This is just what you get when you have a Threatpost reporter interviewing a cryptographer. I think Brumley does a fine job answering the questions factually, without feeding the hype. There really is a timing attack to which most every implementation of OpenSSL is vulnerable.
The problem is that some people interpret that kind of as some kind of armageddon for internet security, whereas the great majority of secure systems probably aren't affected at all because they don't run the vulnerable code. But for those who are affected the problem may be really really serious for them. It is to these people that the researcher must communicate (via a journalist) without being able to select his audience in advance.
It makes no sense to me. You have by far the strongest military in the world. The USSR is gone. Ok, so there's China, but so far they have not made any seriously threatening moves. Who is left that is any threat?
The problem isn't so much the degree to which the threat is or isn't real. If they wanted to fabricate unreal threats, they could certainly do a better
The problem is that there exists a truly massive security-industrial complex. For example, a huge percentage of the population within commuting distance of Washington DC have some kind of security clearance, and their employment depends on it, it's part of their social group, etc. Often these people have lived a relatively sheltered "whitebread" life, except for commonly military service in some place like Iraq. Their biggest worry is that they'll accidentally be friends with someone who'll be busted for pot and that will complicate up their security paperwork for the rest of their life. Sadly, these people are hard-pressed to understand America's freedoms, having renounced much of it for themselves.
Large, highly profitable industries have arisen to service this part of the Federal budget. So they hire people and more people to fill more and more funded positions with names like "Analyst". They write papers which sometimes come out like this.
Personally, I think this is one of the stupidest, most short-sighted, bits of analysis I've ever read. But it's important to contemplate how these things emerge from a process in which most or all of the people involved consider themselves to be doing the right thing for their country, career, employer, social circuit, etc..
It's not FUD and it's not "the sky is falling" either.
This is cryptographers communicating with one another. Terms like "attack" are being used here in their academic meaning. It's an interesting result, exciting even, but shouldn't be emotionally charged.
If there are any real systems at risk, I don't know of them. But it's certainly possible that someone somewhere is really screwed by this attack, so it should be taken seriously. Anyone using ECDSA should probably apply the forthcoming patches as soon as is practical. This is good advice in any case.
The summary has it backwards: Your health insurance company is interested in your calorie intake and the police are ones interested in your Doritos intake. Nobody cares about the soduim.
Renegotiation was not "cracked". Renegotiation worked as intended - it is the software that used renegotiation that failed to view the two streams as separate connections, as it should!
Except that renegotiation was developed by the very same people at Netscape and for the same specific purpose that it got used for: changing crypto parameters and client certificate authentication after the HTTP request had been made.
Will Apple start issuing lawsuits and court orders left and right to try and stop this? And if so will it distract people from Sony's recent actions along those lines?
I doubt it. ElcomSoft's products are favorites of law enforcement and Apple employs some crypto people who know exactly what they're doing with the product's design.
Law enforcement raids journalists' houses and confiscates their computers for Apple, Apple leaves room for law enforcement to buy software from Russians to use against Americans.
Adobe Flash aren't so much security risks to the site, they're a risk to the user's computer running the browser. The attacker gets to choose whether to attack the browser via Adobe Flash or to attack it via WebGL. Unless the user is specifically running Firefox+NoScript, the site itself has little to do with it.
This is why the discussion about Flash and WebGL security is important for users to be involved in, not just hackers and website authors.
I agree it's misleading to imply that there's a specific 'flaw' that leaves the GPU 'exposed'. That's the entire point of WebGL: to expose the GPU to web applications. Whether or not you think that's a good idea depends on where you fall on the security vs. functionality spectrum. It's an interesting discussion.
Look at it this way: GPUs are extremely complex hardware/software combination systems representing a huge attack surface. They're designed either for zero-cost (integrated graphics) or maximum game performance. Security has never been a big driver for this market. Newer graphics engines like WebGL allow the GPUs to be programmed with somewhat arbitrary code. These programs need lightning-fast parallel access to several different kinds of memory and the security model for this programming environment looks something like an afterthought.
Once again, the developers probably thought they didn't need to put security first since the primary use case was running trusted applications on single-user systems (e.g., games).
