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Comment by c0achmcguirk | Hacker News Reader

I've talked to some employees of TrueSec (the firm that just discovered the Yosemite "rootpipe" exploit) and they told me that many security research firms are "on retainer" with intelligence agencies. They didn't share specifics but they said that they have friends who are paid to share exploits with, say, British Intelligence and to not report it to the vendor with the exploit in it.

I assume this is why Stuxnet had so many zero-day exploits in it. The agencies behind it had security firms feeding them.

http://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/

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Most security research firms have no links whatsoever to intelligence agencies, but every security researcher in the world gossips about those links. Clearly some do, though.

I have no firsthand knowledge of how these connections work (the gossip I hear tends to involve firms proffering vulnerabilities to middleman "commercial" firms --- not ZDI, by the way --- but who knows?). But I'm skeptical of the idea that security research firms are a real feeder for vulnerability intel to NSA, because based on the people NSA spits back out into commercial industry, they appear to have a very, very capable internal research staff.

But isn't that exactly what a security researcher with links to intelligence agencies _would_ say ;)

Yes.

The market for 0days has been cooling off in recent years, but for a good decade there you could sell 0days, even mediocre ones for six digits. Nowdays you'll need a pretty good vuln for six digits, and something pretty stellar for seven (this isn't unheard of). ZDI, frsirt and others got into the game as middlemen. They allow(ed) you to not know who the final purchaser is and would allow you to sell 0days that may or may not be interesting to a government entity - in this case ZDI, etc would swallow the cost.

Edit: http://www.vupen.com/english/services/lea-index.php

I'm not sure if I agree with the ethics of selling security exploits, but it's a world I know very little about. You seem knowledgeable, is there any more information you could share about the business and culture of selling 0days? Like, how many people are doing that full time now (dozens or thousands?). Why do you think that the market slowed down, and do you think that most of the security hackers are trying to sell exploits to the responsible parties or do they expect most of them to go to government and other black hats?

Sorry for the questions, no contact info in your profile. Answers from anyone would also be appreciated.

The people who know don't talk and the people who talk don't know...

What is the least interesting vulnerability whose sale you have firsthand knowledge of that fetched more than $20,000?

Have you personally ever sold a vulnerability?

I've contacted independent brokers before, many of whom allegedly resell primarily to "the US government". When asked about hypothetical Tor 0day, they quoted a price of $150,000 before their 20% broker fee. So I'm not sure that 6 figures for most trivial vulnerabilities fits the market.

(And obviously, I don't have such a 0day to sell, so I can't prove that they would actually pay up.)

People believe a lot of weird stuff about vulnerability prices. For instance, any time a post hits HN about someone getting a $500 bounty for an XSS, there's always a post or two saying that's a rip-off compared to the tens of thousands of dollars it would fetch on the black market --- as if single-site XSS vulnerabilities with a half-life measured in minutes were worth huge amounts of money.

I commented on this back when Facebook paid out $30k for that RCE. I know the Facebook security team points to this comment all the time. Maybe more people should read it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7106953

I would be quite happy with a $500 bounty for a trivial XSS bug. That pays for two days of work for me. :D

Oh we're not talking trivial bugs or single-site XSS.

Disappointed that 'mediocre' vulns got interpreted in this thread as 'trivial'.

Mediocre doesn't mean trivial, extremely scoped or useless. Mediocre means that it is for sensitive but not widely deployed software, for widely deployed software on default config but is post-auth or is not reliable, or it is reliable and yiels high auth but requires pairing with another vulns (i.e. memory disclosure) or extended recon (revision number, etc).

A MySQL bug affecting recent revisions that causes arbitrary file overwrites with semi-controlled content but that requires unprivileged (guest) auth would meet this criteria.

Apologies for the confusion with the word 'mediocre' - I figured people here would know.

In general organizations in the offensive world will pay more than those in the defensive world. This is not a hard and fast rule, but mostly it is the case that offensive network operations stand to gain more from the use of 0days than vendors stand to lose by not paying for the disclosure to patch them. It's not really a good calculus to use data from vendors sales to calculate the other.

A post-auth MySQL bug sold for five figures?! Why? How does anyone make money with that bug?

It's worth five figures to the buyer if they can make five figures or more of value from it.

Not speculating about nation states here but 'groups': making good money from post-Auth MySql RCE not totally absurd - Amazon, Rackspace, HP, Heroku and Jelastic all offer MySql-as-a-service, where you are given low privilege (maintained, geo-redundant, etc) account access to shared MySql instance. If there's more than five digits of business value stored in that database then a five digit exploit makes sense.

Or think about any of the (poorly written) bitcoin services out there that use some default phpAdmin creds for a database that also hosts their vault.

Six digits sounds about right for a Tor bug for one target depending on the specifics. The RCE bug used by the FBI recently against the Tor Firefox Bundle would have cost something similar, though the payload suspended the process where it could have resumed silently. It's not clear where that exploit was developed (my gut says in house but who knows?)

IIRC someone analyzed the payload and compared it to a Meterpreter and saw a lot of similarities. Could have been provided (hacked together?) by the person who sold the vuln.

FWIW I don't agree with the assessment of the OP. While there are some security firms that do have contracts, the vast majority of NSA capability is internally developed (or developed under contract by defence contractors).

As for the "market assessment" I find it implausible. It seems to be based on the assumption that the demand for capabilities has decreased over time while the availability of good bugs has increased. This is at odds with reality.

I believe you on this a lot more than I believe anonymous employees of a firm known principally for giving a brand name to an Admin->Root privilege escalation bug.

More defence contractors than internal, I'd understood?

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