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HP Enterprise Let Russia Scrutinize The Pentagon's Cyberdefense Software (reuters.com)
"A Russian defense agency was allowed to review the cyberdefense software used by the Pentagon to protect its computer networks," writes new submitter quonset. "This according to Russian regulatory records and interviews with people with direct knowledge of the issue." Reuters reports:
The Russian review of ArcSight's source code, the closely guarded internal instructions of the software, was part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's effort to win the certification required to sell the product to Russia's public sector, according to the regulatory records seen by Reuters and confirmed by a company spokeswoman. Six former U.S. intelligence officials, as well as former ArcSight employees and independent security experts, said the source code review could help Moscow discover weaknesses in the software, potentially helping attackers to blind the U.S. military to a cyber attack. "It's a huge security vulnerability," said Greg Martin, a former security architect for ArcSight. "You are definitely giving inner access and potential exploits to an adversary."
It's another example of the problems security companies face when they try to do business internationally, according to Reuters. "One reason Russia requests the reviews before allowing sales to government agencies and state-run companies is to ensure that U.S. intelligence services have not placed spy tools in the software."
Long-time Slashdot reader bbsguru has his own worries. "So, opening your code for review because it is demanded by a potential customer? What could possibly go wrong? HPE may find out, and the U.S. Military is among the many clients depending on the answer."
It's another example of the problems security companies face when they try to do business internationally, according to Reuters. "One reason Russia requests the reviews before allowing sales to government agencies and state-run companies is to ensure that U.S. intelligence services have not placed spy tools in the software."
Long-time Slashdot reader bbsguru has his own worries. "So, opening your code for review because it is demanded by a potential customer? What could possibly go wrong? HPE may find out, and the U.S. Military is among the many clients depending on the answer."
This is HPE. I doubt they have anything worthwhile.
Wait until they figure out who all Microsoft has shared the Windows source code with.
A good security product is secure even if attackers know how it works.
We have an absolutely marvelous case study here.
What treason? This story is utter garbage, HP weren't revealing US secrets, they were submitting their OWN software for review to win sales. Every large company does this for governments and sometimes private sector as well. Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Oracle etc etc all do this and if they didn't they would all be a fraction of the size they are now as none of them would get international government business.
buy security software instead of making it's own? Answer: Because none of this matters. The people who matter are global, not national. I saw a thing where Joe Biden said that rich people were as patriotic as poor. But that's just not true. Patriotism is a love of country. But the really wealth (not just the millionaires, but the multi-millionaires and billionaires) are no longer beholden to a country. They no longer depend on a country for anything. They global. And that means all this international intrigue is just pissing in the wind for them. At the end of the day they'll sit down with their fellow global citizens and hash it all out. Usually to the detriment of those of us still dependent on nation-states.
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They're going after people who read only headlines and who don't know what any of this stuff means.
Kind of like that utter nonsense Slashdot published months ago where someone spying on network requests found collusion between a 3rd party Trump company marketing site and a Russian bank. Except it was stray DNS queries caused by Russian spam. Few people bothered to question what the people spying on that network traffic were doing, exactly.
Why all the news about Russia?
To deflect our attention from China.
You're reading too quickly, slow down and try again. Trump = the treason, HPE = the stupid but lesser "crime" (or not a crime, either way common) of giving away the source for a platform in use by US.gov to an adversary. The only question is if they had an "secret" level deal with the US on that particular sw platform or if it were classified "sensitive" "noforn" "no export" etc. In that case it could result in problems for HPE. But probably not. Halliburton and other companies got away with insane amounts of deliberate trading with embargoed enemies, this crappy document platform certainly doesn't rise to that level of seriousness.
Citizenship vs capitalism.
HPE acts like it doesn't have the sense god gave a pissant, but, sadly, it does.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So you're in favor of "security through obscurity".
I can't say that that's in any way a good technical argument.
You share code with the Russians, their people look at it, and suggest changes before they are willing to buy it.
You share code with the U.S. government, their people look at it, and suggest changes before they are willing to buy it.
Everyone wins.
The original Hewlett-Packard split into HP Inc and HPE years ago. The old printer business is on the other side of the split.
Imagine, if Russians would see the source code of Linux. There are too many devices serving as... You name it - servers, routers, and even mobile operating systems are based on Linux! How long will it take until someone will disclose the Linux sources to Russians? What a dangerous world we are living in. Let's hope for the best, although frankly I'm quite afraid.
You're serious?
How about: their people look at, come up with some changes they'd need before trusting their systems to it, then give one back to the vendor and keep some to themselves for later.
