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(Possible) Diginotar Hacker Comes Forward
arglebargle_xiv writes "At the risk of burning people out on the topic of PKI fail, someone claiming to be the Diginotar hacker has come forward to claim responsibility: It's the ComodoGate hacker. He also claims to 0wn four more 'high-profile' CAs, and still has the ability to issue new rogue certificates, presumably from other CAs that he 0wns." Whether this claim turns out to be truthful or not, what led to the breach in the first place? Reader Dr La points to an interim report commissioned by the Dutch government (PDF), according to which
"a) No antivirus software was present on Diginotar's servers; b) 'the most critical servers' had malicious software infections; c) The software installed on the public web servers was outdated and not patched; and d) all servers were accessible by one user/password combination, which was 'not very strong and could easily be brute-forced.'"
Yep. Our whole security system is exactly as strong as the weakest link.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Clearly they were using voting machines for web servers. That explains everything. Oblig: http://xkcd.com/463/
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
on Diginotar's servers
Is this uncommon? Do most (sane) administrators run anti-virus on each of their servers?
We need to stop giving these "Hackers" such press. Oh they broke into a insecure system. They must be real Computer Geniuses. There should be far more press about the state of the hacked sites security, and less on those actual hackers. The hackers are just some dumb kids who did some quick searching around and got some silly tools. The real story is that such organizations have such a poor security.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How DOES one become a trusted CA? Shouldn't there at least be some sort of procedure to check that they can be trusted?
It all made sense to me, and it's useful to know that SSL is less than trustworthy right now.
By the way - you spelled blatantly wrong while saying things were wrong. Ho ho ho.
which is totally what she said
According to the hacker's Pastebin message, one of the other CA's he's 0wned was GlobalSign, a fairly major CA for which it won't be so easy to pull the root certificate as it was for Diginotar. He's also claiming responsibility for the StartSSL breach that occurred a month or two back. GlobalSign have reportedly gone into panic mode. It also includes other details like:
I got SYSTEM privilage in fully patched and up-to-date system, how I bypassed their nCipher NetHSM, their hardware keys, their RSA certificate manager, their 6th layer internal "CERT NETWORK"
as well as their domain admin password Pr0d@dm1n (you can see why Dignotar passed their security audit, they didn't use password1).
How does an organization that works with moderately complex technology, where security is of the utmost importance, go down such a dark alley so many others have treaded before with foreseeable and dreadful consequences? Point-haired bosses? perhaps appointed by politicians? Too good a business to think about the pillars? Seriously, did they never ever have anyone raise the alarm? What happened if someone did?
May we assume by this finding in the Dutch report that the servers were not running any form of Unix or Linux? In any case I do not see how an antivirus program is going to stop an intrusion.
I used to chuckle when our local credit-card processing system would ask me to ensure that my web server had an up to date antivirus package installed. Rather than out right lie, I explained to them that my web server ran Linux and that they don't run antivirus software, but are kept patched and secured with proper firewall rules and proxy servers, and protected by the IDS at the border of the DMZ.
Anyway, not even sure why they mentioned antivirus software at all. The problem was more systemic. Their entire system did not seem to be built with security in mind. Where was the IDS? Why did the public-facing servers have the CA private certificates on them at all?
Because, if you understood anything about PKI, you'd know that all major browsers would have trusted these certificates by default for over a month for sites such as Google, Windows Update and a myriad other popular sites.
And still we don't know what else may have slipped through the net and got certified. The hack was hardly social engineering either - they brute-force cracked Windows domain passwords after gaining entry through compromised web-based servers.
Yes, the CA is an idiot (first, they were running Windows servers in the same domain for certificate generation and day-to-day management, for God's sake!), and they should have noticed... but to the end-user and even associated techies (like the entire Dutch government IT who were trusting these certificates) it's big news.
Next time you go on Google, be thankful your browser has been checking OSCP revocations and hope that you DIDN'T visit Google in the time before the revocations occurred (several weeks).
Hell, if he really hacked it, he'd have signed the message with DigiNotar's key. He's the only person in this whole debaucle I'd trust to actually have a clue as to how to really use their certificates.
