Raccoon Attack | Hacker News Reader

Raccoon Attack

raccoon-attack.com

203 pointswglb51 comments

First off, thanks to the authors for making it clear that this is a difficult attack vector to exploit. I'm tired of sites like these that make it seem like it's the end of the world.

As this is a timing based attack, I wonder what the feasibility would be in a real-world network environment. From a brief skim of the paper, it looks like they were getting a false positive rate of 10% between two VMs on a Gigabit connection. I wonder how quickly that would increase if the servers were in different buildings / cities / continents.

> between two VMs on a Gigabit connection

and likely nothing else running.

Real world webservers running tons of concurrent requests have a very variable processing times (if you get below 5ms you are very good!) purely due to queued up work and context switches.

The amount of extra time needed to sift through network jitter isn't really that huge. It's far less than what people imagine even with basic statistical techniques.

Maybe. My point was that even even network jitter won’t be important, since software processing latencies are much higher. If a server handles another request before your handshake that’s thousands more instructions which obfuscate the result. If it does another TLS handshake before it’s thread might be blocked for several ms before it gets to processing the next thing. That’s all orders of magnitudes higher than any „this tool longer because some bits are different“ measurements

No matter what people say, timing attacks are not practical over the network.

Attacks only get better ...

https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/researchers-exploit-http-...

>Why is the attack called "Raccoon"?

>Raccoon is not an acronym. Raccoons are just cute animals, and it is well past time that an attack will be named after them :)

Better naming and mascot than the last five TLS security bugs if you ask me

Additionally, there's another factor of raccoons that seems serendipitously applicable here. Raccoons are cute, yes, but they are also potentially dangerous and can cause damage or injury if ignored or dealt with incorrectly. If raccoons are present, it's worth it to pay some attention to make sure they aren't the cause or symptom of a larger problem.

Racoons are also very clever and persistent. I have had several run in with them over the years, don't let their "cuteness" fool you, they are ruthless and very devious.

Especially if you have chickens. Raccoons seem to have figured out how to hypnotize them, and will just walk up and eat them one by one buffet style.

From what I've seen, raccoons don't eat the chickens. They attack at night while the chickens are roosting and just decapitate them. Then they just leave the bodies untouched.

That definitely happens too. But over the past ten years they have definitely consumed some of our chickens.

But I don't think they hypnotize the chickens. I think it's more of a timing attack.

ba doom cha!

Surprisingly, chicken hypnosis is a real thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_hypnotism

Don't erase the line!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Yo2UkL-n_Q

Obligatory raccoon removal video (11 of them!) In a Toronto suburb.

https://youtu.be/6S27dgeGqfA

I think this one is the original video (in slightly better quality) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enqiof-3TfE

This came up here on HN recently in some comment thread.

Raccoon Obstical Course

https://youtu.be/hFZFjoX2cGg

Squirrels. Sorry, I'm not from around here.

better than heartbleed

I thought heartbleed was a decent name. A callback to the heartbeat protocol

I think DROWN was kiiinda pushing it.

It's memorable, and DROWN is an _amazing_ attack.

I agree that it was amazing and super cool! Rather it's just a comment on the relevance of the name to the actual attack, contorted to the purpose of a cool acronym.

Just to stoke some fires, I think poodle is also in that bag.

The comment isn't wrong about the name, I'm just compelled to say how awesome DROWN is every time it's mentioned anywhere. It's really spectacular work.

Hmm, the site design is rather similar (done by the same person): https://drownattack.com/

That's true, and also what the authors say, but anyone who has encountered a raccoon knows they are thieves.

It invokes the phantasmagoric shapeshifting tanuki scrotal attack scenes of Isao Takahata's 1994 animated fantasy film, Pom Poko!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH8U4Nt4G40 (@ 6:33)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pom_Poko

>Prominent scrotums are an integral part of tanuki folklore, and they are shown and referred to throughout the film, and also used frequently in their shape-shifting. This remains unchanged in the DVD release, though the English dub (but not the subtitles) refers to them as "raccoon pouches". Also, in the English dub and subtitles, the animals are never referred to as "raccoon dogs", which is the more accurate English name for the tanuki, instead they are incorrectly referred to as just "raccoons".

https://www.tofugu.com/japan/tanuki/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icyOAc_pAvY

https://www.mariowiki.com/Tanooki_Suit

>The Tanooki Suit, or Tanooki Costume, is a fairly uncommon item found in Super Mario Bros. 3 and its subsequent remakes in Super Mario All-Stars and Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3. It is based on tanukis, Japanese creatures who, according to mythology, can use leaves to shape-shift and cause chaos. The suit is an add-on to the Raccoon form that allows Mario or Luigi to temporarily turn into a statue and become immune to enemies and obstacles, in addition to flying and attacking enemies with tail swipes.

