reification requested!
http://blog.cr.yp.to/20140213-ideal.html
"""
Here's a concrete suggestion, which I'll call NTRU Prime, for
eliminating the structures that I find worrisome in existing
ideal-lattice-based encryption systems. This suggestion uses a number
field of prime degree, so that the only subfield is Q; and uses an
irreducible polynomial xp-x-1 with a very large Galois group, so that
the number field is very far from having automorphisms. The best CVP
dimension seems to be about half the degree; this is optimal for
number fields without many real embeddings. (It's hard to create many
real embeddings while keeping coefficients small, and if coefficients
are large then there are other problems.) This suggestion also chooses
its modulus q so that (Z/q)[x]/(xp-x-1) is a field; this
simultaneously avoids (1) NTRU's traditional 2-adic structure and (2)
the linear splittings used in most recent papers.
"""
Bloomberg (Apr 11) - "NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug, Exposing
Consumers":
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-used-heartbleed-b…
> The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.
gf
--
Gregory Foster || gfoster(a)entersection.org
@gregoryfoster <> http://entersection.com/
It occurred to me that I haven't heard much on the news about deliberate attacks on the healthcare.gov website, even though it is reputed to be extremely weak. Might somebody (potentially a supporter of Obama and/or Obamacare) have deliberately 'spammed' it with fake signups, simply to get the number of such signups increased? How vulnerable would it be to 'invented' names/addresses? How 'valid' would these names/addresses have to be to keep the system from finding out until some arbitrary stage in the process? If such an attack had been done, would the public ever find out, and when?
Jim Bell
The major flaw that I see with this case (and others like it) is that it presumes that the defendants actually BELIEVED the statements by the police, and RELIED ON them. From the article:
"Still, undercover officers with the U.S. Secret Service and Miami Beach police told both clearly that they wanted to buy bitcoins with cash supposedly generated by the hacking of Target Corp. customer information. The undercover officers said during the secretly videotaped meetings that they planned to use the bitcoins to acquire still more stolen credit cards."
I could 'clearly tell' somebody that the Sun orbited the Earth, but that doesn't mean that the statement was factual. Similarly, the fact that the police told these guys what the article claims they did, doesn't require that the defendants actually BELIEVED the allegations. My expectation is that these charges will be quietly dropped: The only ones actually committing the crime(s) are the police themselves: The police solicited money laundering, when there were no facts (actual underlying crimes) supporting the money laundering predicate.
Jim Bell
=======================================
http://news.yahoo.com/fla-bitcoin-case-tests-money-laundering-limits-152957…
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Two police officers burst through a hotel room door with guns drawn, yelling "Police! Get Down!" just after an alleged money laundering transaction went down. But instead of briefcases stuffed with a drug dealer's cash, this exchange involved an undercover officer with supposedly stolen credit cards and the virtual currency bitcoin.
The February arrests of Pascal Reid and Michell Espinoza marked the first time any state has brought money laundering charges involving bitcoins, according to Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle. And it's likely to be a closely-watched test of whether criminal law can adapt to new digital forms of payment.
"These cybercriminals are way ahead of the rest of us in terms of trying to figure out ways they can launder dirty money," Rundle said.
Investigators trolled through an online directory of bitcoin traders to find the 29-year-old Reid and 30-year-old Espinoza, setting up separate meetings with each of the men at restaurants and coffee shops. They were arrested at the same Miami Beach hotel on the same day, at different times.
Defense attorneys said the men have no previous criminal records and were simply enthusiasts of the payment format that allows people to convert cash into digital money for online transactions.
Still, undercover officers with the U.S. Secret Service and Miami Beach police told both clearly that they wanted to buy bitcoins with cash supposedly generated by the hacking of Target Corp. customer information. The undercover officers said during the secretly videotaped meetings that they planned to use the bitcoins to acquire still more stolen credit cards.
"My client has never dealt in the area of stolen credit cards," said Espinoza's attorney, Rene Palomino Jr. "My client was simply selling a piece of personal property, which is what a bitcoin is. It has not been recognized as currency yet in the United States."Attorneys for Reid and Espinoza, both of whom have pleaded not guilty, say they will challenge the very legal foundations of the cases, which are being prosecuted separately. The arrest affidavits for both Reid and Espinoza refer to bitcoins as "electronic currency with no central authority."
The Internal Revenue Service issued guidance last month concluding that bitcoins can only be taxed as property and are not legal tender. Federal law enforcement agencies are watching whether bitcoins are used increasingly in criminal activity, such as the now-defunct Silk Road illegal drug marketplace.