COTS is the devil when it comes to American defense procurement. Yeah you don't need to commission a new programming language and compiler for every single solitary project like they had to do back in the 70s and 80s, but then at the same time you don't really want to be buying an OS from a company where the single number one priority is to make sure the 'voice assistant' works instead of silly things like rendering menus correctly or recognizing unformatted disks.
And then the NSA wonders why they keep losing their shit.
"The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."
V.I Lenin
I've read the same news like week ago in Polish national newspaper that usually does not have a clue about tech. Now after a week I read the same BS on /.
ArcSight is a popular SIEM system that lots of companies use. It is not an active security/policy system. It is used to passively analyze and correlate the gathered security data coming from various sources. At simplest think about syslog analyzer but allowing you to deeply correlate security events such as logins, IDS policy breaches, endpoint malware detection etc. Finding a flaw in such software is hardly a security breach.
Also is natural that big spenders like governments tend to like have at least a peak into the code before they decide on buying something significant. I guess the same is opposite that US government had access to ArcSight source code so why Russian government wouldn't?
It is not like USA and Russia are at war yes?
I call it an exaggerated BS.
Obscurity can be a perfectly valid defense layer for an attacker, so I'm not sure why you think there's no technical argument for it.
Tanks have armor, but they are often painted to match their terrain to obscure their location. Painting the vehicle does nothing to harm the armor, and it does help prevent targeting by the enemy -- through difficulty to see on reconnaissance. Invisible tanks would be even better.
By allowing an enemy to see government-run computer code, we're not only identifying what systems we're using, but also giving them an opportunity to look for flaws to exploit. You make a terrible assumption that the Russians would TELL the vendor of exploits they'd find as well as bother to use the software internally themselves.
Open source is great for day-to-day stuff, but for .. oh, I dunno... remote nuclear launch software, there had better be zero -- and I mean zero bugs. That had better be hand-written in assembly and checked by a few hundred master programmers while being overlooked by the designers of the cpu architecture it's being run on.
For other critical systems... yeah... best to keep those closed source so that WHEN bugs are found our national security isn't put on the line because of it.
The higher the standards of security, the more we need FOSS, because it's the superior security model. If you need it with zero bugs, you write it in something like Ada Spark.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
What the author is missing is that if you've done your security properly, then it doesn't matter if the adversary reviews the code or even if they have complete access to the system it's running on, the system will still be secure. That's what you should be designing for. That is proper security. And yes, it is possible.
Why not assure the software is secure and bullet proof to start with? If Russia finds a bug or opening to exploit the US, it only shows the US didn't do it's job in reviewing and securing the software / infrastructure.
Sensationalist crap if I ever saw one.
Making a source-code review is standard operation procedure for high security settings. In fact, I recommend exactly this to some of my clients (I've worked in IS before the abbreviation had a second meaning about murderous religious idiots).
If this allowed them to discover weaknesses in the software, then maybe the US departments should've done a source-code review themselves and discovered those same weaknesses? What is wrong with the author of this crap to shout wolf because someone is doing proper security?
"omg, the Russians tested the same rifle that our army uses! Maybe they discovered at what temperature it explodes!"
Guys, you need to wake up over there before you find yourself plundged into a new Cold War by nonsense propaganda. Ask yourself who profits from such shit, who gets to sell more stuff thanks to articles like this, and who gets to gain more influence from the fear.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
How about: their people look at, come up with some changes they'd need before trusting their systems to it, then give one back to the vendor and keep some to themselves for later.
Yes, the "threat model" is that they discover a bug and don't tell anyone.
Which means that the NSA (who is responsible for keeping US government infrastructure and systems safe) didn't find that bug when they did their source code review.
Additional information: There are many ways to find bugs in software aside from code reviews. So not showing them the code would have had two effects: a) they would've probably bought some other software and b) they would've given the binary to their binary testing team.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
People still use Arcsight in 2017???
It has been superseded by dozens of products.
1. Use off-the-shelf product to save money, but another big customer might also audit the code (the current predicament)
2. Use custom product so it's unavailable to others, but ultimately relying on obscurity
3. Go open source and have politicians and media have a heart attack about how "now everyone can access the source code / Trump is giving our source code away for free"
4. Export ban on this software while you use it, again relying on obscurity
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Bump stocks are perfectly legal and will remain so. Keep pushing against them and we will manufacture more improved models with more âoefeaturesâ
In short, keep your mouth shut like a good little boy, go play with your game boy.
wealth _is_ power. But you're also assuming their greed is unlimited. It's not. They get along just fine with each other and take care of their own. Why do you think Golden Parachutes and bail outs exist? Why are their loans always guaranteed by the tax payer?
They're the ruling class and they know it. They also know who their equals are and, unlike the working class, they take care of their own. It's why they're winning and we're losing.