It's not uncommon to see crash bugs in GPU systems. They look a heck of a lot like the blue screens that used to plague MS Windows. There's no reason to think these bugs will be any less exploitable than those of Windows XP SP 0. We've seen this play out with Adobe Acrobat reader, Flash, and any number of other binary browser plugins. Hopefully the graphics developers are better, but their challenge is much harder too.
In short, all the ingredients are present making in the recipe for disaster. It's probably only a matter of time for exploitable vulnerabilities to surface. I don't think we should kill off WebGL altogether, but the right thing to do is to put the focus on its security.
Personally, I look forward to using it, but I'm going to turn it off by default. I'm counting on noscript to let me enable it selectively. This is just good practice anyway.
Sure, it's released, sure, it's not great. Who is dying? The stuff is flowing into the ocean, which always had nuclear materials in it, diluted in water, so there will be some more now. Horror.
I dare you to go into one of the evacuation centers and say that to one of the 70,000 people who have no idea when (or if) they'll ever be able to return to their contaminated home.
How does having access to the 8 CELL cores make the PS/3 a "supercomputer"?
Well the definition of "supercomputer" changes over time obviously, but I imagine you don't have to go too far back in time for a PS3 to qualify. The fact that I have one in my living room counts for a lot.
For the types of thing that cells are good at, probably nothing even comes close to the installed cost (cycles/sec/$) of a pile of PS3s.
Those phony 240 hz screens don't actually change the pixels 240 times per second.
Well your retina doesn't react instantaneously either, but your brain knows how to compensate for it. My personal theory is that the slow response of the LCD is also an analog or analog-appearing process and your brain will find it less offensive than other types of timing distortions.
But even if the LCD itself doesn't respond instantaneously, increasing the frame rate can potentially decrease every frame-count-denominated source of latency preceding them in the pipeline. By going from 33 ms/frame (30 Hz) to 4 ms/frame (240 Hz) you eliminate 14 to 29 ms worth of latency in even the shortest pipeline. Of course, if you have that much extra CPU it seems like you prevent the multiplier effect by runing the game logic at the higher rate and just throw away the extra frames without rendering them to the GPU.
But I'm not a real game developer or expert on these matters.
I dislike ACTA just as much as the next Slashdotter, but I think it's going just a wee bit too far to say that it's going to be the cause of a new wave of anti-US terrorism.
It's psychologically easier for me to keep paperwork than throw it away, something about the logical difficulty of proving a negative ("no way will you ever need this"). My old stuff is either categorized or disorganized, but I have very little that's older than 5-10 years. At that age, the whole categorical folder can usually be tossed (e.g., I moved years ago and every bill from that utility company is old).
When I get the urge to throw stuff out, I can always go through the older stuff with a different standard and find stuff worth tossing. The older it gets, the more easily it can be tossed.
Err on the side of not categorizing and not shredding. Only categorize into folders the stuff that you're likely to need to access by category in the future (e.g. tax documents). Everything else goes back into the envelope it came in. For bills, write "paid" on the front.
Use an appropriately-sized box to hold old mail neatly. Stick the newly-archived mail in the front (or top) of the stack such that it naturally sorts in a coarse reverse-chronological order. It's not too hard to go back through this to find stuff if you need it later and you'd probably never need to look further back than a year anyway.
Above all, don't spend more energy on the problem than it merits or else it will become a burdensome chore.
Good point. I'm usually so security-conscious that my hands begin to tremble whenever I remove the network cable from its locked safety cabinet and connect my computer to the net.
But one day in a moment of folly I thought "gee maybe it wouldn't be too dangerous to allow a simple video game to be played over my local LAN".
Slashdot Mirror
This is just what you get when you have a Threatpost reporter interviewing a cryptographer. I think Brumley does a fine job answering the questions factually, without feeding the hype. There really is a timing attack to which most every implementation of OpenSSL is vulnerable.
The problem is that some people interpret that kind of as some kind of armageddon for internet security, whereas the great majority of secure systems probably aren't affected at all because they don't run the vulnerable code. But for those who are affected the problem may be really really serious for them. It is to these people that the researcher must communicate (via a journalist) without being able to select his audience in advance.
