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FBSD 7 stable to 8 stable, cryptome, twitenc, fact fault, tor, hidden, limulus

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Upgrading from FreeBSD 7 stable to FreeBSD 8 stable went smoothly. What follows are the general steps I followed. (FreeBSD handbook guidance can be found here for the base system and here for the ports.)

  • Modify my custom kernel configuration for the FreeBSD 8 kernel.

    (The generic FreeBSD kernel configuration for the i386 platform as a starting point can be found in “/usr/src/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC”. e.g.,

    • cp /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC /usr/mykernconf8
    • ln -s /usr/mykernconf8 /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/mykernconf8
    • vi /usr/mykernconf8 and modify as desired)
  • vi /usr/stable-supfile and update my custom “stable-supfile” to point to “RELENG_8″ by changing the relevant line to “*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_8″

    (A sample “stable-supfile” as a starting point can be found in “/usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile”. e.g.,

    • cp /usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile /usr/stable-supfile
    • vi /usr/stable-supfile and modify as needed, such as setting the default release to 8 and setting the host to one of the FreeBSD cvs server mirrors)
  • cd /usr/src
  • cvsup -g -L 2 ../stable-supfile (update source tree)
  • make buildworld (build system binaries, manpages, etc.)
  • make kernel KERNCONF=mykernconf8 (build and install kernel)
  • reboot (into single user mode)
  • cd /usr/src
  • mergemaster -p (prepare for merge of updated scripted and configuration files)
  • make installworld (install system binaries, manpages, etc.)
  • mergemaster (merge in updated scripts and configuration files)

    There was a version increment of the standard contents in “/etc” from 7 to 8, so there was much to sift through. I had made modifications to a few configuration files and scripts that had to be merged, but, for the majority, I just installed the new version.

  • reboot

Next came the joy of rebuilding all the ports. I chose to go with installing pre-built packages (where available), and subsequently rebuilding those few ports that I had customized.

  • cd /usr/ports
  • cvsup -g -L 2 ../ports-supfile (update ports tree)

    Examine “/usr/ports/UPDATING” to see if there were any special instructions relevant to upgrading the installed ports and “/usr/ports/MOVED” to see what ports have been (re)moved.

  • portsdb -Fu (fetch new index and build db)
  • pkgdb -F (check package registry)
  • portupgrade -nvOpPfa (to see what is expected to happen without performing the actual upgrade)
  • portupgrade -vOpPfa (this upgrades installed ports from pre-built packages where available; otherwise, it builds and installs the ports from the source, and creates packages for them.)
  • portupgrade -pf <all those ports that I had custom configs or otherwise made tweaks>

    • (build and install the specified ports from source, and create packages for them)

  • pkgdb -FL (check package registry and look for lost dependencies)
  • portsclean -CDDLP (clean up working dirs, distros, packages, and libraries)

-

Long time readers of this blog may remember that I attended a talk given by John Young of Cryptome.

I attended the panel discussion on “The Secret World of Global Eavesdropping” yesterday, as mentioned in a previous post. It was composed of Patrick Radden Keefe, moderator, and John Young, primary speaker. (Robert Windrem did not attend.)

[...]

For those that don’t know, Cryptome.org publishes information on national security, intelligence, cryptography, etc. with a technical focus.

Well, it seems Cryptome has been in the news a bit of late.

1

Microsoft has managed to do what a roomful of secretive, three-letter government agencies have wanted to do for years: get the whistleblowing, government-document sharing site Cryptome shut down.

Microsoft dropped a DMCA notice alleging copyright infringement on Cryptome’s proprietor John Young on Tuesday after he posted a Microsoft surveillance compliance document that the company gives to law enforcement agents seeking information on Microsoft users.[...]

2

In a bizarre up-and-down — literally — series of events, the controversial site Cryptome.org was forced offline yesterday after posting a sensitive Microsoft document on its site and was back online today.

3

PayPal has finally made good on its pledge to restore Cryptome’s account many hours after the firm’s head of global communications told Register readers it had already done so.

-

Ok.

As i announced yesterday, the new version of shrimp7 (31) support compression for your Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed posts. With that technique you will be able to post messages that are longer then 140 characters. When i implemented message compression i had the idea to implement a AES-256bit encryption method for shrimp7 version 32. I use the same principles as the compression method i use. After encryption I’ll add 2 characters in front of the string so applications could recognize compressed or encrypted messages.

If you weren’t laughing already, from the cypherpunks mailing list…

Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 21:17:30 -0800
Subject: Re: 256-bit encryption for Twitter posts
From: coderman
To: Ted Smith
Cc: Cypherpunks list

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Ted Smith wrote:
> …
> 256-bit encryption for Twitter posts
>….
> .?WsSMSoaGhoZFjHZzQzx7iOZ
> +GKmXXcyD hq0iEBExlReVG2f0ACO256i84cOC7QlxO/txTuRdkQwL
> +fBGZlcUQBQoDHLLm/3cFbEEW3ZU8I/CD63wfgpGbAx+eH9oPAmVyYv14Y=

i say again:
twitter is ruining the internets…

-

Factoring.

On December 12, 2009, we factored the 768-bit, 232-digit number RSA-768 by the number field sieve (NFS, [20]). The number RSA-768 was taken from the now obsolete RSA Challenge list [38] as a representative 768-bit RSA modulus (cf. [37]). This result is a record for factoring general integers. Factoring a 1024-bit RSA modulus would be about a thousand times harder, and a 768-bit RSA modulus is several thousands times harder to factor than a 512-bit one. Because the first factorization of a 512-bit RSA modulus was reported only a decade ago (cf. [7]) it is not unreasonable to expect that 1024-bit RSA moduli can be factored well within the next decade by an academic effort such as ours or the one in [7]. Thus, it would be prudent to phase out usage of 1024-bit RSA within the next three to four years.

Implementation fault abuse.

1

In this work we described an end-to-end attack to a RSA authentication scheme on a complete FPGA-based SPARC computer system. We theorized and implemented a novel fault-based attack to the fixed-window exponentiation algorithm and applied it to the well known and widely used OpenSSL libraries. In doing so we discovered and exposed a major vulnerability to fault-based attacks in a current version of the libraries and demonstrated how this attack can be perpetrated even with limited computational resources.

2

We employed with success the induced faults in order to lead attacks against industry grade implementations of the RSA and the AES cryptosystems. Moreover we devised two new attack techniques, one for each cryptosystem and have been able to validate their practical effectiveness with a thorough experimental campaign. We were able to successfully break the AES cipher employing only 4kB of faulty ciphertext, to retrieve an RSA encrypted plaintext using at most 5 faulty ciphertexts regardless of the size of the modulus and to factor the RSA modulus employing at most two faulty signatures. After conducting the whole experimental campaign no signs of tampering were left on the attacked device, thus proving that the employed technique is not invasive and does not alter the further functioning of the device. The attack technique is fully realizable with low cost off-the-shelf instruments which is a significant strong asset of the proposed attack technique.

-

Back in January, Tor 0.2.1.22 was released (as of this writing, 0.2.1.24 is the current stable release). In the announcement,

Tor 0.2.1.22 rotates two of the seven v3 directory authority keys and locations, due to a security breach of some of the Torproject servers: http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jan-2010/msg00161.html

From the referenced message,

In early January we discovered that two of the seven directory authorities were compromised (moria1 and gabelmoo), along with metrics.torproject.org, a new server we’d recently set up to serve metrics data and graphs. The three servers have since been reinstalled with service migrated to other servers.

-

I’ve brought up hidden assumptions often enough here, so this resonated.

The rules surrounding markets matter a lot–and the reason we don’t know this is that the rules that work have disappeared into the background, faded out of our consciousness, become part of the miasma of “the market”. For example, I recall a web debate years ago in which someone made the standard point that cartels are very difficult to hold together, which means anti-trust rules about this sort of thing have dubious utility. I believe it was Eugene Volokh who pointed out that this was true . . . but only because courts refused to enforce cartel agreements. If courts did enforce them, cartels would work pretty well–which is why we still have professional sports leagues.

-

Interesting.

Limulus is an acronym for LInux MULti-core Unified Supercomputer. The Limulus project goal is to create and maintain an open specification and software stack for a personal workstation cluster. Ideally, a user should be able to build or purchase a small personal workstation cluster using the Limulus reference design and low cost hardware. In addition, a freely available turn-key Linux based software stack will be created and maintained for use on the Limulus design. A Limulus is inteneded to be a workstation cluster platform where users can develop software, test ideas, run small scale applications, and teach HPC methods.[...]

And watch the hardware costs drop.

September 2007 Total: $2302 (US dollars)
September 2008 Total: $2092 (US dollars)*

* includes RAM upgrade price from 1GB/node to 2GB/node

I still remember my Beowulf cluster in college.

Posted in Anonymity & Privacy, BSD, Crypto, Off-topic, Security | No Comments »

Haiti

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

I turned on my television to see a city razed, a gruesome tapestry of survivors and corpses. A girl, buried under the rubble, was screaming for help; a group of men, after hours, managed to free her from the broken concrete. The reporter asked her if she had been scared, and, unconquerable, she told the camera “her heart never skipped a beat.” Many others felt no more, while those they left behind felt all too much.

Mother nature has no wrath, no anger, no hatred. She feels nothing, she is unadorned indifference. And, this makes her brute violence all the more terrifying. As Thomas Hardy put it,

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
-Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan….
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Yet, it is this very indifference and upheaval that burned into us the passion that fires our spirit and ingenuity. We have forged ahead thus far, and we will not go quietly into the night. And, when we see our neighbors shaken, we offer a hand to steady them. Cold indifference, be damned.

Posted in Off-topic | No Comments »

Number

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Like Whitman’s spider, here we cast a filament between a few reads, prompted by “Number”.