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Who cares ...
A gun is like open source software. Everyone can see what the parts are and how it is made.
Closed-sourced software and to a lesser extent, ASICs, are very different beasts. For complex code and ASIC, it's impossible to look at the result of compilation (or manufacture for ASICs) and determine every little thing it does.
Closed sourced software does have more vulnerabilities. With open source software, the bugs are transparent, putting white hats and black hats on an even footing. But with closed source software, the person that has access to the code has access to the vulnerability.
So, shame on the military for not requiring ITAR on the source code. The corporations will do what corporations always do - push every boundary in order to make money. No point blaming HP E unless they violated contract or broke actual laws.
Source code can contain information the binary doesn't. Like why mistakes are made and who made them, to give an example. So if there's an exploit in the binary, you find it either way. If the source code with the mistake contains comments from Sanjay at CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet in Mumbai, that tells you where else that mistake could be. If there's no mistakes in Sanjay's code, you still have a potential recruitment target. Paranoid? Yes. Unlikely? Can't say. Implausible? No.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
So, opening your code for review because it is demanded by a potential customer? What could possibly go wrong? HPE may find out, and the U.S. Military is among the many clients depending on the answer.
If a big contract wants something, you do it. Or you lose huge business. Unless Pentagon had an exclusive contract with HPE, the claim that they gave secrets to an enemy is absurd. They are not Pentagon's secrets. They are HPE secrets. And HPE doesn't seem to think that a potential customer is an enemy.
It's not standard operational procedure to hand your code over to an attacking foreign power. They WILL discover weaknesses and they WON'T tell you about them.
"then maybe the US departments should've done a source-code review themselves and discovered those same weaknesses?"
Maybe the world should be perfect, but it isn't, live in the real world.
"Cold War by nonsense propaganda"
You need to wake up to what Putin's up to.
Russia is not on a no-export list. So saying that HPE is exporting tech to an enemy is a full-fledged defamation.
This article is literally promoting security by obscurity which anybody with even the slightest amount of experience would know is not security at all. Honestly done with slashdot. This is one of the biggest issues in the industry and the author of the article is a joke and is objectively hurting people for monetary gain by preying on those who aren't savvy. Literally a predator.
Security through obscurity doesn't work. Fuzzing will eventually find holes.
It is time to change policies toward open source software. This approach puts security in everyone's best interest.
It is also time to switch to IPv6 only.
It is also time to get critical infrastructure completely off of the Internet.
YOU don't seem to be reading at all. The software in question is clearly identified as Arcsight, an Enterprise SIEM tool used by many all over the world, certainly nothing "sensitive" or "no export" or any other shit you care to make up.
But you are a Krembot so what should we make of your words?
Yes. Everyone does this. Well almost. .au govt dropped this company from the purchase list, even though the tech experts said this was the best at the time. This proves that the best does not always end up on the buy list.
Australia demanded access to Israeli firewall software code. They were told, yes, but inspection would be in the Israeli Embassy with nothing to leave the building. Suffice to say the
I wonder if Kaspersky said no to similar demands. If you look at mobile phones, all the major brands have slipped in CALEA backdoors, thats supplemented by a binary blob from Broadcom. Thus no phone is verifiably 'safe'. ALL phones have proprietary modem binary blobs.
It is possible to remove comments from source code before handing it in to code review.
It is also possible to establish sane comment guidelines, especially when you are a security company.
And it is quite trivial to figure out who actually writes the software for a software company, without comments in source code.
Sure you get additional information from code, especially if good documentation explains the thinking behind algorithms. However, to go into a panic because another country made a source code review is the most insane thing I've seen in a very long time.
These things are standard. Every large important piece of software has been through source code review many, many times. You think that the MS Windows source code is very much secret?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
it shouldn't make any difference who looks at it. Linux and Unix are generally considered more secure than Windows but all the source code is available for anyone to look at.
I'm amazed that none of the commenters here have made the link to GNU's fight for open source.
If this had been GPL code, then the source code would be available already.
The problem isn't that Russia sees the code. It's that the rest of us do not. Otherwise it's just security by obscurity.
Karpesky has been banned in the US for potential links with russian authorities. They could have still used it by requesting a code audit.
To be honest, it doesnâ(TM)t help that NSA and uk counterpart have infected/modified/enforced modifications for their purposes so Russiaâ(TM)s move feels pretty sensible to be.
None of this would happened with FOSS (not to mention taxpayersâ(TM) money being poured into an IT product only accessible for a company).
that also is not an unusual demand. some companies also explicitly demand the inspection can only take place on their secure facilities with nothing (beyond pens and paper) going in or out with the code reviewers. It then comes down to how much said government/organisation really needs/wants that software as to whether they will relent to such demands which I don't think are unreasonable as I can't think of a single government in the world I would trust deeply enough to turn over my assets too when all you have is "hope" that they won't do the wrong thing.
