Poor, Homegrown Encryption Threatens Open Smart Grid Protocol

An anonymous reader writes: Millions of smart meters, solar panels, and other grid-based devices rely on the Open smart grid protocol for communication and control — it's similar to SCADA's role for industrial systems. But new research shows that its creators made the common mistake of rolling their own encryption, and doing a poor job of it. The researchers believe this threatens the entire system. They say, "This function has been found to be extremely weak, and cannot be assumed to provide any authenticity guarantee whatsoever." Security analyst Adam Crain added, "Protocol designers should stick to known good algorithms or even the 'NIST-approved' short list. In this instance, the researchers analyzed the OMA digest function and found weaknesses in it. The weaknesses in it can be used to determine the private key in a very small number of trials."

Comments

Homegrown

[darkain]

Damn those eco-friendly nuts always trying to grow things at home!

Re:Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

...always trying to grow things at home!

The 'grown'ola types make everyone else 'groan'ola types.

Re: Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, we've often seen these "experts" exhibit hostility toward anyone who dares to question them and their systems, even when the questioner has found massive and easily exploitable security flaws.

[Citation needed]

Re: Homegrown

[umghhh]

Everybody makes mistakes. But I had to work with shit made by OMA 'experts' on other issues and quite frankly if I got my hands on them they would be running around: without balls and smeared in tar and feathers. The OMA specs or at least those few I have seen are abomination - hyperlinked documentation written by people with attention span of a chicken after its head been cut off. I actually have no problem believing the security hole is as big as said in TFA.

Re: Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

No I asked about a citation for the latter part.

Re: Homegrown

[fisted]

There's an implicit "unless you *really* know what you're doing" to the sentence, which just tends to not be the case for most people, which is mainly because most people aren't crypto nerds, and the consequences of failing crypto are typically serious. Much more serious than doing your own science at home (provided you aren't going nuclear; "don't do your own nuclear science at home" doesn't sound so absurd, does it?) and ending up with wrong results, or composing music and ending up with horrible garbage.

Re: Homegrown

[Opportunist]

An algorithm that has been in use for years, especially if said algo has been used by companies that value the security of their data where there is also a huge incentive for third parties to break that security (like, say, financial institutes, insurances, journalism, governments), you may rest assured that they all hired various, very different, people with the goal to see whether that algo is actually as secure as they claim it to be. Not to mention a lot of other experts who do it on their own time for the sake of being the one who found a critical flaw in it (which is usually a HUGE boost in credibility and peer esteem, which can easily be converted to more income and better jobs).

There are a LOT of people with nothing better to do than testing those cryptos. You may rest assured that thousands of hours have been thrown against common encryption standards. And while many companies (governments especially) would of course keep such findings secret to exploit them if their opponents use them and consider themselves secure, most others would not only publish it (especially pretty much all security companies out there), to be the one that broke it. As I said, if you could e.g. show that you broke AES, your company becomes the de facto security industry leader.

The hostility you may observe is less about people who "dare" to muscle into their territory. We're in general quite open to criticism and we do want to hear about new algorithms. They drive the industry. When PFS became a reality, we were more than happy to embrace it because it does offer a decisive increase in security. It took away a single point of failure and meant a lot more effort on the side of an attacker, which was something that boosted security considerably.

What irks us is the snakeoil peddlers that litter the industry. Idiots who make impossible claims, knowing that most of this "security stuff" is not really easily understood by someone who isn't privy to the inner workings of encryption. So it's easy for some smooth talking con artist to sell them anything as long as it's sprinkled with buzzwords and makes outlandish claims about the key size. And here the old meme actually is true: It's not the size that matters.

And this is why we're usually wary of anything "homegrown". No "self made" security system so far could come close to the security of the tried and tested systems. And here again first and foremost because of the old axiom that nobody ever managed to crack his own security. By definition. If he could, he would have built it differently. So even if the "homegrower" was a top level security expert... think Rivest, Shamir, Schneier und Adleman rolled into a single brain ... he himself could not sensibly test his own security system because he will never ever find the flaws in it.

And the even bigger problem: Few of those that build such a "homegrown" system come close to a single one of those four, let alone all of them. Because I'm dead sure, those 4 would reach for one of the old, tried algos. Not only because most of them were actually developed by one of them (or, as in RSA, three of them).

Re: Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

You might consider these cases as possible examples of being a bit hostile...

http://www.cnet.com/news/debun...
http://www.dailytech.com/Googl...
http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/...
http://www.mail-archive.com/cr...

and to the lesser extent where Linus posts stuff like ...

one reason I refuse to bother with the whole security circus is that I think it glorifies - and thus encourages - the wrong behavior. It makes "heroes" out of security people, as if the people who don't just fix normal bugs aren't as important.

or

I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

Re: Homegrown

[TechyImmigrant]

In fact, we've often seen these "experts" exhibit hostility toward anyone who dares to question them and their systems, even when the questioner has found massive and easily exploitable security flaws.

[Citation needed]

If you know what you are doing and are competent to design crypto primitives, you've probably had a lot of practice and so want to meet others with similar interests and so you probably have been to the odd IACR conference (CRYPTO, EUROCRYPT, ASIACRYPT etc.) to meet these people. You would know where to publish your algorithms to receive serious cryptographic review by your peers.

Anyone can be a dick, but being a competent crypto primitive designer entitles you to behaviour that from the outside looks dickish, but it really just a case of telling to truth to people who don't know what they don't know.
 

Re: Homegrown

[Immerman]

> Anyone can be a dick, but being a competent _____________ entitles you to behaviour that from the outside looks dickish, but it really just a case of telling to truth to people who don't know what they don't know.

I think that's true of a great many specialties, even when you're trying hard not to look dickish (as I think we generally should)

Re: Homegrown

[Immerman]

On the flip side there may be something to be said for a certain amount of security through obscurity, provided it doesn't interfere with battle-hardened security, after all some of the security holes found by those many eyes will be kept secret/be sold on the black market by nefarious actors. A narrow-purpose algorithm is going to have far fewer eyes, good and bad, looking for security holes.