-

Somewhat in keeping with recent posts, I found Tobias Dantzig’s “Number” (fourth edition – 1953) an interesting tale of the evolution of the number concept that calls attention to things we so completely take for granted today, such as positional numeration (“The struggle between the Abacists, who defended old traditions, and the Algorists, who advocated the reform, lasted from the eleventh century to the fifteenth century and went through all the usual stages of obscurantism and reaction.”). Much of the book is fascinating, such as the following excerpts of possible interest to our readers.

(The human computer is quite different from that there laptop,)

The advantages of the base two are economy of symbols and tremendous simplicity in operations. It must be remembered that every system requires that tables of addition and multiplication be committed to memory. For the binary system these reduce to 1 + 1 = 10 and 1 X 1 = 1; whereas for the decimal, each table has 100 entries. Yet this advantage is more than offset by lack of compactness: thus the decimal number 4096 = 2^12 would be expressed in the binary system by 1,000,000,000,000.

(On the term cipher and the spread of the concept of zero,)

[...]In the English language the word cifra has become cipher and has retained its original meaning of zero.

The attitude of the common people toward this new numeration is reflected in the fact that soon after its introduction into Europe, the word cifra was used as a secret sign; but this connotation was altogether lost in the succeeding centuries. The verb decipher remains as a monument of these early days.

(Think infinite and calculus,)

The conflict between discrete and continuous is not a mere product of school dialectics: it may be traced to the very origin of thought, for it is but the reflection of the ever present discord between this conception of time as a stream and the discontinuous character of experience. For, in the ultimate analysis, our number concept rests on counting, i.e., on enumerating the discrete, discontinuous, interrupted, while our time intuition paints all phenomena as flowing. To reduce physical phenomena to number without destroying its streamlike character – such is the Herculean task of the mathematical physicist; and, in a broad sense, geometry too should be viewed as but a branch of physics.

(And here we take a trip…)

The latter brings to mind Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (1925),

All the same that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was! – that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant …

Of course, I note the following congruence between “Spent” and “Mrs. Dalloway”…

From Geoffrey Miller’s “Spent” (2009),

[...]Almost every dog breed has some idiosyncratic high-maintenance feature that makes it an effective means for displaying conscientiousness, and all require regular feeding, watering, walking, vet care, and diligent physical restraint by leashes and fences. Hence the social and sexual popularity of single people who can be seen walking dogs that are conspicuously well fed, well-groomed, well trained, nonneurotic, and nondead.[...]

From Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”,

Then Clarrisa, still with an air of being offended with them all, got up, made some excuse, and went off, alone. As she opened the door, in came that great shaggy dog which ran after sheep. She flung herself upon him, went into raptures. It was as if she said to Peter – it was all aimed at him, he knew – “I know you thought me absurd about that woman just now; but see how extraordinarily sympathetic I am; see how I love my Rob!”

Now, Elena Ferrante’s “Days of Abandonment” is stylistically reminiscent of Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway”. As Septimus (and Clarissa) verge on dissolution in “Mrs. Dalloway,” Olga in “Days of Abandonment” gives us a view into the mind of someone on the brink of insanity.

From “Days of Abandonment” (2005 english translation),

[...]I tried again to open the door. I couldn’t do it. I leaned over, I examined the key closely. Finding the imprint of the old gestures was a mistake. I had to disengage them. Under the stupefied gaze of Ilaria, I brought my mouth to the key, tasted it with my lips, smelled the odor of plastic and metal. Then I grabbed it solidly between my teeth and tried to make it turn. I did it with a sudden jerk, as if I wished to surprise the object, impose a new statute, a different dispensation. Now we’ll see who wins, I thought, while a pasty, salty taste invaded my mouth. But I produced no effect, except the impression that, because the rotating movement of my teeth on the key wasn’t working, it was finding an outlet in my face, tearing it like a can opener, and my teeth were moving, were being unhinged from the foundation of my face, taking with them the nasal septum, an eye brow, an eye, and revealing the viscid interior of my head.

(Anon, through sane eyes, we find “The key turned in the lock simply.”)

Notable is the portrayal of insanity as a representation of the world constructed by a person’s mind that skews too far from the necessities of the reality around them, a representation incoherently blurred by memories and imaginations and hallucinations, a representation that makes their ability to survive, reproduce, function out there in the world quite difficult. (One could think of the economic bubble that recently occurred as insanity.)

Which somehow made me think, if people’s representations of the world could be assigned some sort of numerical metric and be plotted over the number of people with that representation, should we visualize a bell curve of a normal distribution? Ah, but, bell curves bring to mind means. Aristotle spoke of means; to that end, from “The Ethics of Aristotle” (1953 English translation),

In anything continuous and divisible it is possible to take the half, or more than the half, or less than the half. Now these parts may be larger, smaller, and equal either in relation to the thing divided or in relation to us. [...] The man who knows his business avoids both too much and too little. It is the mean he seeks and adopts – not the mean of the thing but the relative mean.

Of course, Aristotle makes me think of Greek philosophers. Coming back to “Number”, Dantzig quotes Philolaus, a Pythagorean, as saying,

All things which can be known have number; for it is not possible that without number anything can be either conceived or known.

Alas for the Pythagoreans, the irrationals revealed by the Pythagorean Theorem! Hippasus drowned! Dancing round the ruler and compass, what was it Eliot said in “The Hollow Men”,

 Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Moving us toward where we parted, William Blake in “Augeries of Innocence” now pops into mind,

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.

Perhaps, as Wordsworth once wrote, “the world is too much with us”; but then we have these sublime writers, poets, mathematicians! Alas, the act is up; the thread must be caught; summer’s grand finale is at the door. So, we end with the close of Dantzig’s “Number”,

In this, then, modern science differs from its classical predecessor; it has recognized the anthropomorphic origin and nature of human knowledge. Be it determinism or rationality, empiricism or the mathematical method, it has recognized that man is the measure of all things, and that there is no other measure.

It’s turtles all the way down, dear reader, turtles all the way down! ;)

Posted in Off-topic | No Comments »

Violent rambling, etc.

Friday, August 7th, 2009

Behold! Behold!
What lo?
A ramble! A ramble!
What? No!
‘Tis so! ‘Tis so!

-

I think we often take for granted the hidden knowledge built into our cultures, our institutions, our norms, to the degree that we take the results of these structures, of this genetic code for our society, as just a given. I must say that, when I was younger, the more radical beliefs I held at the time were in part motivated by the accumulated noise, junk, I perceived in those structures about me while ignoring the information also contained therein; now, I have more respect for the hidden knowledge in such systems and the hidden assumptions on those systems and their knowledge.

So, I recently read Girard’s “Violence and the Sacred”. In it, Girard discusses the idea that all society, all culture, even all symbolic thought is the byproduct of what he calls a sacrificial crisis, which entails a cycle of reciprocal violence and violent undifferentiation within a community, that culminates in the elimination of a sacrificial victim, whereby the community unites against one member of the community and, in a generative and bonding moment, releases their violence upon that member, thus expelling their violence from the community. According to Girard, religion enshrines this sacrificial crisis and victim, and ritual allows for the re-enactment of the crisis and victim to expunge the violence within the community. (Girard’s, say, over the top, argument is that this crisis-victim is the foundation of all community and culture, and that trying to understand the crisis-victim is what caused symbolic thought to emerge. Side note – I mention symbolic thought with regards to the financial system in this post.)

Thinking on it, I can see the sacrificial crisis culminating in a sacrificial victim, and the ritualized enactment of such an event, applied within communities in the world in which I live today. As Girard discusses, while sacrificial victims may be selected at random in the midst of a crisis, surrogate victims used during the ritualized replay of the sacrificial crisis are often chosen both because they have ties to the community (and so can be substituted for it) and yet because they are outside it (and so have little potential to inspire reciprocal violence). When I look at, say, news of late, where “obese” people seem to be sacrificed in the war on health care costs, I cannot help but see parallels to the surrogate victim in primitive religious rituals (irrespective of any opinion held on the matter).

There is an interesting misdirection noted by Girard as well, the belief that violence stems from something outside of humankind, such as the gods or the dead. This too it seems is visible today in much rhetoric. People speak as if violence itself stems from a gun or from a video game or from a car, from these sacred and powerful items that are outside the world of people, external objects capable of infecting people with violence when they descend upon a community. (I am ignoring any correlation that may exist between these objects and people’s propensities toward violence.)

Regardless of views, the importance of violence, or rather, the expulsion of violence from, within the community appears to be hugely important to, and completely buried in, the very foundations of society as we know it today, at least in the culture in which I reside. This seem to be so much the case, that we take the end result for granted.

For example, Girard points out the significance of the judicial system in replacing religion, such that the judicial system takes on a higher authority as a impartial and superior body, that metes out revenge, relabeled a transcendent term, justice, upon parties of established guilt in the name of the community. The very sublime nature of the institution makes the act of revenge the judicial system deals out beyond revenge, and so it breaks the potential chain of reciprocal violence.

We often take the incorporation of the judicial institution into our culture for granted, as we assume such institutions and such cultures are a given, natural. But, violence has been with us long before such institutions existed. Nature is violent at times, and it makes sense that we have evolved a potential for violence ourselves; we have survived over the long course of time both in spite of and because of violence. As such and in broader terms, I am beginning to think that taking current culture, current norms, current institutions for granted is quite dangerous.

This idea of the generative and community building aspects of violent unanimity also seems in line with Peter Turchin’s ideas “War and Peace and War” (mentioned in this post, particularly bullet point 2) that a common struggle against, say, a foreign enemy can bring people together, that it builds the capacity for collective action. Great nations are forged in the frontier life, in the world of violent interactions between similar peoples with less similar peoples. In this light, Girard briefly notes wars with foreign nations as an example of unifying violence, in that the foreign nation becomes the sacrificial victim, the embodiment of violence that is outside the community ,and yet a violence that has been brought to the community and must be violently expunged.

