The Juniper VPN Backdoor: Buggy Code With a Dose of Shady NSA Crypto (csoonline.com)

itwbennett writes: Security researchers and crypto experts now believe that a combination of likely malicious third-party modifications and Juniper's own crypto failures are responsible for the recently disclosed backdoor in Juniper NetScreen firewalls. 'To sum up, some hacker or group of hackers noticed an existing backdoor in the Juniper software, which may have been intentional or unintentional — you be the judge!,' Matthew Green, a cryptographer and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University wrote in a blog post. 'They then piggybacked on top of it to build a backdoor of their own, something they were able to do because all of the hard work had already been done for them. The end result was a period in which someone — maybe a foreign government — was able to decrypt Juniper traffic in the U.S. and around the world. And all because Juniper had already paved the road.'

Comments

getting out of hand

[danksnugs]

This isn't the first excellent post by Matthew Green. His other on ECC was also informative and scary. Juniper equipment manages industrial control systems, (like the kind used in nuclear power plants) and we rely on encryption for every part of our online experience - not to mention classified data that presumably protects Americans. The passive collection of VPN data Mr. Green suggests probably happened, and the active exploitation of equipment Snowden revealed by the NSA is a much bigger story than collecting phone records ever was. The infosec community making fun of Hillary for suggesting a manhattan project for encryption is funny, but this underlines a serious lack of understanding by too many people in high places. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by letting the NSA hold onto this encryption pipe dream.