University of Washington's Computer Security Course

Tadayoshi Kohno, a Computer Science Professor at the University of Washington, is teaching an undergraduate computer security course with a unique set of intentions: Kohno is trying to teach the security mindset-- the same mindset that Bruce Schneier has been talking about for years.

The results are interesting, not to mention available to the public. Students transforming into a security mindset are writing analytical views of just about anything, from dorm rooms to high-tech. It's available here in blog format.

More Broken DRM

From Slashdot:

"In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD+ Standards Board) declared: 'BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years.' Only eight months have passed since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again. According to the press release, the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD+ protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market."

How many more times must we endure the faulty logic of DRM (Digital Rights Management)? It's simple, that is if you understand key management. You cannot have a ciphertext (the Blu-ray movie) that you allow an end-user to convert to a plaintext (i.e. when it's playing in a hardware or software player) without also allowing plaintext access to the key that unlocks the ciphertext (which all players must have, otherwise the video is just encrypted data-- not playable).

DRM defies the laws of nature. It's just like the recent cold-boot attacks on disk encryption. The decryption keys are there. They're in the software. If you can manipulate the hardware, you can get them. And sometimes (as is the case with the BD+ hack) you don't even have to manipulate the hardware. The keys have to be stored somewhere-- usually in memory just like the whole disk encryption vendors. In fact, a possible application of the Princeton group's research could be to cold boot computers that are playing BD+ protected blu-ray discs, since they came up with new methods of finding (identifying) encryption keys stored in decaying DRAM, correcting the bit-flip decay.

Even if the Blu-ray people mandated that only hardware Blu-ray devices could be created and sold (since software players have been the primary target for DRM destruction), the keys would have to exist in every one of their customer's homes-- right there in the players! It might be a little more difficult to reverse engineer and discover since hardware tends to not be as flexible as software, but the keys would have to be there, stored in CMOS perhaps, or possibly just hard-coded into the decryption-playback circuits. And we have seen, time and time again, that the efforts of even a single person to reverse engineer the decryption key can be devastating to DRM schemes. All it takes is one person to discover it and a company like Slysoft to find a way to legally market it.


...
In summary: DRM is not possible. If you present data to a person outside of your physical reach, then you cannot control how they use the data. Anyone who claims otherwise is peddling the information security equivalent to perpetual motion. Don't buy it.

Anderson Proves PIN Entry Devices are Insecure

If there is a theme in good security research right now, it's that we cannot trust hardware.

Ross Anderson and company at the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University have performed some interesting research demonstrating how a paperclip can be used to steal cardholder data from a bank card PIN Entry Device (PED). Machines believed to be secure because they were assessed through the weakest level of the esteemed Common Criteria are apparently ripe with flaws. The Cambridge group believes that fraudsters have been using these techniques for some time.

Jon Callas Responds to Ed Felten

It's nice to not be on the top spot of Jon Callas' "CTO Corner" anymore ... although I held that spot for four and a half months. Jon Callas, the CTO of PGP Corporation, has moved on to respond to Ed Felten's memory-freezing, whole-disk-encryption-key-stealing crew at Princeton University.

Some highlights from Jon's response ...

"The basic issue is one that we have known for years."

Well, that's not very concerting, or at least it shouldn't be. If it was so well known, then why is PGP Corp just now looking to integrate with hardware and BIOS vendors to attempt to resolve this? That line, along with Jon's general theme, is that this is no big deal ... we've known about it forever ... it's just a new spin on an old trick ...

"Those of us who consider these things have known that this was at least in theory possible for some time. This team did two impressive things: they made it actually work, and they did some math to recover partially-damaged RSA and AES keys. This latter feat they did by looking at scratch variables that the encryption systems use, and back-deducing what some of the damaged bits of the keys must have been. The process is a bit like a big Sudoku game; when you play Sudoku, you deduce what is missing based on what is present."

Again, "it's no big deal", except, wait, yep, there's that really complicated math part. I do like Jon's comparison to Sudoku; it's a good analogy.

"Despite how dramatic this attack is, there is an easy fix for it."

