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OpenSSL To Undergo Security Audit, Gets Cash For 2 Developers
Trailrunner7 (1100399) writes "Scarcely a month after announcing the formation of a group designed to help fund open source projects, the Core Infrastructure Initiative has decided to provide the OpenSSL Project with enough money to hire two full-time developers and also will fund an audit of OpenSSL by the Open Crypto Audit Project. The CII is backed by a who's who of tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, the Linux Foundation, Facebook and Amazon, and the group added a number of new members this week, as well. Adobe, Bloomberg, HP Huawei and Salesforce.com have joined the CII and will provide financial backing. Now, the OCAP team, which includes Johns Hopkins professor and cryptographer Matthew Green, will have the money to fund an audit of OpenSSL, as well. OpenSSL took a major hit earlier this year with the revelation of the Heartbleed vulnerability, which sent the Internet into a panic, as the software runs on more than 60 percent of SSL-protected sites."
The whole security model is broken. How many CAs does your browser come with these days? Do you even know? How do you know they haven't already turned over their CA signing keys to 7 different governments?
There's no way to "fix" openssl. The entire thing is predicated on a false premise.
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This can only be a good thing, right?
The issue that I find, is that OpenSSL is the only Open Source Player out there.
Much like File Systems, we really should have at least a few popular choices, which are interchangeable. So if there is a security problem with one we can switch to an other one.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
While I applaud the efforts and support I do hope that the work of others will not be ignored. The audit is great news, but I do hope the existing and new developers will look to LibreSSL for code updates, ideas and their own audit results. If we can get a nice bidirectional and completely cooperative flow between the two projects than hopefully the final result will be a highly secured, audited product that we can all use.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
The comments from the folks who started LibreSSL at a meeting of the Calgary Unix Users Group the other night were beyond scathing. Bob Beck's first slide shows Laura Dern in Jurassic Park, up to her elbows in stegasaurus dung, as a metaphor for what the first skim of the code felt like. It's a hopelessly overpatched mess of spaghetti code and #IFNDEF mazes that nobody can really maintain. Their fork has already tossed out tens of thousands of lines of code and started again. (Another slide shows the line from Aliens: "Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure").
If not a from-scratch rewrite, think of a home reno where you have to strip it to the frame and put up new drywalls.
And this situation was allowed to grow by the current bunch that manage OpenSSL; they're only doing this at all because one of the hundreds of time-bombs in the code finally went off, and anybody who's looked it knows how many hundreds more there are. For shame.
There's a link to the slides from the libressl.org site, which is very minimal, as they say "We're too busy deleting code to make web pages".
It was just a very sobering presentation. To think we let so much depend on a pile of cruft.
http://www.libressl.org/
seriously pumping openssl full of cash at this point is like buying new deck chairs for the titanic.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Two developers added to an already crummy project? Ha! I'll send my money to the OpenBSD project, instead. OpenSSH and pf are just two examples of how they got the job done when outside projects fail to deliver. They'll do the same with LibreSSL, and in a year most everybody will have switched.
Send the OpenBSD project some money: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/
Two developers for a core piece of software used by nearly the entire network industry. Hooray!! (slow sarcastic clap)
That's chump change for the big organizations involved. That's less than chump change. It wouldn't even catch the eye of brain dead bottom line accountant. It's probably tax deductible too.
Something needs to change.
Given the fact that projects like this have a tendency to shut down in the middle of security audits, it must be curtains for OpenSSL. Just look at what happened to TrueCrypt!
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pst, it's a joke
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Write failed: Broken pipe
This is not one big mistake. It's a series of inept decisions about maintainability and auditability that finally culminated in "one big mistake". (Which, btw, probably cost on the order of at least 10M$ in wasted time.)
The problem was not so much the big mistake itself, but the culture and attitude that lead to it.
Why give these guys money? Start afresh like the BSD guys are doing. I suspect they don't want to lose their juicy consulting gigs.
Question: Why spend money and resources on OpenSSL when you can spend it on LibreSSL?
Question: Is OpenSSL currently useful for intelligence agencies?
Question: Can the same be said for LibreSSL when it is done?
the fact that these companies haven't even addresses the other MASSIVE flaw with openssl (which the OpenBSD team has dealt with already) shows they have no grasp of the issues
...Humans make mistakes. Clever people make just as many mistakes....
You left out the part about clever people not continuing to make the same mistakes over and over.
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The problem with OpenSSL is not that mistakes were made.
