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Hacker Jeff Moss Sworn Into Homeland Security Advisory Council
Wolfgang Kandek writes "Hacker Jeff Moss, founder of computer security conferences DEFCON and Black Hat, has been sworn in as one of the new members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) of the DHS. Moss, who goes by the handle 'the Dark Tangent' says he was surprised to be asked to join the council and that he was nominated to bring an 'outside perspective' to its meetings. He said, 'I know there is a new-found emphasis on cybersecurity, and they're looking to diversify the members and to have alternative viewpoints. I think they needed a skeptical outsider's view because that has been missing.'"
Either he resigns in disgust or becomes assimilated.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
That Obama chap keeps making some inspired decisions - we could do with someone like him over here (UK) to bring a bit of change.
This is actually a great step forward. Why not have some of the best hackers review our current practices?
Seriously. I have no doubt that Jeff has the chops and the "perspective" that has definitely been "missing". I watched the eyes of Richard Clarke and his entourage glaze over at a "town hall" meeting with the "President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board" (or whatever they called it then) in Portland about 8 or 9 years ago, as some very smart security folks told them what was coming and what needed to be done. Honestly, I don't know if they just couldn't grasp the issues or if they were more interested in political play, but the message was quite plain; "the government" was going to be no help in securing things. Political inertia being what it is, I doubt that much as changed, the current administration's well-meaning efforts notwithstanding. Jeff is in for a frustrating ride, I fear.
Look up one-way hashing algorithm. The hash (encrypted password) does not contain all the info of the clear password, so you can't get the password out of the hash. It's a feature.
Or maybe that's not your question?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Could a slashdotter post some "simple to understand code" that produces output I cannot reverse engineer?
function f(int x) { return x/x; }
Find the original value of x, when given f(x) == 1. To get you started, x is not 3853, 178470 or -8956583566.
Why? Discrete mathematics, my friend, and in particular, modular arithmetic. (You know, from fourth grade, when you'd do 11 / 3 and get "3 remainder 2" - the 'modulo' operation just gives you the 2.) Now suppose you have an algorithm:
a = x % 731
b = x % 129
Now take a number: say, x = 10,000. Easy to compute: a = 497. b = 67. Very easy to calculate. But, working backwards from a and b alone, can you determine x? Suppose a = 616 and b = 100; can you tell me what my number is? It's not quite that easy! You'll need to do a lot more math. Not too much, in this case, as this is a ridiculously simple code and the numbers are small, but a lot more than a simple integer-division-and-remainder operation.
That's not an encrypted message. (Public-key cryptography is related but different.) That's a simple one-way cryptographic hash: a secret number (your password) goes in, and a mysterious hash-value (a and b) comes out, and there's no easy way to map it back. But if you give me the password, it's easy to check that it's right. That hash value is what's in your shadow password file. Except it uses MD5 or SHA or whatever-the-latest-hotness-is.
Now, granted, there's few enough passwords that you can check them all, given enough time. (You might even precompute them all, which is why you add a little random 'salt' to each password that makes them all different. In the example above, the 'salt' could be 'add 12345 to X before hashing it'. You can store the salt next to the encrypted password - you'll need it to check the password. It only protects you from the guy who calculated all the passwords adding +12344 each time - his "rainbow table" of passwords and hashes is now useless.). That's why the shadow-password file isn't usually broadcasted to the world. You try to keep it reasonably secret: not world-readable, certainly not exposed to the Internet. But it's a whole lot better than nothing.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I see a number of people have answered, but none have giving a simple and straightforward explanation to what's wrong with your question.
Simply put: Unix does not store your password. If you've been told Unix stores your password encrypted somewhere, someone was glossing over the details to the point of making false statements. People can't reverse the process of decrypting your password because your password isn't stored there to begin with.
If you want to know what is actually stored, follow the previous advice about looking up hashing algorithms. Quick a dirty answer: when you first type in your password, a hashing algorithm is run over it and a hash code is produced, which is stored. When it prompts anyone for your password, it doesn't know the correct answer, but whatever answer anyone gives, it runs through the same hashing algorithm and sees if it produces the same result. The odds of two different strings producing the same hash result vary with the algorithm but it can be something like 1 in 2^160.
But the short answer is, your password cannot be decrypted because it wasn't encrypted and stored to begin with. There's nothing to decrypt.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The password is not encrypted, it is cryptographically hashed (encrpytion is two-way, hashing is one-way). A hash function transforms an arbitrary length input into a fixed length output, so there is no inverse function in the mathematical sense: a single hash value has an infinite number of inputs corresponding to it. Finding a value that produces a given hash is extremely hard: a good hash function will not have any way of computing such a value more effective than brute force (e.g. you try all possible inputs until one of them given you the hash you're looking for).
