Blackhole Crimeware Creator Gets 7 Years

That's a nice law enforcement win. 'Blackhole' is variously known as an exploit-kit or -pack or just straight-up crimeware, as it often came with regular updates,  or even support contracts. I have enough Blackhole references, dating back to 2012, in my database that it became boring to add them.

Brian Krebs reported this on 2016-04-14, at http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/04/blackhole-exploit-kit-author-gets-8-years/. Note that there is a one year discrepancy between the URL and the the stated sentence.

I've already heard rumbles (possibly from other security worker-bees who hated plugging 'Blackhole' into a database for the nth time) that the sentence wasn't long enough. The line of thought was about scale: that Dmitry “Paunch” Fedotov, whom Krebs reports as having more than 1,000 customers, was earning $50,000 per month, and likely contributed to tens of millions of dollars stolen from small to mid-sized businesses over several years.

I can see the temptation there. Particularly the bit about 'tens of millions', and particularly the 'small to mid-sized businesses'. Organizations that fit that size description have been some of my favorite clients, are often most in need of the help, and I just generally feel better about having helped out an organization of that size, rather than some Fortune 500 behemoth. I would be amazed if I were to discover that that viewpoint is unusual, if could somehow survey the people down in the security trenches.

But was the penalty really light, at seven or eight years? Possibly not. First off, this was a Russian law enforcement win, and the sentence will be served in a penal colony. I don't know about you, but the idea of spending 7-8 years in a Russian penal colony does not take me to my Happy Place. I'm not going to address that further.

Suppose this was a United States thing? A US citizen, in US courts, with a potential for serving a sentence in a US prison?

Krebs refers to the likelihood of 'tens of millions of dollars stolen'. I completely agree. But let's compare this to the physical world. That necessarily involves bank heists, armored car robberies, etc., where people are likely to be injured or killed. Much drama, making it a natural for movies, such as Oceans n, or based on the Lufthansa heist, etc. Wikipedia has a list of large-value US robberies, several of which are in that tens of millions category. The most recent of $10+ million robberies date to 1997. The largest of which was the Dunbar Armored robbery, involving $27.9 million in 2016 dollars. The sentence? 24 years for mastermind Allen Pace, an insider. Under parole guidelines, he will have to serve 18 years, and five others will have to serve 8-17 years.

Bear in mind that this was a record robbery: it seems likely that it was politicized to at least some degree. The Loomis Fargo robbery ($25.5 million today) occurred the same year, yielded sentences from probation to 11 years. I haven't researched possible parole dates.

Differences in criminal justice systems make it difficult to judge whether Fedotov drew a sentence that was appropriate. But it seems to me to be broadly comparable, at minimum. That is a win for law enforcement. Penalties used to be no more than a slap on the wrist, as long as the crime was committed over the network. The extent of the damages didn't seem to matter.

There will be no immediate effect, no matter how much we might wish otherwise.

Sending signals has been less than effective in even the geopolitical realm, where huge numbers of government bureaucrats (State Department, etc.) are employed to keep it all sorted out, and react in something like real-time. Criminals will entirely miss this one, even if it should prove to be the start of a trend toward commensurate sentencing. It seems likely to be a generational thing.

I'm fine with that.

A couple of years ago I posted Law Always Lags, As It Should, "The universal claim seems to be that the law is behind the times. My take is that is better to have law that lags than law that leads. While lagging legal thought will certainly lead to injustice, it is less likely to lead to wholesale injustice. It is the lesser of two evils in an imperfect world."

DitL: writing about files, of all things

Have a Day in the Life post, written on a Sunday night, after a lovely Spring afternoon spent with a text editor. Gack. That is just wrong.

Writing. 121 lines, 965 words, 5836 bytes, and all about writing files of all things. It really did take all afternoon, for not very much usable output. Some days just go like that. I mostly discovered what I should have been writing, which is a piece in three (four?) parts.

