However when there was huge media coverage to GSM cracking research results, the tools to make the cracking was really early stage and still very inefficient.

Now Frank Stevenson , norwegian cryptanalyst that already broke the Content Scrambling System of DVD video disc, participating to the A51 cracking project started by Karsten Nohl, released Kraken , a new improved version of the A51 cracking system.

It’s interesting to notice that WiFi cracking had a similar story, as the first WiFi wep cracking discovery was quite slow in earlier techniques but later Korek, an hacker working on cracking code, improve the attack system drammatically.

That’s the story of security research cooperation, you start a research, someone follow it and improve it, some other follow it and improved it and at the end you get the result.

Read more on the Kraken GSM Cracking software release.

And stay tuned as next week at Blackhat Conference Karsten Nohl will explain the details of the required hardware setup and detailed instructions on how to do it :-)

I would really like to see those tools incorporated into Penetration Testing Linux Distribution BackTrack with OSSTMM methodology enforcing the testing of GSM interception and man in the middle :-)

If things proceed that way and Ettus Research (The producer of USRP2 software radio used for low cost GSM signal receiving) will not be taken down, we can still see this.

You know, doing security technology mean that you are personally responsible for the protection of the user’s information. You must make them aware of what they need, exactly what your are doing and which kind of threat model your product protect.

A typical problem of product’s security features is represented by the inability of the user to evaluate the security claims of the product itself.

So there’s a lot companies doing a not-so-ethical marketing of security features, based on the facts that no user will be able to evaluate it.

The previously explained situation reside in the security topic of Snake Oil Encryption, an evolution in the scientific cryptographic environment that let us today use best of breed information protection technologies without having to worry too much about backdoors or insecurities.

Let’s speak about Snake Oil Encryption

Snake Oil Cryptography : In cryptography, snake oil is a term used to describe commercial cryptographic methods and products which are considered bogus or fraudulent. Distinguishing secure cryptography from insecure cryptography can be difficult from the viewpoint of a user. Many cryptographers, such as Bruce Schneier and Phil Zimmermann, undertake to educate the public in how secure cryptography is done, as well as highlighting the misleading marketing of some cryptographic products.

The most referenced crypto security guru, Philip Zimmermann and Bruce Schneier, was the 1st to talk about Snake Oil Encryption:

Snake Oil by Philip Zimmermann

Snake Oil by Bruce Schneier

The Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review also made a very good analysis related to the Security Features of Security Products, SNAKE-OIL SECURITY CLAIMS” THE SYSTEMATIC MISREPRESENTATION OF PRODUCT SECURITY . They explain about the nasty marketing tricks used to tweak users inability to evaluate the security features, including economic and legal responsibility implication.

Several snake oil security product companies does not explain and are not clear about the threat model to which the product apply. Very famous is the sentence of Russ Nelson:

“Remember, crypto without a threat model is like cookies without milk. ….. Cryptography without a threat model is like motherhood without apple pie. Can’t say that enough times. More generally, security without a threat model is by definition going to fail.”

So, how to spot snake oil security products?

Check a guideline of to spot Snake Oil Encryption Products: Snake Oil Warning Signs, Encryption Software to Avoid by Matt Curtin .

You can see this very good Cryptographic Snake Oil Examples by Emility Ratliff (IBM Architect at Linux Security), that tried to make clear example on how to spot Cryptographic Snake Oil.

• Companies that claim Trust Us, We Know What We’re Doing’
• Companies that invent new technology terms without even explaining the innovation, called Technobabble
• Product that use non public protocols along with proprietary and Secret Algorithms
• Company that pretend to have invented new type of cryptography or a Revolutionary Breakthroughs
• Companies that present Useless Certification and supposed Independent Evaluation without any security value
• Product that claim to be Unbreakable
• Companies that claim other products are insecure with fake and artificial evidence
• Companies that claim their system is Military Grade, while everyone know that today cryptography in civil sector is driving the innovation
• Product that have Unsubstantiated bit claims (like 16384 bit or 46080 bit encryption and authentication of sessions)

But all in all how to fix that unethical security approach?

It’s very significative and it would be really useful for each kind of security product category to make some strongly and independent evaluation guideline (like OSSTMM for Penetration testing) , to make this security evaluation process really in the hands of the user.

It would be also very nice to have someone making analysis and evaluation of security product companies, publishing reports about Snake Oil signs.

Users continuously download applications without knowing the details of what they do, for example iFart just because are cool, are fun and sometime are useful.

On mobile phones users install from 1000% up to 10.000% more applications than on a PC, and those apps may contain malware or other unexpected functionalities.

Recently infobyte analyzed ubertwitter client and discovered that the client was leaking and sending to their server many personal and sensitive data such as:

- Blackberry PIN

- Phone Number

- Email Address

- Geographic positioning information

Read about UbertTwitter ’spyware’ features discovery here by infoByte .

It’s plenty of applications leaking private and sensitive information but just nobody have a look at it.

Should mandatory data retention and privacy policies became part of application development and submission guideline for mobile application?

Imho a users must not only be warned about the application capabilities and API usage but also what will do with which kind of information it’s going to handle inside the mobile phone.

Capabilities means authorizing the application to use a certain functionalities, for example to use GeoLocation API, but what the application will do and to who will provide such information once the user have authorized it?

