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The Internet's Biggest Security Hole Revealed
At DEFCON, Tony Kapela and Alex Pilosov demonstrated a drastic weakness in the Internet's infrastructure that had long been rumored, but wasn't believed practical. They showed how to hijack BGP (the border gateway protocol) in order to eavesdrop on Net traffic in a way that wouldn't be simple to detect. Quoting: "'It's at least as big an issue as the DNS issue, if not bigger,' said Peiter 'Mudge' Zatko, noted computer security expert and former member of the L0pht hacking group, who testified to Congress in 1998 that he could bring down the internet in 30 minutes using a similar BGP attack, and disclosed privately to government agents how BGP could also be exploited to eavesdrop. 'I went around screaming my head about this about ten or twelve years ago... We described this to intelligence agencies and to the National Security Council, in detail.' The man-in-the-middle attack exploits BGP to fool routers into re-directing data to an eavesdropper's network." Here's the PDF of Kapela and Pilosov's presentation.
Must have the world's largest collection of online porn.
Which would figure, actually.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Everyone loves sensationalist news headlines. *sigh*
Anyone have any insight as to how serious this ACTUALLY is?
I hope that all of those people who thought that getting users to blindly accept self signed certs was a good idea are starting to feel a bit stupid now...
An SSL cert signed by a trusted central authority isn't the absolute solution to all mitm attacks, but it's a whole lot closer to 'safer' than not.
I find the thought of this genuinley scary. Correct me if I am wrong, but we would have to change the BGP protocol itself to fix this issue. That isn't going to happen anytime soon I reckon, so I guess there is nothing we can do but encrypt senstive transmissions and hope for the best.
BGP is almost always setup manually, at least when first configured. Network admins: DO NOT PUT UNTRUSTED PEERS IN THE ACLs. Joe smith running BGP on 123abcxxxhost.nl has no business being in your tables. If you're accepting adverts from any AS you deserve what you get.
The routing on the Internet has always been hierarchical: get updates from your upstreams. If they send you bad info you're SOL anyway, just like SSL certs and Verisign's root certs.
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...that the good folks at the NSA (and/or the FBI, CIA, DHS, ATF, etc., as well as their counterparts in other nations) have been exploiting this for years.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
A hacker marauding by the name "Goatse" exposed it quite effectively some years back.
I record my sleeptalking
It was really cool, opened a lot of peoples eyes. Here is the archive, http://www.stits.org/fp/Defcon_16/. Please don't flood it and only download it if you will use the info. I also took a ton of photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stits/sets/72157606608859399/ Hope to see you all next year!
Wait, you're telling me that they taught US intelligence agencies and the National Security guys how to attack the internet with man-in-the-middle attacks and exploits to fool routers into re-directing data to an eavesdropper's network...
and they didn't do anything to end the interception and eavesdropping problem???
I am shocked.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The guy's been involved in many of security's moments in history.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
There is a lot of harm you can do, least for a short while. But I have to say, this seems like a lot of FUD to me.
It is not trivial to get BGP peering, or to keep it if you are doing bad things. You will need one or more peers, and they will have to do this for you manually, not automatically. And (as I can attest) the AS prepending this attack relies on is a very blunt instrument.
Here are the troubles I see
- You need to be able to offer a better path from Point A to Point B than the existing Internet topology
- Unless you are Dr. Evil and can afford infinite bandwidth, this better path had better not also apply to a large chunk of the Internet, or you will get hosed with a lot of bandwidth (and, also, instantly stick up on the screens of NOCs all over the place) and
- If you are relying on AS prepends, these affect the path from you, but not directly the path to you. They are notoriously tricky and may stop working (because of changes in other people's advertisements) at any time.
So, to me, this is a might work sometimes for some people in some places, but probably not that well on a general basis.
The DNS cache poisoning sounds a lot worse, frankly.
'I went around screaming my head about this about ten or twelve years ago... We described this to intelligence agencies and to the National Security Council, in detail.'
For a hacker he's pretty dumb. Everyone knows that the best way get attention directed to an exploit is to publish the entire kiddie-porn-folder of the person who can fix it, using the exploit in question.