1. How badly file creation is currently being done
2. That interstitial bit between writing and reading, which leads to exploitable race conditions
3. Reading is not so much a problem as parsing, which has been a gold mine of exploits over the years
4. Possibly a lead-in bit, which I am attempting to dodge by posting this

An additional problem is how to present the material, as an introduction to the subject, without it being an off-putting wall of text. For instance, introducing hexdump to beginners, as well as a few programs in core-utils, all in text, turns out to be non-trivial. This stuff is a lot easier when you can just get in front of a whiteboard in scribble-yack-enjoy mode. 

NIST Defines Microservices, Application Containers and System Virtual Machines

Commentary::Architecture
Audience::All

I'm back on about microservices again, as I was in my
last post, Microservices and Linters. Because yesterday NIST released a draft of Definition of Microservices, Application Containers and System Virtual Machines, which you can see at http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsDrafts.html#800-180.

I have problems with it. The public comments period runs through 2016-03-18, and a comment template is available at the link above. If you don't read many NIST drafts, note that line numbers are part of the document. While that is useful if you catch a typo, or take exception to one statement, it is less useful if you take exception to the entire thing, to the extent of labeling it FUBAR.

That is, of course, just one opinion. I could make a claim about not wanting to bias any opinions, but then I've just done that, to at least some extent. This is mostly about not even knowing where to start, regarding this specific document.

I still regard microservices as something that is not nearly as widely deployed as one might think, given the trade press hype coverage. But it might be nice if, for once, security considerations might be taken into account early in the game. Yes, that is a forlorn hope, but even long odds will come home, given enough time.

Bur, srsly.  "Microservices are built around capabilities as opposed to services..."? Wut? I am not at all convinced that we have a robust system, Linux or otherwise, based on the capabilities security model. Because

• the capabilities security model is still a current research topic
• implementations will contain flaws or a long time to come
• all microservices architectures I have seen have been composed around the services (function) model

In this case, NIST seems to muddy the water through poor definitions. Particularly as it seems unlikely that wide awareness of capabilities-based security models, even as a research topic, exists at all within the wider software developer community. I've certainly seen little evidence for it, for whatever that might be worth.

Perhaps their usage of 'capabilities' was all about a possibly rapid evolution of APIs in containerized software, and not the capabilities security model. But rapid replacement of containerized software is about far more than API changes. Rather importantly, they are also about bug fixes. A percentage of which have always been exploitable, and as these are inherently remotely-accessible, would tend to have severity numbers reflecting that broad attack surface.

A lack of clarity over what, exactly, 'capabilities' might mean, in a NIST publication with 'Definition' in the title is, in and of itself, a problem.

Of course this is just anecdotal, from some random security worker. Not even remotely real evidence. So please ask around in your own organization, form your own conclusions, and comment on 800-180, if at all, as you see fit.

UUID: 92ce460e-58a6-4fd1-b3ed-d44f2d9c0183

Microservices and Linters

Commentary::Coding

Audience::Entry

Microservices are all the rage at the moment, for good reason. I am of course interested in the security aspects, and I am also on record as loving me some Python. Why, in detail, is probably something I should write up in a future post. For now, I'm just going to mention an intersection between the two.

In Chapter 9 (Security) of Building Microservices (Sam Newman, O'Reilly, 2015) we have exactly one mention of static analysis, under Baking Security In. Please don't misunderstand me – I found Building Microservices a worthwhile read. It is, however, a rather broad overview, and does have an unfortunate tendency to follow fashion. That last is probably not avoidable: the title has to sell, after all. And there is no possible way that all languages, strategies, etc., might be mentioned. So, no points off. Overall, author Sam Newman has done a nice job with this title.

That said, I still have a problem with static testing getting only one mention. Much has been written about developers needing to raise their game. It really is ridiculous that most injection attacks (SQL, LDAP, etc), for example, can exist in 2016. A lot of this is justified, but there are also some bits about QA, where that luxury still exists, that do not seem to get a lot of mention. Test-driven development can only take you so far, and an external QA group is a hugely useful defense against groupthink, deadline pressure, and other sources of problems in the delivery of reliable code.