How did this get modded up? HP Inc. makes the HP printers now, HPE is on the other side of the corporate split.
Obscurity can be a perfectly valid defense layer for an attacker, so I'm not sure why you think there's no technical argument for it.
The real equivalent to camouflage paint on the Internet is to not show up on nmap and other port scans. That's not obscurity, that's not offering an unnecessary attack surface -- just as with tank visibility against backgrounds.
I guarantee you that the desert camouflage stands out like a sore thumb in Leningrad in the winter.
You make a terrible assumption that the Russians would TELL the vendor of exploits they'd find as well as bother to use the software internally themselves.
If the Russians get so far as to sign a letter of intent, in order to get access to audit the source code ...and then decline to purchase ...that's a pretty strong positive indicator of exploitable bugs.
At which point you schedule the NSA to audit the code, so that those bugs can be addressed.
What happens when you worship only money? Capitalism!
aaaaaaa
>> But with closed source software, the person that has access to the code has access to the vulnerability.
That's bullshit.
With closed source software, the person with access to the binary has access to the vuln.
aaaaaaa
So the Russians are concerned about the Americans hacking them? Where's the outrage? Where's the massive investigations? This is a threat to Communism hat we must root out.
I think code review is unlikely to discern mistakes at the scale of a large piece of software.
On the other hand, breaking up the chunks of the monolithic application into pieces to do unit testing can presumably make fuzzing easier. So the ability to re-build the project in a different way can be helpful.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
See subject: Whoever the fool is attempting to "impersonate me" is only proves that I've REALLY 'gotten to them' somehow (thanks).
* I am with you on something though - there is a TON of bogus downmoderation but as the saying goes? "When all your opposition has is censorship you've obviously won" (& I am highly against the LOON(s) who shot all those folks up in Vegas - I think it's somekind of falseflag OR an attempt @ further dividing our nation up ala the KING of bogus evil in that capacity, George Soros paying off groups like BLM & Antifa to do so...) - but GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE - people do. NO reason to ban guns there.
As far as "AssFux" Ash-Fox? That whimp's a weasel who ALWAYS starts w/ me (he's 'butthurt' I've busted him up on tech issues is all that is)...
APK
P.S.=> Provoking weasel reactions like yours is all the satisfaction anyone needs... apk
I'm not going into a panic because another country is doing source review. I'm saying the US government shouldn't be using code that's neither open source nor fully closed source. If it's fully open source, everything I said doesn't matter because it's got more eyeballs on it. If it's fully closed source and only domestic users review it, then that attenuates the risk. This here is a no-man's land in between where you don't get any of the benefits and have to assume that everyone's got their thinking hats on with regard to scrubbing anything embarrassing out of the comments that they originally thought were going to stay proprietary.
Security consultant here with experiences in SIEM's. ArcSight is a security information and event management (SIEM), which means all it does is collecting logs from other security devices together and deciding if sequence of events has higher priority compared to individual event.
For example, connection from unknown address, crashed antivirus service and unusually high disk activity is likely to be cryptolocker.
There is nothing valuable in source code of SIEM's, its a bunch of regex to parse incoming logs few basic rules (described in documentation) and interface. Nothing of value. What it could be doing though is leaking logs to US, therefor request code review is very reasonable.
PS. ArcSight is overcomplicated piece of crap, Splunk, Qradar and LogRythm are far superior. Search for Gartner report.
Shoot them both. Its the only way to be sure.
Move along, nothing to worry about. It's just arcsight. You're better off using owasp. We have the HP product, it's crap. False positives and they don't listen to customer feedback. Almost as bad as Tenable. They think they know better than the experts, such as the Crypto experts on a vulnerability that was patched almost a decade ago. They don't even follow their own rules and they don't listen to their customers either.
Do you realize your writing style is annoying? It looks like attention whoring with all the caps, empty lines and asterisks.
I'm saying the US government shouldn't be using code that's neither open source nor fully closed source.
While there are theoretical advantages to Free Software in this context, they do not manifest to the degree that many Free Software advocates think. And I say that as a stern believer in Free Software (to the degree that I refuse to call it "Open Source").
OpenBSD is about the only project that actually does this right - by not relying on the assumption that Free Software actually gets read, but making sure it happens and running regular code reviews.
From a security perspective, I'd rather take a piece of close source software that I know has been through code reviews, than a piece of Free Software that may or may not have been looked at by anyone else besides the creator.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I think we're agreeing here.