The problem is that mistakes were made and the developers did not learn from those mistakes, did not seem to care about fixing those mistakes, and did not care about preventing similar mistakes from recurring.
Humans make mistakes. Clever people make just as many mistakes. Occasionally they make huge, multiple-death causing mistakes
That's not what happened here. This was making a mistake, then instead of addressing it, building someone on top of it, and making a mistake in that, and then rather than addressing it, and so on ad infinitum.
One big mistake is not a reason to scorch and salt the earth.
Good thing that's not what is happening.
Good thing you didn't log in, you wouldn't want that kind of bullshit associated with a name.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I recently had reason to look at the hashing code. It's all written in f**ing macros.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I hope they don't shut the project down... abruptly and without warning...
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
The system described in the article that AC's comment cites sounds like Namecoin. Like a full Bitcoin client, a full Namecoin client would be impractical on a mobile phone. But like Bitcoin with online wallets, Namecoin would allow third parties to run resolvers. So ideally, you could point your mobile browser to a resolver running on the VPS of someone you trust.
> ... One big mistake is not a reason to scorch and salt the earth.
Listen, lad. I've built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. All the kings said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.
An' that's what your gonna get, lad -- the strongest castle in these islands.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Whoever is hired to fix OpenSSL will instantly receive an NSL to STFU and put in an NSA backdoor.
Do you follow the commit feed and feel like you're reading the DailyWTF? If no, then fuck off. I've seen them fix things that I wouldn't imagine doing even when I was still a student...
This is so typical of corporate clueless management. You have some expert developers with really good track records who have looked at the OpenSSL code and declared it unfit to live. They are already doing the right thing and rewriting it (LibreSSL). The clueless mgmt comes along and commits resources to "Exactly The Wrong Thing" despite having enough information available to them to make a good decision.
Are there any developers out there who have not experienced this same situation? We all know this will guarantee a crappy product (OpenSSL).
OpenSSL is the shiniest meat bicycle. Are you the conductor of the poop train? It's time to strip the flesh and salt the wounds.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
FYI: LibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that started over a month ago.
http://www.libressl.org/ [libressl.org]
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
A virtual machine runs a PC operating system of the customer's choice in a sandbox, and the server provides services from inside that sandbox through an Internet connection. Are there documented cases of VPS operators injecting malware into such a sandbox?
The problem is that mistakes were made and the developers did not learn from those mistakes, did not seem to care about fixing those mistakes, and did not care about preventing similar mistakes from recurring.
To play Devil's advocate (or rather, advocate of the developers): if they were a properly resources software-development team, they might have been better able to pay off the technical-debt accumulating in the codebase. Hopefully this injection of resources will change things for the better. (The LibreSSL crew seem to be making good progress on the technical debt front, also.)
Meanwhile, in Git's crypto code.
(Linked from this blog entry.)
By writing it in macros the code is moderately human-readable, while giving the performance benefits of actually being written in assembly. By doing it that way the compiler also has the opportunity to optimize the assembly somewhat.
So don't bring in cryptographers. Heartbleed was a bonehead entry level programming error based on some arguably foolish decision about performance improvements. Read the code cleanup comments at libressl.org.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I saw those slides. There were 17 levels of #ifdefs in the code. Every ifdef is a binary switch, which means 2^17 different iterations of source code.(!!!!!) That's 131072 different compiles (!!!!!!).
So, lets pretend that a config/make sequence just needs 10 minutes (unlikely, they have an oddball config script that isn't like autoconf). To hit 17 levels of ifdef, you'd need approx 910 computer-days just to do all the compiles. Do you think they tested this matrix?
I hate to beat up on a bunch of people who did hard work for free, but they really did a bad job on a lot of things.
That list of funders has a bunch of companies that are already known to be on their second gallon of NSA Koolaid.
Can you say _NSAKEY?
Program it here in the USA if you must, but audit it and release it outside the USA.
I saw those slides. There were 17 levels of #ifdefs in the code.
Wouldn't surprise me if people commenting on hyperbole have never actually seen the source code to OpenSSL or any other open source library. They are all universally littered with ifdefs and compatibility layers from the dawn of civilization with entire suites of meta-programs (e.g. autotools) devoted to making it all work.
When managed properly these things are a non-issue.
More than that I think this is a matter of not having the resources to deal with the codebase because OpenSSL just isn't all that sexy and man hours aren't just being thrown at that project. Much of the code that LibreSSL is removing was already tagged for removal but the man hours weren't there to take it out and throughly test the results. Now that all hell has broken loose more man hours are being thrown at it. Where were these awesome LibreSSL folks before the blowup? I'm sure plenty of people were aware that the code was a mess but now there is sufficient political capitol to get people moving to fix it.