Girard notes that change is often feared by primitive communities as a potential trigger of violence, and often there is lots of ritual performed around change to relieve any potential for violent buildups, such as at times of seasonal transitions or the coming of age of a child. In bullet point 2 of the aforementioned post, I noted that “radical change can cause instability” along with a slightly broader discussion of change or adaption in a follow-up post. Additionally, Schoeck notes in Envy that extreme envy and envy avoidance, such as that in exhibited in primitive communities and small towns, can often stifle innovation, creativity, and achievement, all of which have undertones of change. So, combining this with Girard, we can see envy threatens violence, and, violence being contagious, such a threat could wipe out a whole community, which leads us to innovation, creativity, and achievement, as purveyors of change, being punished and avoided.

Now, it is easy to forget walking down the street in NYC just how much everything around us requires this breaking of the chain of reciprocal violence. In the past, when men could easily descend into a tornado of violence and everything else was swept aside by it, the world as we see it now in NYC could not exist. The weak would have to huddle together and perhaps flee the storm, and the strong could tear everything down in a moment of rage.

That is not to say that violence is not still present, but that most people tend towards non-initiation of violence, and the rare initiation of violence tends to end at the time it begins. Self-defense is acceptable at the moment of being attacked, but, after the fact, we rely on law enforcement and the judicial system to catch and punish the aggressor; vigilante-ism and personal revenge are frowned upon and punished, norms that reinforce a breaking of reciprocal violence. (In some communities in NYC and the USA in general, reciprocal violence may still run free, such as gang violence or the eruption of riots; however, those are the exceptions and not the norm.)

Evolution is the way of nature and, as such, ourselves, and I rather enjoy this spiraling progression, much as I like the evolution of what I consider to be my self as I grow older. As noted by Turchin’s “War and Peace and War” or in Michael Flynn’s scifi-esque “Introduction to Cliology” (inspired by Asimov) or even Barrow’s “The Artful Universe”, we live in cycles within cycles, in this chaotic nature, and so we must. But, I maintain a certain sense of caution when unraveling the fabric of our modern world, as pulling at the strings of our norms, cultures, institutions, communities, etc. without properly considering their hidden store of knowledge, and the hidden assumptions one might be making, can have quite profound and completely unintended consequences, for better or worse.

-

I mentioned “the map is not the territory” in this post. How about another? “Correlation is not causation.” This is one of those great insights that we so often fail to see. I have made this mistake at times in this blog.

So, if I had remembered nothing else from Judith Rich Harris’ “The Nurture Assumption”, then the wit, and the clear and concise explanation of “correlation is not causation” that makes the concept easy for me to explain to others, would have made the book worth it. An excerpt of her fictional example to illustrate correlation is not causation,

[...]Our method will be straightforward: we will ask a large number of middle-aged people how much broccoli they consume and then, five years later, check to see how many of them are still alive.[...]

[fictional results showing a statistically significant correlation between eating broccoli and longevity in men but not women]

Our study appears in an epidemiological journal. A newspaper reporter happens to read it. The next day there’s a headline in the paper: EATING BROCCOLI MAKES MEN LIVE LONGER, STUDY SHOWS.

But does it? Does the study show that eating broccoli caused the male subjects to live longer? Men who eat broccoli may also eat a lot of carrots and brussel sprouts. They may eat less meat or less ice cream than broccoli shunners. Perhaps they are more likely to exercise, more likely to buckle their seatbealts, less likely to smoke. Any of these other lifestyle factors, or all of them together, may be responsible for the longer lives of the broccoli eaters. Eating broccoli might even have been shortening our subjects’ lives, but this effect was outweighed by the beneficial effects of all the other things broccoli eaters were doing.

-

The 0.2.1.x branch of Tor has gone to release.

Tor 0.2.1.18 lays the foundations for performance improvements, adds status events to help users diagnose bootstrap problems, adds optional authentication/authorization for hidden services, fixes a variety of potential anonymity problems, and includes a huge pile of other features and bug fixes.

Bravo.

-

Attacks only get better.

In this paper we describe several attacks which can break {\it with practical complexity} variants of AES-256 whose number of rounds are comparable to that of AES-128. One of our attacks uses only two related keys and $2^{39}$ time to recover the complete 256-bit key of a 9-round version of AES-256 (the best previous attack on this variant required 4 related keys and $2^{120}$ time). Another attack can break a 10 round version of AES-256 in $2^{45}$ time, but it uses a stronger type of {\it related subkey attack} (the best previous attack on this variant required 64 related keys and $2^{172}$ time). While neither AES-128 nor AES-256 can be directly broken by these attacks, the fact that their hybrid (which combines the smaller number of rounds from AES-128 along with the larger key size from AES-256) can be broken with such a low complexity raises serious concern about the remaining safety margin offered by the AES family of cryptosystems.

Posted in Anonymity & Privacy, Crypto, Off-topic, Security | No Comments »

Quickies – FIPS 186-3 etc., other notes, metro, etc.

Thursday, June 11th, 2009

Just a few quick and mostly old notes accumulated over the last few months…

–

FIPS 186-3 has been released, as announced here.

This notice announces the Secretary of Commerce’s approval of Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 186–3, Digital Signature Standard (DSS). FIPS 186–3 is a revision of FIPS 186–2. The FIPS specifies three techniques for the generation and verification of digital signatures that can be used for the protection of data: the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and the Rivest-Shamir-Adelman (RSA) algorithm. Although all three of these algorithms were approved in FIPS 186–2, FIPS 186–3 increases the key sizes allowed for DSA, provides additional requirements for the use of RSA and ECDSA, and includes requirements for obtaining the assurances necessary for valid digital signatures. FIPS 186–2 contained specifications for random number generators (RNGs); this revision does not include such specifications, but refers to NIST Special Publication (SP) 800–90 for obtaining random numbers.

[...]FIPS 186–3 allows the use of 1024, 2048 and 3072-bit keys. Other requirements have also been added concerning the use of ANS X9.31 and ANS X9.62. In addition, the use of the RSA algorithm as specified in Public Key Cryptography Standard (PKCS) #1 (RSA Cryptography Standard) is allowed.

In the announcement, some of the changes between the last draft and the final document are covered in a comments received and NIST response format. I found the most interesting NIST responses to be…

This permits the use of a public key algorithm and key size that is stronger in security than a hash algorithm, so long as both provide sufficient security for the digital signature process. The use of hash algorithms that provide equivalent or stronger security than the public key algorithm and key size is still encouraged as a general practice.

NIST studied the suggestion and decided not to impose further restrictions on the selection of the public exponent e. Such restrictions would negatively impact NIST’s Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) by precluding the validation of currently accepted implementations without providing a significant increase in security.

NIST reviewed the comments and made the appropriate changes to ensure alignment with respect to the generation and management of ECDSA domain parameters. NIST deleted the statement ‘‘ANSI X9.62 has no restriction on the maximum size of [the cofactor]’’, since the current version of X9.62 imposes limitations on the size of the cofactor. NIST also revised statements regarding elliptic curve domain parameter generation for purposes other than digital signature generation.

I commented on an early draft here and mentioned a later draft here.

Update:Annex A and Annex C of FIPS 140-2 have been updated to reference FIPS 186-3.

The algorithm testing tool has been updated to include testing for FIPS 186-3 algorithms, with some exceptions. As found the announcements,

New release of the CAVS algorithm validation testing tool to the CST Laboratories (CAVS8.0). This version of the CAVS tool activates the FIPS 186-3 DSA2 validation testing with the exception of generation and validation of provably prime domain parameters p and q and canonical generation and validation of domain parameter g. It also requires the IUT to specify the assurances necessary for valid digital signatures specified in FIPS 186-3.

The exceptions to the algorithm testing tool are vendor affirmed for now, as per an update to the FIPS 140-2 Implementation Guidance.

Validation testing for FIPS 186-3, Digital Signature Standard (DSS) is separated into the three digital signature algorithms. Validation testing is available for FIPS 186-3 DSA, with the exception of the domain parameter generation and validation method listed above. These methods, along with FIPS 186-3 ECDSA and RSA, will require vendor affirmation until validation testing is available in the CAVS tool.

Update: NIST has released a new version of the algorithm testing tool (8.1) that “addresses several minor modifications and enhancements to CAVS including the Addition of a cover letter template, the addition of more efficient elliptic curve routines for NIST binary (e.g.., B-163 and K-571) curves, and the modification of several minor issues.”

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Speaking of FIPS, the FIPS 140-2 implementation guidance (IG) has been updated over the last few months. There has been much in the way of important and clarifying guidance, translating both “FIPS lore” and the forward thinking on algorithms/protocols as well as revs to FIPS 140 into the current requirements.

New Guidance
o04/01/09: 3.2 Bypass Capability in Routers
o04/01/09: 9.5 Module Initialization during Power-Up
o03/24/09: 7.9 Procedural CSP Zeroization
o03/10/09: 1.14 Key/IV Pair Uniqueness Requirements from NIST SP 800-38D
o03/10/09: 5.3 Physical Security Assumptions
o03/10/09: 7.8 Key Generation Methods Allowed in FIPS Mode

Modified Guidance
o03/10/09: G.1 Request for Guidance from the CMVP – Updated NIST POC.
o03/10/09: G.5 Maintaining validation compliance of software or firmware cryptographic modules – Updated references to firmware and hybrid modules.
o03/10/09: G.13 Instructions for completing a FIPS 140-2 Validation Certificate – Updated examples.
o03/10/09: 1.9 Definition and Requirements of a Hybrid Cryptographic Module – Updated to include hybrid firmware modules.
o03/10/09: 7.1 Acceptable Key Establishment Protocols – For Key Agreement; added the KDF specified in the SRTP protocol (IETF RFC 3711) is allowed only for use as part of the SRTP key derivation protocol. For Key Transport; wrapping a key using the GDOI Group Key Management Protocol described in the IETF RFC 3547.

