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Encryption Would Not Have Protected Secret Federal Data, Says DHS
HughPickens.com writes: Sean Gallagher reports at Ars Technica that Dr. Andy Ozment, Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity in the Department of Homeland Security, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that in the case of the recent discovery of an intrusion that gave attackers access to sensitive data on millions of government employees and government contractors, encryption would "not have helped" because the attackers had gained valid user credentials to the systems that they attacked—likely through social engineering. Ozment added that because of the lack of multifactor authentication on these systems, the attackers would have been able to use those credentials at will to access systems from within and potentially even from outside the network. "If the adversary has the credentials of a user on the network, they can access data even if it's encrypted just as the users on the network have to access data," said Ozment. "That did occur in this case. Encryption in this instance would not have protected this data."
The fact that Social Security numbers of millions of current and former federal employees were not encrypted was one of few new details emerged about the data breach and House Oversight member Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was the one who pulled the SSN encryption answer from the teeth of the panel where others failed. "This is one of those hearings where I think that I will know less coming out of the hearing than I did when I walked in because of the obfuscation and the dancing around we are all doing here. As a matter of fact, I wish that you were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers as you are in keeping information out of the hands of Congress and federal employees. It's ironic. You are doing a great job stonewalling us, but hackers, not so much."
The fact that Social Security numbers of millions of current and former federal employees were not encrypted was one of few new details emerged about the data breach and House Oversight member Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was the one who pulled the SSN encryption answer from the teeth of the panel where others failed. "This is one of those hearings where I think that I will know less coming out of the hearing than I did when I walked in because of the obfuscation and the dancing around we are all doing here. As a matter of fact, I wish that you were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers as you are in keeping information out of the hands of Congress and federal employees. It's ironic. You are doing a great job stonewalling us, but hackers, not so much."
These days so many people think that encryption is the answer to security. When I read the story the other day and everyone was up in arms over the lack of encryption, my first question was "what impact would encryption have had? Likely very little."
Encryption for data at rest usually protects against physical theft - like backup tapes or a whole computer. Remote exfiltraction is much easier on a running system where the data is intended to be accessed. In those cases, encryption does little to protect data.
Dear Government. Stop being idiots and use REAL freaking security on your systems.
the lowest bidder is not how you get real security. here at work, even if I give away my password (77Grumpy-Cat88) not even the best hackers in the world can get into the server here because they do not have my second factor authentication.
Instead we get retarded IT security and policies at the government that lets anyone from outside reset a users password if they get that users information and SSN.
All it takes is faking that you are an HR person and suddenly you have all you need to convince the lowest paid drones at the help desk to reset a password and you have the keys to get inside.
The head of OPM also claimed in recent House hearings that their failure to close these systems down was justified since the hackers were already in the system when the recommendation was made.
In other words, we didn’t do anything to make the system secure, and when hackers broke in it was further justification for not doing anything.
Yeah, let’s put our healthcare under their control also!
Well. The most charitable possible explanation I can give is that this DHS 'cybersecurity' guy realizes that congress as been getting non-stop "zOMG 'encryption' will cause all the pedophiles and every terrorist to 'go dark' and become impossible to catch; and only by mandating magical Clipper 2.0 backdoors can we possibly save America from this impenetrable code wall!" bullshit from the DHS, FBI, and various other spook flacks for weeks on end at this point(they've pretty much been flipping out about it since Apple first considered making it a default, if not earlier).
Because of that, the primitive herd mind now presumably believes that 'encryption' is a magic data-protection sauce that can be added to any IT system just by swiping at a touchscreen for a minute or two without too much drooling. This will...not...aid their comprehension of what went wrong, or the coherence(if any) of their demands that Something Be Done. So he has the unenviable task of trying to explain that no, actually, 'encryption' is pretty tricky to get right; and needs to be part of an overall system that isn't completely fucked if it's supposed to work, and so on.
The Feds always look for the most expensive option. They'll end up with pricey battery powered hardware tokens when they could look at cheap Yubikeys.
Trolling is a art,
Total and complete incompetence from the Obama administration where the only qualification that matters is political loyalty.
From the article:
"A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project "was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People's Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports."
The alternative to limited government is unlimited government.
Correct me if I am wrong but stealing thousands or millions of records through an accessible UI doesn't seem feasible to me. If the data itself had been encrypted, even if the thiefs had access to the storage directly, they would have been stealing encrypted files. Maybe encryption isn't the holy grail but I would sure feel better knowing my data wasn't readable after downloading. I mean make them work for it anyway.
Or joy. Google has started blocking portions of SourceForge for Chome users for distributing mamware.
The article's author makes it sound like logging into the system would have automatically unlocked the encrypted files, or at least have allowed a logged-in user to get at the keys without authenticating further.
I suppose an encryption scheme could be implemented that way, and as just as the article suggests, that would have been useless. But an encryption doesn't need to be implemented that way, shouldn't be implemented that way, and is in fact harder to implement that way. It would provide protection against stolen hard drives, but that's not the main model of threat for things like this, and a proper policy would protect against that equally well while handling additional threats.
It's a simple policy: some things do not go in your freaking keychain. Important data like this, if it must be encrypted with a password, should require that password to be entered manually, every time. Yes, it is less convenient, but some things are too important to afford shortcuts.
... to outlaw social engineering.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It doesn't matter how many factors of authentication are used to obtain those credentials...
One past known attack was to obtain the users credential file. Works against AD just as well as against Kerberos (they are the same).
The one protection that kerberos had was that to use such credentials you had to be on the machine that they were given to. But since so many sites are now using NAT (which makes this useless), the stolen credentials can be used from anywhere for as long as the credentials have lifetime.
One thing the DoD did was mandate that the kerberos credentials granted received different lifetimes based on the network the request came from. As short as 15 minutes (least trusted) up to 7 days (with renewal every 10 hours) when the machine making the request was in a trusted network.
Worked fairly well at flushing out violations of policy.
So encryption would not have helped because the Attackers had a valid set of credentials with which to ex-filtrate ,millions of records.
The bigger issue here is why were alarms not ringing in the appropriate places while millions of records were being ex-filtrated? Why was there not effective monitoring of access use and network anomalies?
Funny thing is, if that sort of software was being used properly where another notable security cleared contractor was working (who's data was also leaked by this breach) he would have had a much harder time copying out so many documents without leaving a trace of his activities.
I have to think on the most recent Lastpass breach. In that case the lastpass people detected the anomalous network traffic, quickly tracked it down and discovered the exact nature of the possible breach. Because though their systems only stored data encrypted by keys that the systems themselves did not hold then the only leak was of the master-password hashes which because they were individually salted and hashed would only be useful in a targeted attack on individuals should they have weak passwords.
Maybe I'm wrong, but why is this kind of data on publicly accessible Internet? Is it not possible to put the encrypted data on totally secure servers requiring the best kind of login services that are not attached in any way to the public Internet but accessible through a separate wide area network? Folks who have access to this kind of data might need a separate terminal to access the data perhaps in a physically different location from their Internet connected computer. Users would need to be prevented from switching cables between the two kinds of terminals or otherwise allowing the servers to connect to the public Internet.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
So they can't one arm of the government saying encryption would have helped and another saying it should be illegal.
The thing is, how bad do you suck at security if social engineering was behind this "attack"
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If it's not it should be. The databases containing the background information on cleared government employees were taken; this info could be used to surveil or blackmail workers who have access to state secrets.
From TFS:
"As a matter of fact, I wish that you were as strenuous and hardworking at keeping information out of the hands of hackers as you are in keeping information out of the hands of Congress and federal employees. It's ironic. You are doing a great job stonewalling us, but hackers, not so much."
Never blame on bureaucratic conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by Congressional incompetence.
I admit I'm getting old, but is "mamware" a new name for tittypics?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I presume they know who's credentials were used.
Have they been fired? Because giving anyone your credentials is like crossing the streams...it's never done.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Can anybody think of any reason any user would ever need full SSN data?
No sir I dont like it.
Problem is, other people have similar sorts of systems and similar weaknesses. I used to work at a company that did IT for several hospitals (a relationship defining "its complicated" since they founded us) and well, simple auditing of usage after the fact is so..... 1990s.
By the time I left there was already some real time auditing and control in place, even to the extent of flagging attempts to access inappropriate records. In fact, if you were to access the medical record of your next door neighbor, or a relative, it would be flagged as suspicious access. The only records I knew of that you could look up frivolously were Santa Claus' and the Easter Bunny (Santa had much more hilarious prescriptions).
I am pretty sure you couldn't easily use that system to download large swaths of records before you got noticed. And that system had additional issues like, you basically need to let most people access most records because you don't want to deny access in an emergency so you HAVE to err on the side of letting the authorized user see everything and audit their usage.
Why would any other system have such a restraint? A nurse might need to emergency look up a patient she found in the hallway.... federal employee information... who has those needs on an emerhency basis? Seems they could have rate limits and cross checks against work loads.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Since everyone had access to it... Seriously, this is why least access principles are so important. Encryption isn't a silver bullet, there is no silver bullet, it's a process, with many layers and technology. You need to do it all, or determined attackers will pick the weakest link.
Is that anything like "Malware"?
If not, what is "Manware"?
There is so much wrong with this article its not even funny. I don't blame the writer, he's just trying to tie a nice neat bow on a badly wrapped pig.
I had to laugh though when he twice gives the example of proximity unlock on cars as IOT security. These are the same devices that only guarantee proximity security by using signal strength and thus are easily defeated by a $17 signal booster available on eBay, which has been in the news as the cause of many thefts of the contents of vehicles.
By seriously the core issue here is authentication and concentration of secrets, and no matter how many extra factors you have this will not change because each new factor requires the service to store another secret to be stolen or live phished from you.
As I see it the only long term solution is a better single factor and one that puts the handling of secrets as close to the user as possible and contained in something that is hardened or prevented from running malware. Then have that device use a site specific asymmetric key pair to offer a zero knowledge proof of authentication to the service. In that way the services hold no authentication secrets and what they do hold cannot even be used by an attacker to infer linkage between services.
Unfortunately right now, there is nothing in production and widely available that can do this, not even the much vaunted FIDO an U2F will accomplish this as their choices have rendered those protocols only usable as a second factor. There is one Single factor protocol that is presently 18 months into its research and development that I think will satisfy all the requirements of what the article writer needs, that being SQRL from The Gibson Research Corporation. Which also has additional features that even allow complete recovery from a loss of control over its core secret.
My family is visiting D.C. this summer, and in order to take a tour of a government facility (Capitol Hill, Congress, Dept. of Engraving, etc.) you need to apply through your congressional representative's office.
The "official and only" way to apply for a tour is to fill in and return, by email, unencrypted, a non-protected Excel spreadsheet with full names, SSNs, and other personally-identifiable information for your entire tour group (family) in one page of the spreadsheet.
Basically, if you want a tour, you must be willing first to roll over and put your goods out for anyone to sniff. No exceptions.
I was sick to my stomach over the idiocy of it all.
No, those would be manpages.
it isn't Controlled Unclassified Information (née Sensitive But Unclassified)
Yes it is. It is considered Confidential/Sensitive. It is also considered to contain PII, which means it has to be protected according to various government regulations.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
'encryption would "not have helped" because the attackers had gained valid user credentials to the systems that they attacked—likely through social engineering'
An encrypted database that could only be queried through a secure and fully audited channel. Any attempt to download the entire database would trip an alarm.
She's lying about her "it wouldn't have mattered".
Part of the "valid user credentials" is the system from which the login request is originating.
If only certain authorized machines, or machines within a certain building, or on a certain network, are permitted to log in using the credentials that were obtained, they would still not have been able to log in remotely.
Additional restrictions, such as time windows during which certain credentials may be used could also have further constrained the attackers.
She's obviously relying on the technical ignorance of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee membership to try and "pull a fast one".
It's too bad these guys do not have competent technical advisors in the room with them to tell them the questions they need to ask to elicit the truth.
I was watching the inquiries on CSPAN. My thoughts exactly were, "do we even know encryption would have solved the issue?". You have this legislator (didn't catch his name) up in front everyone lambasting OPM Director Katherine Archuleta and demanding to know why the data was not encrypted. As if the guy has a clue about what is involved and what problems it would solve directly. Exactly as mentioned in the article since the system has to be able to decrypt it's own data in order to function all you have to do is compromise the system and you get the data. I'm not defending outdated, piss poor public sector security practices, but it's just pretty lame to grandstand and pretend all the solutions are so obvious and that encrypting all your data for the last 30 years is as simple as deciding it should be done. It's particularly obnoxious when the criticism comes from a clueless legislator, who doesn't know anything about network security and is just engaging in a self serving attempt to seem tough on the issue.