BUT for Gandalf's sake use your custom algorithm as a second layer of defense behind a well tested one, not instead of it! It's not like there's not plenty of good patent free security available. Some of it even has BSD licensed implementations.

Re: Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. If you know the pitfalls and how to get yourself into them, feel free to feed yourself to the swamp monsters in the moat.

Anyone not familiar with swamp monster taming should probably stay home.

Re: Homegrown

[Jane Q. Public]

This.

A little extra obscurity (almost) never hurt anybody... as long as it's backed up by real security TOO. It's really "obscurity instead of security" that is the demon to vanquish here.

Re: Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

Rolling your own is stupid, whether or not you also use other algorithms. A side-channel timing attack on your homegrown cipher, for example, could easily compromise the security of the second, proven cipher.

Your erroneous belief that adding a second cipher couldn't hurt is precisely why non-professionals shouldn't be doing this stuff. If you're not knowledgeable in the area, you don't even know what you don't know.

That said, "professional" isn't synonymous with "cryptographer". You don't need to understand the mathematical proofs behind the security of sponge constructions, or the security properties of a particular elliptic curve, to be able to design safe protocols. But you at least need to know what you're ignorant about, and that takes a significant amount of experience. No amount of browsing Stack Overflow will provide you the necessary expertise.

Re: Homegrown

[Jane Q. Public]

I can think of a pretty good example: TrueCrypt's ability to use Twofish in conjunction with AES. Twofish is pretty good by itself, but maybe not quite up to AES. Even so, there's still AES backing it up. Even if one is cracked, good luck with the other.

One-Time-Pad is 100% pure security-though-obscurity, and nothing beats it if you have leakproof key management. But that last is a "little detail" that can be pretty hard to achieve.

Re: Homegrown

[swillden]

There's an implicit "unless you *really* know what you're doing" to the sentence, which just tends to not be the case for most people

It's not the case for any people. You won't see professional cryptographers rolling their own crypto and using it, either.

I'm not a cryptographer myself, but I am a very experienced cryptographic security systems engineer, and I work with a bunch of serious cryptographers, who are well-published and extremely well-respected in academic circles -- exactly the sort of people who you'd expect to be most capable of designing and building custom systems. And you know what? They don't.

And I'm not just talking about creating new ciphers. Even when I go to them with novel requirements that seem to demand some sort of new construction using existing algorithms and techniques, the very first thing they do is go to the literature to see what has been done, how long it's been in use, how widely it's been reviewed and analyzed, etc. The less knowledgeable (like me, frankly, though I'm getting better) tend to start by cooking up some new scheme. Real experts avoid that if at all possible, and if they have to do something new they look really hard at how they can prove its security by reducing it to known constructions.

Even the guys who do create new ciphers do it with great care, often spending years designing and attacking and tweaking, and then their next step is to publish it so others can attack it. Only after it has survived lots of other review does anyone, especially the author, begin to trust it for real use. But the most common outcome, when something new is designed, even by serious experts, is that it gets broken shortly after publication. It's quite common for new algorithms and constructions to be broken at the same conference they're initially presented.

I reiterate: No one who knows what they're doing creates new crypto for production work.

Moreover, people who know what they're doing even approach implementation of known and trusted algorithms with trepidation! There are so many very subtle things you can get wrong. Heh, just last week someone pointed out that my implementation of a constant-time memcmp had a subtle bug that caused it to be not quite constant-time on some architectures. Novices have no idea why it even matters in crypto that memcmp always run in the same amount of time for a given buffer size, irrespective of the contents of the buffers, and assume that the C library's memcmp is fine. More knowledgeable engineers know why it matters, but really deep expertise is required to get it right. That's just one tiny example. My primary mistake wasn't the bug in my implementation, it was trying to write memcmp at all. I should have found a well-vetted implementation and used that.

Doing your own crypto is nothing like doing your own science or doing your own music. The thing about security is that it's only as strong as the weakest link; the tiniest crevice can give the attacker a wedge to bust your system wide open. Other fields are forgiving of minor flaws, you can do useful and interesting work even if it has some defects. In security, and crypto is often at the heart of security solutions, one tiny mistake can render the totality of what you did not only useless, but actively dangerous to your users.

If writing a good secure memcmp is too hard for an engineer with 25 years' experience, including 20 years doing cryptographic security, what does that say about trying to write something that doesn't appear to be trivial? Crypto is hard. Really, really hard. The more you learn about it the harder it gets, because you understand more about what can go wrong.

Re: Homegrown

[ad454]

I wish I had mod points to give to you.
This is the most true and best written comment I have seen posted to slashdot in a very long time.
Thanks.

Re: Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

No one who knows what they're doing creates new crypto for production work

In the generalized cases, I fully agree with you. However, the successful suites of cryptography software were written by someone, presumably someone who knew what they were doing, so I'd wager that the statement is a bit over broad. Might I suggest...Only a tiny fraction of people who know what they are doing even manage to do it successfully

Re: Homegrown

[Immerman]

Hmm, sounds plausible. Knew there was a reason I stay away from security beyond avoiding buffer overrun potential, etc. (I mean, aside from it encouraging unhealthy paranoid tendencies)

But... it seems like your raw data would be protected from such side-channel attacks though if your home-grown encryption was the *first* line of defense instead - any vulnerabilities would then only expose the battle-tested encrypted stream, would they not? That might even improve the penetration resistance of your own algorithm as well, especially if the attacker doesn't know what battle-tested algorithm is in use. I mean it's pretty obvious that you've found a vulnerability if you're suddenly able to access a well-organized stream of data, less so if you're just getting a different stream of "white noise".

Re: Homegrown

[Opportunist]

Quite the opposite.

Part of my job is doing just that. Performing security audits to test the stability and robustness of security algorithms and implementations thereof. We are some of the few good eyes that look for security holes.

