This was an interesting find because it wasn’t too long ago I published a post about Mediggo, a Tool To Detect Weak Or Insecure Cryptosystems Using Generic Cryptanalysis Techniques.

Requirements

Windows Binaries included in this distribution as well as supporting libraries were compiled using gcc, Mingw and Msys.

Linux binaries were compiled using gcc 4.1.2. They were tested from command line in machine with Windows Vista Home Premium (32 bit + SP1) and on Linux Gentoo 2008.0 X86 operating systems.

Compiling

Version 1.02 includes standard configuration scripts for Unix like systems. The old Makefile (Makefile.linux32) is still included; if you use Windows I suggest you use MINGW+MSYS.

You can download CIAT v1.02 here:

ciat-1.02.zip

Or read more here.

This library is open source (LGPL licence) and written in C programming language. Samples and test cases are provided with each techniques:

• the solution is not always given to make people practice
• the solution can always be obtained by contacting the development team

Current Features

• Detection and cryptanalysis of weakly implemented or trapped systems

Future Features

• Automatic detection of statistical biases in cryptographic algorithms.
• Specific cryptanalysis tools.

You can download Mediggo here:

megiddo-0.4.0.tar.gz

Or read more here.

The latest discovery of such implementations was in the immobiliser technology used by car companies to secure their expensive vehicles. A researcher Karsten Nohl has exposed these weaknesses at the recent Embedded Security in Cars conference in Germany.

Weak cryptography means that car engine immobiliser technology has become easy for crooks to circumvent.

Nothing weaker than 128-bit AES is considered sufficient protection for e-commerce transactions, but car manufacturers are still using proprietary 40-bit and 48-bit encryptions protocols that are vulnerable to brute force attacks. Worse still, one unnamed manufacturer used the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) as the “secret” key for the immobiliser.

The weakness of the technology was exposed in security research by ethical hacker Karsten Nohl of Security Research Labs, who links the weakness of the technology with a growth in car thefts in Germany last year, following years in decline.

Nohl outlined preliminary findings from his research at the recent Embedded Security in Cars conference, in Bremen, Germany. His research covers the communications between card immobilisers and engine electronic systems in dozens of cars. For example, Nohl was able to crack the Hitag 2 car immobiliser algorithm used by Dutch firm NXP Semiconductors in around six hours.

And using the VIN number as the secret key? Well, that’s not very secret is it? It’s akin to using the MAC address of a computer as the SSH secret key, no one in their right mind would do that. I guess that’s what happens when you leave the engineers to implement cryptography schemes without having anyone around handy with the cluestick.

I’d imagine some of these systems are protecting extremely expensive cars, so some basic equipment, some strong crypto knowledge and 6 hours and you can land yourself a $100,000 car. Not bad for a days work.

The research builds on work by other computer scientists and encryption experts dating back at least five years. In 2005 Ari Juels of RSA Labs and researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, circumvented the encryption system used by Texas Instruments.

Manufacturers of car immobiliser technology have defended the robustness of their technologies.

“To our knowledge the direct causal link between the failure to adopt AES systems and the rise in car theft cannot be drawn,” Thomas Rudolph of NXP told New Scientist.

Texas Instruments claimed its proprietary cryptographic systems might be stronger than AES. Nonetheless both firms are in the process of phasing out their home-cooked crypto tech in favour of industry standard encryption systems based on 128-bit AES.

And what it is with TI claiming their system MIGHT be stronger than AES? When did ‘might‘ ever give anyone confidence? In all honesty, there is no reason at all for using proprietary algorithms or implementations. Those out in public like AES have been tried, tested and approved by the greatest crypto minds in the World, I don’t care how smart you think your employees are – but trust me they aren’t as smart as the people scrutinising AES.

I hope to see all companies using weak proprietary protocols in any industry phase them out and switch to tried and tested industry algorithms.

Source: The Register

If you had set up your server to the ‘best standards’ you shouldn’t be vulnerable to this anyway as the data in your config files should be encrypted, but honestly..how many people really take such precautions?

As the exploit is being used in the wild, I’d say not many.

Attackers have begun exploiting a recently disclosed vulnerability in Microsoft web-development applications that opens password files and other sensitive data to interception and tampering.

The vulnerability in the way ASP.Net apps encrypt data was disclosed last week at the Ekoparty Conference in Argentina. Microsoft on Friday issued a temporary fix for the so-called “cryptographic padding attack,” which allows attackers to decrypt protected files by sending vulnerable systems large numbers of corrupted requests.

Now, Microsoft security pros say they are seeing “limited attacks” in the wild and warned that they can be used to read and tamper with a system’s most sensitive configuration files.