That’s a security profiling level that mobile phone manufacturer does not provide and they should, because it focus on the information and not on the application authorization/permission respect to the usage of device capabilities.

p.s. yes! ok! I agree! This kind of post would require 3-4 pages long discussion as the topic is hot and quite articulated but it’s saturday morning and i gotta go!

The paper has been done by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems that’s a consortium of all space agency around that cumulatively handled more than 400 mission to space.

Read the paper Encryption Algorithm Trade Survey as it gives interesting consideration and comparison between different encryption algorithms.

Obviously the finally selected algorithm is AES, while KASUMI (used in UMTS networks) was avoided.

This post it’s a summarized set of information to let the reader the get picture, without taking much a position as RIM and Blackberry can be considered, depending on the point of view, an extremely secure platform or an extremely dangerous one .

Let’s goes on.

On one side Blackberry it’s a platform plenty of encryption features, security features everywhere, device encrypted (with custom crypto), communication encrypted (with custom proprietary protocols such as IPPP), very good Advanced Security Settings, Encryption framework from Certicom (now owned by RIM).

On the other side they does not provide only a device but an overlay access network, called BIS (Blackberry Internet Service), that’s a global worldwide wide area network where your blackberry enter while you browse or checkmail using blackberry.net AP.

When you, or an application, use the blackberry.net APN you are not just connecting to the internet with the carrier internet connection, but you are entering inside the RIM network that will proxy and act as a gateway to reach the internet.

The very same happen when you have a corporate use: Both the BB device and the corporate BES connect to the RIM network that act as a sort of vpn concentration network.

So basically all the communications cross trough RIM service infrastructure in encrypted format with a set proprietary encryption and communication protocols.

Just as a notice, think that google to provide gtalk over blackberry.net APN, made an agreement in order to offer service inside the BB network to the BB users. When you install gtalk you get added 3 service books that point to GTALKNA01 that’s the name of GTALK gateway inside the RIM network to allow intra-BIS communication and act as a GTALK gateway to the internet.

The mobile operators usually are not even allowed to inspect the traffic between the Blackberry device and the Blackberry Network.

So RIM and Blackberry are somehow unique for their approach as they provide a platform, a network and a service all bundled together and you cannot just “get the device and the software” but the user and the corporate are always bound and connected to the service network.

That’s good and that’s bad, because it means that RIM provide extremely good security features and capabilities to protect information, device and access to information at various level against third party.

But it’s always difficult to estimate the threat and risk related to RIM itself and who could make political pressure against RIM.

Please consider that i am not saying “RIM is looking at your data” but making an objective risk analysis: for how the platform is done RIM have authority on the device, on the information on-the-device and on the information that cross the network. (Read my Mobile Security Slides).

For example let’s consider the very same context for Nokia phones.

Once the Nokia device is sold, Nokia does not have authority on the device, nor on the information on-the-device nor on the information that cross the network. But it’s also true that Nokia just provide the device and does not provide the value added services such as the Enterprise integration (The RIM VPN tunnel), the BIS access network and all the local and remote security provisioned features that Blackberry provide.

So it’s a matter of considering the risk context in the proper way when choosing the platform, with an example very similar to choosing Microsoft Exchange Server (on your own service) or whether getting a SaaS service like Google Apps.

In both case you need to trust the provider, but in first example you need to trust Microsoft that does not put a backdoor on the software while in the 2nd example you need to trust Google, as a platform and service provider, that does not access your information.

So it’s a different paradigm to be evaluated depending on your threat model.

If your threat model let you consider RIM as a trusted third party service provider (much like google) than it’s ok. If you have a very high risk context, like top-secret one, then let’s consider and evaluate carefully whether it’s not better to keep the Blackberry services fully isolated from the device or use another system without interaction with manufacturer servers and services.

Now, let’s get back to some research and some facts about blackberry and blackberry security itself.

First of all several governments had to deal with RIM in order to force them to provide access to the information that cross their service networks while other decided to directly ban Blackberry usage for high officials because of servers located in UK and USA, while other decided to install their own backdoors.

• Russian Secret Services (FSB) reach an agreement with RIM and now FSB can eavesdrop Blackberry email and web traffic in Russia
• French Government banned Blackberry for use by Government officials and also replaced the device for voice encryption use
• Indian government made pressure on RIM to reduce encryption capabilities and later announced that they have cracked blackberry encryption . A summary on India-RIM story by Bruce Schneier.
• United Arab Emirates (UAE) Etisalat operator tried to silently install a government spyware on all country blackberry but they got caught
• USA National Security Agency initially prohibited Obama to use Blackberry for his presidential works giving him a Sectera Edge Secure Phone, after 2 years they managed to secure it with a custom encryption layer done specifically by NSA and allowed Obama to use a custom secured blackberry

There’s a lot of discussion when the topics are RIM Blackberry and Governments for various reasons.

Below a set of official Security related information on RIM blackberry platform:

• Official Security Knowledgebase on RIM website
• Blackberry Internet Service security features
• Wireless Data Security

And here a set of unofficial Security and Hacking related information on RIM Blackberry platform:

• Hackish blackbox security analysis by FX of Phenoelit:  Analysing Complex Systems – The Blackberry case
• Accessing corporate intranets trough Blackberry BBProxy Hack
• Blackberry Master Control Program little bit of hacking
• Blackberry Reversing research (mostly by Dr Bolsen, however no one have ever decompiled and published the whole RIMOS)
• • Bypassing Blackberry COD Signature
• • Reversing Blackberry The COD format
  • Blackberry Internal Folders Layout
  • Blackberry decompilated COD binaries
  • Blackberry Coddec decompilation tool release

Because it’s 23.32 (GMT+1), i am tired, i think that this post will end up here.