And therein lies the problem: Not only are we "good" guys probably fewer in numbers, we also have less time than the "bad side". Less time simply because you cannot sensibly afford employing us for the dozens of days it takes for a sensible black box test. A black box test tests your tester. Not your security. A black box test will tell you whether the crew you hired is up to their claim of abilities (because you know more than they do and hence can gauge whether they find what they are supposed to find). That's acceptable if, and only if, that is your goal: Testing the people you plan to hire. It is NOT a sensible way to test your security.

Because they will only have so many days to work at your project. Because you cannot sensibly afford them for more than maybe a week or, if the project really, really warrants it, two.

The "evil side" does not have those constraints. They have this commodity, time, in near infinite amounts. Because the possible gains are much higher. If I have a good chance to end up netting a few million bucks, how many weeks, hell, months do you think I'd be willing to spend on it? You, on the other hand, as the company trying to keep from losing those millions, cannot spend those millions on a tester team.

That's why obscurity not only does not add anything to your security, it actually acts in favor of your worst enemy: The Black Hat.

Re: Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

An algorithm that has been in use for years, especially if said algo has been used by companies that value the security of their data where there is also a huge incentive for third parties to break that security (like, say, financial institutes, insurances, journalism, governments), you may rest assured that they all hired various, very different, people with the goal to see whether that algo is actually as secure as they claim it to be. Not to mention a lot of other experts who do it on their own time for the sake of being the one who found a critical flaw in it (which is usually a HUGE boost in credibility and peer esteem, which can easily be converted to more income and better jobs).

There are a LOT of people with nothing better to do than testing those cryptos. You may rest assured that thousands of hours have been thrown against common encryption standards. And while many companies (governments especially) would of course keep such findings secret to exploit them if their opponents use them and consider themselves secure, most others would not only publish it (especially pretty much all security companies out there), to be the one that broke it. As I said, if you could e.g. show that you broke AES, your company becomes the de facto security industry leader.

The hostility you may observe is less about people who "dare" to muscle into their territory. We're in general quite open to criticism and we do want to hear about new algorithms. They drive the industry. When PFS became a reality, we were more than happy to embrace it because it does offer a decisive increase in security. It took away a single point of failure and meant a lot more effort on the side of an attacker, which was something that boosted security considerably.

What irks us is the snakeoil peddlers that litter the industry. Idiots who make impossible claims, knowing that most of this "security stuff" is not really easily understood by someone who isn't privy to the inner workings of encryption. So it's easy for some smooth talking con artist to sell them anything as long as it's sprinkled with buzzwords and makes outlandish claims about the key size. And here the old meme actually is true: It's not the size that matters.

And this is why we're usually wary of anything "homegrown". No "self made" security system so far could come close to the security of the tried and tested systems. And here again first and foremost because of the old axiom that nobody ever managed to crack his own security. By definition. If he could, he would have built it differently. So even if the "homegrower" was a top level security expert... think Rivest, Shamir, Schneier und Adleman rolled into a single brain ... he himself could not sensibly test his own security system because he will never ever find the flaws in it.

And the even bigger problem: Few of those that build such a "homegrown" system come close to a single one of those four, let alone all of them. Because I'm dead sure, those 4 would reach for one of the old, tried algos. Not only because most of them were actually developed by one of them (or, as in RSA, three of them).

And yet, OpenSSL remained broken for years.

Re: Homegrown

[MikeBabcock]

QFT ... that's all.

And I'm not just talking about creating new ciphers. Even when I go to them with novel requirements that seem to demand some sort of new construction using existing algorithms and techniques, the very first thing they do is go to the literature to see what has been done, how long it's been in use, how widely it's been reviewed and analyzed, etc. The less knowledgeable (like me, frankly, though I'm getting better) tend to start by cooking up some new scheme. Real experts avoid that if at all possible, and if they have to do something new they look really hard at how they can prove its security by reducing it to known constructions.

I reiterate: No one who knows what they're doing creates new crypto for production work.

Re: Homegrown

[MikeBabcock]

Spoken out of true ignorance.

Obscurity doesn't work for *any* form of security; someone will figure it out and then it will be broken.

Good security can be published and peer reviewed and is *still* secure.

The only thing that should be obscure is your encryption key.

Re: Homegrown

[swillden]

No one who knows what they're doing creates new crypto for production work

In the generalized cases, I fully agree with you. However, the successful suites of cryptography software were written by someone, presumably someone who knew what they were doing, so I'd wager that the statement is a bit over broad. Might I suggest...Only a tiny fraction of people who know what they are doing even manage to do it successfully

No.

The statement is precisely accurate, not overbroad at all. Yes the suites were created... but not for production use. All of the bits and pieces were created first, then analyzed and attacked for years, and only then put into production.

And as the raft of SSL implementation and protocol bugs over the last year demonstrate quite conclusively, many of them are still put into production too soon.

Re: Homegrown

[Immerman]

Nonsense. It may not add *much* security, but that depends entirely on the resources of your attacker. Have you never hidden a house key somewhere outside in case you lock yourself out? Classic case of security through obscurity (though in fairness, that's probably one of the stronger links in your home security). Ditto secret passages across the ages. Your security *will* be broken, if it's important then you need to implement multiple independent layers and pray that the weaknesses in one will be found and fixed before attackers find a way through all the others. If one or more of those layers is something the attacker has never seen before, then when they encounter it they have to break it from scratch, rather than just purchasing the crack on whatever markets deal in such knowledge. If you've got an "obscurity layer" in, say, your insulin pump software, then there's probably very little market for the knowledge of how to break it, which greatly improves the chances that such knowledge will be lost, or noticed by the "good guys" before simultaneous holes in the other security layers are found.

I suppose it depends on the attacker. After all, the question probably isn't "has my security been broken?" but "who has broken my security?". Or can you offer a few examples of encryption *implementations* that have never been compromised? After all, even theoretically unbreakable encryption algorithms would be only as secure as the specific implementation you're using, and nobody is perfect.

