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Boarding Pass Hacker Targets Bank of America
Concerned Customer writes "The fake boarding pass guy is at it again. His blog shows a demonstration phishing website that is able to bypass the SiteKey authentication system used by Bank of America, Fidelity, and Yahoo. Users will be shown their security image, even though they're not visiting the authentic websites." This hack compounds the study showing that users don't pay attention to the SiteKey pictures anyway.
This is the loophole that we use in our demonstration. Through deceit, we convince the user to enter her security question, and thus get the SiteKey image.
No matter what kind of security system you devise, you cannot take out the human element. The Internet seems like magic to people - it knows them, it knows things about them, people can find them from all over the planet. The average user is not curious enough to learn how this is accomplished, paranoid enough to distrust anything at first glance, or savvy enough to protect themselves. Bank of America is kidding itself if it thinks the SiteKey is any kind of deterrent to a hacker.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
It's great to know this guy is still at it, despite getting raided by the FBI for the boarding pass hack. However, unless I'm mistaken banking stuff like this is under the auspices of the Secret Service, so this guy might want to set some extra places at the dinner table for a different group of goons.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Here's an example on how B of A does business:
This guy just wanted to check to see if a check was good!
You can bet B of A will go after this hacker guy.
The core problem of online banking is that the bank has to implicitly trust an untrustworthy system, using insecure protocols. The bank has no way to verify that the system used at the other end has not been tampered with and they cannot verify that the data sent to them is identical with the data entered by the user.
You can implement a billion "security features", it won't mean jack as long as the only channel between bank and user is the computer. If that channel has been corrupted, the corrupter will be able to alter, delete or forge any kind of information either side should (in his opinion) get about the other end. There is no way to remove this problem unless you open a second, secure channel which is independent of the machine used for bank transfers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The summary is not quite correct. It's not so much that the SiteKey is being bypassed, as that the attacker is able to get their hands on the user's SiteKey. They can only do this by getting the user's password and security code, which they do with a conventional man-in-the-middle attack. Once they've got that, getting the SiteKey seems the least of their worries.
The obvious problem with SiteKey is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting the image to the server in the first place. There's some step where you're communicating in a fashion where you trust the server enough to give them your SiteKey, which they later show back to you. It's tied to a single computer, via a cookie, so if you log in from a different computer you need to send a new SiteKey or get them to send yours back to you, on the new computer.
So this attack only works if you can get the user to give up not only the password but also the "security question" (one of the dumbest bits of security I've ever seen; it's like a password only you can look it up.) Easy enough, if the user isn't alert (and they usually aren't.)
SiteKey depends on users to expect the key image, but the absence of the image doesn't usually trigger warning bells because they're not very common. You need some sort of phishing detector which says, "Hey, this site is known to require a SiteKey and isn't sending it to you."
These authentication images seem to be one of these ideas that is based on the assumption that you only deal with one company.
Within the last six months, three banks and two brokerage houses I use have all gone to the use of these authentication images. In each case, the only way to select the image is to go through slow-loading screen after slow-loading screen of apparently random images.
I can choose my own password, but it is virtually impossible to "choose" my image, so they're not very memorable to me. I certainly can't choose the same image at all five sites, which is what I'd like to do. (That's insecure for a password, but I don't think it's insecure for an authentication image; it's not as if one bank were going to try to pretend to be a different bank).
One of them also wants you to give them a little phrase that goes below the picture. Ah, I thought, I'll use my phrase to describe the picture, that way I'll know if the picture is incorrect. Wrong, I couldn't do it. I had to enter the phrase before I got to choose the picture. Well, I thought, OK, I'll just change it. The picture was of (let's say) soccer ball. So I went to the screen that lets you change your passwords and personal information, entered "soccer ball" as my phrase... and was then taken to a screen where I was required to select a picture, again. And the soccer ball wasn't one of the choices. I clicked through about ten screens of five-by-five pictures trying to find the soccer ball and couldn't find it. Was it just because they were randomly selecting from a huge collection of images? Or do they actually enforce changing the image? I don't know. All I know is that I now am supposed to remember my password AND the phrase "soccer ball" AND a picture of a kangaroo.
If the picture were wrong, would I notice? I might have a vague sense of unease, but I wouldn't be sure. Not unless I wrote them all down.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why don't the banks just require that the referrer to a login page be blank. Yes, this would mean that the login page would have to be either on the main page or very simple to type since the only way a (normal) user will have a blank referrer will be to type the url in.
Essentially this means that banks would be requiring everyone to physically type (or bookmark) their banks login page and that would be the ONLY way to get there. I suppose it could be modified to accept a referrer of the banks own domain so you could click a "Login Here" button.
I know power users can spoof their referrer using a browser setting and malware could do the same, but at least that would be another layer. What am I missing here?
!hoD
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could give someone (e.g. PayPal, known by some for removing money back out as fast as they put it in) Deposit-Only account numbers. Like the Roach Motel, the money checks in, and it don't check out.
Or Limited Transfer Out numbers. (Allow AOL, and AOL only, to automatically debit monthly payments for amounts not exceeding your monthly bill, and only valid for 6 transactions before you give them a new number.)
Personal Checks, each one of which has a One Time Only account number on it that is worth nothing to a thief who tries to forge a hundred duplicates of the check you just gave him.
The archaic current system could, I believe, be made much more secure by this simple change alone.
Note to IP thieves: This constitutes Prior Art, and you're not allowed to patent it now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Looking at what banks can do to improve security:
- Stop putting the "lock" icon on your login form. Users should look for the lock on the toolbar or part of browser frame. (chase.com, others)
- Stop using non secure login pages (not where the login form is being submitted to) (chase.com, usbank.com, wachovia.com)
- Stop using marketing emails from strange marketing addresses. This just gets people used to bank emails from weird places.
- Make a secure bookmarkable banking page. (my bank does not do this, I get an error screen if going to bookmark)
- Simplify navigation and operation and unify systems. (my bank does not do this, if I log out on one part of the site, I'm not logged out from the "very secure" part)
Bank sites driven by marketers
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
it is very arrogant for somebody to think that BoA's security team did not think of this problem themselves.
I agree. In fact, I would go further and say that the author of this blog should actually be quite embarassed and ashamed of this post. His "amazing discovery" is actually the whole point of sitekey. Yes, you can be a man in the middle and get the sitekey images yourself. Congratulations. You and everyone else already thought of that.
And guess what, your man-in-the-middle now has to make a sitekey request to bank of american for *every potential victim* and as a result, BoA will easily identify your IP block as running a MITM scheme.
So in other words, this blogger is an idiot. He hasn't defeated sitekey at all. Set up a MITM site, make ten requests, and now you're out of business and the ten accounts that you phished are locked.