I hope to have provided the reader a set of useful information and consideration to go more in depth in analyzing and considering the overall blackberry security (in the good and in the bad, it always depends on your threat model!).

Cheers

Fabio Pietrosanti (naif)

p.s. i am managing security technology development (voice encryption tech) on Blackberry platform, and i can tell you that from the development point of view it’s absolutely better than Nokia in terms of compatibility and speed of development, but use only RIMOS 5.0+ !

It’s been 25 years since “Hackers” was published. Author Steven Levy reflects on the book and the movement.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/hackers-at-25.html
Steven Levy wrote a book in the mid-1980s that introduced the term "hacker" -- the positive connotation -- to a wide audience. In the ensuing 25 years, that word and its accompanying community have gone through tremendous change. The book itself became a mainstay in tech libraries.
O'Reilly recently released an updated 25th anniversary edition of "Hackers," so I checked in with Levy to discuss the book's development, its influence, and the role hackers continue to play.

The result is that in such context attacking an RSA 1024bit key would take only 28 years, compared to theoretical 19 billion of years.

Reading of this article, is extremely interesting because it gives our very important consideration on the cryptography strength respect to the computation power required to carry on cracking attempt, along with industry approach to “default security level”.

I would say a must read.

How many of the patented technologies you dealed with was also “secrets” in their implementation?

Well, there’s a set of technologies whose implementation is open source (copyright) but that are patented (intellectual property right).

A very nice paper about the topic opensource & patents that i suggest to read is from Fenwick & West and can be downloaded here (PDF).

i found this very interesting paper on China Encryption Import/Export/Domestic Regulations done by Baker&Mckenzie in the US.

It’s strongly business and regulatory oriented giving a very well done view on how china regulations works and how it may behave in future.

Read here Decrypting China Encryption’s Regulations (form Bakernet website) .

The only main limit is that it does not support UDP, but that’s a very cool tool!

A very good txt to read is Netcat hacker Manual.

That’s before open source and scientifically approved encrypted technologies went out as a best practice to do crypto stuff.

I would like to remind when, in 1992, USA along with Israel was, together with switzerland, providing backdoored (proprietary and secret) technologies to Iranian government to tap their communications, cheating them to think that the used solution was secure, making also some consideration on this today in 2010.

That’s called The Crypto AG case, an historical fact involving the United States National Security Agency along with Signal Intelligence Division of Israel Ministry of Defense that are strongly suspected to had made an agreement with the Swiss cryptography producer company Crypto AG.

Basically those entities placed a backdoor in the secure crypto equipment that they provided to Iran to intercept Iranian communications.

Their crypto was based on secret and proprietary encryption algorithms developed by Crypto AG and eventually customized for Iranian government.

You can read some other facts about Crypto AG backdoor related issues:

The demise of global telecommunication security

The NSA-Crypto AG sting

Breaking codes: an impossible task? By BBC

Der Spiegel Crypto AG (german) article

Now, in 2010, we all know and understand that secret and proprietary crypto does not work.

Just some reference by top worldwide cryptographic experts below:

Secrecy, Security, Obscurity by Bruce Schneier

Just say No to Proprietary cryptographic Algorithms by Network Computing (Mike Fratto)

Security Through Obscurity by Ceria Purdue University

Unlocking the Secrets of Crypto: Cryptography, Encryption and Cryptology explained by Symantec

Time change the way things are approached.

I like very much the famous Philip Zimmermann assertion:

“Cryptography used to be an obscure science, of little relevance to everyday life. Historically, it always had a special role in military and diplomatic communications. But in the Information Age, cryptography is about political power, and in particular, about the power relationship between a government and its people. It is about the right to privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of political association, freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom to be left alone.”

Any scientist today accept and approve the Kerckhoffs’ Principle that in 1883 in the Cryptographie Militaire paper stated:

The security of a cryptosystem should not depend on keeping the algorithm secret, but only on keeping the numeric key secret.

It’s absolutely clear that the best practice for doing cryptography today obbly any serious person to do open cryptography, subject to public review and that follow the Kerckhoff principle.

So, what we should think about closed source, proprietary cryptography that’s based on security trough obscurity concepts?

I was EXTREMELY astonished when TODAY, in 2010, in the age of information society i read some paper on Crypto AG website.

I invite all to read the Crypto AG security paper called Sophisticated Security Architecture designed by Crypto AG of which you can get a significant excerpt below:

The design of this architecture allows Crypto AG to provide a secret proprietary algorithm that can be specified for each customer to assure the perfect degree of cryptographic security and optimum support for the customer’s security policy. In turn, the Security Architecture gives you the influence you need to be fully independent in respect of your encryption solution. You can determine all areas that are covered by cryptography and verify how the algorithm works.The original secret proprietary algorithm of Crypto AG is the foundation of the Security Architecture.

NATO countries have the right to use the force against attacks on computer networks.

The slides provide a wide an in-depth overview of mobile security related matters, i should be doing some slidecast about it putting also audio. Maybe will do, maybe not, it depends on time that’s always a insufficient resource.

I am particularly concerned about data protection in case of theft and so started having a look around about the iPhone provided protection system.