It makes no sense to me. You have by far the strongest military in the world. The USSR is gone. Ok, so there's China, but so far they have not made any seriously threatening moves. Who is left that is any threat?
The problem isn't so much the degree to which the threat is or isn't real. If they wanted to fabricate unreal threats, they could certainly do a better
The problem is that there exists a truly massive security-industrial complex. For example, a huge percentage of the population within commuting distance of Washington DC have some kind of security clearance, and their employment depends on it, it's part of their social group, etc. Often these people have lived a relatively sheltered "whitebread" life, except for commonly military service in some place like Iraq. Their biggest worry is that they'll accidentally be friends with someone who'll be busted for pot and that will complicate up their security paperwork for the rest of their life. Sadly, these people are hard-pressed to understand America's freedoms, having renounced much of it for themselves.
Large, highly profitable industries have arisen to service this part of the Federal budget. So they hire people and more people to fill more and more funded positions with names like "Analyst". They write papers which sometimes come out like this.
Personally, I think this is one of the stupidest, most short-sighted, bits of analysis I've ever read. But it's important to contemplate how these things emerge from a process in which most or all of the people involved consider themselves to be doing the right thing for their country, career, employer, social circuit, etc..
It's not FUD and it's not "the sky is falling" either.
This is cryptographers communicating with one another. Terms like "attack" are being used here in their academic meaning. It's an interesting result, exciting even, but shouldn't be emotionally charged.
If there are any real systems at risk, I don't know of them. But it's certainly possible that someone somewhere is really screwed by this attack, so it should be taken seriously. Anyone using ECDSA should probably apply the forthcoming patches as soon as is practical. This is good advice in any case.
The EFF's SSL observatory project found a handful of them on servers on the internet, but none of them actually rooted to a well known CA.
The summary has it backwards: Your health insurance company is interested in your calorie intake and the police are ones interested in your Doritos intake. Nobody cares about the soduim.
The idea is that you would obtain a backup or image the data with a backdoor interface, then use this software to guess the password.
Simple, they use ElcomSoft. The iPhone4 is fairly new right?
Renegotiation was not "cracked". Renegotiation worked as intended - it is the software that used renegotiation that failed to view the two streams as separate connections, as it should!
Except that renegotiation was developed by the very same people at Netscape and for the same specific purpose that it got used for: changing crypto parameters and client certificate authentication after the HTTP request had been made.
Will Apple start issuing lawsuits and court orders left and right to try and stop this? And if so will it distract people from Sony's recent actions along those lines?
I doubt it. ElcomSoft's products are favorites of law enforcement and Apple employs some crypto people who know exactly what they're doing with the product's design.
Law enforcement raids journalists' houses and confiscates their computers for Apple, Apple leaves room for law enforcement to buy software from Russians to use against Americans.
Adobe Flash aren't so much security risks to the site, they're a risk to the user's computer running the browser. The attacker gets to choose whether to attack the browser via Adobe Flash or to attack it via WebGL. Unless the user is specifically running Firefox+NoScript, the site itself has little to do with it.
This is why the discussion about Flash and WebGL security is important for users to be involved in, not just hackers and website authors.
I agree it's misleading to imply that there's a specific 'flaw' that leaves the GPU 'exposed'. That's the entire point of WebGL: to expose the GPU to web applications. Whether or not you think that's a good idea depends on where you fall on the security vs. functionality spectrum. It's an interesting discussion.
Look at it this way: GPUs are extremely complex hardware/software combination systems representing a huge attack surface. They're designed either for zero-cost (integrated graphics) or maximum game performance. Security has never been a big driver for this market. Newer graphics engines like WebGL allow the GPUs to be programmed with somewhat arbitrary code. These programs need lightning-fast parallel access to several different kinds of memory and the security model for this programming environment looks something like an afterthought.
Once again, the developers probably thought they didn't need to put security first since the primary use case was running trusted applications on single-user systems (e.g., games).