Today we know that the NSA, and presumably other major spy agencies around the world, successfully managed to crack and/or compromise many of the key encryption standards in use, and have no particular reason to assume we know about more than the tip of the iceberg. And I'm willing to bet that knowledge leaks into the hands of other powerful interests as well. And from there... well, useful secrets tend to spread for the right price.

Re: Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the product of two discrete encryption algorithms a secure algorithm, For example, If I encrypt once with AES and then follow up with 3fish or two fish algorithms.

I am thinking only of symmetric algorithms such as 3DES, AES, 3 Fish, etc.

Re: Homegrown

[swillden]

Unless there's some interaction between the two, such that one reverses some property of the other, then the combination should be at least as secure as either. I don't expect that would be the case with any of the important algorithms.

However, you're not going to gain any security by doing that, either, unless you're hedging against the possibility that one of the two gets completely broken. I don't think that's very likely with something like AES. If you really want to make sure you've achieving good security, you should focus on the rest of what you're doing: encryption mode, source of randomness for IV and key generation, key management, etc. Those are the areas you're actually likely to have problems, not AES.

Re: Homegrown

[swillden]

But... it seems like your raw data would be protected from such side-channel attacks though if your home-grown encryption was the *first* line of defense instead - any vulnerabilities would then only expose the battle-tested encrypted stream, would they not?

I'm not sure what you're thinking of as "first" (which direction), but if you did something like this you'd want to make sure that AES, or similar, is what operates directly on your actual data. "Encrypting" the already AES-encrypted ciphertext with your homegrown thing can't reduce the security of AES, and can't expose anything via side channels because all it would expose is the AES-encrypted data.

OTOH, you're really, really unlikely to gain anything at all by doing that. If you want to defend yourself against an AES break, superencrypt with a different well-known and well-tested algorithm, ideally one that uses a very different construction.

However, if your system is insecure I guarantee AES won't be the reason. It'll be your key generation or key management practices, or misuse of block modes (e.g. reusing IVs or nonces), failing to authenticate, etc. And the non-experts who contemplate layering something on AES will almost certainly screw up some other piece of the puzzle and produce an insecure system.

Re: Homegrown

[Natanael_L]

Do your own research all you want. But if you are arrogant enough to ask others to trust their lives in your home built algorithms, you're outright dangerous to mankind.

Re: Homegrown

[Natanael_L]

Try being the security researcher that's threatened with lawsuits as the first response every other time you report a flaw you found, who gets dismissed when reporting a security hole that literally could get people killed, who gets rejected when proposing changes that would make software much more robust "because those fringe cases don't happen IRL" (and then they do), etc... When there's flaws everywhere and nobody wants to hear it, guess what happens?

Re: Homegrown

[Immerman]

Yes, that is the order I meant - I didn't think there was any ambiguity in my phrasing. The first line of defense is the first defense an attacker encounters. Just as the last line of defense is your last chance to repel attackers before being overrun.

> if your system is insecure I guarantee AES won't be the reason

In the sense that an easily-picked lock is typically the most secure element of home security, I'm inclined to agree.

Re: Homegrown

[swillden]

You're comparing AES to an easily-picked lock? You should make a YouTube video of AES cracking. You'll become wealthy.

Re: Homegrown

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but only if you use discrete, independent keys for each encryption method. If the keys are related in any way, all bets are off.

how do i...

[Anonymous Coward]

hack my meter to only count once for every 10 or 100 kwh actually used?

Re:how do i...

[pushing-robot]

Troll? What else would make a public utility monopoly change its ways?

Head/desk...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hasn't "Don't roll your own crypto, dumbass" been one of the cardinal rules of security since sometime before WEP violated it?

The least you can do is implement a real algorithm; but screw it up somehow (key handling is always a good place for that); but just making it up? How did they sneak this past a standards body?

Re:Head/desk...

[afidel]

The least you can do is implement a real algorithm; but screw it up somehow

That's why the best recommendation is to not only use the approved algorithm, but also the standard implementation. Don't get cute, don't try to optimize it, just use it as is. AES was required to run on emdedded systems 13+ years ago, any modern chip should have zero problem running the standard C implementation today.

Re:Head/desk...

[William-Ely]

There are many MCU's that have hardware acceleration for AES256 and SHA256 so there's no real performance based excuse not to use it.

Re:Head/desk...

[msobkow]

Even if you use existing crypto algorithms, such as with Java, verifying that a crypto key has not been tampered with is non-trivial. I've been working on such code over the past few months, and what I found is that you need to deliver a set of approved root certificates with your application so that you can verify the certificate chain. That makes delivering an application an on-going maintenance headache compared to just using the crypto and hoping you don't get hit by a man-in-the-middle attack.

Given how rarely firmware is updated for devices, I can't imagine how you could possibly keep the certificate chain information up to date for such devices, unless you were able to presume that all keys for the devices were always signed by the same CA so you could embed it's chain in your firmware.

Re:Head/desk...

[Translation Error]

Yeah, it's the easiest thing in the world to come up with an encryption scheme that you can't break.

Re:Head/desk...

[mysidia]

Every crypto is roll your own at some point in its life

At this point in its life; it has no place in new protocol specifications or production systems, not until the new crypto is published and disseminated by the community and found to have no flaws that any researchers can find.

Even for something as simple as AES it's a chore to find an open implementation that's actively being maintained

No... there are many implementations that are actively maintained; your implementation doesn't have to be Open source, so long as the implementation of the specified ciphers and hashes is a correct implementation....

It is a small price to pay to use standardized ciphers or standardized implementations known to be secure, instead of risk everything on a homegrown cipher.

Re:Head/desk...

[tlhIngan]

Hasn't "Don't roll your own crypto, dumbass" been one of the cardinal rules of security since sometime before WEP violated it?

The least you can do is implement a real algorithm; but screw it up somehow (key handling is always a good place for that); but just making it up? How did they sneak this past a standards body?