If there really was an easy fix for it, then the whole notion of "coldboot" would be a solved problem, but that's obviously not the case. Ripping power from a running system (which Jon later goes on to say has never been the primary threat that PGP WDE was designed to overcome) does not protect the keys. Even if BIOS vendors started shipping with features that sanitize memory at boot, a quick power off optionally followed by a cool down of DRAM and finally placing the memory into a prepared system could still read the encryption keys. Yes, that requires a dedicated and trained adversary, but there are organizations with very valuable information. Jon should not be so quick to downplay the likelihood that his customers may have such an adversary, unless of course the really security conscious organizations have been skipping his company's products altogether.

"When a computer is hibernated, the contents of its memory is written to disk, and then the computer is shut down. No residual power is supplied to the RAM, so it will fade in one to two minutes, just as if you had shut it off. It doesn't matter what software you are running; if you hibernate a machine with WDE, it will be safe in a couple of moments. (Note: the Cold Boot researchers say that hibernate mode is vulnerable, and they are wrong on this nit. A truly hibernated machine is turned off, but with a copy of RAM written to disk. These machines are safe, once memory has faded.)"

Anyone else want to hear Felten's and crew's response to the hibernate "nit"?

"If there is a hard power loss, such as pulling the battery from a laptop or yanking the power cord out from a server, there's next to nothing that software alone can do. There's next to nothing that hardware can do. We could design hardware and software to do something in this case, but you probably wouldn't pay for it. I wouldn't."

I can think of several options here, all of which cannot be so expensive that when typical economies of scale (mass production and consumer demand) are applied the price becomes unreasonable. I'm not sure what this says about what's on Jon's computer, that he wouldn't be interested something as simple as a small reserve of electrical power (like in a capacitor) that can detect when main power has diminished and employs its small reserve which is just ample to perform a basic overwrite or sanitizing operation on DRAM. Such a feature could not possibly cost more than a seat of PGP WDE.

"External authentication using smart cards, tokens, TPMs, does not solve the problem. There have been reports of some people claiming that it does. It doesn't. Remember, this is very simple; there is some RAM that has a key, and that RAM needs to be cleared. Authentication doesn't clear memory. TPMs do not clear memory. The people who claim that a USB key helps at all are displaying their ignorance."

I agree that USB keys don't clear memory. What was Dr. Eric Cole of SANS thinking when he said this in the Feb 29th issue of their Newsbites?

"(Cole): The cold boot attack has a cool factor to it, but remember that
full disk encryption will protect a system only if it has a strong
password (two factor recommended) and if the system is completely turned
off. Use of a USB token stops the attack. If you turn your system
completely off (and hold on to it for more than 5 seconds) the attack
is not successful. If you do not follow either of these rules, than
full disk encryption can potentially be broken even without this
attack.]"

But a future generation of TPMs, or more specifically secure co-processors, could potentially perform all cryptographic operations in hardware, not just integrity checking of boot procedures. Whereas today's TPMs can store keys only later to hand them off to a process that will unfortunately store them in DRAM, the next generation of secure co-processors could be passed the ciphertext blocks of data for decryption, passing the plaintext version back to a WDE-like service. There will be I/O performance concerns to overcome initially, but it is feasible that a commodity-priced chip will one day solve that problem.

"There is more reason to use WDE in conjunction with either Virtual Disk or NetShare. We have always said that the primary threat model for WDE is a machine that is shut down or hibernated. We have always pointed to the added benefits of the other forms of encryption. In his recent article on mobile data protection, Bruce Schneier touts PGP Virtual Disk. The PGP Encryption Platform gives you defense in depth. Defense in depth is good because the layers of protection give more security."

Translation: buy more of their products.



Of course, there's always the solution I have offered despite common objections: one method for securing information is to not place it on disk at all. Encryption is not always the answer.

Excellent Cold Boot Step-By-Step

News.com has an excellent step-by-step complete with pictures detailing what it takes to steal the encryption keys for Apple's File Vault using the Princeton University's Cold Boot attack on whole disk encryption. Jacob Appelbaum, one of the independent security researchers involved with Ed Felten's Princeton crew, is your guide.