John
EPIC FAIL
C|N>K
3.2
Compromised CAs
The attacker(s) had acquired the domain administrator rights. Because all CA servers were members of the same Windows domain, the attacker had administrative access to all of them. Due to the limited time of the ongoing investigation we were unable to determine whether all CA servers were used by the attacker(s). Evidence was found that the following CAs were misused by the attacker(s):-
DigiNotar Cyber CA-
DigiNotar Extended Validation CA-
DigiNotar Public CA - G2-
DigiNotar Public CA 2025-
Koninklijke Notariele Beroepsorganisatie CA-
Stichting TTP Infos CAThe security of the following CAs was compromised, but no evidence of misuse was found (this list is incomplete):-
Algemene Relatie Services System CA-
CCV CA-
DigiNotar PKIoverheid CA Organisatie - G2-
DigiNotar PKIoverheid CA Overheid en Bedrijven-
DigiNotar Qualified CA-
DigiNotar Root CA-
DigiNotar Root CA Administrative CA-
DigiNotar Root CA G2-
DigiNotar Root CA System CA-
DigiNotar Services 1024 CA-
DigiNotar Services CA-
EASEE-gas CA-
Hypotrust CA-
MinIenM Autonome Apparaten CA - G2-
MinIenM Organisatie CA - G2-
Ministerie van Justitie JEP1 CA-
Nederlandse Orde van Advocaten - Dutch Bar Association-
Orde van Advocaten SubCA Administrative CA-
Orde van Advocaten SubCA System CA-
Renault Nissan Nederland CA-
SNG CA-
TenneT CA 2011-
TRIAL DigiNotar PKIoverheid Organisatie TEST CA - G2-
TU Delft CA
For some of these CAs extra security measures were in place (like the CCV CA). This makes it moreunlikely they were misused.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I say that as a dutchman. I'm ashamed to be from the same country as these bozos.
Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
The hacker is Ichsun again, better known as "skill of 1000 hackers."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Self-signed certs, distributed verification system. Try it out now:
http://www.networknotary.org/firefox.html
http://www.convergence.io/
Have you been living in a cave?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
First, here is the actual PDF instead of some web-based PDF viewer surrounded by dubious ads.
The most damning statement from the report (in my opinion) didn't make the summary: "The separation of critical components was not functioning or was not in place. We have strong indications that the CA-servers, although physically very securely placed in a tempest proof environment, were accessible over the network from the management LAN."
I have worked at company that generated encryption keys and they did so on a PC in a locked rack in a locked room with no network connection; such an approach would have prevented this attack.
This fragment from the timeline is also interesting:
19-Jun-2011 Incident detected by DigiNotar by daily audit procedure
02-Jul-2011 First attempt creating a rogue certificate
10-Jul-2011 The first succeeded rogue certificate (*.Google.com)
So an incident was detected three weeks before the first rogue cert was issued.
Here are the messages from ComodoHacker on pastebin:
http://pastebin.com/u/ComodoHacker
He published a cert for Mozilla in March.
a) No antivirus software was present on Diginotar's servers;
As per the XKCD, if this is a problem, you're already doing it wrong. Antivirus software won't save you against sophisticated attacks, only unsophisticated ones. CAs need to be safer than that.
b) 'the most critical servers' had malicious software infections;
Probably because of (c).
c) The software installed on the public web servers was outdated and not patched;
Seriously, everyone who runs a business should know not to do this.
and d) all servers were accessible by one user/password combination, which was 'not very strong and could easily be brute-forced.
Well, that's just stupid.
So (c) and (d) are the real problems, and they're pretty obviously problems.
This shouldn't have been listed; it should be considered a good thing. However, considering the rest of the things they did, I doubt they actually knew it was a good idea.
Antivirus software on a production server should be the exception, not the norm; it's just one more attack vector. In the end, it's just a blacklist pattern matcher. If the exploit isn't on the list, it goes right in the front door---and it can't watch all the "doors" either. The AV companies have some really good marketing going on if the FUD has the security experts this paranoid.
The ssh host key for a server is generated automatically by the ssh daemon the first time it runs.
The first time a user connects to that server, they get a fingerprint they can check, and a "This is the first time you've connected to this host, are you sure it's the right one?". Subsequent connections are silent, unless the host key changes. You get a big, scary message if a host you've allowed in the past changes it's key. (As this signals a potential MITM attack.)
SSL certs should be handled the same way by the browser. If you tell the browser you trust CAs, then a new certificate can be automatically approved. Self-signed certs (or all certs if you opt to not trust CAs) get a quiet "Oh, this is a new server. No big deal. Are you sure it's legit?" message. If any cert changes before its expiry date, shout dire warnings. (If a cert changes, but the stored fingerprint has an expiry date that is passed, tell the user in a non-threatening way that they need to be sure of their destination.)
In nearly all cases, the question of who made a certificate is not of any real use to the end-user. All they need to know is that the server they connected to yesterday (their bank, Facebook, GMail, or whoever) is the same server they tried to connect to yesterday.
It's the same as equivalent resistance of resistors in parallel, slightly weaker than the weakest link.
It's not really likely that this person did the 'hacking' on his own. The certificates somehow found their way into the Iranian backbone networks and I do no believe that they got there by the actions of one person, nor do I believe that they could get there without the backing of the Iranian government (or some cabal within it). The message on pastebin is clearly formatted to make some people believe in a ' lonely superhacker', but I am not buying that line. For one the first sentence ends on 'us'.
"High assurance" now just means "not p0wned, yet".
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
I really am not concerned with MITM attacks on my own LAN, and in the VPN network.
I agree with Anonymous Coward: start your own private certificate authority and install its root certificate on PCs on your LAN and PCs that connect to your VPN.
If I connect to a site with a SS cert, I get a warning about it, and whitelist that cert. If I come back some other time, and there is a new self signed cert, I get the warning again.
And if there was already a man in the middle on the first day you visited the site, you're screwed. There is the Perspectives project, which uses network route diversity to detect a man in the middle, but it doesn't work so well if the man in the middle is situated between the server with the self-signed cert and its upstream Internet connection, such as a server behind a country's firewall.
The admin's point of view should be that there will always be barbarians at the gates, it's his job to keep them out. In this case the admin instead put up a big bright neon welcome sign. It is this gross negligence which so over shadows the hacker's criminal activities that causes outrage here. This is part of the way we self police, or at least educate. In the non-tech inclined world the perceived level of responsibility will be switched.
Sig is on vacation
Because "the hacker" is inevitable. Period.
If you run into the center lane of a 70mph freeway and get hit by a truck, you do NOT blame the truck. If you jump off a building and hit the ground, you do NOT blame the ground. They are always there, and their existence must be expected.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
But how do you know whether the first, second, third, fourth, Xth CA signed cert you got is a good one?
;) ).
What if the CA signed cert you got was actually created by the hacker? By default most browsers won't warn you, as long as the cert is signed by ANY of the dozens of CAs accepted by your browser[1] (I personally use Certificate Patrol so I am more likely to be warned in such situations - cert changed CA and changed way before expiry).
Seems a worse situation than the self-signed cert - where you can choose not to do any security sensitive stuff till you confirm that the self-signed cert doesn't change over time and over different ISP connections (and your email to the bank gets an appropriate response). If the hacker has MITM'ed the bank's internet connection and nobody (including the bank and their customers) has noticed even after a few days or a week, then it might not make a big difference - the hacker probably has pwned the bank in other ways.
Even with a CA signed cert I still had to email my bank to confirm it, because the cert changed from a single host cert to a multiple host cert for multiple countries, signed by a different CA (remember: most browsers by default would not warn you in such a situation). Are you so confident that it would still be OK to login and do transactions in that situation?
So what's the big difference in security? If you talk about "normal users" there's no difference. Normal users can get pwned just because the hacker gives the bank the user's mother's maiden name as the "security answer" or other corporate idiocy. Or they'll get pwned because they got phished. Or they'll get pwned because they won't know that the valid CA signed cert is actually invalid.
If you talk about people who actually care and know about security, there is no real difference either - because they will still have to do extra checks.