WEP used a standard algorithm - RC4. They just accidentally screwed it up because of the way RC4 works (related to key handling and IVs).

A homegrown algorithm for WiFi is TKIP, which was created because RC4 had hardware acceleration, while AES didn't at the time. So they created TKIP to leverage the hardware crypto alongside several protections to mitigate several shortcomings that were found.

Even for something as simple as AES it's a chore to find an open implementation that's actively being maintained and that works with your system; and when you do one of your expensive security consultant mandates that you stop using AES for being too old and not cool enough.

AES is fixed by standard. There is no need to "maintain" it - as long as the code compiles properly you're done.

And for AES, because it's an official encryption algorithm, NIST has the official specification document, and the original author has the reference code.

Of course, the vast majority of people will just use OpenSSL or LibreSSL, being BSD licensed and all that. Even on embedded systems there is often a reference AES implementation.

That alone should be disincentive to roll your own algorithm - the fact that the standard ones are available everywhere for practically no cost and very little effort. Why write your own algorithm when you can copy and paste an existing one in? Even the lazy should see the benefits.

Re:Head/desk...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even before Linux was around, there were encryption algorithms with reference implementations as part of UNIX directly, or built as source code:

One of the first was crypt(1). It isn't secure by today's standards, and actually there was a tool called Crypt Breaker's Workbench... but one file encrypted on Solaris would work on IRIX.

Another was des(1). This came around in the early 1990s, and had two implementations, one ecb mode. This eventually became part of base UNIX distributions, but was superseded by mcrypt.

Around 1992-1993, PGP 2.x came around, which gave the ability to use symmetric encryption, and if one could build RSAREF, it could be used on Solaris, IRIX, AIX, Linux, and other builds. Since PGP was fairly well trusted, the OpenPGP standard became pretty much a common way to encrypt files in a reliable and secure fashion.

Barring PGP is the mcrypt utility, which bundles all modern algorithms in an industry standard format.

As for RAM, the des() program ran quite well on a box with 4 megs of RAM, so an embedded device can easily handle that these days.

I would say you have a point in the late 1980s when there wasn't a decent implementation that was widespread of a secure encryption method. People rolled their own left and right. However, after 1990, virtually every general purpose OS, even QNX (which is used for embedded systems) has had at least DES (which can be used in 3DES mode for security against modern attacks) available.

As for actively being maintained, pretty much a crypto reference implementation winds up being "finished". If it can do the job as per the algorithm's spec and handles sample data, it really doesn't need to be maintained, other than making sure the code builds and works on modern revs of operating systems.

Even in today's limited environments, crypto is relatively lightweight, especially symmetric algorithms. There is no excuse to say "no reference standards exist" and roll one's own these days.

Re:Head/desk...

[Anonymous Coward]

AES is fixed by standard. There is no need to "maintain" it - as long as the code compiles properly you're done.

You must be quite the cowboy coder. Clearly bugs cannot exist as long as the code "compiles properly", right?

Re:Head/desk...

[Immerman]

>AES is fixed by standard. There is no need to "maintain" it

Provided the implementation is flawless of course. After all, a lot of maintenance is bug-fixing rather than updates.

Re:Head/desk...

[swillden]

AES is fixed by standard. There is no need to "maintain" it - as long as the code compiles properly you're done.

Not if you care about security. What about side channel attacks? What about leaking sensitive data into the heap? What about performance? On various architectures? I could go on.

Merely compiling and generating correct test vector outputs is far from all an implementation has to do to be good. Luckily, there are good implementations out there, easily obtained and under generous licenses.

Re:Head/desk...

[MikeBabcock]

I'm assuming the MPAA spent good money creating their stupid protocols too; from the Content Scramble System to HDCP.

don't fall for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

They want you to use a pre-cracked one which saves time even putting it in front of a human cryptoanalyst.

In the days of pre-broken encryption (that NIST recommends like Eliptic curves which was just found to be backdoored)

Re:don't fall for it.

[Darinbob]

Only one elliptic curve method using a set of parameters that may be been chosen by the NSA is at risk. Elliptic curve in itself is still secure as far as I know.

Re:don't fall for it.

[mysidia]

The "pre-broken" Eliptic curve technology is a backdoored random number generator, not a cipher.

It is not ECC itself that is broken or backdoored, only the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator with specific input parameters.

Re:don't fall for it.

[Opportunist]

How dare you bother this AC on his crusade against the evil encryption lobby with facts?

How many times do we have to say it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on we're in 2015, there are plenty of widely available not publicly broken primitives.

DO NOT ROLL YOUR OWN GOD DAMNED CRYPTO. Unless you're a cryptographer planning to have it reviewed and attacked long before even considering using it.

Let me quote Schneier's law again: "any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it."

This is a blatant example of Dunning-Kruger. Again.

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[mlts]

Homegrown crypto has been a constant menace since the 1990s when people sold numerous encryption programs, usually sporting their own encryption algorithm and DES.

A few I've seen were running 1-2 rounds of DES at most (FWB Hammer's hard disk drivers for Macs did this, but at the time, it was the best encryption one could get due to the relatively slow CPUs like 68000s at the time.) Others were seeding random() with a CRC of the password and XORing the output with the plaintext.

However, back then, there were no government entities standardizing functions like is done now with AES, RSA, and other algos, so people had to write their own, and if it jumbled and unjumbled stuff, it was good enough, since not much in the way of ciphertext was really being attacked.

Times are different now.

These days, with most ARM, AMD, SPARC, POWER, and Intel CPUs having hardware AES acceleration, why would one want to roll their own algorithm?

If one thinks AES is backdoored, cascade it with another known good algorithm like SERPENT, Threefish, heck, maybe even an older one like IDEA, 3DES, or even 3-Skipjack. There are other less known algorithms which have withstood testing as well. Cascading isn't intended to expand the bit width, but to have protection should one algorithm get broken. TrueCrypt offers/offered this functionality.