I don’t think any of these are a surprise, but reading through it might be useful. Much has been set done cleanly here, with the possible exception of IG 9.5, which seemed more confusing than clarifying to me, but maybe that was a case of my (unfortunately) “knowing” too much about the FIPS world. Anyway, the changes to or additions of IGs 1.9, 7.1, 7.8, and 1.14 are perhaps of the most interest.

Since I have been coming at things from a more deployment side these days, I think IG 5.3 helps to illustrate how to interpret FIPS 140-2 validation results as applied to the selection and deployment of FIPS modules.

The four physical security levels of FIPS 140-2 are focused on the protection of the modules CSPs by the module itself independent of the environment the module is deployed. Therefore selection of a security level is greatly influenced by the environment the module is to be deployed. At a Level 1 security level, which does not itself provide physical security protection, in the right environment, may be an acceptable solution because the environment provides the required physical security protection features.

In this same deployment regard, IG 1.14 makes the following note.

2. The standard sets the minimum security requirements. The buyer is free to demand that the module allows for longer names. Users should be smart enough to name their modules in such a way that name collisions become extremely rare.

Also, for the old timers, the following was an area of debate back in the day. Now it is officially documented in an IG 7.8.

To be used in FIPS mode, a secret value K can be any value of the form:

K = U XOR V, (1)

where the components U and V are of the same length as K14, are “independent” of each other, and U is derived, possibly using a qualified post-processing (see below), from the output of an approved RNG in the module that is generating K. In addition, each component may be a function of other values (e.g., U = F(U’), or V = F(V’)).

The security strength of the generated value K is equal to the larger of the security strengths of U and V. In general, the security strength of K is determined by the security strength of U, and the security strength of U is the minimum of the length of U (and K) and the security strength of the RNG used to generate U. Therefore, the length of U (and K), and the security strength of the RNG used to generate U shall meet or exceed the security strength required for K. However, a vendor can claim that the security strength of the generated value K is determined by the security strength of V if it can be demonstrated that V has a higher security strength than U.

Update: NIST released revised implementation guidance. Besides “certificate annotation examples” added to a few sections, there was the following modification.

08/04/09: 7.1 Acceptable Key Establishment Protocols – For Key Agreement; removed the KDF specified in the SRTP protocol (IETF RFC 3711). For Key Transport; added reference to EAP-FAST and PEAP-TLS.

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Since I am on this topic, I guess a quick note that a number of new revs of the CAVS were released in months prior is in order. Most were bugfixes and tweaks, but there were some additions to supported algorithms. E.g.,

[04-15-09] — New release of the CAVS algorithm validation testing tool to the CST Laboratories (CAVS7.4). This version of the CAVS tool adds the capability to test DRBG (NIST SP 800-90) implementations that do not have the optional reseed function.[...]

[03-12-09] — New release of the CAVS algorithm validation testing tool to the CMT Laboratories (CAVS7.1). In addition to minor modifications to enhance the tool, Version 7.1 of the CAVS tool adds testing for the draft of FIPS 186-3, Digital Signature Standard, Digital Signature Algorithm and file formating changes to the NIST SP 800-90 (DRBG) files to make them more similar to those used for other algorithms. As of the CAVS 7.1 release date, FIPS 186-3 is still in draft. No validations will be processed for this algorithm.

Update: NIST released the CAVS Management Manual. As per the announcements,

[08-17-09] — Posting of the CAVS Management Manual. The purpose of the CAVP Management Manual is to provide effective guidance for the management of the CAVP and other parties in the validation process.[...]

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Switching direction, upgrading Gnome from 2.24 to 2.26 on FreeBSD through the ports went mostly smoothly. As always, follow the FAQ. I had been using xulrunner for a while, but I was happy to see this change for the removal for FF2.

A FreeBSD port of libxul-1.9 has been added as an alternative Gecko provider to Firefox 2. This can be used by setting WITH_GECKO=libxul in /etc/make.conf.

And, on Ubuntu, this deadlock hit me after upgrading to Ubuntu Jaunty (2.6.28-11.server). I have been manually loading the padlock drivers for quite some time via /etc/modules. To avoid the issue, I added in manual loading of the generic kernel crypto implementations for aes, sha1, and sha256 prior to loading the padlock drivers.

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Moving along, this gives me deja vu, yet made me laugh. (Please consider avoiding that previous link and the first link in the following blockquote’d text if you mind profanity.)

[...]Listen to his comedy bit about the DC metro system, which is he says is “the [...] Tron compared to NYC subways[...]

Having lived both in NYC and DC metro areas and having ridden both the NYC subway and the DC metro quite a bit, I think there are two points to make about the DC Metro system.

  1. The DC Metro is minor in scope compared to the NYC subway. Not only is it a fraction of the size moving a fraction of the people, but it is only part-time.
  2. The DC Metro system is designed like an X, and much of that X only has a single track going in each direction. So, if anything goes wrong in your part of the X or the center of the X, well, lets just say you are out of luck.

Now, because of point 2, even if DC blows up in size and develops a late-night night-life, it would be quite difficult to do away with point 1 in any significant fashion without some fundamental design changes. Even if you could magically do away with unexpected problems in the system (and, yes, that would have to include rainy and snowy days), you are stuck juggling trains between single tracks best case or shutting down parts of the line and running shuttle buses worst case for basically any line maintenance, significantly impacting service on those parts of the system and on the overall system as you move closer to the center of the X. This becomes even more acute due to the increased wear and tear that lovely, underground center of the X suffers, especially as you ramp up service to handle more people or longer hours.

The NYC subway system, by contrast, looks like a bunch of parallel lines that crisscross here and there, and these multitudes of lines generally have multiple tracks supporting each direction. While there may be sparse coverage at some points (e.g., parts of Queens come to mind) and a large concentration of lines at other points (e.g., Manhattan), you still tend to end up with lots of independent enough ways to route around much of the maintenance work and unexpected problems such that the effect on the overall system tends to be quite limited and interruptions to the particular parts undergoing work or suffering issues can be mitigated/minimized (e.g., the handling of maintenance work on the 7 line happening right now), even in spite of 24/7 operation.

Like so much else that varies between NYC and its neighbors, there is a big difference in the scale/scalability and availability requirements of public transportation for an enormous 24/7 city accustomed to public transit and a large 18/7 city accustomed to the beltway. So, when it comes down to how to spend limited resources, one gets beauty sleep, the other keeps on keeping on. :)

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Finally, it has been a while since I have pointed out notably pleasant customer service experiences. So, here is some praise for the LIRR cleaning crew in Penn Station left in a comment.

To Whom It May Concern, I would like to praise all the cleaning men and women who work in the station. They all do a fantastic job on keeping the station clean.

Posted in BSD, Crypto, Customer service, Debian & Ubuntu, Off-topic | No Comments »

Quickies – zero, conficker, https, djbdns, fashion

Friday, February 27th, 2009

This month has certainly been interesting.

A couple of zero days in widely deployed software were discovered by virtue of active exploitation out there in the world…

An Adobe Acrobat and Reader zero day [demo exploits], with an official patch expected next month (there is an unofficial patch).

A critical vulnerability has been identified in Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 and earlier versions. This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this issue is being exploited.

Adobe is planning to release updates to Adobe Reader and Acrobat to resolve the relevant security issue. Adobe expects to make available an update for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 by March 11th, 2009. Adobe is planning to make updates for Adobe Reader 7 and 8, and Acrobat 7 and 8, available by March 18th.[...]

Update: Adobe has released the security updates for Acrobat and Acrobat Reader 9.

A potential Microsoft Excel zero day, with more information to be determined.

Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in Microsoft Office Excel that could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Excel file. At this time, we are aware only of limited and targeted attacks that attempt to use this vulnerability.

As always, exploiting vulnerabilities for which patches are available is working quite nicely too – just look at Conficker having a ball.

Why Conficker has been able to proliferate so widely may be an interesting testament to the stubbornness of some PC users to avoid staying current with the latest Microsoft security patches  [2].  Some reports, such as the case of the Conficker outbreak within Sheffield Hospital’s operating ward, suggest that even security-conscious environments may elect to forgo automated software patching, choosing to trade off vulnerability exposure for some perceived notion of platform stability [8].   On the other hand, the density of where the vast bulk of Conficker victims are concentrated may also suggest other reasons, such as the wide use of unregistered (pirated) Windows releases, which Microsoft does not patch [9].  

Browser usability with https continues getting hammered as well.

This tool provides a demonstration of the HTTPS stripping attacks that I presented at Black Hat DC 2009. It will transparently hijack HTTP traffic on a network, watch for HTTPS links and redirects, then map those links into either look-alike HTTP links or homograph-similar HTTPS links. It also supports modes for supplying a favicon which looks like a lock icon, selective logging, and session denial. For more information on the attack, see the video from the presentation below.

The djbdns package has come under fire, of particular note.

Summary: Weaknesses in dnscache’s outgoing query management and caching policies allow an attacker to poison arbitrary DNS records in far less time than previously believed possible.
Versions Effected: All current versions of djbdns (< =1.05)

(And, now I know about zinq.)