Real developers could probably provide me with a lengthy list, and are invited to do so. You could further educate me with an ordered list – one can never have too much data.

Circling Back to Python

Back in June Andrew Collette (creator of much Python HDF5 code) wrote an excellent piece:

My Experience Using Static Analysis With Python. He was on Travis CI, and recommended both pyflakes (at minimum) and PyLint.

As it happens, we ended up using PyLint, which found about 100 legitimate issues with the code base, ranging from missing docstrings to calls to functions with the wrong number of arguments.

The takeaway is to use at least some sort of linter. Fine. That's doable, in either a full-on Continous Integration environment, or just using git hooks in a personal repo. Low marginal cost, better code. What's not to like?

Distributed Computing Is Inherently Complicated

Modern computing environments may consist of a single machine, comprised of multiple threads on multiple cores, many nodes in a cluster, or extremely parallel computing via GPU. In some cases (RDMA comes to mind), basic security mechanisms provided by Unix-like kernels are already being bypassed.

The need for reliable user-land code is never going to decrease. If even a minor improvement can be had by using something as widely known as a linter, yet that is not a universally accepted practice, then we are collectively Doing It Wrong.

UUID: d4b72b13-5dd1-46d1-913a-9dc470e0b6d7

If There Were One Feature I Wish Bugzilla Had

Commentary::Performance
Audience::Entry
UUID: ddf3eae9-a84d-4083-987e-a84cf2ec8aec

It would involve track records. Specifically, there is no way to know how many bugs in Open Source software you have reported have never been assigned, and were simply closed due to End of Life (EOL), or what the track record of an assignee (who never addressed it, but simply closed EOL), closed but reopened due to a broken or incomplete fix, no communication whatsover from the assignee, etc.).

I have biases which you should probably be aware of.

1. I weight communications issues more heavily than some do, because I am usually thinking in terms of security, and taking a sane approach to disclosure. This is often about how well communications works, and timeliness.
2. Many bugs can fall into a security context, for reasons that may not be readily apparent. Failure of some Linux update mechanisms in terms of alerting on rpm.new/.save files is a pet peeve, as is maintaining performance.

This is about that second point -- maintaining performance. I have another bias there -- if I didn't do security, I would do perf. It's the next most interesting problem. The high-frequency trading community is running without firewalls. Some turn SELinux off not due to usability concerns, but because characterizing perf impacts is difficult. Some run Remote DMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE) for the performance pop without considering the security implications of bypassing defenses built into the kernel.

There are a lot of interesting behaviors out there, and not all are well-considered. The last thing we should be doing is making it difficult to easily explore the performance impacts of things we might recommend. That's a recipe for losing all credibility, and becoming part of the problem.

I've recently destroyed the lab (again), because 2016 is coming up fast, and I wanted a first cut on what the hardware budget should look like. One of the things I wanted to explore is the overhead of rapidly spawning a lot of processes. Likely the last time I would do such a thing, for a couple of reasons.

1. Amazon AWS probably makes more financial sense than tearing up the lab, though reproducible research is a concern. But Amazon is only one vendor.
2. 'a lot of processes' is subjective, and relevance is entirely dependent on your *aaS (Infrastucture, Platform, etc., as a Service), your existing or contemplated local/cloud/hybrid security posture, etc.

Given the large number of possible deployment scenarios in modern infrastructure, it would be really nice if even the basics of performance tools were reliable. Nicer still if one could have some confidence that 'bleeding edge' Linux distributions could give us a preview of coming attractions, as used to be the case. Sadly, this is much less the case than it used to be.

In the case of Fedora and the rest of the Red Hat family, it goes beyond default file systems. I could go on about that, but this is about performance testing. So, well past time that I circled back to https://bugzilla.redhat.com/process_bug.cgi (login required), and spawning processes. That submission, for those who do not have a Red Hat Bugzilla account, reads as follows.