>According to Shigeru Miyamoto in the Super Mario Bros. 3 entry of the 25th Anniversary Super Mario History Booklet, he was aware that most players outside Japan would be overall confused with the Tanooki Suit and the transformation, but he left it in because he was too excited to remove it.

I think more projects should have cute mascots like this. Really like the "Raccoon is not an acronym. Raccoons are just cute animals, and it is well past time that an attack will be named after them :)" line.

This writeup covered each and every question that popped up in my head in pretty much the same order too. Clear and concise.

I assumed this was about the time Kevin Rose throw a raccoon down a flight of stairs

Still a better offering than digg.

already posted 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24421247

Is the top comment and most of the responses going to be about the "raccoon" in the name of the attack, or the first paragraph of the page (it's not really exploitable), and not on the actual content again? Only time will tell.

> I am an admin, should I drop everything and fix this?

> Probably not. Raccoon is a complex timing attack and it is very hard to exploit.

Nice of them to put this up as one of the first non-technical bulletins.

No need to feed hysteria.

"BearSSL and BoringSSL are not affected because they do not support DH(E) cipher suites. GnuTLS, Wolfssl, Botan, Mbed TLS and s2n do not support static DH cipher suites. Their DHE cipher suites never reuse ephemeral keys."

Good for them.

The vulnerability is really hard to exploit and relies on very precise timing measurements and on a specific server configuration to be exploitable.

It's interesting that they emphasize this is a really hard problem to solve, and for 99% of use cases this really isn't an issue to worry about.

But if you work in national security or are sensitive to security threats from nation states, this would certainly be an absolutely critical item to address or understand.

National Security and nation states would absolutely use this as a target where billions of dollars or thousands of lives could be at stake.

I don't know why you assume this. It's true that state-level adversaries can undertake more expensive attacks, but it doesn't follow that all expensive attacks are useful. Here, the effort required to exploit this would probably buy so many Firefox and Juniper remotes, and offer so little payoff, that it's hard to imagine it ever being exploited.

Sometimes vulnerabilities are just valuable to science. The work that follows up from this could be valuable to CNE and SIGINT!

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24421247

maybe this one will have comments that will be on the actual content this time. Well, nevermind.

This attack seems pretty surgical and might not be very practical, but pretty interesting nonetheless.

I was honestly thinking this was going to be about a pre-release game on Steam that turns out to be called "Wanted: Raccoon"[1]

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/1320100

Timing attacks, never saw a real world exploit working for them. Even in my local tests without web server latency the results are indistinguishable.

Did anyone ever show a working timing attack for a web service? Even assuming no DoS/request limiting is in place.

> Leading bytes of Z that contain all zero bits are stripped before it is used as the pre_master_secret.

what would possess someone to introduce a padding oracle/side-channel into something that didnt even need it??

They simply misunderstood a document

Almost everybody assigned the task of implementing this stuff (SSLv3, last century) didn't understand it, even for the old finite field DH where it's just about within the grasp of someone with high school mathematics if you insisted on having it explained before you implement. So it's just magic, and once one person does it wrong everybody else must do it wrong or lose interoperability.

And the "wrong" DH implementation works fine, except that it introduces a slightly larger side channel.

You mention a padding oracle, this isn't a padding oracle. It's an oracle because it provides the attacker with answers to questions they can't answer themselves, but there isn't any padding involved here.

And it's a pretty weak oracle, the insight you gain from asking the oracle questions is about a single pre-master secret, not the underlying DH private key or any long term authentication key.

There is a trend with TLS attacks and fancy websites and names. :)

Is there a reason for that? Not really following the scene, the same group of people finding these issues over the years and hence marketing is similar?

If this is a timing sidechannel, why is it considered s protocol vulnerability and not an implementation vulnerability? Could it be mitigated by using a time-constant implementation of the KDF?

Because the specification does not mandate a constant time operation.

You are not mandated a constant-time aes implementation either.

nobody cares about an AES constant time implementation, but any specification about MACs and signing algorithms will specifically mention that you need to have constant-time operations

None of you have dealt with raccoons before. They are vicious. They are persistent. They will mess you up. You do not want to square up with a raccoon without the intent to walk away without causing massive harm. Because when a raccoon comes for you. It comes for keeps.

I wanted to see raccoons attacking something dammit. Stop naming your pet vulnerabilities cute names with logos for chrissakes.

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