Drawing on ideas from Capsicum, they also support fine-grained in-process sandboxing using capabilities. The conference talk was presented on a CHERI tablet running CheriBSD, with a video of the talk by student Jonathan Woodruff (slides).
Although based on the 64-bit MIPS ISA, the authors suggest that it would also be usable with other RISC ISAs such as RISC-V and ARMv8. The paper compares the approach with several other research approaches and Intel's forthcoming Memory Protection eXtensions (MPX) with favorable performance and stronger protection properties. The processor "source code" (written in Bluespec Verilog) is available under a variant of the Apache license (modified for application to hardware). Update: 07/16 20:53 GMT by U L : If you have any questions about the project, regular Slashdot contributor TheRaven64 is one of the authors of the paper, and is answering questions. -
University of Cambridge Develops Potentially More Secure Password Storage System
An anonymous reader writes "University of Cambridge's S-CRIB Scrambler resides in a Raspberry Pi and performs a hash-based message authentication code (HMAC). 'The secret 10-character key used to generate the HMAC resides solely on the dongle. Because it's not included in password tables that are stored on servers, the key could remain secret even in the event of a major security breach.' There are pros and cons associated with this method, of course, ranging from scalability to loss of access due to device hardware failure. As with all current options for password security, there's no guarantee that even this system remains secure." -
Google Ports Capsicum To Linux, and Other End-of-Year Capsicum News
An anonymous reader writes "Security researcher Robert Watson at the University of Cambridge has posted a blog article describing recent progress on the Capsicum security model, which will shortly appear in FreeBSD 10.0 enabled by default, and has now been ported to Linux by Google, who have posted patches with the intent to upstream to the Linux kernel." Capability systems are pretty interesting. -
Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be Abolished
First time accepted submitter MetalliQaZ writes "Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau learned that he had won the NSA's first annual "Science of Security (SoS) Competition." The competition, which aims to honor the best 'scientific papers about national security' as a way to strengthen NSA collaboration with researchers in academia, honored Bonneau for his paper on the nature of passwords. And how did Bonneau respond to being honored by the NSA? By expressing, in an honest and bittersweet blog post, his revulsion at what the NSA has become: 'Simply put, I don't think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form.'" -
DARPA Open Source Security Helped FreeBSD, Junos, Mac OS X, iOS
An anonymous reader writes "In a February 2013 ACM Queue / Communications of the ACM article, A decade of OS access-control extensibility, Robert Watson at the University of Cambridge credits 2000s-era DARPA security research, distributed via FreeBSD, for the success of sandboxing in desktop, mobile, and embedded systems such as Mac OS X, iOS, and Juniper's Junos router OS. His blog post about the article argues that OS security extensibility is just as important as more traditional file system (VFS) and device driver extensibility features in kernels — especially in embedded environments where UNIX multi-user security makes little sense, and where tradeoffs between performance, power use, functionality, and security are very different. This seems to fly in the face of NSA's recent argument argument that one-size-fits-all SELinux-style Type Enforcement is the solution for Android security problems. He also suggests that military and academic security researchers overlooked the importance of app-store style security models, in which signed application identity is just as important as 'end users' in access control." -
Multiword Passwords Secure Or Not?