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
I looked at this problem back in the early 1980s, when I was doing some work on TCP. I was trying to come up with a routing protocol that didn't require passing the same information around repeatedly, because backbone networks had very low bandwidth back then, and the existing routing protocols had either O(N^2) traffic or the "hop count to infinity" problem.
I came up with something called "Gateway Database Protocol", which was a scheme for passing tuples of the form "X says Y=Z" around. The idea was that any node seeing inconsistencies in "X says ..." would propagate the tuple back to X, revealing the problem to X.
This is enough to detect hijacking, but not enough to stop it. I'd worked out a scheme good enough to automatically correct erroneous data, but not one good enough to deal with the insertion of hostile data. The design goal back then was to guarantee that if the hostile site was removed from the network (perhaps forcibly), the system would then stabilize into a valid state.
That's not enough any more. But it is worthwhile considering that a routing protocol should have the property that if X's info is being faked anywhere in the network, X hears about it. BGP doesn't do that.
I've seen implementations of ISIS, and have deployed it myself in both IP and ATM environments. I've never seen an actual deployment of ESES, and I've never heard of one either. I've encountered ISIS adjacencies which don't form correctly, and come up as ESIS, though.
What hardware supports ESES?
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The whole MITM thing would raise a flag unless the attackers were close enough to the real routers for the ip address block it was hijacking. Several companies I know notice when BGP screws up and doubles their latency. They notice and complain loudly.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Not quite.
Prepends affect your outbound announcements, and this affects inbound traffic to you. Prepends are the most effective tool for BGP manipulation because they're transitive - announcing more specifics works too, but that's not quite the same thing.
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Great, give the very people who want to abuse this the most the inside details, then show shock when it isn't fixed.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Enterprising hacker hijacks BGP and Rickrolls the whole world in 3... 2... 1...
that requires one teensy weensy detail to work (in other words, one huge wonking detail)
here, it is to be a bgp level peer
kind of like i can empty a bank of all of its money
all i need is the key to the safe
yeah, minor detail
so do i panic now?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Dude, l0pht aka @stake sold out in the early 2000's. Their only claim to fame was their work on the CdC "Back Orifice" and of course "l0phtcrack", which just tricked out LM passwords from cleartext, big deal. Everyone knows about BGP!
He (Munge) turned it into a deal, and now he works for BBN. That's where the money is (or has been). Just because someone was at Defcon once doesn't mean he's not working for the Feds. There are some benefits to working for the government.
It's nice how they've packaged this presentation but this is not news really.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I am familiar with l0phtcrack... I used it to reset a password or two back in the day. It came recommended (believe it or not) by one of the higher-ups in Microsoft network security.
Oh... but it did more than just sniffing cleartext passwords. It would also decipher encrypted passwords over the net, given plenty of time. And it could be used to crack encrypted Hosts passwords.
I always wondered why they did not follow it up.
So these guys go and convince the spooks that the Internet can be hijacked for comprehensive but totally stealth eavesdropping. And the spooks "don't do anything about it".
Except they do, don't they. The spooks go ahead and snoop the entire Internet. For the last 10 years.
I'm surprised at only the fact that the L0pht guys and others are still alive and running around loose to tell anyone that the spooks have known how to do this for this whole time.
Why is it taking so long for all Internet traffic to be encrypted end to end by default?
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make install -not war
Yeah, I was exaggerating. Mudge was pretty good. But to say that he sold out the Internet to the Feds is pretty false. I mean, they built it, and the dudes at the NSA have long known about the intrinsic properties of BGP. BBN built a lot of it, actually, which is sort of ironic.
It is weird though that you saw them drop off the map (along with a lot of other high profile people) after 2001 and now a lot of them work for the Feds. But like I said, that's where the money is (or was).
Cool! Amazing Toys.
You called? Sorry I'm late
The Internet's Biggest Hole Revealed at http://goatse.cz/
> So Firefox's solution has been make it hard to pick the unsafe choice.
Except they really haven't. They've made it hard to make the sorta-kinda-theoretically-less-safe choice, the one that might result in a MITM attack, but in doing so they discourage SSL use generally.
Do you think that hypothetical user you're talking about is going to notice whether the page is using SSL or not? I doubt it. And a lot of companies seem to agree, and use plain old HTTP for all sorts of stuff when they shouldn't (we just had an FPP on this a few days ago, in fact).