Same with public key algorithms. Worried about RSA? Have two signatures, one RSA, and one with ECC or a lattice based algorithm that is resistant to TWIRL and quantum factoring, and validate both sigs.

As for crypto implementations, if a user needs to encrypt a file, OpenPGP is a known standard. For communicating across the wire, SSH and SSL are known standards that are decently robust. For encrypting stuff in RAM, almost all modern operating systems have a facility like KeyChain to keep sensitive data from being swapped out, or if it is, have it encrypted.

With almost every programming language offering hooks for AES and RSA, there isn't a need to roll crypto, even for obfuscation reasons. If one just needs obfuscation, use an AES() function with all zeroes as the key.

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[PRMan]

In fact, you can use AES but not the recommended default values. Satoshi did this with Bitcoin, just in case the NSA was recommending those values for a reason.

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[sl149q]

To be (slightly) fair the 1.1.1 standard was published in 2012. Presumably the first versions where a year or several before that. So most likely this is circa 2008-2010 protocol standard writing.

Doesn't really excuse them. But it wasn't 2015 and not quite as obvious then.

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[PRMan]

Here is a link to the article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/7781/satoshis-genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic-bullet/

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't found a reference to what Satoshi did with Bitcoin's crypto, but I'd be careful before recommending that.

If you're suggesting that people go mess around and change the S-Box values, that's a *horrible* idea, please don't do that.
If people just want to add some rounds or change some known harmless no-trick-up-my-sleeve constants, then sure, knock yourself out.

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for not suggesting we use NIST-approved crypto. That's even worse.

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[Immerman]

And if you absolutely, positively MUST roll your own encryption (because, reasons!), then cascade THAT behind something battle-tested.

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[Immerman]

Right. At that point only pretty much every homegrown encryption algorithm on the planet had been trivially cracked. Not like today when pretty much every homegrown encryption algorithm on the planet has been trivially cracked

Re:How many times do we have to say it?

[swillden]

In fact, you can use AES but not the recommended default values. Satoshi did this with Bitcoin, just in case the NSA was recommending those values for a reason.

No, Satoshi did not change any values in AES. Satoshi chose a less-common curve for ECC, nothing to do with AES.

Hipster crypto

[red_dragon]

"We use a custom-made encryption algorithm with organic S-boxes and artisanal feistels. You probably have never heard of it."

Re:Hipster crypto

[bosef1]

But are your Strowger switches vintage?

Re: Hipster crypto

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it web scale?

Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are going to implement your own crypto, you will screw it up, so at least make it entertaining:

https://xkcd.com/153/

more work

[cyberwave]

isn't it more work to make your own shitty encryption? are these people retarded?

Re:more work

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep... They would save a lot of trouble by going with rot13 off-the-shelf

Re:more work

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but one of most common differences between noobs and experienced people is that noobs are afraid of using someone else's libraries, or aren't aware that they exist.

Re:more work

[Anonymous Coward]

Or think they are all shit.

Re:more work

[Opportunist]

One key sign of being a noob is to think that everyone else is one.

Quite seriously. If there is a library that has been written by people who spent not only years but DECADES studying and perfecting a topic, where should I take the hubris from to think that I can do it better?

Re:more work

[Immerman]

Dude, have you *seen* me code? 96 hours with no sleep, just Cheetos and Jolt cola, and I can write a much improved Office from scratch. Okay, it can't actually save, or format text, and the spreadsheet formulas can only use addition in Reverse Polish notation, and never get quite the right result. But damn it, the cursor blinks in a Fibonacci sequence mod 5!

Re:more work

[swillden]

isn't it more work to make your own shitty encryption? are these people retarded?

Foolish, yes, but not completely retarded. If you look at the details, it's pretty clear that what they were trying to do was to build something really, really fast, so they could process huge volumes of packets on lower-spec hardware, with less generated heat, etc. There were valid reasons for putting in the extra work... but obviously the approach they chose was wrong.

Screwed either way these days.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you roll your own encryption, you'll probably screw up in some way and your software will end up with security flaws.

If you use popular libraries (like, say, OpenSSL), developed by "experts", they'll probably screw up in some way and your software will end up with security flaws.

Go with a less popular library, and you'll experience not only the authors' flaws, but also the ones you'll introduce when adding missing functionality.

So a developer wishing to use encryption in a product will end up screwed no matter which path is taken.

Re:Screwed either way these days.

[Em Adespoton]

Ah; but defense-in-depth says "Assume you're screwed no matter what you do. Now that you're in the right mind space, which implementation is easiest to mitigate when things go wrong?"

I can tell you right now: the answer isn't roll-your-own, and it's not "optimize the reference implementation" either.

Re: Screwed either way these days.

[Anonymous Coward]

There has never been any problems with the algorithms in OpenSSL. It's only the SSL part that have shown weaknesess.

Re:Screwed either way these days.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah; but defense-in-depth says "Assume you're screwed no matter what you do.

Where do you have to live to have a Friday night like that?

Re:Screwed either way these days.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you roll your own encryption, you'll probably screw up in some way and your software will end up with security flaws.

If you use popular libraries (like, say, OpenSSL), developed by "experts", they'll probably screw up in some way and your software will end up with security flaws.

Go with a less popular library, and you'll experience not only the authors' flaws, but also the ones you'll introduce when adding missing functionality.

So a developer wishing to use encryption in a product will end up screwed no matter which path is taken.

Quit being stupid.

When you roll your own private encryption, the only ones who know the vulnerabilities are the ones who've cracked it - and OWN YOUR ASS.

And they're NOT going to tell you they own your ass.

At least with public, distributed implementations like OpenSSL - or even in TFA - along with the larger community developing and vetting the implementation there's a good chance the flaws will be discovered, publicized, and fixed.

But then there are morons like you who can't see the difference.

Re: Screwed either way these days.

[slew]

There has never been any problems with the algorithms in OpenSSL. It's only the SSL part that have shown weaknesess.