Its the same problem that closed shops have... nobody want's to prioritize technical debt and code trimming especially when they are heavily resource constrained.
Luckily now that all hell has broken loose resources are being allocated and money is even flowing into the project.... hopefully this is good news but my guess is the resources dry up before the job is done and we end up with something that still has a lot of hidden problem and new ones will be layered on top of that.... this is pretty much how we roll in the world of software.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
the problem being that how there are 2 sets of resources doing the same thing.... a shame really since neither one will probably be fully successful at paying down all the technical debt.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
LibreSSL isn't close enough to an American-agenda (NSA). America needs to pursue insecure OpenSSL to find new levels of incompetence.
So YOU'RE the guy --who is running Big-Endian AMD64 !! (*cvs)
Most of what they are ripping out is archaic, un-realistic, or poor implementations platforms. You could argue that hacked-support for too many platforms is part of the reason openssl is in the position its in today - if you can't do it right (or don't have the resources to), don't do it. Name a platform other than VMS, they've ripped out and that you need : )
The professional snooping folks will sure as hell lean on the likes of HP to achieve exactly what you fear.
http://www.libressl.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl
Look at how the gobbermint did it with that company Crypto AG in supposedly neutral cheese-with-holes country. Now, apply some abstraction to the thing at hand. And, their long arm certainly reaches into ANY teasipper territory.
So, roll you own one. Nobody mandated you can only use SSL/TLS. Actually, the cheese-holers allegedly still use pigeons in their martian services. You have to assume they know why.
I have an answer to anyone who comes later to look at the code and says, "WTF??" - "Historical reasons!" This covers the seven different hacks that resulted from the hardware changing, the requirements being uprooted and new ones being grafted on, bad design decisions, and 14 years of mods to handle various idiosyncracies of different machines and OS that the dang code had to run on in those 14 years.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I know the CII wants to backstop OpenSSL, but from the first, second, third and post ternary reports of the state of the code, the quality of the code is crap. Take what is there, clean it up and maintain it enough to do a clean sheet replacement. A few years ago the GNU C compiler (gcc) was becoming unmaintainable. A lot of the Linux Kernel developers strongly suggested not compiling with it, but rather with egcs (1997). In 1999, egcs became the 'new official' version of gcc. Too many #IFNDEF's and multiply nested #IFNDEFS leads to dependency problems and odd behaviour (and "I got it to work" instead of "this is so clean its almost self-documenting"). Going by the changes already made by the FreeSSL group, they did changes in the low ten-thousands, with many more in the mid ten-thousands needed just to get to a reasonable code base. They could rightfully complain about the cruft in OpenSSL the way they complained about the cruft in X11R6 (switching to X.org seems to have been a very positive move).
Be careful with libressl though, the developers have been stripping out what they see as the wrong approach to portability and currently only support openbsd. There have been third party ports to other operating systems but great care is needed when making such ports as assumptions that hold on openbsd but not on other platforms may go unnoticed.
A badly done port of libressl could easilly end up significantly worse than openssl.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Well yes, if you only target a single platform, that sure makes it easier.
For a quick check on audit status you can look at this...
http://www.isopensslauditedyet.com/
"FYI: LibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that started over a month ago."
I've just come back from a security conference. LibreSSL has very little trust from security professionals at this point. They've made too many changes, too fast, on too much code. It'll be a while before any security professionals trust their code base.
They'd have been better off (and in the same trust position) if they'd started a complete API compatible rewrite of the code.
We'll see how LibreSSL goes once the fun and glory of the initial fork and rewrite dies down and it goes into longer term maintenance. Because that was the part of the software development cycle that OpenSSL failed at and led to heartbleed.
Just too evident:
"Matthew Green is a Research Professor of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University and a co-founder of the Open Crypto Audit Project."
And guess who gets one of the first chunks of money.
And no word about LibreSSL ... I do understand they may think that funding LibreSSL and OpenSSL at the same time may be inefficient but they should absolutety sponsor OpenSSH. No word about that either. Biased? yes I think so.
Their bug tracker has many untouched bugs sitting there for years, and their code apparently is so poorly styled and painful to read that everyone tried to avoid it.
....technical-debt accumulating in the codebase...
Are we playing buzzword bingo? If so, I concede, you win.
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Nope.
Are you not familiar with the idea of technical debt?
That I can recall, I've only ever seen it used by technical people, never by managers or marketers.