As for reversing the algorithm: in essence, the generation of the password hash always uses a stateful generator, and this state is not preserved in the hash. When trying to reverse the hash, you must know not only the hash but also the state of the generator at the end of the algorithm, otherwise backtracking to the initial state of the generator defined in the hash function definition can take more than the age of the universe, even if you used all the computing power on earth to break this single password. Another mathematical idea that is frequently used is that if you have two very large prime numbers x and y, you can quickly compute their product z, but you can't easily find x and y if you only have z. Unless you have a quantum computer, which doesn't exist yet.
Real world analogy: it's nearly impossible to find two persons with the same fingerprints, but the fingerprints themselves don't contain any infromation about the name of the person. If you have a fingerprint and a person, you can easily identify if it the fingerprint belongs to the person, but if you only have the fingerprint, you need to check the fingerprints of all people to find a person that has the same fingerprint.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I wonder how the rules of "Spot The Fed" will change now that DEFCON is somewhat run by a fed????
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I guess I'll give the perspective here of a very small (yet dedicated) section of the hacker community. I have retired from hacking, but the hacker community still interests me, and I feel a responsibility with some others in guiding it.
As far as myself, I was on H/P sub-boards of BBSs in the early/mid 1980s, and did use the Feature Group B (950-XXXX) codes they posted to phreak, but I put that aside because I did not begin to seriously hack (and phreak) until 1989, and I retired in 1996, the day I began working for an ISP. I personally have met many members of LoD, MoD, BoW, l0ck and so forth, have gone to many cons and 2600 meetings, have gone on trashing runs, talked to them on "confs" (conference calls), on BBSs, IRC etc.
Perhaps I'll search for more original links later, but Gweeds speech at H2K2 in July 2002 is what was really the clarion call of the white hat backlash. That speech was great, and expressed what I felt for a long time but hadn't heard anyone else say.
This web page is dedicated to the white hat backlash as well.
Actually, the anti-whitehat movement in my mind has itself already split. There are the older people like me, Gweeds and some others who primarily want to delineate this line between hacking and the security industry. They are two separate things, in fact, they are against each other - the security community arrests and jails hackers. The idea that there can be a grey hat who is between white hat and black hat is ridiculous, you are either a hacker, or you are working for the security industry and law enforcement. I think even a lot of anti-hacker people would agree with us on that one.
Most of us are older, most of us don't hack any more, and the people in this movement or tendency that Gweeds became a spokesman for I have noticed are also in the anarchist movement. After all, Gweeds talked about anarchism a lot, I have been involved in the anarchist movement, and I know others of our mindset (some who I feel have expressed sympathetic sentiments are in the cDc).
I myself more than most of this group are in a political plain at the cross-section of anarchism and Marxism. So being one more of a dialectic bent, I think the progression of what has happened - people hacked until the mid 1990s, in the mid 1990s many hackers entered the security industry and the hacking movement died out to a large degree, then Gweeds made his speech in 2002 and the hacking movement is still moribund, but has some more self-awareness now anyhow. The rise and fall of IT with the dot-coms caused a chain of reactions. Perhaps the rise and fall of IT within FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) will have some reaction as well.
I think what is more important is I think the expression of the "hacker ethic" has always been bullshit. Whether it was what the Mentor said, or that Phrack or 2600 talked about. 2600 has said things like "Companies should be glad we're hacking as we're showing them holes before the bad guys do" which sounds ridiculous to me from a hacker perspective, and I'm sure sounds ridiculous to law enforcement and companies being hacked. Gweeds, and some of the people who picked up the torch of what he said have refined that.
I myself think another criticism has to be made, not just of the white hats, but of the crowd which I'll call the 4chan/Anonymous crowd. I think what they're doing is a new development, is sort of in the spirit of hacking, but misses the boat in a few ways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_function
I'll take the bait. The phrase "poacher turned gamekeeper" refers to someone who now protects the interests they previously attacked. Jeff Moss never (in public knowledge) attacked the security of the United States. He has exposed weaknesses in various security systems, but that's often considered helpful. It would be more like a naturalist with a BA in Criminal Justice turned gamekeeper.
If a known algorithm produces the encrypted password, why can't that algorithm be "reversed" to produce the original password in the first place?
It has been. But it doesn't really do you any good. The actual password is lost. The reverse of a hash produces infinite solutions. (In the same way the reverse of modulus division produces infinite solutions).
