Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Revoking Code Signing Certificate Used To Sign Malware
wiredmikey writes "Adobe said Thursday it will be revoking a code signing certificate next week after discovering two pieces of malware that had been digitally signed with Adobe's credentials.
Two malicious utilities, pwdump7 v7.1 and myGeeksmail.dll, both came from the same source and were signed with valid Adobe digital certificates, Adobe's Brad Arkin said.
Adobe plans to revoke the impacted certificate on Oct. 4. After initial investigation, the company identified a compromised build server which had been used to access the code signing infrastructure, Brad Arkin wrote in a blog post. The build server did not have rights to any public key infrastructure functions other than the ability to issue requests to the signing service and did not have access to any Adobe products such as Flash Player, Adobe Reader, Shockwave Player, or Adobe AIR, Arkin said.
According to Adobe, most customers won't notice anything out of the ordinary during the certificate revocation process, but some IT administrators may have to take some actions in response."
did not have access to any Adobe products such as Flash Player, Adobe Reader
Phew, good thing that Flash Player and Acrobat Reader are still secure.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
" According to Adobe, most customers won't notice anything out of the ordinary during the certificate revocation process, but some IT administrators may have to take some actions in response."
Considering the fact that the malware associated with the use misuse of Adobe certs is either .exe or .dll binaries my guess is that the admins that will be most plagued by users not having access to some things all of a sudden will be mostly administering small Windows servers.
I would guess that a large number of small businesses that run some form of win server will have kittens if they have implemented the lax user security policies that most MS certified pimple faced admins use by default.
It's why just about everyone has a copy of Photoshop.
People have been shot for less than this.
Will we do when malware gets "legitimate" signatures for the new and secure "secure boot" we will have in all PC's from now on. I don't think such malware will be so easily removed, or even detected. As things stand, any legitamate use of UEFI's secure boot feature, even if one would be fool enough to believe in their "it improves security" falacy is bogus - and it will be bad(tm) when the root-kit, hyper-visor-level signed malware starts to strike the PC World.
-><- no
If signing certificates for code do not even get basic certificate protection (standard infrastructure, but offline, and signing machine does nothing else but sign builds), then code signatures become not only worthless, they get negative worth, because they imply security where there is none.
These people seem to still not have understood the basics of secure IT.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Our investigation to date HAS SHOWN NO EVIDENCE that any other sensitive information"
A non-denial-denial there. Sloppy to see the PCs that code sign computers are all on the corporate network! A single employee could have done the same a lot easier if their internal security is so bad.
Perhaps they should GET THEIR SHIT TOGETHER at Adobe HQ?? Because I am so sick of their updates that seem to bring more security holes than they fix each time. Their endless broken PDF updates to fix security problems. Their inability to get their shit together with Android, did they even check with their customers before deciding to cancel it?
It all smacks of a few incompetent programmers, and a few lazy managers.
If I found that one of my PGP keys were compromised, I would revoke it in less than 5 minutes. Why does it take a week to revoke a code-signing certificate? How much more damage might occur in that week?
Obviously, Adobe has a big mess to clean up. But here's a question -- for those of you who are systems guys or work with them -- how well do IT people really understand PKI and how it relates to security? I think big messes like this could be minimized if this topic were better understood.
In my experience doing systems integration work, I take in lots of code from developers who know just barely enough about this to get their builds signed, and work with other systems guys who know just barely enough to get the web server to run the code without throwing up error messages in the browser. I've had to learn a fair amount about this topic because I've been called in to fix more than one mess. Nothing like this level, but still bad. (We get called in when the other people in our fairly large organization can't figure something out.)
The problem is that while the theory is pretty intuitive, practice is spotty, error-prone and differs radically between OS vendor and even OS version. On top of that, some applications have their own layer of certificate security on top of the base OS one, further leading to confusion. And, it's a strange topic because it's admittedly hard to understand something like "I trust this application because some magic algorithm controlled by the data in this 1K file was passed over the executable. And I trust that 1K file because it links to a chain is similar files all the way up to VeriSign, GoDaddy, etc."
Even making sure admins of small organizations know things like "When you generate your org's root certificates and private keys, shut off the machine, bury it in concrete and never let it near a network connection again!" would help avoid some of the worst problems. Didn't one of the global root certificate authorities get compromised last year? How should that have even been possible? Just stuff like, "By the way, it's a really bad thing if someone else can digitally sign software on your behalf, and you need to stop it right away if you notice it." might spur some systems guys and developers to do something.
Two pieces of malware signed with Adobe keys, better known under their common names "Flash Player" and "Adobe Reader".
Also known in antivirus circles as W32/Flash and W32/AdobeReader.
Is it going to fuck up my existing apps?
Is it going to have to be debugged after it fucks up?
Is the patch going to be a single exe file, or will we need to dig into the certificates, the registry, the directories, the files, the reboots and the lack of any confirmation anything at all has been fixed.
HTML5 instead of Flash
evince instead of Acrobat Reader
Gimp instead of Photoshop
Then there are Scribus, SVG, Inkscape and lots more.
They only care about $$. Security is just a nuisance. And a Cost Center.
..should never do the things you described. The average drone should not write software. Neither should he or she administer computers.
It is a fallacy to think that drones can do all that. All they do is to create safes without locks, buildings without doors and nuclear weapons which go off randomly.
When IT was done by professionals in the "data center" they knew what they did and most of them had a proper education. Nowadays droners who also want to become managers before they ever held a real job with any real proficiency. So they waste their time with all sorts of bullshit (e.g. learning how to make juicy powerpoint presentations) and then they also do some programming and fumble with systems design.
Take away their PCs and give them a mainframe terminal. Hire experts to do hard work in the data center. Forget the idea that all sorts of amateurs "can do software". It is about as rational as saying "amateurs can design rocket motors".
..but probably not the APIs. After all, the crypto keys for protecting the code is affected, not the code itself.
Maybe you should educate yourself as to how this all works. You could start by creating your own GPG cert and then sign your own executables with it. And no, there are no funny GUIs with dancing bunnies available for that. You need to spend serious time reading and experimenting. No instant gratification.
Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography is also a good starting point to get a conceptual understanding.
Dufu
Adobe Management has been failing their clients for years.
Nobody should be using anything from this company unless you make money with it. Period.
Further, anyone currently useing anything from Adobe should be actively seeking alternatives.
Microsoft management saw similar issues with their products around the same time that Adobe management knew about the security flaws in all their programs. Microsoft revamped how they develop code and are doing much more than just "trying to do better." MS had/has a plan.
Adobe management doesn't seem to have a plan. They won't make the hard choices to revamp their products with security as a top goal. Flash should have been completely revamps - it is crap code, full of security issues. Closing 10% would break backwards compatibility, so Adobe won't do it. Think of all those mom-pop tiny web stores with flash that we all hate. All of those would need to be redone.
Adobe management - I plead that you'll do the right things. Fix your development processes. Lock down your certificate management. You know you should. Just do it already.
Adobe Flash player is one of the most exploited programs on the internet, so this doesn't really seem to be much of a surprise that their other security infrastructure is lacking.
Have you ever thought that there are enterprises running security software on their system, which can have all the programs blocked if the certificate is found to be revoked? The spare days are to let the customers update to the new versions.
There is a huge difference between a mail signed with PGP and a software run on 5000 desktops in a big corporation.