"The idea that illicit actors might exploit the vulnerabilities of virtual currency to launder money is not merely theoretical," said Jennifer Shasky Calvery, director of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, in a recent Florida speech to bankers.
Still, bitcoins have been gaining popularity among mainstream businesses. Overstock.com recently became the first major retailer to accept digital money and the NBA's Sacramento Kings in January announced the team would accept bitcoins, another first. They are increasingly used in restaurants, coffee shops and elsewhere.
The Latin House Grill in Coral Gables is one of the first South Florida restaurants to accept bitcoins and has been hosting meetings to educate people.Bitcoin users exchange cash for digital money using online exchanges, then store it in a computer program that serves as a wallet. The program can transfer payments directly to merchants or individuals around the world, eliminating transaction fees and the need for bank or credit card information.
"This technology can't go away. It's completely disrupted a lot of existing technology that's archaic, that hasn't evolved," said patron Andrew Barnard, who has been using bitcoins for a year.
In the Florida criminal case, Reid and Espinoza each face up to 25 years in prison if convicted of money laundering and engaging in an unlicensed money services business. Reid is free on $100,000 bail but Espinoza has been unable so far to make bail.
The transactions started small — one payment of $500 translated into about half a bitcoin — and eventually built to a proposed swap involving $30,000 in Reid's case.
"Ice cold money. Ice cold cash. Right out of the freezer," the undercover agent, holding a plastic bag of cash tells Reid on the surveillance tape. Just after Reid accepts the bag, the undercover agent says, "We're cooking with gas," an apparent signal to the officers outside to come in.
"You're a cop?" Reid is heard saying on the tape. "You're a cop?"
Reid attorney Ron Lowy said the prosecution was manufactured.
"The government is frightened of bitcoin. Apparently, they see it as an emerging, new type of economic medium of exchange, and they're worried that they're not regulating it close enough," Lowy said. "These facts do not constitute a crime."
___
Hey there,
I was auditing OpenSSL last night. I looked at several files and found
the following:
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/master/ssl/t1_lib.c#L2893
/* Determine if we need to see RI. Strictly speaking if we want to
* avoid an attack we should *always* see RI even on initial server
* hello because the client doesn't see any renegotiation during an
* attack. However this would mean we could not connect to any server
* which doesn't support RI so for the immediate future tolerate RI
* absence on initial connect only.
*/
Well that's awful coding.
Unless I'm mistaken, the following memcmp is vulnerable to a remote
timing attack.
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/master/ssl/ssl_lib.c#L1974
static int ssl_session_cmp(const SSL_SESSION *a,const SSL_SESSION *b)
{
if (a->ssl_version != b->ssl_version)
return(1);
if (a->session_id_length != b->session_id_length)
return(1);
return(memcmp(a->session_id,b->session_id,a->session_id_length));
}
I posted both of these findings to the full disclosure list last night.
I figured someone on this list might find it interesting as well.
Cheers,
Peter.
Hi there,
so this has come to my attention. Whaddya guys and gals think?
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http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/julian-assange-debian-is-owned-by…
In his Q&A to his keynote address at the World Hosting Days Global 2014
conference in April, the world’s largest hosting and cloud event, Julian
Assange discussed encryption technology in the context of hosting
systems. He discussed the cypherpunk credo of how encryption can level
the playing field between powerful governments and people, and about 20
minutes into his address, he discussed how UNIX-like systems like Debian
(which he mentioned by name) are engineered by nation-states with
backdoors which are easily introduced as ‘bugs’, and how the Linux
system depends on thousands of packages and libraries that may be
compromised.
I recommend watching his 36 minute Q&A in its entirety, keeping in mind
my recent warnings about how GNU/Linux is almost entirely engineered by
the government/military-affiliated Red Hat corporation.
The Voice of Russia website has an article on Assange’s address with a
few quotes:
“To a degree this is a matter of national sovereignty. The news is
all flush with talk about how Russia has annexed the Crimea, but the
reality is, the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, principally the United
States, have annexed the whole world as a result of annexing the
computer systems and communications technology that is used to run the
modern world,” stated Julian Assange in his keynote address…
Don’t just read the short article, listen to the address yourself,
because Assange goes into many areas, and the work being done in these
fields.
Assange mentions how Debian famously botched the SSL random number
generator for years (which was clearly sabotaged – a known fact).
