U.S. government probes VPN hack within federal agencies, races to find clues
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-nicole-perlroth-...
>The NSA can play either defense or offense. It can either alert the vendor and get a still-secret vulnerability fixed, or it can hold on to it and use it to eavesdrop on foreign computer systems. Both are important US policy goals, but the NSA has to choose which one to pursue. By fixing the vulnerability, it strengthens the security of the Internet against all attackers: other countries, criminals, hackers. By leaving the vulnerability open, it is better able to attack others on the Internet. But each use runs the risk of the target government learning of, and using for itself, the vulnerability — or of the vulnerability becoming public and criminals starting to use it.
Unsurprisingly, the NSA often chooses to keep zerodays for their own use.
If the government only used open-source software, the NSA could create patches that only the government would use, while keeping zero days that can be used against everyone else.
If the government started requiring all/most software to be open-source, it would create a market. There's no way big government vendors would refuse to create open source software. They would just shift to monetizing more heavily using consulting services, or support, or something.
Tightly enclose all running software with a beyond-root, kernel-level authority/sandbox, so even vulnerabilities only we know can't harm us if they're discovered?
Hasn't this been the debate since encryption came around? I thought we've been having this debate for at least 50 years.
I think it's an interesting hypothesis, but one weakness is that the government can have its cake and eat it too: they can mandate that all encryption have backdoors, except that the government is exempt from that requirement.
Of course, then it just becomes the usual "if you outlaw strong encryption, then only outlaws will have strong encryption". As long as backdoor-free encryption merely exists, the "bad guys" will get their hands on it and use it. So you haven't fixed the problem of being unable to prosecute crimes due to encryption, and at the same time you've weakened everyone's security. This state of affairs is still beneficial to the government, as it makes dragnet surveillance a lot easier, and your average citizen with "nothing to hide" won't seek out the (illegal) strong encryption.
As an aside, I personally would argue that in the age of big data/information that your populous having security is extremely important. Modern warfare (or all warfare) depends highly on information. TOR only works if average people use it. The military suggests soldiers use Signal because many times they've gotten in trouble because adversaries intercepted SMS messages to loved ones (or just someone getting some strange).
There is of course a question of balance, but personally I don't see one. Safer to encrypt everything imo.
:)
The downside of having generally-known weaknesses seems to have been largely deprecated.
Rather than "security by obscurity", the operational status has been "insecurity by obscurity". Unknown to users, systems are largely wholly insecure, and it's only ignorance that gives the illusion that they are secure.
I wrote on this recently: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/b596219086b1013991d8002590d8e...
In practice, the "everyone anywhere can attack any online system" status of the Internet, and the porosity of most LANs and even nominally airgapped / detached systems (see the Stuxnet attack on Iran's centrifuge systems) means that virtually all systems are vulnerable.
I suspect that the debate is quite live within government, particularly as the US itself is repeatedly the victim of such attacks.
In the defensive world, success is abstract, failure is concrete and there are always going to be bugs, accidents, lapses, etc. in the offensive world, you demonstrate success by providing actual intel, you can demonstrate value. I’ve worked on security products for most of my career, there is a point in the lifecycle before your product is just a requirement where customers will ask “how do I know I need this? Or it’s working?” It can be more challenging to answer that than if your product failed and they got popped, at least you can help and provide information if they got popped.
I know who I think would climb the ranks. Long term strategy wise, if they split it up and aggressively worked with industry to patch holes and fix things, encouraging best practices, it would probably save the nation trillions but we would have to use other techniques to get some of our intel.
Interesting, no mention of any requirements towards software manufacturers themselves.
If you think about it, this will further incentivize poor-quality software as responsibility of vulnerability response is now being laid on the product owner.
Imposing this requirement on their own agencies is enforceable because there's software that can generate an SBOM, at least from container images.
Then the agencies will have to choose software that meets compliance requirements, so they're the ones putting pressure on their chosen vendors. It follows logically that a vendor who wants a better chance of being chosen for more government contracts will make it easy to obtain SBOMs for their software.
Speaking from US Gov perspective - if the company is part of a contract (and ~40% of the Gov are contractors), Gov certainly can.
They can put nearly anything (legal) into the RFP/Q. Even if they do not say "give us your BoM", they can wrap it in requirements that in essence delivers the same exact result.
That said, it is Gov mistake to ask for the BoM. They will do little with it in a timely fashion, and lack the expertise to identify risks, and lack the resources to go after it. The best contracts are the ones where the rules and parameters are set for the contractor, (i.e. no untested software, no foreign influence, no this, no that, must have this and that), and auditing of the compliance.