It's because the algorithms are the easiest parts to get right (because they are mostly just math and have been successfully ported and rewritten into many different programming languages many times). How you use the algorithms are the biggest part of the problem (e.g., actually getting random numbers to use as keys, or not having buffer overrun issues).

One of the issue with OSGP is that they used RC4 incorrectly (well, to be fair they probably weren't up on a weaknesses of RC4 discovered in 2001) in addition to the fact they were attempting to roll some of their own algorithms...

"Expertly" designed systems are just as bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

If there is one thing we should have learned from the various SSL/TLS flaws lately, it's that security systems developed by so-called "experts" can be just as vulnerable as systems developed by non-experts.

Re:"Expertly" designed systems are just as bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a fair assessment at all. What we should have learned is that attacks only get better.

Cyptosystems designed decades ago are just as vulnerable as systems designed by non-experts, because they don't take what we now know to be best practices into account.

If we could redesign SSL/TLS from scratch, it'd probably end up much cleaner and much more future-proof, but that's not easy.

Re:"Expertly" designed systems are just as bad.

[Lunix Nutcase]

SSL's flaws are due to poor protocol design by cowboy coders at Mozilla. They were hardly "experts". It was the "experts" that had to bandaid the system to make even the barest safe to use.

Re:"Expertly" designed systems are just as bad.

[Opportunist]

And so it makes more sense that some dufus sits down and tries to roll his own security suite? Seriously?

To stress the ever popular car analogy, time and again cars get called back because of some flaw, so Mr. Mechanic from the shop 'round the corner should design my next one, not the "self proclaimed experts" at GM.

Re:"Expertly" designed systems are just as bad.

[Natanael_L]

It was still Netscape when SSL was created. Since then most work has been done by international standards bodies.

Article sponsored by the NSA.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Protocol designers should stick to known good algorithms or even the 'NIST-approved' short list. In this instance,

"NIST-approved".

Don't make me laugh. Better to use home-brewed MIGHT be secure crypto than broken-by-design crypto which was DESIGNED TO BE BROKEN.

What a joke.

Re:Article sponsored by the NSA.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Protocol designers should stick to known good algorithms or even the 'NIST-approved' short list. In this instance,

"NIST-approved".

Don't make me laugh. Better to use home-brewed MIGHT be secure crypto than broken-by-design crypto which was DESIGNED TO BE BROKEN.

What a joke.

You keep telling yourself that you're smarter than all the cryptoanalysts who say otherwise.

You're right: you ARE a joke.

Re:Article sponsored by the NSA.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm.. what? Virtually all reputable (i.e, not obviously paid off) cryptoanalysts say that NIST-approved implementations are broken-by-design.
That is NO BETTER than a micky-mouse stupid algorithm, because it is STANDARD, so it's already broken. It's not even a 10 minute exercise like it would be with shitty hobby-spun crypto.

Re:Article sponsored by the NSA.

[F.Ultra]

Good luck breaking an AES256 encrypted block of data in 10minutes. There have been flaws discovered in AES since it's NIST approval that makes it weaker than initially thought yes but there is still no known exploit of a full 256-bit AES than to use brute force.

Re:Article sponsored by the NSA.

[Bengie]

There's a theoretical attack on AES256 that if the attacker can get the target to encrypt several petabytes of known text with the exact same key, you could possibly analyze the resulting petabytes of data and reverse the key. Get the target web server to encrypt petabytes of data with the same session key, and... The key changed... damn.

Re:Article sponsored by the NSA.

[F.Ultra]

Which makes the attack vector kind of infeasable. Or atleast way more time consuming than the 10 minutes promised by AC.

Quick tell the FBI!

[denis-The-menace]

We have found the first FBI-compliant system!!!

Re:Quick tell the FBI!

[Anonymous Coward]

Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration

Holy fuck you're dumb as bricks. How exactly could the TSA be "Obama's legacy" when it was created during George W's presidency and before Obama was even a US Senator?

Re:Quick tell the FBI!

[Anonymous Coward]

One doesn't have to create something in order for it to become part of one's legacy.

An act of omission, such as the failure to a CEO to shut down a disastrous business unit created by her predecessor, would become part of her legacy.

Something can even become part of one's legacy when one isn't even directly involved. Systemd is a good example of this. Even though it's independent of the Debian project, the fact that the Debian project chose to integrate systemd, and this ended up resulting in the downfall of the Debian project, will forever be part of systemd's legacy. Systemd will be known as the init system that destroyed what was, for many years, the most trustworthy and best Linux distro around.

Re:Quick tell the FBI!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mebbe because the fucking hopey-changey guy was going to, er, change that?

Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration

Holy fuck you're dumb as bricks. How exactly could the TSA be "Obama's legacy" when it was created during George W's presidency and before Obama was even a US Senator?

Re:Quick tell the FBI!

[Anonymous Coward]

No he claimed to do many things but never once mentioned the TSA. The TSA and the worst of its abuses were not under his watch.

Dear Open Smart Grid Ppl

[Minupla]

Read this - pay attention to the interpretive dance requirement:

http://www.moserware.com/2009/...

K/Tnx/Bai,
Min

One Time Pad still valid

[Anonymous Coward]

NIST algos are subject to NSA backdoors, recall the random number generator that isn't random at all, but rather the output of a encryption algo to which they held the key? Likewise certificates are regularly backdoored by the NSA and others, simply because its a third party (rogue NSA agent) verifying a key. 12 million TLS sessions intercepted daily with a big expansion (see Snowden leaks) that could be billions of sessions by now. The certificate system is worthless.

So the issue here is that the "approved" encryption schemes have been sabotaged or cracked.

One time pad is still valid, you can use a key bigger than the total data to ever be sent and and it is secure. S-Boxes and multiple rounds are really no match for the basic one time pad

Worst comment stream ever, folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Folks, this is the worst comment stream ever, or at least in a long while.