As script-kiddyable as MITM attacks may get, they're never going to be as easy as just sniffing unencrypted traffic, and any time you make encryption difficult or complicated, that's the alternative people use.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
s/The US Government is/governments are/
There, fixed that for ya.
Do you really think government anywhere is trustworthy, or that only the US government would use this technique?
This technique isn't even hard. I used to work at an ISP in Japan that once spent the best part of the day off the Internet because an incompetent router admin in the ROK was announcing our IP space. We finally managed to get the guy on the phone, only to find that his ability to either speak or comprehend English was negligible and that he spoke no Japanese at all. By then, he seemed to have some clue that he'd screwed up and said he was working on it (I wouldn't be surprised if he announced routes for other ASes than ours). When my jaw really hit the floor was when he managed to explain that he had done this before. He obviously didn't get reamed by his boss enough the first time he screwed up like that.
As soon as I started reading TFA, I thought "I bet I know how they did it" - and I'm no CCIE level network engineer - and it turned out I was spot on. The technique is simple enough that I'm sure L0pht Heavy Industries 10 years ago were nowhere near the first group to come up with an attack like this. Heck, they probably didn't tell the NSA anything they didn't already know. Any CCIE could devise an attack like that, and so could quite a few people who aren't CCIEs.
Spying on a large group of Internet users would require tremendous bandwidth and hardware, however - what you might call a rather conspicuous amount of both. It's also not something that would go unnoticed for a really long time by the network engineers at large networks. It might start with a customer complaint of long ping times into their network, or it might start with a neteng looking over the BGP table for something unrelated and thinking, "That's funny" - but it would certainly be noticed. Routing all the traffic for a large AS in, say, the UK through, say, New York, would not go unnoticed for very long.
The best way to conceal an attack like this would be very near the target network. For example, if you were trying to pick off all traffic bound for a regional ISP, you put your sniffing setup in the same colo facility where they are located.
If the target is a national ISP in a large country - the kind that is likely to have multiple ingress points to their network - the attack becomes more complicated. You have to either be in all their colo locations if you want optimum concealment (and if they are large, they probably own the colo, making it trickier to hide what you're doing), or you need to pull all their traffic through your single location, which is more likely to be noticed.
Another good technique for concealing this kind of attack is to not use it all the time. For example, if you know that there are users on Network A on whom you'd like to spy, and that they are communicating with users on Network B, on whom you'd also like to spy, you have a couple of options. One is to randomly announce routes for Network A (and maybe network B at the same time) for some fairly short period of time and at random intervals long enough to let the BGP state go back to normal, and hope you catch something. Another approach is to use some other intelligence sources to figure out the time of day when the communication usually happens and do your intercepts at that time, then turn them off.
If I can think this up - and I've even been out of the neteng business for over 5 years now - the people who do things like that for a living have not only known about it for many years, they were probably thinking "It took L0pht until *1998* to come up with that, and anyone else another 10 years to come up with a usable exploit?!"
Not exactly weird. If cracking networks, etc., is your bag, and somebody offers you a high-paying, stable job where you can not only spend your time doing that, but doing it without fear of prosecution, that could be kind of hard to turn down.
Oh great idea, lets go straight to the NSA, FBI, CIA, SS and any other agency out there and explain in full detail how to spy on the entire world. Wow, real shocker they didn't fix this one. Even bigger Internet Security Hole: Best Intentions.
End-to-end encryption prevents eavesdropping.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A man-in-the-middle attack on BGP would require that you intercept and re-write BGP data. The only place to do that is if you can insert some hardware on the physical route between two BGP-speaking routers. That is, on the cable between two ISPs that are peering with each other or have a transit agreement. While the BGP protocol could, in theory, be routed across the internet, my understanding is that in practice it never is.
Add to that that to successfully perform such an attack, you would need appropriate (expensive) network interfaces and hardware capable of speaking fast enough, and this "attack" becomes something that needs a *lot* of resources to pull off. Sure, governments and big corporations can do it, maybe big organised crime could too, but yer average bedroom cracker couldn't.
And why would the big boys bother anyway, when they can just announce bogus routes?