Speaking of botched security affecting Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo,
SuSE, *BSD, and more, the nightmarish OpenSSL recently botched SSL again
(very serious – updated comments on how a defense contractor in Finland
outed the NSA here?) It’s very hard to believe this wasn’t deliberate,
as botching the memory space of private keys is about as completely
incompetent as you can get, as this area is ultra-critical to the whole
system. As a result, many private keys, including of providers, were
potentially compromised, and much private info of service users. Be sure
to update your systems as this bug is now public knowledge. (For more on
how OpenSSL is a nightmare, and why this bug is one among many that will
never be found, listen to FreeBSD developer Poul-Heening Kamp’s
excellent talk at the FOSDEM BSD conference.)
From the start, my revelations on this blog about Red Hat’s deep control
of Linux, along with their large corporate/government connections,
hasn’t been just about spying, but about losing the distributed
engineering quality of Linux, with Red Hat centralizing control. Yet as
an ex-cypherpunk and crypto software developer, as soon as I started
using Linux years ago, I noted that all the major distributions used
watered-down encryption (to use stronger encryption in many areas, such
as AES-loop, you needed to compile your own kernel and go to great
lengths to manually bypass barriers they put in place to the use of
genuinely strong encryption). This told me then that those who
controlled distributions were deeply in the pockets of intelligence
networks. So it comes as no surprise to me that they jumped on board
systemd when told to, despite the mock choice publicized to users –
there was never any option.
A computer, and especially hosting services (which often run Linux), are
powerful communication and broadcasting systems into today’s world. If
you control and have unfettered access to such systems, you basically
control the world. As Assange notes in the talk, encryption is only as
strong as its endpoints. eg if you’re running a very secure protocol on
a system with a compromised OS, you’re owned.
As Assange observed:
“The sharing of information, the communication of free peoples,
across history and across geography, is something that creates,
maintains, and disciplines laws [governments].”
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--
Pozdr
rysiek
http://news.yahoo.com/passwords-vulnerable-security-flaw-found-222708914.ht…
Passwords vulnerable after security flaw found
By ANICK JESDANUN
6 hours ago
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
NEW YORK (AP) — Passwords, credit cards and other sensitive data are at risk after security researchers discovered a problem with an encryption technology used to securely transmit email, e-commerce transactions, social networking posts and other Web traffic.
Related Stories
* 'Heartbleed' bug in web technology seen as major threat to user data Reuters
* Internet “Heartbleed” Bug Exposing Passwords To Hackers CBS Dallas Fort Worth (RSS)
* What You Need to Know About Heartbleed, the New Security Bug Scaring the Internet The Atlantic Wire
* 'Heartbleed' bug puts encrypted data in dangerAFP
* Google, Microsoft Race to Assess Heartbleed Vulnerability The Wall Street Journal
Security researchers say the threat, known as Heartbleed, is serious, partly because it remained undiscovered for more two years. Attackers can exploit the vulnerability without leaving any trace, so anything sent during that time has potentially been compromised. It's not known, though, whether anyone has actually used it to conduct an attack.
Researchers are advising people to change all of their passwords.
The flaw was discovered independently in recent days by researchers at Google Inc. and the Finnish security firm Codenomicon.
The breach involves SSL/TLS, an encryption technology marked by the small, closed padlock and "https:" on Web browsers to signify that traffic is secure. With the Heartbleed flaw, traffic was subject to snooping even if the padlock had been closed.
The problem affects only the variant of SSL/TLS known as OpenSSL, but that happens to be one of the most common on the Internet.
Researchers at Codenomicon say that OpenSSL is used by two of the most widely used Web server software, Apache and nginx. That means many websites potentially have this security flaw. OpenSSL is also used to secure email, chats and virtual private networks, which are used by employees to connect securely with corporate networks.
Despite the worries, Codenomicon said many large consumer sites don't have the problem because of their "conservative choice" of equipment and software. "Ironically smaller and more progressive services or those who have upgraded to (the) latest and best encryption will be affected most," the security firm added.
A fix came out Monday, but affected websites and service providers must install the update.
Yahoo's Tumblr blogging service uses OpenSSL. In a blog post Tuesday, officials at the service said they had no evidence of any breach and had immediately implemented the fix.
"But this still means that the little lock icon (HTTPS) we all trusted to keep our passwords, personal emails, and credit cards safe, was actually making all that private information accessible to anyone who knew about the exploit," Tumblr's blog post read. "This might be a good day to call in sick and take some time to change your passwords everywhere — especially your high-security services like email, file storage, and banking, which may have been compromised by this bug."
Yahoo Inc. said its other services, including email, Flickr and search, also have the vulnerability. The company said some of the systems have already been fixed, while work is being done on the rest of Yahoo's websites.
The company reiterated its standard recommendation for people to change passwords regularly and to add a backup mobile number to the account. That number can be used to verify a user's identity if there are problems accessing the account because of hacking.
___
AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