And, to end on a lively, off-topic note, fall fashion in New York is usually a favorite of mine, and the Fall 2009 season combined that general preference with up my alley trends (already visible on the streets of New York) – comforting protective and edgier futuristic clothing, dark somber and rich powerful colors (e.g., royal blue, plum purple, forest green), playing with construction and textures (e.g., velvet, tweed, leather, satin), asymmetrical geometrical strong-shouldered architectural designs. Because of these trends, many shows had at least a few pieces that I loved, making for my much wider appreciation of the designs of a variety of designers this season. Some of my favs…

  • Yet again, Proenza Schouler – This collection veered slightly softer and perhaps nodded to their earlier days, yet still maintained the edge and architecture I have come to love. In a season where those I thought would shine seemed to go astray, these guys hit the mark.
  • Rodarte – This collection had singular point of view, with the same silhouette and structure throughout; however, the play with construction, textures, and even a pop of color kept it so interesting that I could not wait to see what would come next.
  • Ralph Lauren – This collection was like walking out into a clean, clear, crisp fall day and inhaling deeply. I said it over and over – it feels like a breath of fresh air. The simplicity, elegance, and beauty of the clothing was remarkable.

Of course, given the trends and my high expectations, I must note there were a number of train wrecks out there too. The two main categories I saw: 1) designs that looked plain silly, gaudy, and/or obnoxious, a way too literal translation of the 1980s; and 2) designs that looked stiff, heavy, and/or just plain burdensome, too much like wearing actual medieval armor, scratchy carpeting, or sound absorbing curtains.

Posted in Off-topic, Security | No Comments »

PEoD

Friday, January 30th, 2009

For a while there, it was cold in NY, seriously cold. I mean, teens F day and touching upon single digits F night with wind chills that frighten small children cold. Now we are seeing the 30’s F again. Summer.

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So, I was reading a book from back in the early 1990’s, titled “The Political Economy of Defense” and edited by Andrew Ross, that I picked up during one of my explorations of a used bookstore. The book was more geared towards a discussion of potential research topics rather than actual research, but it did leave me with some scattered thoughts.

Update: My first “controversial” post in a while has left me talking about topics this weekend that I care little to discuss with what little I know. I now regret items 3 and 4 in the bullet points below, as my attempt to at least have a couple of bullet points more in line with the book led me down a foolish path. That said, I added one minor update to item 4 below, and that will be the extent of this post’s growth. (Ok, time to enjoy Super Bowl Sunday!)

Note: As fair warning, this post is a total ramble. And, politics is part of the topic by definition, but I endeavor to keep it politically indifferent. You may want to skip it.

This first half will be generic rambling derived from some of the books content taken mostly way out of context (I guess just wanted to jot down some thoughts on, say, gaming the system).

  1. Structure influences behavior and outcomes, and vice versa.

    An example, players in a market having an oligopolistic structure tend to end up exhibiting a specific set of behaviors, and one study in the book examined the international arms market up through the 1980’s as an oligopoly. It found that while this market had some oligopolistic behaviors, it lacked others, and, overall, the structure was shifting further away from an oligopolistic market to a competitive market. Moises Naim’s “Illicit” has a description of just how far that shift has gone today.

    This suggested to me that players, people, will adapt to a structure over time, and, as I quite often see out there in the world, will likely learn ways to game the system. This adaptation to, or gaming of, the system can lead to new or unintended outcomes, perhaps beneficial, perhaps otherwise. In response, the structure will be modified to incorporate these behaviors and outcomes, perhaps encouraging them, perhaps counteracting them. And so on.

  2. Radical change can cause instability.

    An example, consider “third world” countries adopting advanced industrial country technology as discussed in the book. A major problem here can be that “third world” countries typically have a labor surplus, while advanced industrial nation technology favors less labor-intensive production. Additionally, the technical skills required to use such technology tend to be possessed by a very small portion of the labor supply in “third world” countries. So, making a leap to these technologies can facilitate mass unemployment, which can lead to, say, political instability.

    Of course, this brought to mind creative destruction and entrenched players stifling innovation, but it also served as a reminder that where we are today is built upon where we were yesterday. There is a progression that provides time for adjustment to the new. (Certain potential future advances are labeled “event horizons” precisely because they are considered to involve such radical change that all the rules go out the window.)

    Peter Turchin’s “War and Peace and War” popped into my head too, in which he examines the cycles within cycles that have made for a perpetual cycle throughout world history of conflict and instability leading to peace and stability leading to conflict and instability. The general idea is that there is a coming together phase and a falling apart phase in the life cycle of empires. Within these phases, there are various cycles, which first build the propensity for collective action, and then break down the ability for collective action. And, this often seems to start at a fault line between sets of people that differ in easily identifiable (to them) ways, where by conflict between these sets of people builds internal cohesion and equality within the sets. Once this us and them conflict is resolved and the threat mitigated, prosperity generally kicks in. Over time, prosperity brings about population growth and pushes resources (e.g., food) and grows inequality, and this breaks down the internal unity and leads to internal conflict. Eventually, through cycle upon cycle, an empire is so weakened that it dissolves, often with the help of external enemies. And so on.

    However, Turchin points out the this theoretical framework may not apply to the conditions of today (e.g., food is no longer a concern in modern societies) and applauds technology, such as the Internet and, in particular, the cell phone, as breaking down hierarchy and leading to heterarchy, which changes the rules of the game. Dalton Conley’s “Elsewhere, USA” discusses some trends we see here in the, as he coins it, “neofeudal” USA, such as massive inequality coupled with a breaking down of hierarchy and the pervasiveness of ephemeral stuff for invidious (Schoeck’s “Envy” anyone?) comparison with the exception of the readily available basics, food and water.

    Anyway, coming back to the thoughts on 1, there is a sort of continuous change implied, in which the structures, behaviors, and outcomes of a system evolve over time. However, too much change too quickly can lead to instability. This seems to promote a sort of tweaking process where some stability is desired.

    Thinking of gaming the system brings security to mind. Security generally seems to follow this pattern of tweaks – attacks get better, and defenses are modified accordingly. However, when a situation of radical change occurs, the instability that results can make security objectives quite difficult to meet, even if defined objectives exist. After all, locking down a system generally requires that the system have some stability and structure. Security itself is structure, and instability breaks down structure. So, radical change can require a shift from tweaks to a wider (re)building of a security structure as areas of this new system solidify.

    This brought to mind the situation of online security in the world of the web, a world that is radically changing right here and now. The security community is scrambling to catch up, to get a foothold and (re)build structure. For example, capability systems seem to be one possible wave of this future.

    (This also reminded me of the current economic mess in the USA, where it seems that radical financial innovations (e.g., a piece of paper saying “this is an apple” held between two mirrors was somehow magically thought to be creating infinite, edible apples) combined with much (extremely leveraged) gaming of the system played a big part in the disaster that is beginning to unfold. Of course, bubbles and credit crisis are nothing new (tulip bulbs or tech, anyone?). Which, in a mindset framed by Turchin’s book, makes cycles seem to be a way of life given our current mental composition (e.g., “Choices, Values, and Frames” edited by Kahneman and Tversky, Cialdini’s “Influence”).)

    3. This second half will be more specific rambling to a couple of topics touched upon in the book.

  3. As discussed in the book, in the USA, defense spending was quite large and had little relation to economic conditions within the country. The questions of how much defense spending and how much security came down to political decision-making.

    Perhaps political decision-making is not always the most effective and efficient, but, regardless, its makes me wonder… If states must be capable of pulling together such massive amounts of resources for defense, then, other than a new hot or cold war between major players (e.g., a China-USA showdown), conflict should be quite localized and/or take the form of, say, electronic warfare, guerilla warfare, and terrorism.

    Its makes for other interesting trade-off topics too. I can see the USA as carrying a large amount of the defense costs of the whole Occident and much of the world – this gives the USA a huge degree of power in the world, but it also allows others to free ride and focus on different efforts. The opportunity cost of defense spending is something to ponder – defense research has led to technology that is adopted by the civil sector, but it is not known what the civil sector would have come up with and produced if those resources (e.g., some of the brightest out there) had not been tied up in the defense sector. And so on.

  4. As discussed in the book, there was a mild consensus that defense spending can cause short term benefits (e.g., resource utilization) to a country’s economy, but long term it tends to be detrimental (e.g., decreased savings and investment in the civil sector). These detrimental economic effects might build on each other as well.

    Now, looking around, we tend to see large territories organized into nation states, and these are generally structured such that the government is the monopoly provider of defense in these territories. My rough understanding, a la papers such as Frederic Lane’s “Economic Consequences of Organized Violence,” is that the primary point of defense being a government monopoly in, say, modern democracies is to reduce the overall burden of defense costs allowing a greater focus on other productive endeavors by everyone else (although, in the USA, the rise of the military-industrial-congressional complex, as Eisenhower coined it, might serve to counter part of this point – e.g., Osprey and Comanche). In that direction, it may be that successful nations tend to be those that find ways to reduce defense costs while maintaining appropriate levels of security and stability. These cost savings can then be rolled into the other economic growth, and so, other things being equal, become a competitive advantage out there in the world market. Defense cost savings can also be devoted to other things, like social programs, such as health care.

    Update: Due to follow-up conversation, I now feel a need to point out two things.

    First, some have thought that my views of the world have shifted radically based on what is written in this post. While my interpretations of the world shift over time and the tendency is towards moderation, I have not been reborn. I just tried to remain indifferent in the post.

    Second, my choice of Lane’s simplified view of the world was quite simple – the idea of the government as a defense service provider to its clients, particularly with those clients being the people of the nation state in a modern democracy, trivially rolled back into the general bullet point. As with most costs, people want to get the most bang for their buck – so, the less clients pay for defense services, the more resources they have for other productive efforts. And, all things being equal, this becomes a competitive advantage over others that have to spend more on defense services for a similar level of security. This translates to more investment, more innovation, more exports, and, well, more capital, resources, wealth for the defense cost savers. Other things being equal, this also gives the defense service provider itself a competitive advantage over other defense service providers. The defense service provider could advance its defense services, at the same or perhaps quite a bit less cost, especially relative to its clients’ growing resources, and maybe even throw in other value add services that benefit from economies of scale. And so on.