There is an interesting set of iPhone Business Security Features that make me think that iPhone is moving in the right path for security protection of the phone, but still a lot of things has to be done, especially for serious Enterprise and Government users.

  

For example it turned out that the iPhone PIN protection is useless and it can be broken just plugging the iPhone to a Linux machine and accessing the device like a USB stick.

That’s something disturbing my paranoid mindset that make me think not to use sensitive data on my iPhone if i cannot protect my data.

Probably an iPhone independent disk encryption product would be very useful in order to let the market create protection schemas that fit the different risk contexts that different users may have.

Probably a general consumer is not worried about this PIN vulnerability but for me, working within highly confidential envirnonment such as intelligence, finance and military, it’s something that i cannot accept.

I need strong disk encryption on my mobile phone.

I do strong voice encryption for it, but it would be really nice to have also something to protect the whole iPhone data and not just phone calls.

I went to National Iranian Oil Company website and have seen “Exploration & Production” section where are listed all the companies and their country of origin that are allowed to make Exploration of oil in Iran.

On that list we find the list of countries along with the data of signing of exploration agreement:

• Norway/Russia (2000)
• Australia/Spain/Chile (2001)
• India (2002)
• China (2001)
• Brazil (2004)
• Spain (2004)
• Thailand (2005)
• China x 2 (2005)
• Norway (2006)
• Italy (2008)
• Vietnam (2008)

Those countries’s oil companies are allowed to do oil extraction in Iran and i would like to point out that Iran is the 2nd world Oil Reserve just after Saudi Arabia.

As you can see there’s NO USA company doing extraction.

Of European Countries the only one doing business with IRAN are:

IRAN Norway Relationship

IRAN ITALY Relationship

IRAN SPAIN Relationship

While of the well known non-US-simpatizing countries, the one doing Oil business with Iran are:

IRAN RUSSIA Relationship

IRAN BRAZIL Relationship

IRAN China Relationship

Don’t missing some Asian involvement.

IRAN India Relationship

IRAN Vietnam Relationship

As you can see Iran is doing Oil business with most big south America and Far Asia countries, with some little exception in Europe for what apply to Norway, Italy and Spain.

To me it sounds that those European countries are going to face serious trouble whether they will accept and subscribe UN sanction against Iran.

Or some of them, like Italy, are protected by the strenghtening cooperation they are doing with Russia on Energy matters?

Well, i don’t know how things will end up, but it’s possible the most hypocrit countries like the European ones doing business in Iran while applying Sanctions will be the only European winning in the international competition for Iran Oil (Unless France did not drop a nuclear bomb on theran ;) ).

In 2004 a lot of accusation against Hafner of SecurStar went out because of alleged intellectual property theft regarding opensource codes such as Encryption 4 the masses and legal advert also against the Free and opensource TrueCrypt project .

In 2008 there was a pre-boot authentication hacking against DriveCrypt Plus posted on Full-Disclosure.

Early 2010 it was the time of the fake infosecurity research secretly sponsored by securstar at http://infosecurityguard.com (that now they tried to remove from the web because of embarrassing situation, but backup of the story are available, hacking community still wait for apologies) .

Now, mid 2010, following a research published in December 2009 about Disk Encryption software vulnerabilities made by Neil Kettle (mu-b), Security researcher at digit-labs and Penetration tester at Convergent Network Solutions , DriveCrypt was found to be vulnerable and exploitable breaking on-device security of the system and exploit code has been just released.

Exploit code reported below (thanks Neil for the code release!):

• Arbitrary kernel code execution security exploit of DriveCrypt: drivecrypt-dcr.c

• Arbitrary file reading/writing security exploit via unchecked user-definable parameters to ZxCreateFile/ReadFile/WriteFile: drivecrypt-fopen.c

The exploit code has been tested against DriveCrypt 5.3, currently released DriveCrypt 5.4 is reported to be vulnerable too as it has just minor changes related to win7 compatibility. Can anyone make a double check and report a comment here?

Very good job Neil!

In the meantime the Free Truecrypt is probably the preferred choice for disk encryption, given the fact that it’s difficult to trust DriveCrypt, PGP has been acquired by Symantec and there are very bad rumors about the trust that people have in Symantec and there are not many widely available alternatives.

Rumors say that also PhoneCrypt binaries are getting analyzed and the proprietary encryption system could reveal something fun…

To oversimplify the system is based on the fact that if someone cut the fiber, put a tap in the middle, and joint together the other side of the fiber, the amount of “errors” that will be on the communications path will be higher than 20% .

So if QBER (Quantum Bit Error Rate) goes above 20% then it’s assumed that the system is intercepted.

Researcher at university of toronto was able to cheat the system with a staying below the 20%, at 19.7% , thus tweaking the threshold used by the system to consider the communication channel secure vs compromised.

The product found vulnerable is called Cerberis Layer2 and produced by the Swiss ID Quantique.

Some possibile approach to detect the attack has been provided but probably, imho, such kind of systems does not have to be considered 100% reliable until the technology will be mature enough.

Traditional encryption has to be used together till several years, eventually bundled with quantum encryption whether applicable.

When we will see a quantum encryption systems on an RFC like we have seen for ZRTP, PGP and SSL ?

-naif

One the the review, imho the most fun one on film Star Wars:

The scene

Death star getting blown up

Infosec Analysis

Darth Vader must be heralded as the prime example of a chief executive who really didn’t care about information security. The entire board was unapproachable and clearly no system testing was undertaken. The network security was so poor that it was hacked into and the designs for the death star were stolen without anyone knowing.