Gaygirlie writes "An article over at Gizmag says: 'It's a meme that's been doing the rounds on the internet in recent years: multi-word pass-phrases are as secure as long strings of gibberish but with the added benefit of being easy to remember. But research from Cambridge University suggests that this may not be the case. Pass-phrases comprised of dictionary words may not be as vulnerable as individual passwords, but they may still succumb to dictionary attacks, the research finds.' I find this to be twisting of words and general consensus; of course any password whatsoever is going to be insecure against offline attack, and using common, popular words is going to make guessing the password much easier. But is this really an issue in a world where most attacks are done online? Should general populace still be coaxed into using randomly generated passwords?" -
UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication
An anonymous reader writes "Representatives of the UK banking industry have sent a take-down notice (PDF link) to Cambridge University, demanding that they censor a student's webpage as well as his masters thesis (PDF). The banks' objection is that the information contained in the report might be used to exploit a vulnerability in the Chip and PIN system, used throughout Europe and Canada for credit and debit card payments. The system was revealed to be fundamentally flawed earlier this year, as it allowed criminals to use a stolen card with any PIN. Cambridge University has resisted the demands and has sent a response to the bankers explaining why they will keep the page online." -
UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication
An anonymous reader writes "Representatives of the UK banking industry have sent a take-down notice (PDF link) to Cambridge University, demanding that they censor a student's webpage as well as his masters thesis (PDF). The banks' objection is that the information contained in the report might be used to exploit a vulnerability in the Chip and PIN system, used throughout Europe and Canada for credit and debit card payments. The system was revealed to be fundamentally flawed earlier this year, as it allowed criminals to use a stolen card with any PIN. Cambridge University has resisted the demands and has sent a response to the bankers explaining why they will keep the page online." -
New Sandbox Framework For Chromium Released
Trailrunner7 writes "As applications have become more and more complex in recent years and Web browsers have evolved into operating systems unto themselves, the task of securing desktop environments has become increasingly difficult. And while there's been quite a bit of innovation on Windows security, advances in Unix security have been less common of late. But now, a group of researchers from Google and the University of Cambridge in England have developed a new sandboxing framework called Capsicum, designed specifically to provide better security capabilities on Unix and Unix-derived systems (PDF). Capsicum is the work of four researchers at Cambridge and the framework extends the POSIX API and introduces a number of new Unix primitives that are meant to isolate applications and users and handle rights delegation in a better way. The research, done by Robert N.M. Watson, Ben Laurie, Kris Kennaway and Jonathan Anderson, was supported by Google, and the researchers have added some of the new Capsicum features to a version of Google's Chromium browser in order to demonstrate the functionality." -
Using Google To Crack MD5 Passwords
stern writes "A security researcher at Cambridge was trying to figure out the password used by somebody who had hacked his Web site. He tried running a dictionary through the encryption hash function; no dice. Then he pasted the hacker's encrypted password into Google, and voila — there was his answer. Conclusion? Use no password that any other human being has ever used, or is ever likely to use, for any purpose. I think." -
Cambridge Researcher Breaks OpenBSD Systrace
An anonymous reader writes "University of Cambridge researcher Robert Watson has published a paper at the First USENIX Workshop On Offensive Technology in which he describes serious vulnerabilities in OpenBSD's Systrace, Sudo, Sysjail, the TIS GSWTK framework, and CerbNG. The technique is also effective against many commercially available anti-virus systems. His slides include sample exploit code that bypasses access control, virtualization, and intrusion detection in under 20 lines of C code consisting solely of memcpy() and fork(). Sysjail has now withdrawn their software, recommending against any use, and NetBSD has disabled Systrace by default in their upcoming release." -
Chip & PIN terminal playing Tetris
Fearful Bank Customer writes "When British banks introduced the Chip-and-Pin smartcard-based debit and credit card system three years ago, they assured the public it was impervious to fraud. However, the EMV protocol it's based on requires customers to type their bank account pin number into store terminals in order to make any purchase. Security researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory derided the system as insecure at the time, as it gave access to customer's bank account pin numbers to every store they bought from. Despite these objections, the system was deployed, so researchers Steven Murdoch and Saar Drimer recently modified a straight-off-e-bay chip-and-pin terminal to play Tetris, with a video on YouTube, demonstrating that devices are neither tamper-resistant nor tamper-evident, and that even students with a spare weekend can take control of them. The banks are claiming that this can be reproduced only "in the laboratory" but seem to have missed the point: if customers have to type their bank account pin into every device they see, then the bad guys can capture both critical card information *and* the pin number for the bank account, leaving customers even more vulnerable than they were under the old system."