    For a broader investigation of empire, I already noted Peter Turchin’s “War and Peace and War.” If you just want to hear a concise rain on much of Lane’s quick parade, Charles Tilly’s “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” might be of interest. Finally, if you want to read radical theorizing about anarcho-capitalist ways of doing things in the future that may or may not result in a defense monopoly, you could check out David Friedman’s “The Machinery of Freedom.” Or, if you just want a fun work of fiction about such a future, Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” is one of my favorites, and it contains one of coolest characters ever, Raven.

    This reiterates to me in yet another fashion that security is not, well, priceless.

    Thinking on this, the Internet is a new, massive territory. As it gains in popularity and power, nation states have started to partition this territory, much like the geographic boundaries in the physical world, which contain the physical infrastructure on which the Internet is built. If the rules of the real world hold here, then defense of large Internet territories will continue to move into the government arena. Which makes me wonder, perhaps ridiculously, if, as the virtual world moves much faster than the physical world and is, by nature, highly networked and interconnected, much as the real world is more and more becoming, and is even intermingling with the real world to such an extent that some boundaries are blurring between the two, the progression of the Internet could serve as a sort of virtual model for exploring the future of defense in the real world?

All in all, not much of this post really deals with the book. Ah well, I can’t imagine many made it this far anyway. :)

Posted in Off-topic, Security | No Comments »

Quickies: headaches, links, stories, crypto stuff, other

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

So, I recently saw Juno for the first time, and was surprised and happy to hear Kimya Dawson permeate the soundtrack. And, I ate at wd~50, which was, well, an experience – highly recommended if you want to try something truly new.

Anyway, yes, still here. Unfortunately, this rare act of posting will be limited to a quickie – a few miscellaneous items accumulated over a couple of months.

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A few headaches…

  1. Wow, just wow.

    The result of this is that for the last two years (from Debian’s “Etch” release until now), anyone doing pretty much any crypto on Debian (and hence Ubuntu) has been using easily guessable keys. This includes SSH keys, SSL keys and OpenVPN keys.

    Update immediately. And be sure to do things such as regenerate all persistent keys that used random data taken from the vulnerable Debian OpenSSL during their generation – some of this type of work is handled automatically when updating your packages (e.g., OpenSSH server keys), but only you know what you have done outside this automated window.

  2. I booted up a Windows XP box only to find that some resource of the Logitech QuickCam software had become corrupted, and this resulted in a nasty msi installer loop hitting the box as soon as a user logged in. I found this tool extremely useful in cleaning up the mess.

    [..]With the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, you can remove a program’s Windows Installer configuration information. You may want to remove the Windows Installer configuration information for your program if you experience installation (Setup) problems. For example, you may have to remove a program’s Windows Installer configuration information if you have installation problems when you try to add (or remove) a component of your program that was not included when you first installed your program.

  3. Much to my very unpleasant surprise, I upgraded a server over here from Ubuntu Gutsy to Hardy and discovered networking for Xen DomU’s in Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 is somewhat broken. I ended up using the 2.6.24-17-xen kernel from the hardy-proposed repository, but you could also just stick with the Gutsy Xen kernel for DomU’s.
  4. When I upgraded to Gnome 2.22 on a particular FreeBSD 7.0 system, certain things, like the clock applet, did not work. This was due to the dbus daemon not being started. Then, the hal daemon and Gnome did not want to play nice together. This page provided the information necessary to get them playing nice – in this particular instance, not mounting procfs was the problem.

Side note, I was helping someone install Ubuntu recently, and it brought to my attention yet again how much I take what I consider to be basic skills for granted when using *nix. Small things, like running an executable from within your environment path versus by directly specifying the path (the most confusing to many example of this seems to be trying to run an executable in the current working directory), are just not common knowledge. Even the whole command line itself is often scary and bizarre to people. This makes it extremely difficult to provide useful guidance for people to blindly follow (posts on this blog should never be assumed to provide step-by-step instructions – they are just some basic notes at best, as extremely helpful comments like this make obvious). And, even Ubuntu is not as trivial to use as it would appear to many that work in the *nix world.

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Three useful Ubuntu and FreeBSD pages…

USN.

These are the Ubuntu security notices that affect the current supported releases of Ubuntu.[...]

FreeBSD VuXML.

Security issues that affect the FreeBSD operating system or applications in the FreeBSD Ports Collection are documented using the Vulnerabilities and Exposures Markup Language (VuXML).[...]

FreeBSD Security Advisories.

This web page contains a list of released FreeBSD Security Advisories.[...]

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Story-telling is one of the fundamental tools in a teacher’s toolkit. Having done quite a bit of consulting, I have learned how invaluable a good story is to driving home particular points and building relationships. There is something fundamental about how stories effect us, perhaps stemming from our innate ability to empathesize and our massive pattern recognition horse-power.

Anyway, this site has a useful set of stories. [via exi]

Here are some stories, analogies, research findings and other examples that provide wonderful illustrations for learning, and inspiration for self-development.

In fact, the first story mirrors a recent post.

An old lady had a hearing-aid fitted, discreetly, hidden underneath her hair.

A week later she returned to the doctor for her check-up.

“It’s wonderful – I can hear everything now,” she reported very happily to the doctor.

“And is your family pleased too?” asked the doctor.

“Oh I haven’t told them yet,” said the old lady, “And I’ve changed my will twice already..”

This reminds me of a story I often tell about someone I met a while back, a graduate student in psych. She was studying aspects of the initial meeting/courtship routines of people, and would go out to bars and such and interact with potential suitors. Here these suitors were, following their typical pickup routines and sometimes spilling more than their drinks, and here she was, analyzing their interaction and subsequently writing up notes to be turned into research papers, etc.

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NIST draft SP 800-108 has been released.

SP 800-108

DRAFT Recommendation for Key Derivation Using Pseudorandom Functions

NIST announces the release of draft Special Publication 800-108, Recommendation for Key Derivation Using Pseudorandom Functions. This Recommendation specifies techniques for key derivation from a secret key using pseudorandom functions (PRF). Please submit comments to draft-SP800-108-comment@nist.gov with “Comments on SP800-108″ in the subject line. The comment period closes on June 28, 2008.

Yet more KDFs.

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They just don’t quit, do they?

1

This is the first article analyzing the security of SHA-256 against fast collision search which considers the recent attacks by Wang et al. We show the limits of applying techniques known so far to SHA-256. Next we introduce a new type of perturbation vector which circumvents the identified limits. This new technique is then applied to the unmodified SHA-256. Exploiting the combination of Boolean functions and modular addition together with the newly developed technique allows us to derive collision-producing characteristics for step-reduced SHA-256, which was not possible before. Although our results do not threaten the security of SHA-256, we show that the low probability of a single local collision may give rise to a false sense of security.

2

We study the security of step-reduced but otherwise unmodified SHA-256. We show the first collision attacks on SHA-256 reduced to 23 and 24 steps with complexities $2^{18}$ and $2^{50}$, respectively. We give an example colliding message pair for 23-step SHA-256. The best previous, recently obtained result was a collision attack for up to 22 steps. Additionally, we show non-random behaviour of SHA-256 in the form of pseudo-near collisions for up to 31 steps, which is 6 more steps than the recently obtained non-random behaviour in the form of a semi-free start near-collision. Even though this represents a step forwards in terms of cryptanalytic techniques, the results do not threaten the security of applications using SHA-256.

3

[...]First we describe message modification techniques and use them to obtain an algorithm to generate message pairs which collide for the actual SHA-256 reduced to 18 steps. Our second contribution is to present differential paths for 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 steps of SHA-256. We construct parity check equations in a novel way to find these characteristics. Further, the 19-step differential path presented here is constructed by using only 15 local collisions, as against the previously known 19-step near collision differential path which consists of interleaving of 23 local collisions. Our 19-step differential path can also be seen as a single local collision at the message word level. We use a linearized local collision in this work. These results do not cause any threat to the security of the SHA-256 hash function.

4

[...]We build on the work of Nikoli\’{c} and Biryukov and provide a generalized nonlinear local collision which accepts an arbitrary initial message difference. This local collision succeeds with probability 1. Using this local collision we present attacks against 18-step SHA-256 and 18-step SHA-512 with arbitrary initial difference. Both of these attacks succeed with probability 1. We then present special cases of our local collision and show two different differential paths for attacking 20-step SHA-256 and 20-step SHA-512. One of these paths is the same as presented by Nikoli\’{c} and Biryukov while the other one is a new differential path. Messages following both these differential paths can be found with probability 1. This improves on the previous result where the success probability of 20-step attack was 1/3. Finally, we present two differential paths for 21-step collisions for SHA-256 and SHA-512, one of which is a new path. The success probability of these paths for SHA-256 is roughly $2^{-15}$ and $2^{-17}$ which improves on the 21-step attack having probability $2^{-19}$ reported earlier. We show examples of message pairs following all the presented differential paths for up to 21-step collisions in SHA-256. We also show first real examples of colliding message pairs for up to 20-step reduced SHA-512.

Completely academic, but you know what they say – attacks only get better.

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Interesting stuff.

NSA/CSS periodically releases declassified documents or indexes to these documents to the public. The documents listed on this page were located in response to numerous requests received by NSA on the various subjects stated and for which there appears to be a general public interest. The date after each entry reflects the most current release date of that material. When additional material for a given subject is updated then a new subject index date is posted. To select a subject index, click on the subject title.

In particular, the Cryptologic Spectrum Articles and Cryptologic Quarterly Articles have some fun reads.