Description of problem: /usr/bin/free -s fails for floating-point and integers.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
3.3.10-5

How reproducible: Always.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. /usr/bin/free -s 1
free: seconds argument `1' failed

2. /usr/bin/free -c 1
works

3. /usr/bin/free -s 1 -c 1
free: seconds argument `1' failed

4. /usr/bin/free -c 1 -s 1
works

Actual results: As above. Verified that c > 1 work, when -c works at all.

Expected results: Functional continuous results from /usr/bin/free, and agreement between man page and program output. From man:
-c, --count count
Display the result count times. Requires the -s option.
-s, --seconds seconds
Continuously display the result delay seconds apart. You may actually specify any floating point number for delay, usleep(3) is used for microsecond resolution delay times.

Currently, it is -s that requires -c. Which is perverse if one wants to use free as a rough and ready means of tracking memory usage as several processes are started, and the time required to do that is unknown. Nor should order of specifying -c and -s matter, which would be a usability bug.

Additional info: Discovered this while attempting to use '-s 0.1', and discovering that even integers did not work.

Bad Weather: Must Rant on Scientists

Commentary::Science
Audience::Entry
UUID: 42bea053-2a40-4be6-93d0-dd3e17142907

This the current NOAA weather forecast. Note the absence of blue sky. People whom I respect have fled to San Diego. Why? I'm guessing that it's because they are much smarter than me.

Somewhere between the last week of October and the first week of November, the weather always goes to hell, from Puget Sound to at least the south end of the Willamette Valley. I don't need NOAA to tell me that, which is A Good Thing, as I have already mentioned that NOAA Can't Predict Weather, Can't Secure Their Systems.

I'm still annoyed with NOAA, not least because when they have clearly blown a forecast, as in whatever they predicted is obviously wrong, their updates just ignore it. High temp of 80° F, but it's already 87° by 1130 and climbing fast? Screw it. Keep predicting 80°. Perhaps people won't notice that they are baking.

That's a really bad example, given the time of year, but the frequency of this sort of thing has led me to log at least some of the more egregious examples into daily notes file. So, worth a minor rant-by-example.

I tend to follow the weather fairly closely. I'm out in it a fair amount, though I do tend to back off when it's really rotten. So I follow some weather blogs, and a bit of research. One of the more popular blogs is http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/. He's a University of Washington scientist, and is often spot-on. When he isn't spot-the-FUBAR-off.

Problems? Yeah, I have some. Appeal to Authority flaws, sometimes in the same post that he denigrates those authorities, inconsistency of message, and more than a little hype about certain topics. Again, sometimes in the same post in which he denigrates hype.

Perhaps my biggest problem is that he is a scientist. I am very far from being some sort of anti-science Luddite; I am a heavy consumer of science. But there's a corner case involved, in his field, which seems to be ignored. Mostly, it's about where the money goes. As taxpayers, how are we to judge whether we are receiving value? Why is NOAA not quantifying errors, so that we might judge when forecasts are most likely to be erroneous?

The other axis in that corner case is this.

http://www.probcast.com/ is about probabilities and ensemble forecasting, from UW. It's an experiment, with a useful 'about' page. But still no indication of the circumstances under which it wanders off into left, and it's run by scientists. Who are often the most security-clueless people imaginable. It's somewhat understandable, because they are all about generating new knowledge, and sharing it widely.

Still, having even half a security clue is useful. There is a reason that Linux directories under /home are private in most modern distros. Despite UNIX being historically rooted in research environments.

Now and then (very occasionally) I report a problem to a Web site owner. Not often, because as often as I find them, it would burn too much time. In this case, I got on the phone. The UW person I spoke with had no idea what I was even talking about. She knew of no such site, who to contact, etc. The issue was fixed in fairly short order (do not remember exact timing) but in terms of appropriate response, it was a miserable failure.

