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Inside North Korea's Naenara Browser
msm1267 (2804139) writes with this excerpt from Threatpost Up until a few weeks ago, the number of people outside of North Korea who gave much thought to the Internet infrastructure in that country was vanishingly small. But the speculation about the Sony hack has fixed that, and now a security researcher has taken a hard look at the national browser used in North Korea and found more than a little weirdness. The Naenara browser is part of the Red Star operating system used in North Korea and it's a derivative of an outdated version of Mozilla Firefox. The country is known to tightly control the communications and activities of its citizens and that extends online, as well. Robert Hansen, vice president of WhiteHat Labs at WhiteHat Security, and an accomplished security researcher, recently got a copy of Naenara and began looking at its behavior, and he immediately realized that every time the browser loads, its first move is to make a request to a non-routable IP address, http://10.76.1.11./ That address is not reachable from networks outside the DPRK.
"Here's where things start to go off the rails: what this means is that all of the DPRK's national network is non-routable IP space. You heard me; they're treating their entire country like some small to medium business might treat their corporate office," Hansen wrote in a blog post detailing his findings. "The entire country of North Korea is sitting on one class A network (16,777,216 addresses). I was always under the impression they were just pretending that they owned large blocks of public IP space from a networking perspective, blocking everything and selectively turning on outbound traffic via access control lists."
"Here's where things start to go off the rails: what this means is that all of the DPRK's national network is non-routable IP space. You heard me; they're treating their entire country like some small to medium business might treat their corporate office," Hansen wrote in a blog post detailing his findings. "The entire country of North Korea is sitting on one class A network (16,777,216 addresses). I was always under the impression they were just pretending that they owned large blocks of public IP space from a networking perspective, blocking everything and selectively turning on outbound traffic via access control lists."
IPv6 will never take off, so in the end we'll be bridging national internets just like this one.
I didn't think it was possible to make the Internet Explorer and Windows XP I'm forced to use at work seem like a privilege. Congrats, North Korea. You pulled it off.
The internet browses YOU!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
1976.1.11?
This means that North Korea is VIOLATING RFC 1918! Forget all that other stuff, this must be stopped by any means necessary!
Can someone translate this for the people that do not understand network speak.
In other words, the U.S. government could make attackers coming from inside the DPRK a non-issue through a (relativey cheap for a national government) DDOS service?
You heard me; they're treating their entire country like some small to medium business might treat their corporate office,
Oh wait. Plenty of ISPs today don't even give you a publicly routable IP anyway. But North Korea does it and OMG!!
Really, maybe cover how politicians are already using deaths in France to gain support for ubiquitous surveillance. Soon enough, North Korean Intranet will be less scrutinized than the one outside.
From the article:
So, this is the response to the question of whether the North Koreans hacked Sony or were themselves compromised by others: the NK government has control over outbound traffic and so either undertook the Sony hack or at least permitted it. Now time to increase US military and intelligence funding at the expense of both social spending (screw the left) and the taxpayer (screw the right): those who make the news are now closing the loopholes in the NK-hacking narrative.
If I were in charge of the network in a place like North Korea where it's heavily monitored and locked down, I'd run it like a big corporate LAN too, utilizing the 10.x.x.x block. The IP that every browser hits on load would be set up as an anycast address with nodes in datacenters near large groups of users (corporate campuses, or cities with lots of PCs in this case.)
The article also provides some good insight for those who aren't aware how malware can discretely provide security holes... using only one encryption key, allowing for easy man-in-the-middle attacks, as in this example.
I like how the summary posts the non-reachable IP address just so we can slashdot it anyway.
DPRK has one network under central control, much like a large corporate entity... it's not like there is a choice of ISPs who have to link with each other! Anyways, the DPRK internet as used by the those DPRK citizens (still a very small percentage of the overall population) is completely airgapped from the public internet as we know it. Only a very very small number of elites have access to the 'real' internet...
Can you really generalize that all the internal network must be from the 10.0.0.0/8 block? What prevents those addresses from being used other than convention and router setup. Perhaps they are only for the internal government computers to make them completely invisible to outside networks.
The article seemed a bit overexcited to me. Is it really that surprising that they use 10.x space? It's not like Internet access is widely used in NK. And most of the other items were not what I would call weird, just what you would expect in a regime like this. Still, kudos to the author for doing this analysis.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Just wait until everyone in North Korea finds out that the animals in the rest of the world don't actually speak English!!!!
How do we get the slashdot classic view again? First time viewing on a PC in a long time, I know it used to be available when you logged in.
Thanks
Well this sums up the degradation of slashdot....
The entire country of North Korea is sitting on one class A network (16,777,216 addresses).
Possible but not likely. It is more likely that the country is split into many state run networks, all of which have a state owned machine with a 10.76.1.11 interface. It would provide more IP space, segregate the country into different Internet groups (in N Korea probably social classes), provide protection for some of those classes against DDOS worms infecting other classes, and make the "for your own good citizen" monitoring more tractable.