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An easy to cut ‘n paste into a blog post set of old web server log entries depicting an instance of Tor being used to proxy/anonymize automated probes of this web site.

anonymizer.blutmagie.de – - [13/Mar/2008:00:59:00 -0700] “GET /forum/phpbb/index.php HTTP/1.0″ 404 285 “http://forum.d-kriptik.com/phpbb/index.php” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

tor.anonymous.proxy.quex.org – - [13/Mar/2008:00:59:01 -0700] “GET /forum/phpbb2/index.php HTTP/1.0″ 404 286 “http://forum.d-kriptik.com/phpbb2/index.php” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

tor.anonymizer.ccc.de – - [13/Mar/2008:00:59:02 -0700] “GET /forum/forums/index.php HTTP/1.0″ 404 286 “http://forum.d-kriptik.com/forums/index.php” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

tor.anonymizer.ccc.de – - [13/Mar/2008:00:59:08 -0700] “GET /forum/board/index.php HTTP/1.0″ 404 285 “http://forum.d-kriptik.com/board/index.php” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

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Like heat and humidity, free music and Central Park mean summer. The 2008 schedule is up at the Summer Stage web site. And, the opening Saturday looks good to me.

Vampire Weekend
Kid Sister
Ecstatic Sunshine

Saturday, June 14, 2008
From 4:00 PM to 7:30 PM
Central Park SummerStage

Posted in Anonymity & Privacy, Authentication & Identity, BSD, Conferences, Crypto, Debian & Ubuntu, Off-topic, Security | 2 Comments »

FIPS yet again, hotplug, impact

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

I feel like I am beating a dead horse with the start of this post. I tried to go a little off course from there.

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Another discussion of FIPS 140 has been kicked off on SAAG. Besides the kick off message (on including FIPS-approved algorithms in a possible IETF recommended set of crypto algorithms), this post (on product customer demand for FIPS 140) and this post (on the general pain of the process) are probably of most interest, but the entire thread may be worth a read if FIPS 140 matters to you. (Oh, and this made me laugh.)

This post of mine from a year ago seems relevant to some of what is being said.

  1. A vendor has been put at a competitive disadvantage because they do not have FIPS 140 validation. Perhaps their competitors have it. Perhaps a bid requires it. Whatever the case may be, they don’t have it, so now they want to tear it down.

    Also found here are people that just dislike FIPS 140 or, perhaps, standards in general.

  2. A vendor has gone through the process, and it was quite painful. So, now they vent about all the changes they had to make, how silly particular requirements were, how incompetent the lab staff was, etc.
  3. An expert tells stories of how the requirements are ambiguous and the labs all vary in how they interpret the requirements.

    Also found here (and often quite different from the previously described expert) are people that have run into FIPS a number of times over the years, which has caused them exposure to differing requirements without having seen the evolution of those changes.

In that lengthy post, I discuss some points often causing pain.

  1. Vendor misunderstanding of the FIPS 140 requirements and terminology.
    [...]
  2. Vendor misinterpretation of lab (or NIST/CSE) questions and issues.
    [...]
  3. Labs can, and do, make requests and recommendations.
    [...]
  4. New labs, new lab staff, new technologies, and new revisions of FIPS 140 (and related) standards can make for created requirements. (This is where you can find the most variation among labs.)
    [...]

Anyway, I think a couple of additional points might be relevant to some of what I read in the latest SAAG thread.

First, I don’t think the concept of failure in a FIPS validation effort is quite so rigid as is being implied in parts of the SAAG discussion. During a FIPS validation effort, the lab (during testing) or NIST/CSE (during review) may bring up issues that a vendor has to address. These issues are often areas in which the module may be failing to meet particular FIPS requirements. This does not mean the module “fails,” it just means that the issues raised must be addressed before the module “passes.” In general, issues often boil down to some of the following:

  1. Clarification – the issue raised is just seeking some short clarification about the product’s workings and/or how a requirement is met. A quick written or verbal response (e.g., answering a question) can often be enough.
  2. Documentation – the issue raised is about incorrect, confusing, or incomplete documentation. Modifying the documentation is normally the fix here. (Even though what follows in 3 is often what vendors dread most, 2 can also lead to much pain if the lab starts questioning technical aspects of the product and heads down all sorts of testing paths that would otherwise have been avoided (i.e., prepare documentation that gives the lab what it needs in an easy to use form).)
  3. Technical – the issue raised is actually a technical problem with the product in regards to meeting the requirements. Here is where the product itself may have to be modified, and this is what most vendors want to avoid once they are knee deep in the validation (i.e., get the product meeting the requirements before the lab testing gets underway).

In all three cases, the “failure” can be corrected and the product can continue on with its validation. Depending on the issues raised, labs will often continue working on the validation effort in other areas while the vendor is working on addressing the issues; however, there is, of course, a point where the lab will need certain issues addressed before being able to move forward – this is where the third case can be especially problematic.

Second, this brings us to the “restarting” portion of the discussion in that thread. In general, if the issues raised can be addressed in a timely manner and based on the version of the product at that moment going through validation, then there should be no “restart” issue. However, if the issues raised take a long time for the vendor to fix and/or require a switch in the version of the product such that the new version includes a large number of other changes in the product (e.g., a switch to a new version of the product with a whole suite of new features), this could cause a “restart.” I generally think of these restarts coming in these two forms.

  1. The lab can no longer move forward with the effort while waiting on the vendor to address issues, so the project is put on hold. Depending on time frame here, lab resources will be moved elsewhere and lab knowledge of the product will deteriorate. When the vendor is ready to start back up, the lab has to restaff the effort, rebuild its knowledge of the product and the validation effort, and generally kick things off again.
  2. The changes were rolled into a new version of the product, and this new product is dramatically changed from the one that began the validation effort. The lab will have to figure out what has changed and determine how much of their work performed to this point can be reused, much like in a revalidation scoping but more awkward. If this is in combination with 1, this could get close to starting over.

Needless to say, you want to avoid going down this road.

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Since I mentioned TrueCrypt in a previous post, look at this.

HotPlug allows you to seize and move a computer without losing power. (Video demos.) See also: MouseJiggler.

Yep, you guessed it.

How to circumvent Whole Disk Encryption
The key: Do not allow the encryption to activate. Low level encryption such as Vista’s Whole Disk Encryption (WDE) can halt an investigation. Use HotPlug and Mouse Jiggler to prevent encryption technologies from activating. If you can carry away the computer while it’s still logged in, you maintain full access to the hard drive.

In short, the plaintext key is often stored (cached), or authorization to access the plaintext key is stored (cached), in volatile memory (e.g., RAM) when using things like full disk encryption, so that data read from/written to disk can undergo transparent (to the user) processing. When the computer is powered down, goes to sleep, etc., assuming the hardware/software properly handles things, the (easy) access to the plaintext key is lost (e.g., the cached key or authorization to use the key is wiped). This gear is meant to prevent the circumstances that cause that wiping from happening.

Think of TrueCrypt – if you are using system disk encryption on your home desktop, then you know that, once you have entered your password at boot, the stored encrypted key is decrypted and the plaintext key is then stored in memory by TrueCrypt to transparently encrypt/decrypt data as it is written to/read from disk (i.e., you only enter your password once per boot). Anyone taking control of your desktop at that point has full access to your encrypted drive. However, if you pulled the plug, then the plaintext key would be lost. Well, this gear allows an attacker to grab your desktop and remove it from your home without it losing power (or hibernating).

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Now this phenomenon sounds a little familiar.

Over 90% of people responded physically, for example with an exaggerated stare or a wave. Almost half responded verbally – more men than women. Here, says Professor Shuster, the sex difference was striking. 95% of adult women were praising, encouraging or showed concern. There were very few comic or snide remarks. In contrast, only 25% of adult men responded as did the women, for example, by praise or encouragement; instead 75% attempted comedy, often snide or combative as an intended put-down.

I mentioned this impact with regards to attire in this post.

(Side note, I have an old, bright red Futura t-shirt that says “For love or money”. With many, it generates mostly “for love!” comments and generally leads to conversation about values and the like. With others, it often inspires awkward mockery, as is the case with almost any loud attire.)

The “others” here are generally straight men showing negative interest, while the “many” are usually straight women or gay men showing positive interest. Perhaps this makes sense, as I am likely viewed as a potential rival to the former and a potential suitor to the latter.

Whatever the case may be, I always enjoy hacking peoples’ thoughts and behavior with something so simple as a t-shirt. As such, my custom t-shirts often play to this effect quite nicely.

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Speaking of impact,

ABC2 has obtained new video of Baltimore police officer Salvatore Rivieri in action at the Inner Harbor. This time he confronts Billy Friebele, an artist from Washington D.C., who was videotaping at the Harbor last summer.

Friebele told ABC2 he was taping the reactions of passersby to a box he was moving with a remote controlled car. Officer Rivieri is seen on tape kicking the box off of the car and then kicking the car. The officer then orders Friebele to leave the area.

Small world. I knew Billy back in college.

Posted in Crypto, Off-topic, Security | No Comments »

Quickies: fips, banks, misc.

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

I am caught up in a few things, but I thought some quickies might be nice.

***

Lets begin with sort of FIPS 140 news…

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The FIPS 140-2 Implementation Guidance has been updated.

[01-24-2008] Implementation Guidance for FIPS PUB 140-2 and the Cryptographic Module Validation Program [ PDF ] has been updated

New Implementation Guidance:

* 7.7 Key Establishment and Key Entry and Output

Updated Implementation Guidance:

* G.2 Completion of a test report: Information that must be provided to NIST and CSE
o Added reference to CMVP comments document.
* G.8 Revalidation Requirements
o Added reference to the CMVP FAQ in change scenario 1.

[01-16-2008] Implementation Guidance for FIPS PUB 140-2 and the Cryptographic Module Validation Program [ PDF ] has been updated

Updated Implementation Guidance:

* G.13 Instructions for completing a FIPS 140-2 Validation Certificate
* 1.8 Listing of DES Implementations
* 7.1 Acceptable Key Establishment Protocols
* 9.4 Cryptographic Algorithm Tests for SHS Algorithms and Higher Cryptographic Algorithms Using SHS Algorithms

There are two key updates to look at here, which finally explain in public, written form what has been lore for quite some time.