Even worse than that, the death star had a major design flaw where by dropping a bomb thingy into a big hole on the outside, it actually blew up the entire thing!

Darth Vader needed to employ a good Security Consultant to sit on the executive board and promise not to force choke him. Should have commissioned a full risk assessment of the death star followed by a full penetration test. Only then should the death star have been released into the production environment.

Extremely flexible approach: works everything

Extreme performance: very low latency

but unfortunately…

Extremely weak: Scrambling cannot be considered secure.

Only encryption can be considered secure under the Kerckoff’s principle .

So please don’t even consider any kind of analog scrambler if you need real security.

Read deeply the paper Implementation of a real-time voice encryption system” by Markus Brandau, especially the cryptoanalysis paragraph.

UPDATE: Nice summary of the whole story (i know, it’s long and complicated to read at 1st time) on SIPVicious VoIP security blog by Sandro Gauci.

Following my discoveries, Mr. Hafner, SecurStar chief exec, tried to ultimately defend their actions, citing absolutely unreasonable excuses to The Reg instead of publicly apologizing for what they have done: creating a fake independent security research to promote their PhoneCrypt product.

“SecurStar chief exec Wilfried Hafner denied any contact with Notrax. Notrax, he said, must have been using his firm’s anonymous browsing service, SurfSolo, to produce the results reported by Pietrosanti”

surfsolo.securstar.net – 67.225.141.74

surfsolo.securstar.com – 69.16.211.133

How does the fact that the “independent research” was semantically a product review of PhoneCrypt, along with the discovery that the author come from the SecurStar GmbH IP address offices, along with the anonymity of this Notrax guy (SecurStar calls him a “well known it security professional” in their press release..) sound to you?

It’s possible that earth will get an attack from outer space that’s going to destroy our life?

Statistically extremely difficult, but yes, possible. More or less like the “anonymous proxy” story told by Mr. Hafner to cover the fact that they are the ones behind the infosecurityguard.com fake “independent security review”.

Hey, I don’t need anything else to convince myself or to let the smart person have his own thoughts on this.

I just think that the best way for SecurStar to get out of this mess would probably be to provide public excuses to the hacking community for abusing the name and reputation of real independent security researches, for the sake of a marketing stunt.

Regards,

Fabio Pietrosanti

p.s. I am currently waiting for some other infos that will more precisely confirm that what Mr. Hafner is saying is not properly true. Stay tuned.

I already wrote about that voice crypto analysis that appeared to me very suspicious.

Now it’s confirmed, it’s a fake independent hacker security research by SecurStar GmbH, its just a marketing trick!

How do we know that Infosecurityguard.com, the fake independent security research, is a marketing trick from SecurStar GmbH?

1) I posted on http://infosecurityguard.com a comments to a post with a link to my blog to that article on israelian ministry of defense certification

2) The author of http://infosecurityguard.com went to approve the comment and read the link on my own blog http://infosecurity.ch

3) Reaching my blog he leaked the IP address from which he was coming 217.7.213.59 (where i just clicked on from wordpress statistic interface)

4) On http://217.7.213.59/panel there is the IP PBX interface of the SecurStar GmbH corporate PBX (openly reachable trough the internet!)

5) The names of the internal PBX confirm 100% that it’s the SecurStar GmbH:

• Hafner : Wilfried Hafner, CEO and founder of SecurStar GmbH (linkedin profile)
• Can : Can Yavuzyilman, Country Manager at SecurStar GmbH (linkedin profile)
• Markus : Markus Bensinger, System Administrator at SecurStar GmbH (linkedin profile)

6) There is 100% evidence that the anonymous hacker of http://infosecurityguard.com is from SecurStar GmbH

Below the data and reference that let us discover that it’s all but a dishonest marketing tips and not an independent security research.

Kudos to Matteo Flora for it’s support and for his article in Debunking Infosecurityguard identity !

The HTTP referral tricks

When you read a link going from a website to another one there is an HTTP protocol header, the “Referral”, that tell you from which page someone is going to another webpage.

The referral demonstrated that the authors of http://infosecurityguard.com read my post, because it was coming from http://infosecurityguard.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php that’s the webpage you use as a wordpress author/editor to approve/refuse comments. And here there was the link.

That’s the log entry:

217.7.213.59 – - [30/Jan/2010:02:56:37 -0700] “GET /20100129/licensed-by-israel-ministry-of-defense-how-things-really-works/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 5795 “http://infosecurityguard.com/wp-admin/edit-comments.php” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6.3; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)”

The PBX open on the internet tell us that’s SecurStar GmbH

Here there is their forum post where the SecurStar GmbH guys are debugging IPCOPfirewall & Asterisk together (so we see also details of what they use) where there is the IP 217.7.213.59 .

That’s also really fun!