Maybe I don't understand how the internet work. so like, one router in North Korea handles all the connections? I guess other countries have more routers to connect to other countries? did not know that there are different types of IP addresses. Mine is 192.168.1.105. The router is 192.168.1.1.
I don't see many articles and personal blogs from the people of North Korea. Maybe only the wealthy people can afford internet access?
When I first saw an image of the browser I was awe-struck to see that it made a request to an adddress (http://10.76.1.11/) upon first run.
This guy may want to tweak his astonishment threshold before going outside.
"Here's where things start to go off the rails: what this means is that all of the DPRK's national network is non-routable IP space.
Not necessarily. He might well be right, but it might it not just be that the address is actually routeable from within DPRK, and that the IP address was deliberately chosen so as not to be routeable from the outside world?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yes, there is _such_ a moral equivalence there. Get real, and stop lecturing us with your whining.
How does North Korea have anyone talented enough to write such software or carry out all these sophisticated attacks? Do they recruit educated people from the south or abroad with the promise of unlimited hookers, blow, cash, and total insulation from international laws? Be as black hat as you wanna be as long as you do this for us?
Clearly, you can NAT an entire nation! IT JUST WORKS!
(Of course, the fact that one of the most reclusive and oppressive nations in the world is using this isn't a shining endorsement, but still....)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The part about the whole DPRK essentially being on a single giant LAN that you can't reach from the outside. That's not news to me.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
WhiteHat doesn't get to comment about browser security any more until they've got their own house in order:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JustinSchuh/posts/69qw9wZVH8z
Did nobody see Will Scott's talk titled "Computer Science in the DPRK" at the Chaos Communication Congress in December?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuxlLLeKZZ8
Or maybe the Internet doesn't browse at all.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Um, no, this is probably not the case. IPv6 makes way more sense. You would end up creating so much over head latency by keeping IPv4, the system simply wont scale well.
Another summary written by a clueless, not a nerd.
10/8 network is a perfectly routable IP range.
http://10.76.1.11./ is a URL, not an IP address.
It also has an extra dot before the closing slash.
"News for _nerds_", sure...
wow -1?
Plenty of people get RFC 1918 or RFC 6598 instead of public addresses from their ISP. I would guess that the majority of internet connections in the world are given private space.
It is not common in the US because the US is still drowning in IP addresses, and a lot of the customers are using cable or DSL. In Europe you will often be behind CGN when you use a mobile ISP, and in Asia you will likely be behind CGN no matter how you connect.
Welcome to 2015.
(Of course most ISP's do not hand out browsers at all, much less browsers which are remote controlled from a server somewhere. It is hardly a surprise that North Korea does.)
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
It's a censornet.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Clearly, you can NAT an entire nation! IT JUST WORKS!
(Of course, the fact that one of the most reclusive and oppressive nations in the world is using this isn't a shining endorsement, but still....)
Sure, but your big NK router only has 64K ports per external IP address. It will probably croak well before it has 64K NAT sessions going, though.
Fiat Lux.
Even if your idea had been done, it would have grown from 32 bits to 36. But that aside, even if it had grown from 32 bits to 33, you'd still have a completely incompatible protocol, even if they preserved NAT and everything else already there in IPv4, since your IPv4 header would have changed. Which would have required all networking gear worldwide to be redone.
The 128 bit representation - if you want, you could have represented an address of 2001:db8:fab:cad::1 in decimals as 8193.3512.4011.3245.0.0.0.1. While this particular address might not look ugly, one could have addresses like 8193.3512.42674.13579.59867.27384.57365.37485. Which would be about as ugly as hex. One advantage of hex - you are automatically clamped at ffff within a segment, as opposed to remembering not to exceed 65535 for any block, which would be somewhat more complicated than remembering not to exceed 255.
It shouldn't be that difficult for network admins to understand: as for the average Billy Joe Blow, he'd have trouble even understanding subnet masks, NAT, Class C addressing and so on. Link Local addresses are addresses that belong to a link, and which don't need a network - you can connect 2 computers via an ethernet cable, and the addresses they'll use to communicate w/ each other would be the link local addresses. Node local is loopback address, this time, instead of reserving all of 127.x.x.x, they've just assigned 1 address ::1 to it. The site unique addresses are the equivalent of private addresses that one would use behind a NAT (in IPv4, concepts like link-local and site unique addresses are all conflated, due to the limited addresses). However, instead of the 192.168.1.176 that a lot of computers might get, this one is likely to be a unique address since it's randomly assigned from 112 bits: as a result, overlapping 2 VPNs is less likely to have conflicting addresses than in IPv4.
So the Sony Hack came from IP address 10.76.1.11.
That will be the final and uncontrovertible PROOF that North Korea did it!
__
L.
I am surprised this made the "news" - Saudi Arabia uses the same block of IPs and the same firewall technique to separate their "internet" from the internet folks. Try serving a page or routing/joining a 10.x.x.x network via vpn to a host within the S.A. 10.x.x.x network. Highly amusing unless it's your job...