The new 7.1 IG provides a detailed explanation the key distribution versus key input/output for FIPS 140-2. I can’t say the explanation is the friendliest, but it is good to see the information out there now.

The update to 7.7 basically finishes the translation of the key establishment requirements into something concrete. And, Appendix D now points here.

Also, I always assumed what the change to 9.4 specifies, but I guess this wasn’t explicit until now.

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An update to the SHA3 candidate implementation C API has been published by NIST.

Revision 3: January 24, 2008

This document specifies the ANSI C interface profile for implementations of SHA-3 candidate algorithms. C implementations shall support the syntax and parameterization of the interface profile messages as described in this API. The API consists of a few data definitions and one function to compute hashes. The function specified in this API has return values listed that are largely used to supply error codes in the event of incomplete execution of the routine. The error values listed are not meant to be an exhaustive list. If additional error codes are useful for your implementation, please provide them.


Update: I figured I would insert this here, rather than in a separate post.

Submissions for the NIST SHA-3 contest are required to include test vectors that can be used to help to verify the correctness of implementations of the candidate algorithms. A specification has been published with the requirements.

Each submission package is required to include Known Answer Test (KAT) and Monte Carlo Test (MCT) values, which can be used to determine the correctness of an implementation of the candidate algorithm. Values shall be included (at a minimum) for each of the four minimum required hash sizes: 224, 256, 384, and 512-bits.

These KAT and MCT tests are based on tests specified in The Secure Hash Algorithm Validation System (SHAVS) [SHAVS], which describes tests for the SHA-2 family of hash functions. Each of the tests for which values are required in the submission packages is described below. In addition, example files are included which specify the exact syntax and format that submitters are required to use when submitting their KAT and MCT values.

Anyone that has undergone algorithm testing for SHA-1 or any of the SHA-2’s will be familar with these types. However, there is an additional test added into the mix, besides the usual SMTs, LMTs, and MCTs.

To test an algorithm’s ability to process messages longer that 232-bits in length, the candidate must supply a message digest for one extremely long sequence. The sequence is a 64-byte character string repeated 16,777,216 times. The message will be supplied in a file called ExtremelyLongMsgKAT_{Length}.txt for each of the required hash length.[...]

So, it looks like we will be running XLMTs in the future too.

(I guess while I am writing this, I should also note that the C API for candidate algorithm implementations has been updated since I wrote the initial post.)

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Oh, and NIST is running a workshop on IBE.

June 3-4, 2008

This workshop brings together academia, government and industry to explore innovative and practical applications of pairing-based cryptography. Pairings have been used to create identity-based encryption schemes, but are also a useful tool for solving other cryptographic problems. We hope to encourage the development of new security applications and communication between researchers, developers and users. In addition to presentations, the workshop will facilitate panel discussions among invited experts and workshop participants.

***

Besides the many tumbles taking place, banks have had lots of security news of late…

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Foiled, but popping through physical and people security is a favorite of mine.

The device, which police described as “sophisticated and requiring great (technical) skills,” had apparently been installed during a previous break-in, during which nothing had been stolen from the bank.

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It looked like looking the part struck again at a bank.

On Wednesday, a man dressed as an armored truck employee with the company AT Systems walked into a BB&T bank in Wheaton about 11 a.m., was handed more than $500,000 in cash and walked out, a source familiar with the case said.

It wasn’t until the actual AT Systems employees arrived at the bank, at 11501 Georgia Ave., the next day that bank officials realized they’d been had. “When the real security guards showed up is when it became known,” said Richard Wolf, a spokesman with the FBI’s Baltimore division.

Or not. Now, it sounds like an insider job.

Assistant State’s Attorney Marybeth Ayres named Elizabeth K. Tarke, a teller at the BB&T branch, as a possible ringleader. Detectives have linked Tarke with Thursday’s theft at a Wachovia branch in the District, Ayres said.

Detectives talked to other employees and grew dubious about Tarke’s story, Pak wrote. Other employees said they saw no “AT” patch on the man’s clothing, just an all-black outfit, with a black hat, gun belt and semiautomatic handgun. They also didn’t see a badge, Pak wrote. Bank video corroborated their accounts, according to the charging documents.

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Speaking of insiders at a financial (and ignoring write-down scapegoat theories for the moment), this sounds stunning.

The bank identified the trader as Jerome Kerviel. Mr. Kerviel, 31, joined Societe Generale in August 2000 and was working as a trader on the futures desk at the bank’s headquarter near Paris. He was in charge of futures hedging on European equity market indices, known as “plain vanilla” futures. The bank said he was able to dupe the bank’s own security system because he had inside knowledge of the control procedures gained from previous jobs with the bank.

Though Societe Generale says it first learned of what it termed “massive fraudulent directional positions” on Jan. 19, it waited until it could close out those trades before going public with the problem. Winding down the trades, the bank said, resulted in a €4.9 billion write-down, making it potentially the largest loss ever from an alleged rogue trader.

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Somewhere else, a little online recon strikes at a bank.

A fraudster walked into a branch of Barclays Bank posing as its chairman Marcus Agius and managed to walk out with £10,000.

The conman is believed to have found Mr Agius’ details online and persuaded call centre staff into issuing a Barclaycard in his name.

***

Finally, some miscellaneous items…

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I mentioned smell before. Well, here is some more.

After the men were allowed to change, 49 women sniffed the shirts and specified which odors they found most attractive. Far more often than chance would predict, the women preferred the smell of T-shirts worn by men who were immunologically dissimilar to them. The difference lay in the sequence of more than 100 immune system genes known as the MHC, or major histocompatibility complex. These genes code for proteins that help the immune system recognize pathogens. The smell of their favorite shirts also reminded the women of their past and current boyfriends, suggesting that MHC does indeed influence women’s dating decisions in real life.

And,

After the men were allowed to change, 49 women sniffed the shirts and specified which odors they found most attractive. Far more often than chance would predict, the women preferred the smell of T-shirts worn by men who were immunologically dissimilar to them. The difference lay in the sequence of more than 100 immune system genes known as the MHC, or major histocompatibility complex. These genes code for proteins that help the immune system recognize pathogens. The smell of their favorite shirts also reminded the women of their past and current boyfriends, suggesting that MHC does indeed influence women’s dating decisions in real life.

Fear not would be social engineers, we already hack this system.

Since the 20th-century hygiene revolution and the rise of the personal-care industry, however, companies have pitched deodorants, perfumes, and colognes to consumers as the epitome of sex appeal. But instead of furthering our quest to find the perfect mate, such products may actually derail it, say researchers, by masking our true scent and making it difficult for prospects to assess compatibility. “Humans abuse body smell signals by hiding them, masking them, putting on deodorant,” says Devendra Singh, a psychologist at the University of Texas. “The noise-to-signal ratio was much better in primitive society.”

Oh, and don’t assume that smelling “good” is always the way to go. For example, say you want some space on a crowded subway.

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Remember this?

The DHS is funding security audits of many commonly used pieces of open source software, as noticed by Schneier here and described in eWeek here, from which the following excerpt was taken.

If these [1,2] articles are about the same effort, apparently a bit of low-hanging fruit was removed as a result, as noted in this press release.

All the software scrutinised was found to have significant numbers of security flaws, Coverity said on Wednesday. Since 2006 the project has helped fix 7,826 open source flaws in 250 projects, out of 50 million lines of code scanned, the company said.

For instance, 236 flaws were uncovered in 450,000 lines of Samba code, of which 228 have been corrected.

So, now some open source projects are moving on to the next version Coverity’s static analysis tool.

Projects at rung 2 of the Scan ladder have access to a significant upgrade of Coverity Prevent. The first projects to use these new capabilities report a significant increase in the number of identified defects, with some finding as many as 100 new hard-to-find defects than identified in rung 1 of the Scan ladder.

Anyway, I have no idea of what significance the bugs detected by the scans were, but these extra eyes seem like a good thing in general, as does ~7800 less bugs in this open source software.

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I found this article quite fun.

The study authors, Dr. Rachel C. Vreeman and Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, said that while doctors realize good medicine requires them to constantly learn new things, they often forget to reexamine their existing medical beliefs. “These medical myths are a lighthearted reminder that we can be wrong and need to question what other falsehoods we unwittingly propagate as we practice medicine,’’ wrote Dr. Vreeman and Dr. Carroll.

And the material from which the article was derived, from which I can quote a concise list of the “medical myths” explored.

  • People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
  • We use only 10% of our brains
  • Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
  • Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
  • Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
  • Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
  • Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.

“Food coma.”

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Lastly, I poked my head in on this.

Replicant

Dates: January 10–February 9, 2008
Opening: February 17, 2008
Location: 526 West 26th Street – 4th Floor – Room 416 – New York, NY
Gallery Hours: Tuesday to Saturday 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment

Virgil de Voldère is proud to present Replicant, a group exhibition of four emerging artists. Rather than brood over a technocratic dystopia, herald clean utopian spaces, or take a reactionary stance on biological and environmental issues such as climate change and bioengineering, this exhibition explores potential futures in which imagination, adaptation, and creativity present a positive view of cultural and scientific progress. The artists—Ian Burns, Shane Hope, Gilles Rotzetter, and Scott Wolniak—are wildly divergent in their mediums and methods: the work is both outsourced and handmade, meticulous and low-tech, highly conceptual and grounded in materials.

If you go, I recommend bringing printout of the linked to page (or related) and plan on spending 10 minutes or so, as it is a small room/exhibition.

Posted in Crypto, Off-topic, Security | No Comments »

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