“There is a combination of attacks that was publicly demonstrated that can leak the contents of your web.config file, including any sensitive, unencrypted, information in the file,” Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie wrote on Monday night. “You should apply the workaround to block the padding oracle attack in its initial stage of the attack.” (He went on to say sensitive data within web.config files should also be encrypted.)

It’s actually another fairly complex and interesting example of a side channel attack. The last time we reported on this kind of attack was when Website Auto-complete Leaked Data Even Over Encrypted Link.

This is certainly not a straight forward attack and I wouldn’t expect to be seeing widespread hacks using this technique, but skilled attackers could leverage this when doing focused attacks on certain organisations or web properties.

Microsoft personnel also warned about ASP.Net applications that store passwords, database connection strings or other sensitive data in the ViewState object. Because such objects are accessible to the outside, the Microsoft apps automatically encrypt its contents.

But by bombarding a vulnerable server with large amounts of corrupted data and then carefully analyzing the error messages that result, attackers can deduce the key used to encrypt the files. The side-channel attack can be used to convert virtually any file of the attacker’s choosing.

The temporary fix involves reconfiguring applications so that all error messages are mapped to a single error page that prevents the attacker from distinguishing among different types of errors A script to identify the oracles that needlessly reveal important cryptographic clues is here.

Thai Duong, one of the researchers who disclosed the vulnerability last week, said here that simply turning off custom error messages was not enough to ward off exploits because attackers can still measure the different amounts of time required for certain errors to be returned.

Details from the ASP.Net Blog including the workaround are available here:

Important: ASP.NET Security Vulnerability

There’s also a FAQ for the vulnerability here:

Frequently Asked Questions about the ASP.NET Security Vulnerability

More technical details about the nature of the attack are on the technet blog here:

Understanding the ASP.NET Vulnerability

Source: The Register

WEP fell long ago and there’s a myriad of WEP Cracking tools available. In 2008 it was reported flaws had been found in WPA and it was partially cracked.

These factors of course shifted a lot of people to WPA2, which has now been found to have certain flaws.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time. But wireless security researchers say they have uncovered a vulnerability in the WPA2 security protocol, which is the strongest form of Wi-Fi encryption and authentication currently standardized and available.

Malicious insiders can exploit the vulnerability, named “Hole 196″ by the researcher who discovered it at wireless security company AirTight Networks. The moniker refers to the page of the IEEE 802.11 Standard (Revision, 2007) on which the vulnerability is buried. Hole 196 lends itself to man-in-the-middle-style exploits, whereby an internal, authorized Wi-Fi user can decrypt, over the air, the private data of others, inject malicious traffic into the network and compromise other authorized devices using open source software, according to AirTight.

The researcher who discovered Hole 196, Md Sohail Ahmad, AirTight technology manager, intends to demonstrate it at two conferences taking place in Las Vegas next week: Black Hat Arsenal and DEF CON 18.

It’s a pretty interesting attack and leverages a man-in-the-middle style exploit to decrypt data from the wire and inject malicious packets onto the network.

The researched Md Sohail Ahmad is going to demo the exploit at 2 upcoming conferences (Black Hat and DEF CON 18) so I’ll be looking out for the slides and videos on that. We’ll have to wait and see if this is another ‘mostly theoretical‘ attack – or something that can actually be implemented in the wild.

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) derivative on which WPA2 is based has not been cracked and no brute force is required to exploit the vulnerability, Ahmad says. Rather, a stipulation in the standard that allows all clients to receive broadcast traffic from an access point (AP) using a common shared key creates the vulnerability when an authorized user uses the common key in reverse and sends spoofed packets encrypted using the shared group key.

Ahmad explains it this way:

WPA2 uses two types of keys: 1) Pairwise Transient Key (PTK), which is unique to each client, for protecting unicast traffic; and 2) Group Temporal Key (GTK) to protect broadcast data sent to multiple clients in a network. PTKs can detect address spoofing and data forgery. “GTKs do not have this property,” according to page 196 of the IEEE 802.11 standard.

These six words comprise the loophole, Ahmad says.

The upside is that the attack is limited to people who can genuinely authenticate to the network first, the downside that means large organizations using WPA2 in trouble – as generally most damage comes from the inside.

It’s also something to think about when connecting to ISP/public Wi-fi hotspots using WPA2 encryption.

I’m sure there will be more news about this soon.

Source: Network World (Thanks Austin)

The number of Crackberry Blackberry users is increasing exponentially – especially since they released the much sexier Bold and the latest touch-screen Storm.

The latest revelation is that used BlackBerries are being traded, not by the value of the phone but by the value of the data contained on the phone!