Scientists mostly don't do operations. The concept of domain squatting (excuse me,  'cybersquatting') completely escapes them. I'm fine with that, actually. Different fields of endeavor, and I'd rather scientists were paid to do science.

But I get annoyed as hell when some scientist writes about something that is way outside their area of expertise, expecting to be considered an authority.

A Tier 1 Information Source: Ross Anderson

Commentary::Sources
Audience::Intermediate
UUID: 34e6bddc-58a3-47a7-a1e2-7e83981bacc8

On 3/20/14 I published Congratulations to Leslie Lamport, winner of the 2013 Turing AwardCongratulations to Leslie Lamport, winner of the 2013 Turing Award, as announced to the public a bit later, in CACM volume 57, number 6 (June, 2014). That post is a bit dated now -- I don't host ACM logos now, the post contains a link to an Adobe Flash presentation, etc. But Lamport did so much work as the original developer of LaTeX, and that is very close to the heart of my documentation production pipeline.

Fine. Times change, sometimes for the better. Flash is finally becoming recognized as the security nightmare that it has always been. ACM still seems to have no concept of this (scientists often have absolutely no clue about security), as their webinars still require it. Another reason (there are several) that I no longer belong to the ACM.

In that issue, there is an article by Ross Anderson and Ross Murdoch. In CACM, it's behind the paywall, but it's also public, as EMV: Why Payment Systems Fail. An extract:

Now that US banks are deploying credit and debit cards with chips supporting the EMV protocol, our article explores what lessons the US should learn from the UK experience of having chip cards since 2006. We address questions like whether EMV would have prevented the Target data breach (it wouldn’t have), whether Chip and PIN is safer for customers than Chip and Signature (it isn’t), whether EMV cards can be cloned (in some cases, they can) and whether EMV will protect against online fraud (it won’t).

More generally, a summary of Cambridge Computer Laboratory research is available from Anderson, as well a more general overview from the Security Group. Once upon a time (actually twice upon a time) CLCAM used to emit "Three Paper Thursday". But it was dependent on the availability of grad students, current research priorities, etc. Back in July of 2014, I asked if he might bring it back, and it turned out to be impractical. That sucked, as I always had a block of calendar time that was devoted to reading it. Largely on the strength of reading the first edition of Security Engineering. There is a second edition out now, and it is even better. It's also available as chapter-by-chapter series of PDFs, for free. My Wiley first edition (2001) cost about what you would expect for a tech book, but that is available as well, so you can compare the two, and get a notion of how Anderson thinks the security landscape has changed. If you are any sort of security worker-bee, you have little excuse for not having read it.

Why post this now? Because UK banks were proven to not be capable of even recognizing the concepts of ethics or morality, as first widely widely published by Anderson. Does anyone think that the Oct 1 shift in liability to merchants, which will undoubtedly drive EMV adoption in the US, will be any different?

I could go on about this, and the ongoing legal battles between the retail and banking sectors. But the post is becoming very long, as is. I'm going to let it ride, at least for now. Suffice it to say that both sectors are worth trillions of dollars per year. When such enormous sums are involved, neither sector will have your best interests in mind, whether you are subject to PCI-DSS self-regulation, or are simply a consumer shopping on the Internet.

I don't do generic blogroll links, either by request or some weird notion. This is my second. The first was to Brian Krebs, largely because he is the best security blogger I know of, in the consumer space. I hate to go there (the consumer security space, not Krebs on Security), which is why my first (10/2/14) source was titled A Brief Foray Into the Horrible.

How I divide news sources into tiers (currently Vendor, then Tiers 1-3) lies somewhere in the area of proprietary, complex (as opposed to complicated), and just really hard to describe. I may post something about that in future (sorry, 'going forward' is the current corporate bullshit fashion) but no promises.

However, I do promise to talk about their take on mobile security. You can read up on it the new link to Light Blue Touchpaper, now appearing under "(Some) Blogs I Read".