I've never even heard of the software the government is using. Why aren't they using Cisco AnyConnect like literally every other company I've worked for who has a VPN?
I would suggest people look at a very foundational essay on this [2]. Key quote: "Security is a process, not a product. Products provide some protection, but the only way to effectively do business in an insecure world is to put processes in place that recognize the inherent insecurity in the products. "
How many times do we have to learn this?
[1] In quotes 'cause "secure software" does not exist. In two different ways; software always has bugs and using a piece of software incorrectly makes a secure system insecure.
[2] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2000/04/the_process...
Firstly there's the information asymmetry for non-technical users - they don't think of themselves as buying security, they think of themselves as buying a remote access solution. They therefore don't see this as a process, but instead as a product or solution. That means they're surprised and caught unaware when something goes wrong.
The second issue is that people creating the software aren't themselves thinking about security, because the customer isn't buying security, or comparing security. And how do you measure or quantify or observe security? There's no commercial incentive to invest a month in hardening a product against attack, unless that month of engineering effort sees more sales and revenues. And since the people who buy are satisfied by slideware and specification sheets for security, nothing changes.
I think we need a whole change to how we buy software, hardware, and solutions in general, to see this change. The underlying economics don't incentivise secure products, in fact they actively discourage them.
Perfectly secure software does not exist. More secure and less secure software certainly does exist.
Which is why software should be expected to provide some basic level of protection.
In any org there will be a proportion of idiots who cannot be trusted to do the right thing, and software should be designed to minimise the damage their idiocy can generate.
This isn't enough to make an org secure, but it's a good start on whack-a-mole with the most obvious attack vectors.
The real problem is that too much of the industry - both management and devs - lacks maturity and professionalism. There's too much casual hobby tinkering, too much "But that's too expensive", and too much "Get it out the door and worry about it later".
There isn't enough conscientious attention to detail and far, far too little understanding of the disastrous - literally potentially explosive - consequences of serious security failures.
And CS courses teach far too little of all of the above. Academic algo noodling is one thing. But the reality is that computers can literally be as dangerous as weapons - and should be treated as such.
In some sense security is binary - if your software happens to have even a single mistake that results in RCE or authentication failure, then it's totally exploitable and does not provide any level of protection whatsoever. And as experience shows, we seem unable to write any software without such mistakes, even if we try really, really hard by skilled people with security in mind, as far as I recall every popular piece of software that needed to be secure has had vulnerabilities.
This isn't saying you're wrong that quality can raise the bar. It's saying that time and context also lower the bar. Especially, not being subject to "that’s in easy reach of anyone who can program" not guarantee by any purely default action - notably not guaranteed by spending X dollars.
Obviously it's difficult to draw the line, and that's why we have courts. The company will argue that they did all that was possible, but as sometimes happens, something got through; the plaintiff will argue that the company's software had serious flaws because they were negligent or cut corners or had poor development processes or whatever. However imperfect the process is, the court can render judgment case-by-case.
(Before someone suggests this, I'm not trying to say that a random open source developer who works on OpenSSL should be held liable here. But if you're selling a product, you should hold some liability for when that product fails.)
Even if you report it, this kind of behavior is so normal, I'd be shocked if it does anything other than create more billable project management hours for the company you are protesting.
Not really, this is more about transparency of all components and letting people downstream be aware that there is an issue and either fix it, mitigate it, or raise the issue upstream. My guess is that this is related to Allan Friedman's SBOM work at NTIA (sorry - this is not the most up to date link: https://www.csiac.org/podcast/software-bill-of-materials-sbo... )
The problem that keeps on getting hit time and time again is that both end users and product manufacturers do not know everything that is in their system. Consider the case of say, an MRI machine. What OS is it running and how up to date is it? If the end user has an SBOM they can better evaluate that and demand fixes if there are known issues. Likewise if the MRI manufacturer is good at making MRIs, but not so much at knowing if their version of Windows on the MRI is out of date, the SBOM for the MRI can be analyzed to automatically flag problems.
You can regulate all you want about "There must be no open issues" and plenty of certifications for the Fed government do have that language. The problem this answers is forcing a listing of every component so that "Sorry I didn't know OpenSSH v.1.2.3 is out of date" or "I had no idea we were running Windows 95 on this hardware" are no longer valid excuses.
That would be an insane waste of resources.
Tho Ken Xie is also a Stanford graduate and has had US citizenship for decades.
By this logic does it not mean that Google is a Russian/Soviet company? Sergey Brin was born and spent some years in Russia, also Google has staff in Russia(and China in this regard)
A situation is different from where a double citizen operates a sales office of a company from his home country
Is above what you are trying to say?