But those solutions are all 'collisions' and they could all be used interchangeably with the original password. So getting any solution is almost as good as getting the original.
Even in open source systems, encrypted passwords are not easy to crack. Why?
Because pretty much all modern encryption is based on the idea that its VERY easy to multiply two stupidly large prime numbers to find an even stupidly larger number. Multiple two 1000 bit prime number numbers and get a 2000 bit non-prime as a result.
But it takes years upon years of processor time to take that stupidly larger number, and factor it back into the original stupidly large primes.
Could a slashdotter post some "simple to understand code" that produces output I cannot reverse engineer?
z = primex * primey;
suppose z = 377, how do you find the factors: 13 and 29?
Now, for encryption, z is thousands of digits instead of 3.
Algorithms that solve this exist, they just won't finish running until after you've died of old age.
This almost makes me believe that the government is serious about cyber-security.
Now, next, add a Constitutional Rights specialist from the EFF or ACLU and I might have an honest-to-goodness heart attack.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Jeff is hardly a maniac, he's an expert in computer security. Far from a PR stunt, this is an effort to get somebody who knows how to secure computer systems involved in *gasp* security.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Kevin Mitnick and Adrian Lamo do not seem to like the idea of Moss getting the nod. Mitnick prefers Bruce Schneier while Lamo believes Moss is a suit, "the reality is he's as corporate as hiring someone out of Microsoft."
I wonder what the reaction in the tech community would have been had the 2 above gotten the call instead.
Could a slashdotter post some "simple to understand code" that produces output I cannot reverse engineer?
While I *love* the first respondent's answer, and giggled like an idiot when I read it, perhaps this will be more a more useful example for understanding how it works.
The modulus operator in arithmetic returns the remainder after integer division. It is commonly noted "x % y", "x mod y", "mod( x, y )", or similar.
So: ...
3 mod 2 = 1
4 mod 3 = 1
4 mod 2 = 0
5 mod 2 = 1
5 mod 3 = 2
5 mod 4 = 1
Now, suppose a password structure "x:y" -- you are required to enter your password as two digits, separated by a colon (not normal, but just suppose).
You could enter, as your password, "4:3", and the system could store as your password hash "1" -- the result of "4 mod 3". Then, when you attempt to log in next time, if you submit "4:3", the system would take the modulus and check the result, "1", against its internal table of password hashes and allow you in.
Now, suppose you get the table of hashes, and see:
joeSmith: 1
joeSmith has the password hash "1". Is his actual password "3:2", "4:3", "5:2", or "5:4"? Since the modulus of all those pairs is "1", the correct answer cannot be determined from the output alone. Modulus is what is called a "non-reversible function." The output of the modulus function contains less information than the input, so it cannot be reversed.
In this example it is trivial, however, to generate another password combination that results in the same hash. For example, "6:5" also equates to the hash "1". This is called a collision between "6:5" and "4:3". The attacker does not have to know joeSmith's actual password, as long as he can supply input that results in the correct hash. That leads to the next step in identity verification systems: ensuring that it is not possible for a reasonably funded attacker to forge a document which collides with the actual document (or password in this case, which is a special kind of document).
That is a much harder topic.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Of course Jeff Moss was invited into the Homeland Security Advisory Committee, he has been organizing events for over ten years to collect information about hackers in the computer underground. Anyone who goes to DEFCON or Black Hat is immediately "on the radar" of every three letter agency here and abroad. He's an FBI stooge, always has been, always will be.
Jeff Moss initially got started as an FBI informant working with members of the "Legion of Doom"; his FBI handler was named Dick Brandis, a former polygrapher for the Pittsburgh PA Federal Bureau of Investigation. Brandis eventually ended up resigning from the Pittsburgh FBI for taking classified government information home with him and establishing his own network of hackers that Moss et al would get into compromising positions and then blackmail for information and unpublished exploits.
Um, no, you have remembered incorrectly. There as a girl with you taking film pictures of myself, Dom, K0re, and another person and trying to be clever about it. I turned a non functioning web cam around at your group to essentially say "It works both ways"
Having been at Defcon 1 and seen how far things have come, I have nothing but respect for DT and what he has done. It's funny how times change. To have gone from an environment where people were paranoid about "the Feds" even knowing who was attending the conference, to having the organizer of the conference working for the Feds, is a real change. He has the contacts and the insider knowledge of what the threats are. The government made a smart choice by hiring him. Now, DT... since my tax dollars are going into your pocket, how about a free admission to the next con? -Phax