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Ask Hacker and Security Gadfly Moxie Marlinspike
As a security researcher, Moxie Marlinspike has played a big role in explaining what can go wrong in using Certificate Authorities to authenticate SSL traffic, an issue that's been top of mind this year thanks to compromised and faked certificates. On that front, he's lately come up with a system designed to circumvent CAs entirely, which means bypassing compromised (or invidious) authorities, rather than trying to patch the CA system.
Another line of research, but not the only one, is mobile security and privacy; his Whisper Monitor Android firewall, released earlier this year, gives Android users notifications (and fine-grained permissions) when apps — including location-tracking or malware apps — want to make outbound connections. Possibly related: Moxie can also speak first-hand about what new border-search policies mean for travelers, having had his laptop and phones seized on returning to the U.S. from a trip. (And by the way, he's also an accomplished sailor and film-maker.) Moxie's agreed to answer your questions. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, be kind of rewind^wask don't ask unrelated questions in the same post.
And also, how do you feel about hemlock?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I really like the idea behind WhisperCore. The problem, as I see it, is that it's only available for two devices, and the Android source is updated regularly, making it difficult to keep WhisperCore up to date with the latest version of Android. Also, there are a wide variety of existing ROMs, each sporting its own array of features, but WhisperCore is the only one focusing on full-device encryption and a quality firewall interface. Given that security is becoming more critical on mobile devices, I would love to see WhisperCore's functionality integrated into every ROM. Have you given any consideration to integrating the WhisperCore project into an existing community such as CyanogenMod, or opening the source to build a community around WhisperCore? It would definitely help with making it available on more devices.
Does Whisper Monitor stop CarrierIQ as well?
As a followup to my previous question, have you considered releasing Whisper Monitor as a standalone app for rooted devices, rather than integrating it exclusively with WhisperCore?
From this interview:
Heather Brooke: Maybe if you could just tell me what you do. Have you created this name as well?
Moxie Marlinspike: No that’s my name. It’s my really real name.
H: Were you born with it?
M: I wasn’t born with it but it is a real name.
H: So you changed your born name to this one.
M: For all intents and purposes this is my real name.
I don't think he wants anyone to know his birth name.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Moxie, please oh please add the ability to use wildcards for a range of IPs and subdomains. The tedium of creating rules ad nauseum for certain CDNs outweighs the utility of the firewall itself. This is a major usability issue. Please look into it. Thanks.
Why is it that prominent security researchers have names like Moxie, Trevor and Tavis and not Bob, Alice or Walter?
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
From your Web site it looks like you've worn a number of hats. How do you mainly earn your living -- by penetration testing, developing software as a contractor, or what? Or do you have a day job? (I won't ask where). Do you have any advice for software engineers seeking an independent career?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Most secure sites we normally depend on require you to establish an account. Rather than sending our passwords in the "clear" over SSL as everyone is foolishly doing today couldn't part of this problem be solved using trust previously established between you and the site in the form of mutually authenticated credentials?
The best case example would be an online banking site first requiring you to physically come into the office with proper ID. There would no longer be any need for this bank to need to trust or use any third party.
TLS-SRP RFCs have already been written, SSL stacks used by all popular browsers already patched with support... obviously this does not fully eliminate the need for trusted third parties.
For traveling in and out of the USA is using UPS or some other shipping a good idea for moving your laptop to your destination?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
True names can be dangerous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names
As a security researcher myself - albeit an unknown one - I find myself constantly looking around at the state of security in our always-online world. To say the least, striving for a goal of security where nothing is ever actually secure is disheartening, something akin to a donkey chasing an inedible plastic carrot.
While the cat and mouse games between genuine rob-your-grandmother criminals and (hopefully) 'honorable' types continue today, is there really any hope that this situation won't eventually just escalate into a forced-at-birth Orwellian nightmare?
PGP provides a model for partial trust in a public key based on the trust placed in signers of that key. I think a similar model would work much better for SSL certificates than either the current forest of fully trusted root CAs or projects like Convergence because it would allow long term trust in entities instead of merely the ephemeral keys used for SSL connections while also providing offline security and the ability to separate the keys used for privacy and identification.
If I wanted to validate the hypothetically secure https://slashdot.org/ I would be happy seeing an SSL certificate signed by Geeknet's PGP key (assuming they cared enough to be in the strong set), but even happier if it was also signed by a couple certificate authorities and some other folks in the strong set. I would assign partial trust to each of the certificate authorities' root certificates and use PGP to measure the partial trust of other signatures and set a threshold for the security of any SSL site, perhaps requiring "full trust" for automatic acceptance of an SSL certificate, a warning for marginal trust, and a bigger warning for anything less.
One of the primary advantages is separation of privacy and identification; the private key for identifying an entity would only be used to sign SSL certificates, reducing the likelihood of an attacker compromising an identity certificate. Notaries, as in Convergence, would simply be entities who sign a large number of SSL certificates after verifying the owner's identity through the existing trust network. The advantage for notaries is that they would not need to keep their private keys online and would only serve signatures. SSL sites could also just include the signatures in the initial SSL/TLS exchange, shifting bandwidth costs to the entities that benefit from the signatures. Site owners could also pre-distribute new SSL keys to certificate authorities and notaries to obtain signatures similar to the way that the existing PKI works, without relying on projects like Convergence to correctly identify a legitimate key change through heuristics.
The biggest advantage is a much more robust framework for trusting the privacy and identify of web sites. The likelihood of obtaining fraudulent SSL certificates signed by enough entities to achieve full trust is much lower than the likelihood of compromising a single fully trusted root CA or tricking a Convergence-style network into trusting a fraudulent SSL certificate by DNS poisoning or other methods.
Do you think this is a workable and, if so, good idea?
In addition to being a very sharp security researcher, you seem to have a strong interest in issues of social and political control.
What emerging security trends do you see as being most important or helpful for authoritarians (at home and abroad)?
What security trends are most important for anti-establishment movements?
There is a project called Monkeysphere which have been working on doing this and much more with PGP for a while. They support SSL certificates in the browser (with some difficulty) and SSH host keys authentication, and generally aim to bridge the PGP web of trust with other tools to decentralize the work of certification authorities.
How does Convergence compare with Monkeysphere? Why didn't you collaborate with the Monkeysphere project instead of starting your own?
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction