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US Military Websites Still Relying On SHA-1 (netcraft.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Netcraft confirms many U.S. Department of Defense websites, including a remote access service used by the Missile Defense Agency, are more vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks than most consumer websites. The weaker than previously-thought SHA-1 algorithm is the main culprit, with the DoD today being the most prolific user of SHA-1 signed SSL certificates, even though NIST banned new use of this signature algorithm two years ago. Most of the vulnerable certificates to be issued recently are used by .mil websites, which are operated by agencies, services and divisions of the DoD. All of these sites are consequently vulnerable to attack by enemy governments and criminals who can stump up enough cash ($75,000) to crack the certificates.
...how did the $75,000 figure come to be? Is that what it costs for computer time to brute-force something? Is that what someone that holds a huge list of brute-calculated keys charges to do a lookup and provide the reverse-engineered private key?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Given the pages are mostly a picture, logos, public mission statements, employment/recruiting details, domestic and global propaganda images.
The only thing thats going to be "discovered" is a log or trace of anyone looking at the site.
Its all just bait. If the person looking is found domestically, they might get the recruited by indictment offer.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
SHA-1 hasn't been "defeated" -- at most, an attacker able to muster substantial computer resources *might* be able to discover a random binary file of random length that shares the same SHA-1 hash as something else.
In other words, there might be some denial-of-service potential if an attacker were able to forge the signature for an update file & trick a remote computer into replacing good files with nonworking ones, but that's pretty much *it* for the immediate future.
Should a new app use SHA-2? Of course. It's no harder to use, and bulletproof at this point. But there's no great urgency to replace SHA-1 in existing code at this point.
Right now, I'm freelancing as a software developer, working for a company with a 10 billion yearly revenue. As you can imagine, the IT here is very complex and you have dozens of "software architects" trying to keep an eye on all the connections between systems.
At some point, an internal iOS app wouldn't work because since iOS 9, Apple by default requires decent algorithms for secure network connections. Upgrading these requires consulting half a dozen software architects, just to coordinate a simultaneous upgrade of all the systems.
And before that, I find myself explaining to software architects what the difference is between SSL and TLS.
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I noticed the other day that ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) throws a SHA-1 warning in Chrome ("This site uses a weak security configuration (SHA-1 signatures), so your connection may not be private").
https://www.asio.gov.au/About-...
Still almost two years left on the cert.
So I wonder:
1) Is this a terribly big deal and, as Chrome (i.e., Google) warns, should I be massively concerned that our chief intelligence agency is running with algorithms that are considered obsolete by the infosec community?!
or
2) Have they carefully looked at all the known SHA-1 weaknesses (and presumably several that are not known to the wider public) and determined the risk is acceptable and that (for example) people applying for jobs on their website are not in danger of having their details compromised?!
A real, bona fide, practicing, reliability engineer explained to me once that military procurement procedures are intentionally biased toward older technologies and minimal upgrading. He said (and I believe him) that the military's nightmare scenario is that they will do something like installing 50000 computer boards in equipment scattered worldwide in poorly accessible equipment only to find that the ROMs they have used lose their memory after three or four years.
Obviously, that's primarily a hardware concern. but it's far from clear that it doesn't have considerable validity for software as well. And it's the way their process is set up.
Personally, I'm far from convinced that the current civilian -- ship now, we'll fix the problems in production -- approach to systems work is going work out well in the long run.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
If this post is a true reflection of the source material then its a Load of Fetted Dingoes Kidneys.
"Netcraft confirms many U.S. Department of Defense websites, including a remote access service used by the Missile Defense Agency, are more vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks than most consumer websites." - True but not by enough to matter unless you can utilize the worlds GRP in processors.
"even though NIST banned new use of this signature algorithm two years ago." - Not banned, deprecated & there is an application in the works to continue issuance until the end of 2016.
"vulnerable to attack by enemy governments and criminals who can stump up enough cash ($75,000) to crack the certificates." - That is a gross underestimate by many many orders of magnitude. The figure I guess comes from the recent paper where the researches spent about this much to generate a collision for the most inner part of the algorithm, that was NOT against the entire signature function which would be orders of magnitude more costly in processing time.