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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."
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.
People obsess over this idea that North Koreans must be hacking from within North Korea, and that there's no way they could realistically do it because their connection bandwidth is so puny. They forget that North Korean government is really an organized criminal syndicate with a huge military and slave labor base. They likely have vast criminal connections. All they have to do is hire sympathetic South Korean hackers on the condition that they do their work under the North Korean banner. When all is said and done, the North Koreans come out looking like bad asses you don't want to mess with, when in reality they just farmed the work out using basic email, a courier, and a satellite phone.
We could break their internet access forever, with a never ending DDOS, and it wouldn't matter one bit.
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.