[1] Firefox recognizes many dozens of CAs. Windows/IE recognizes any CA that has their cert signed by Microsoft or other appropriate installed CA, so even if the CA cert isn't listed at first, it will automatically get added (try deleting a CA root cert and watch it get readded when you visit their site using IE via https). Google Chrome on Windows by default recognizes any CA that IE recognizes (good luck
Not entirely true - just read all the posts - still there seems to be a consensus that an organisation that is charged with ensuring security has certain responsibility and while we know it is impossible to guarantee that such things never happen you could do something at least and the admins in this authority did not do much which means they are at least partially to blame.
Learning fingerprints from email or IM conversations isn't guaranteed to be safe.
Nothing is guaranteed to be safe under this system of things. But typically, e-mail, IM, microblog, and the SSH connection itself will follow different network paths, and a man in the middle is unlikely to have compromised all at the same time. This is the principle of route diversity, the same thing the Perspectives add-on uses to check HTTPS certificates against notaries spread throughout the Internet.
It seems to me that by using multiple signatories, you are approaching a distributed model. I think it would be worthwhile to put some thought into a system that would take this to the limit: Allow anyone and everyone to become a source of trust according to the configurations of anyone and everyone else; why should it be the case that other people get to decide for me what what the core of my web of trust looks like? I don't trust Diginotar or any other weirdly named Web 2.0 company; I trust my fanatical, principled, OSS friends.
My comments were wrong. You (and other posters) have a good point. Specifically Ledow, and one random anonymous coward. However, I do disagree with the latter on the idea that people wouldn't have been clicking OK on random certificates: People are sheep, and, well, they DO.
Correct wordage is 'pwn'.
Read radical news here
I love this comment from Mozilla's Nelson Bolyard in that thread:
Does/Did SONY own Diginotar?
I had missed it (removed manually) but it looks like MS is doing the responsible thing: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/2607712.mspx
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Sky hasn't fallen. Yet. I suspect that I'll be trimming the list of trusted CAs on my own machine very drastically before I next connect it to the web.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Among these are [fraudulent] certificates for *.*.com and *.*.org, which would allow someone in possession of the certificates to perform man-in-the-middle attacks for almost any site with a .com or .org domain—a far wider problem than initially assumed. The Tor Project has also discovered some unusual text in one of the certificates. It contains a number of phrases written in Farsi, which translate as "great cracker," "I will crack all encryption," and "I hate/break your head." This alludes to ComodoHacker's statement about the Comodo hack, in which he claimed to be able to break strong encryption.
There's also increasing evidence that the certificates were used widely within Iran. Trend Micro's Smart Protection Network collects many kinds of data, including domain name lookups. Over the past few weeks, the number of Iranian systems looking up DigiNotar's validation.diginotar.nl domain was far higher than normal, until it abruptly dropped on August 30th. This activity implies that with large numbers of Iranian machines were performing revocation checks on the bogus DigiNotar certificates during July and August. The abrupt stop in turn implies that traffic to validation.diginotar.nl has now been blocked within Iran.
This suggests that the number of man-in-the-middle attacks performed against Iranians was substantial, and that the attacks occurred over many weeks, making secure communication insecure for all those within Iran. After the Comodo hack, ComodoHacker made clear that he was deliberately acting to thwart anti-government dissidents within Iran. In spite of his criticism of the Dutch, the true target remains the Iranian people.
Sounds like...
1. no security team presence, probably 1 guy who realized the overwhelming of his situation and just gave up and only shows up to work to collect $. Textbook start of a hacking story.
2. No security audits... what internet based company ever needs those... I've never known a security professional who leaves critical malware/spyware on a machine after they are finished, the malware's stealthy, but NOT that stealthy.
3. Poor corporate leadership... nobody was concerned about it, just raking in the $ and the christmas bonus.
Ladies and gentlemen I present you with every single IT shop that is not government or forture 500 based.
The thing is... IT cost money, usually a lot, there is no visible ROI, IT people are not sales people, and typically don't pitch system enhancements cause they'd rather ask for a raise (basic human nature). If you were the CEO, it's a seemingly easy choice, until your on the news for the wrong reasons and goodbye PR. Still most CEOs skate on air when it comes to securing their sh*t.