It's not uncommon to see crash bugs in GPU systems. They look a heck of a lot like the blue screens that used to plague MS Windows. There's no reason to think these bugs will be any less exploitable than those of Windows XP SP 0. We've seen this play out with Adobe Acrobat reader, Flash, and any number of other binary browser plugins. Hopefully the graphics developers are better, but their challenge is much harder too.
In short, all the ingredients are present making in the recipe for disaster. It's probably only a matter of time for exploitable vulnerabilities to surface. I don't think we should kill off WebGL altogether, but the right thing to do is to put the focus on its security.
Personally, I look forward to using it, but I'm going to turn it off by default. I'm counting on noscript to let me enable it selectively. This is just good practice anyway.
They emit more radiation than nuclear power plants, too.
Can't wait to see the article where they update that study with the new data from Fukushima.
Sure, it's released, sure, it's not great. Who is dying? The stuff is flowing into the ocean, which always had nuclear materials in it, diluted in water, so there will be some more now. Horror.
I dare you to go into one of the evacuation centers and say that to one of the 70,000 people who have no idea when (or if) they'll ever be able to return to their contaminated home.
That makes no sense. Why should they get credit for something that they destroyed?
If someone sells you a nice house for market price, do they get credit? Not really, they weren't doing you a favor, they were making money.
When they later burn your house down, do they get credit?
Sony's divisions are semi-independent...So lay off of SCE, okay.
No, actually this makes me adverse to things with just Ericsson's name on it too.
OK I'll go read TFA now.
Probably it's their parents who were screwed with the CC info loss.
How does having access to the 8 CELL cores make the PS/3 a "supercomputer"?
Well the definition of "supercomputer" changes over time obviously, but I imagine you don't have to go too far back in time for a PS3 to qualify. The fact that I have one in my living room counts for a lot.
For the types of thing that cells are good at, probably nothing even comes close to the installed cost (cycles/sec/$) of a pile of PS3s.
Well your retina doesn't react instantaneously either, but your brain knows how to compensate for it. My personal theory is that the slow response of the LCD is also an analog or analog-appearing process and your brain will find it less offensive than other types of timing distortions.
But even if the LCD itself doesn't respond instantaneously, increasing the frame rate can potentially decrease every frame-count-denominated source of latency preceding them in the pipeline. By going from 33 ms/frame (30 Hz) to 4 ms/frame (240 Hz) you eliminate 14 to 29 ms worth of latency in even the shortest pipeline. Of course, if you have that much extra CPU it seems like you prevent the multiplier effect by runing the game logic at the higher rate and just throw away the extra frames without rendering them to the GPU.
But I'm not a real game developer or expert on these matters.
I guess Osama was wise to hide out in a place where they don't know how to use the internet
I dislike ACTA just as much as the next Slashdotter, but I think it's going just a wee bit too far to say that it's going to be the cause of a new wave of anti-US terrorism.
It's psychologically easier for me to keep paperwork than throw it away, something about the logical difficulty of proving a negative ("no way will you ever need this"). My old stuff is either categorized or disorganized, but I have very little that's older than 5-10 years. At that age, the whole categorical folder can usually be tossed (e.g., I moved years ago and every bill from that utility company is old).
When I get the urge to throw stuff out, I can always go through the older stuff with a different standard and find stuff worth tossing. The older it gets, the more easily it can be tossed.
Err on the side of not categorizing and not shredding. Only categorize into folders the stuff that you're likely to need to access by category in the future (e.g. tax documents). Everything else goes back into the envelope it came in. For bills, write "paid" on the front.
Use an appropriately-sized box to hold old mail neatly. Stick the newly-archived mail in the front (or top) of the stack such that it naturally sorts in a coarse reverse-chronological order. It's not too hard to go back through this to find stuff if you need it later and you'd probably never need to look further back than a year anyway.
Above all, don't spend more energy on the problem than it merits or else it will become a burdensome chore.
Good point. I'm usually so security-conscious that my hands begin to tremble whenever I remove the network cable from its locked safety cabinet and connect my computer to the net.
But one day in a moment of folly I thought "gee maybe it wouldn't be too dangerous to allow a simple video game to be played over my local LAN".
Silly me. I'll never make that mistake again.
It's to prevent the server compromise from spreading to my unit. Details are in the blog post I linked.