None of you made any suggestions that make sense for a deep embedded device that will be deployed for, oh, 50 years or more, may not be remotely updatable (new certificates? Revoking? Software?), and probably does not have the cpu to run an entire Java or bsd stack.

Please respect the actual product requirements before making suggestions.

Re:Worst comment stream ever, folks

[Natanael_L]

If you need security but can't achieve it, admit to the fact that it will be insecure. From there you either give up, or force a change in the requirements so security becomes achievable.

Embedded is different

[monkeyxpress]

I was an embedded developer for many years. It is just a totally different way of thinking. Embedded guys are always writing the same thing again from scratch. They also are obsessed with knowing exactly what is going on. Before I got into high level software development, the idea of dumping someone else's library into my carefully constructed embedded code made me cringe.

The other issue is that embedded guys can think they know it all, because they normally understand how a line of code they write affects things right down to the electrons and holes in the chip's transistors. This narrow over-confidence totally sets them up to fail at something like crypto, where you can write the safest, neatest to-spec code in the world, and then someone just walks right around the problem. A good example was the whole BMW connected drive thing where the researchers just spoofed a 'trusted' cell station.

The other thing to keep in mind is that 'security' has become a consultant fest since Y2K (possibly before that). There are plenty of snake oil salesmen out there who will talk endless BS, charging you $500/hr to do so, and then leave you with a half finished piece of bug-ridden rubbish. I don't blame many companies for just trusting the internal dev who at least has delivered on other projects before, rather than a suit wearing chatter monkey.

Re:Embedded is different

[mlts]

"Suit wearing chatter monkey" describes so many of those out there out there, especially "security consultants" which are sprouting up left and right. I have cleaned up the messes that those types leave behind, especially after they "do" a job for six months, and the fundamental issues are still present. Usually they may be familiar with one tool, and because they have that hammer, everything is a nail.

I can see the NIH mentality of embedded programmers, since those are the types who usually are proud of the fact that their code is as close to mathematically perfect as one can get. A probable compromise is to hand them the libraries, then demand that their code match the testsuite given to ensure their stuff encodes/decodes correctly. It may not be perfect, but at least it will pass muster in that respect. The ideal is to use a known, tested, certified library, but rigorous testing of a reinvented wheel is better than nothing.

unshakable physical laws security

[Max_W]

It is easy to sneak a back door into a complicated mathematical algorithm. Most people do not understand how it works anyway. And as we know it does happen on an epic scale, from many sides.

But there are impregnable physical laws, which all people understand. Still this type of security is neglected by hardware producers. For example, why there is no a light physical plastic lid, which can be used to close web-camera on a ultra-book physicaly? Why the web-camera lenses are always open? Why people shall use a messy scotch tape to close it? Or rely just on a dubious software security.

Why where is no a similar lid to close a microphone and a web-camera on a smart-phone? If a web-camera is closed by a physical lid it is closed. This is it. And it is not difficult to make a convenient design so that it is opened and closed easily.

Hooray Smartmeters

[drinkypoo]

People called me a luddite when I refused a smartmeter. Then they started overcharging people, actually overreporting power consumption where when the old mechanical meters fail, they underreport it. Next the power meters literally started exploding, yes exploding, not just burning. Now it turns out anyone good at crypto, or any skript kiddie, can read your smartmeter in the near future.

I'm not worried about RF interfering with my brain, even if I thought that was a concern with these frequencies they only chirp occasionally, they don't broadcast nonstop. I just thought they were a bad idea. Every month I photograph my meter and email the result to my meter readers from my phone.

Since they can't switch power on and off to my house, and the only thing they can switch remotely is at the substation level, they don't need to know what I'm doing when. They can measure my whole branch circuit, and cut it off if they have to, like always.

OSGP? Never heard of it

[Shoten]

I work for a smart grid consulting company...before that, a major (nearly a century old, and widely-recognized) civil engineering firm, again in the power industry. Before that I was the official smart grid security spokesman for a large IT company, and briefed Gartner, Ponemon, Forrester, etc. I've been deep into the guts of generation, T&D, energy marketing, and smart metering infrastructure at dozens of power companies over the past decade.

I've never seen OSGP in the field, not once. The OP talks about "millions of smart meters" using it, but damned if I can figure out which meters those are. Landis+Gyr? Nope. GE? Uh uh. Itron? Hell no; they have their own end-to-end architecture (and it works really, really well, which is why Itron is now the 800-pound gorilla of the smart metering world) Sensus? Nope, they bought FlexNet from Motorola and use that, and it has its own (decent) encryption. Elster? Definitely not...I've seen Elster's architecture up super-close, and this protocol is nowhere to be found.

In fact, if you look up OSGP, you'll see all kinds of announcements from the alliance behind it, but not a lot of actual success. Sounds to me like someone found vulnerabilities in an also-ran protocol, but the security issues aren't the only thing wrong with it...which is why nobody seems to actually USE it.

GSM Rolling their own - Malice or Incompetence?

[billstewart]

GSM rolled their own crypto. They depended on Obscurity to protect their algorithm. Somebody handed a copy to Ian Goldberg, then a grad student at Berkeley, and the reason it took him three whole hours to break it was that the Chinese restaurant near campus was having the good lunch special that day.

It was a weak enough algorithm (designed in electrical-engineer-math style, which is fine if you want checksums for reliability) that I'll give them credit for incompetence, though the fact that 10 bits of the already-too-short key were always set to 0 looks much more like malice (with a slight possibility that an early hardware implementation didn't have enough spare bits on some part of the chip.)

Ron Rivest can sometimes get away with rolling his own algorithms - but RC4 and MD5 are looking pretty weak these days, even if you don't count the (documented from the beginning) rules about making sure to never ever use the same RC4 key twice, which was ignored several different ways in PPTP and in a number of other protocols implemented by people who were rolling their own implementations without understanding the algorithms.

Re:GSM Rolling their own - Malice or Incompetence?

[swillden]

Don't forget RC2, which is pretty badly broken. Rivest does have a better track record than most cryptographers, though.