They sell secure telephony but their company telephony system is openly vulnerable on the internet. :-)

I was thinking to call the CEO, Hafner, via SIP on his internal desktop PBX to announce we discovered him tricks.. :->

They measured their marketing activity

Looking at the logs of my website i found that they was sensing the google distribution of information for the following keywords, in order to understand how effectively they was able to attack competing products. It’s reasonable, if you invest money in a marketing campaign you want to see the results :-)

They reached my blog and i logged their search:

infosecurityguard+cryptophone

infosecurityguard+gold-lock

217.7.213.59 – - [30/Jan/2010:02:22:42 -0700] “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 31057 “http://www.google.de/search?sourceid=navclient&IE=UTF-8&rlz=1T4SKPB_enDE350DE350&q=infosecurityguard+cryptophone” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6.3; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)”

217.7.213.59 – - [30/Jan/2010:04:15:07 -0700] “GET /20100130/about-the-voice-encryption-analysis-phonecrypt-can-be-intercepted-serious-security-evaluation-criteria/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 15774 “http://www.google.de/search?sourceid=navclient&IE=UTF-8&rlz=1T4SKPB_enDE350DE350&q=gold-lock+infosecurityguard” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; GTB6.3; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; InfoPath.2)”

Domain Name: INFOSECURITYGUARD.COM

Registrar: GODADDY.COM, INC.   

Updated Date: 01-dec-2009

Creation Date: 01-dec-2009

Administrative Contact: Private, Registration INFOSECURITYGUARD.COM@domainsbyproxy.com , Domains by Proxy, Inc. DomainsByProxy.com

The “independent review”completely oriented in publicizing PhoneCrypt

Of the various review don the phonecrypt review is only positive and amazing good feedback, while the other are only bad feedback and no single good point.

As you can imagine, in any kind of independent product evaluation, for all products there are goods and bad points. No. In this one there are only product that are good and product that are bad.

They missed to consider the security of the technology used by the products

They completely avoided to speak about cryptography and security of the products.

UPDATE: Who’s Wilfried Hafner (SecurStar founder) ?

I got a notice from a reader regarding Wilfred Hafner, SecurStar founder, CEO and security expert.

He was arrested in 1997 for telephony related fraud (check 2nd article on Phrack) earning from telephony fraud 254.000 USD causing damages to local telcos trough blueboxing for 1.15 Million USD.

He was not doing “Blueboxing” for the pleasure of phreaking and connecting with other hackers, but to earn money.

Hacking for profit (and not for fun) in 1997… brrr…. No hacker’s ethic at all!

Badmouthing a competitor amounts to an unfair competition practice in most jurisdictions, so it is arguable (to say the least) that SecurStar is right on a legally sound ground here.
Moreover, there are some specific statutes in certain jurisdictions which provide for a straightforward ban on the practice we are talking about. For example in the UK the British Institute of Practitioners in Advertising  - in compliance with the Consumer protection from Unfair Trading regulation – ruled that:

”falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for the purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer” is a criminal offense.

We have no doubt that PRPR  (which is the UK-based *PR company for SecurStar GmbH, led by Peter Rennison and Allie Andrews as stated in SecurStar Press Release) did provide their client with this information. Heck, they *are* in the UK, they simply cannot ignore that!

IANAL, but I would not be surpised if someone filed a criminal complaint or start civil litigation for unfair competition against SecurStar GmbH.
Whether this is going to be a matter for criminal and/or civil Courts or not is not that important. However, it is clear enough that SecurStar GmbH appears to be at least ethically questionable and not really worth of trust.

SecurStar GmbH made very bad things making that infosecuriguard.com fake independent research.

It’s unfair approach respect to hacking community.

It’s unfair marketing to end user. They should not be tricking by creating fake independent review.

It’s unfair competition in the security market.

Let’s make some more important consideration on this.

Must be serious on cryptographic products. They are not toys

When you do cryptographic tools you should be really aware of what you are doing, you must be really serious.

If you do bad crypto people could die.

If you don’t follow basic security rules for transparency and security for cryptography you are putting people life at risk.

You are taking the responsibility of this. (I want to sleep at night, don’t think SecurStar CEO/CTO care about this…)

Security research need reference and transparency

Hacking environment is neutral, should not be used instrumentally

Hackers are considered neutral, nerds, doing what they do for their pleasure and passion.

If you work in the security market you work with hackers.

If you use hackers and hacking environment for your own marketing purposes you are making something very nasty.

Hackers give you the technology and knowledge and you use them for your own commercial purpose.

Consideration on the authority of the information online

That’s something that pose serious consideration on the authority of information online.An anonymous hacker, with no reference online, made a product security review that appear like an independent one. I have to say that the fake review was very well prepared, it always posed good/bad things in an indirect way. It did not appeared to me at 1st time like a fake. But going deeply i found what’s going on.

However Journalists, news media and blogger went to the TRAP and reviewed their fake research. TheRegister, NetworkWorld and a lot of blogs reported it. Even if the author was completely anonymous.

What they have done is already illegal in UK

SecurStar GmbH is lucky that they are not in the UK, where doing this kind of things is illegal.

Fabio Pietrosanti (naif)

Initially it appeared to my like a great research activity but then i started reading deeply the read about it.I found that it’s not properly a security research but there is are concrete elements that’s a marketing campaign well done in order to attract public media and publicize a product.
Imho they was able to cheat journalists and users because the marketing campaign was absolutely well done not to be discovered on 1st read attempt. I personally considered it like a valid one on 1st ready (they cheated me initially!).

But if you go deeply… you will understand that:
- it’s a camouflage marketing initiative arranged by SecurStar GmbH and not a independent security research
- they consider a only security context where local device has been compromised (no software can be secured in that case, like saying SSL can be compromised if you have a trojan!)
- they do not consider any basic security and cryptographic security criteria

However a lot of important website reported it:

• The Register
• Network World
• Slashdot
• InfoSecurity Magazine

This article is quite long, if you read it you will understand better what’s going on around infosecurityguard.com research and research result.