It just shows most companies still don’t have responsible disposal policies when it comes to releasing old equipment and making sure it’s wiped of data or destroyed.

A TV investigation has revealed that secondhand BlackBerries on Nigerian markets are priced according to the data held on them, not the age or the model of a phone.

Jon Godfrey, director of Sims LifeCycle Services, who is advising on a TV investigation into the trade due to screen later this year, said that BlackBerries sell for between $25 to $65 on Lagos markets. Details of the trade come from an agent in Nigeria unaffiliated to Sims’ technology recycling business.

Godfrey explained that the smart phones offered for sale come from the US, continental Europe and the UK. “It’s unclear as yet whether the phones are either sold, thrown away, lost or stolen,” Godfrey explained.

Other type of smartphone are also of potential interest to data thieves, but it is the trade in BlackBerries that seems to be the most active. Data retrieved from smartphones is itraded by crooks in Nigeria.

I’d imagine the phones are older models sold off by lot from companies upgrading to the newer versions of the BlackBerry.

The BlackBerry is a wise choice for data thieves as it’s more likely to be used for business purposes and contain important e-mail information.

Other smart phones would be used more for media and leisure purposes.

BlackBerries include technology to remotely wipe devices and come with built-in encryption. But this encryption is often left switched off because it is considered an inconvenience.

“Business critical data is left on unprotected devices,” Godfrey explained. “Anyone who gets these devices will obtain a snapshot of someone’s life.”

“People need to take residual data issues more seriously and have a policy on how to use and dispose of devices,” he added.

According to a survey by endpoint security firm Credant Technologies, four in five mobile phone users store information on their phones that might easily be used to steal their identities. A survey of 600 commuters at London railway stations revealed that 16 per cent kept their bank account details saved on their mobiles, while 24 per cent also saved their PIN numbers and passwords in the same insecure manner. One in 10 (11 per cent) keep social security and inland revenue details on their phone. Two in five fail to take even basic security precautions, such as password protecting their devices.

It’s scary the amount of people that keep really important stuff in their phones like their bank PIN numbers, banking passwords, passport numbers, social security info and much more.

And only 3 out of 5 take some basic security precautions like passwording their device, that means the number who actually encrypt their data and secure it properly would be less than 5%.

Source: The Register

A paper about cracking SHA-1 originally surfaced in 2005, from a fairly reputable scientific source in China, it was widely publicised nor talked about much.

But then recently, just last month China managed to make a wave out of it, almost 2 years after the initial ‘report’.

It was even Slashdotted on January 20th 2007, the article states the following:

These two main algorithms are currently the crucial technology that electronic signatures and many other password securities use throughout the international community. They are widely used in banking, securities, and e-commerce. SHA-1 has been recognized as the cornerstone for modern Internet security. According to the article, in the early stages of Wang’s research, there were other data encryption researchers who tried to crack it. However, none of them succeeded. This is why in 15 years Hash research had become the domain of hopeless research in many scientists’ minds.

Source: Epoch Times

Bruce Schneier wrote about this in 2005, February in fact, almost 2 full years ago.

SHA-1 Broken

Cryptanalysis of SHA-1

It’s not a major thing though and it’s far beyond anything most criminals could use to thwart national security…or even the security of things based on SHA-1 like OpenSSH.

There are however plenty of replacement algorithms if you are paranoid such as SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512.

I know this maybe old news for some of you, however, I just got the chance of reading this great article on Security Focus (it’s been 2 weeks since I add it to my Favorites)

This two part article discusses some good points of Cryptology, more precisely in the field of Cryptovirology.

Writing a virus is just like writing any other piece of software, unfortunately. The designer tries to put some cleverness in the application to improve its function (or stealth), its robustness, its replication strategies, or even its payload. However, when an anti-virus analyst gets ahold of such a piece of code, he learns how it works, what it does, and so on. In the end, both the writer and the analyst share the same view of the virus, in what amounts to a Turing machine (we have a state-transition table and a starting state).

You read about the WoW Trojan and the Trojan Writers Coding for Money here at Darknet. This article will give you a clear idea of how things work.

To open your appetite, let me give you a little excerpt from the article:

A basic model seen today

This basic model can be seen according to intended targets:

• The virus writer creates an RSA key:
• The public key appears in the body of the virus.
• The private key is kept by the author.
• The virus spreads and the payload uses the public key. For example, it ciphers the data (hard drives, files, e-mail, whatever) of the targets with the public key.
• The virus writer requires a ransom before sending the private key.

Even if you’re not into Cryptology, I strongly recommended this reading.

Part 1 & Part 2

Source: Security Focus