I want to to tell you why and how (imho) they are wrong.

The research missed to consider Security, Cryptography and Transparency!

Yes, it’s true that most of the product described by SecurStar in their anonymous marketing website called http://infosecurityguard.com have some weakness.
But the relevant weakness are others and PhoneCrypt unfortunately, like most of the described products suffer from this.
Let’s review which characteristics are needed basic cryptography and security requirement (the best practice, the foundation and the basics!)

a – Security Trough Obscurity does not work

However, to be clear, those are only basic parameters to be used when considering a voice encryption product (just to avoid being in a situation that appears like i am promoting other products). So it may absolutely possible that a product with good crypto (transparency, peer reviewed and opensource) is absolutely a not secure product because of whatever reason (badly written, not usable causing user not to use it and use cleartext calls, politically compromised, etc, etc).
I think i will prepare a broader criteria for voice crypto technologies and voice crypto products, so it would be much easier and much practical to have a full transparent set of criterias to evaluate it.

But those are really the basis of security to be matched for a good voice encryption system!
Read some useful past slides on security protocols used in voice encryption systems (2nd part).

The security concept of the review is misleading: any hacked device can be always intercepted!

Now they are pointing out that also Zfone from Philip Zimmermann is broken (a pc software), just because they install a trojan on a PC like in a mobile phone?
Any security software rely on the fact that the underlying operating system is somehow trusted and preserve the integrity of the environment where the software run.

Like i explained above how to intercept PhoneCrypt.

The only things that can protect you from this threat is running in a closed operating system with Trust Computing capability, implementing it properly.
For sure on any “Open” operating system such us Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux, iPhone or Android there’s no chance to really protect a software.
On difficult operating system such as Symbian OS or RimOS maybe the running software can be protected (at least partially)

That’s the reason for which the security concept that guys are leveraging to carry on their marketing campaign has no clue.
It’s just because they control the environment, they know Flexispy software and so they adjusted their software not to be interceptable when Flexispy is installed.
If you develop a trojan with the other techniques i described above you will 100% intercept PhoneCrypt.

On that subject also Dustin Tammel, Security researcher of BreakPoint Systems, pointed on on VoIP Security Alliance mailing lists that the security analysis is based on wrong concepts.

The PhoneCrypt can be intercepted: it’s just that they don’t wanted to tell you!

PhoneCrypt can be intercepted with “on device spyware”.
Why?
Because Windows Mobile is an unsecure operating environment and PhoneCrypt runs on Windows Mobile.
Windows Mobile does not use Trusted Computing and so any software can do anything.
The platform choice for a secure telephony system is important.
How?
I quickly discussed with some knowledgeable windows mobile hackers about 2 different way to intercept PhoneCrypt with an on-device spyware (given the unsecure Windows Mobile Platform).

The government don’t want that companies doing cryptography can do anything bad to them and what they can do of good for the government, so they have to first be authorized.

Companies providing interception and encryption must apply to a license because Israel law on this is so restrictive to be similar to china law.

That’s because those kind of technologies are considered fundamental for the intelligence and espionage capabilities of Israel country.

To give some example of “Licensed by Israel Ministry of Defense” companies:

GSM encryption products “Licensed by Israel Ministry of Defense” – Gold-lock

Interception of communication products “Licensed by Israel Ministry of Defense” – Verint

HF encrypted Radio “Licensed by Israel Ministry of Defense” – Kavit

Surveillance services and equipment “Licensed by Israel Ministry of Defense” – Multi Tier Solutions

For example how to apply for a “License by Israel Ministry of Defense” if you do encryption technologies in Israel?

Be sure to be an israeli company, click here and fill the forms.

Someone will contact you from encryption-control@mod.gov.il and will discuss with you whether to give you or not the license to sell.

What does the department of defense will require from an israeli company in order to provide them the authorization to make and sell interception and encryption products?

Well, what they want and what they really ask nobody knows.

It’s a secret dealing of Israel Ministry of Defense with each “licensed” company.

What we know for sure is that Verint, a “Licensed by Israel Ministry of Defense”, placed a backdoor to intercept companies and governments in the US and Netherland into the interception systems they was selling.

Verint, a Licensed by Israel Ministry of Defense Company, provided to Israel government eavesdropped communications of private and government users in the United States and in the Netherland .

CIA officier reported that Israel Ministry of Defense was known to pay Verint a reimbursement of 50% of their costs in order to have from Verint espionage services trough their commercial activity on selling “backdoored” interception equipment to spy foreign users.

It can be a legitimate doubt that the cooperation within the Israeli Ministry of Defense may be problematic for an Israeli company that want to sell interception and encryption product abroad.

Those companies may be forced to make the interests of Israel Ministry of Defense and not the interests of the customers (like Verint scandal is a real-world example).

So, how would a “Licensed by Israel Ministry of Defense” be a good things to promote?

It represent the risk that the “Israel Ministry of Defense”, like is publicly known that it has already have done with Verint, will interfere with what the company do.

It represent the risk that the “Israel Ministry of Defense” may reasonably provide “reimbursement” of costs paying the company and get what they would likely would like to get.

So, what does really “Israel Ministry of Defense” want from Israel companies doing encryption and interception technologies?

Should we ask ourself whether Israeli companies doing encryption and interception businesses are more interested to do business or to do “outsourced espionage services” for their always paying customer, the “Israel Ministry of Defense”.

For sure, in the age of financial crisis, the Israel Ministry of Defense is a paying customer that does not have budget problem…

Strict control, strict rules, strong government strategic and military cooperation.

Be careful.

If you want to read more about this matters, about how technologies from certain countries is usually polluted with their governments military and secret services strategies stay tuned as i am preparing a post about this .

You will much better understand about that subjects on the “Licensed by Israel Ministry of Defense”.

A project where also google is one of the shareholder, covering 3 billion persons trough low orbit, low latency broadband (10GBit) satellite network.

Check here technical infrastructure details on ITU website.

Well law enforcement can now know even better where you are, at any time, even with historical data and much better than BTS based location systems.

Sprint has given 8 million times customer’s GPS information to law enforcement (sound something like a semi-automatic request).

Read here.

Nice extract is:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The informations was provided at wiretapping and interception industry conference ISS WASH in Washingtown.

If you want see directly the video:

Sprint: 50 million customers, 8 million law enforcement GPS requests in 1 year from Christopher Soghoian on Vimeo.

Then you know that “big brother” is watching you only because you let him to watch you.

Following an announcement seen on Linkedin “Information Security Community” group:

GoldLock is offering US$ 100.000 and a job for an unencryption

GoldLock, an israeli encryption and security company is offering US$ 100.000 and a job to anyone capable to decrypt a cellular conversation contained in a file provided in their site ( https://www.gold-lock.com/app/en/?wicket:interface=:8 ::::).
The transcription must be sent back to GoldLock until February 1st, 2010.
The contest is open to all and any tools or technology may be used.
Good luck to all!!!

I commented:

Not having a public protocol specification is not even scientifically serious to make a marketing tricks like this.
I would say to gold-lock, let’s release the source code and let anyone compile the cryptographic engine if you trust not to to have something nasty inside… ;)

Toni Koivunen from F-secure said:

So… They will pay $100k if you get through the AES and the hassle with keys.
If someone would pull it off they would certainly make a truckload more money elsewhere. Plus they would retain the rights to the code/technology that they created, which isn’t the case if they go for the $100k since the License pretty clearly says that:
# An assignment letter to Gold Line, in a form satisfactory to Gold Line of your technology and the Work Plan (the “Technology”). Such assignment form shall enable Gold Line to transfer the rights on the Technology to Gold Line, including the right to register patents and all other rights.
# A release and waiver form, in a form satisfactory to Gold Line, duly executed by you and any other participant of any rights to the Technology.
Plus of course Gold Line retains the right to change the rules of the game with prior notice. Or needing to notify afterwards either.
Sounds fair :)

Michel Scovetta from Computer Associates said:

It sounds like the purpose of this is to get some cheap testing out of it, and to be able to say something like, “The best crypto experts in the world tried to break it, and were unable to.”

According to some of the docs on Gold Lock’s website, they use ECC-256 and a “modified DH key exchange” (which tingles my spidey senses), SHA-256, and then XOR for the actual data encryption. They use practically blasphemous language like, “Each component of the Gold Lock Enterprise solution is tested and proven secure against any conceivable attack.”

*Proven* secure? *Any conceivable* attack? Yikes!

In another doc on their site, they talk about their first layer relying on 1024-bit RSA. GoDaddy doesn’t even allow 1024-bit keys to be used anymore when generating $20 SSL certificates. They quote 300 billion MIPS-years to break, but if my math is correct, that comes down to about 52 days on the top supercomputer right now. Not trivial, but this is an offline attack, so time is on the side of the attacker.

The description then talks about the device generating 16k keys when you register the device. If the protocol is “secure”, then it should be “secure” with only a single key. If it’s not secure with a single key, then generating 16k keys could only make it 16k times more secure, which is far off from a proof of security.

I agree with Fabio – a fair contest would be to include source code and the cryptographic specification. Also, as other contests have proven (e.g. SecureWebMail), the weakest point isn’t usually the cryptography. It’s all of the other stuff, and it doesn’t look like any of it is being disclosed for the contest.

http://xkcd.com/538/

Mike

I would say that all those considerations from security experts from well known and established security companies bring us to consider that:

• Gold-lock is not transparent on their encryption at all and they work trough bad practice of Security Trough Obscurity (no one know what’s inside the product)
• Gold-lock is not playing a fair game by proposing this ‘security contest’
• Gold-lock being certified by Israeli ministry of defence may raise doubt related to possible relationship with the intelligence… Read by post Certified by Israeli MInistry of Defense.

Voice security is a sensible matters and lacks of transparency and governmental relationship for cryptographic choices usually does not provide anything good…

Think about it…

If you just accidently deleted some files on windows or your employee leave the company deleting all his data, well that you get out from trouble quickly.

It also came out in a ‘portable’ version to be loaded from an USB stick drive.

Check Recuva recovery tool

Read here a nice analysis from rochtel on how military contractors should adapt their strategy.

There are a lot of way to convince a person to release a password.

However there’s a case in Australia where not revealing the disk password resulted in a successful way to avoid going in jail:

Secret code saves man who spied on flatmates

My opinion is just that spying flatmates is not a so relevant and particular crime and that law enforcement did not used ‘convincing systems’ to get the password of encrypted disk.

UPDATE 29.06.2010: It also worked for Daniel Dantas against FBI .

Initially it appeared like an accident.

Now it’s known that was caused by a cyber attack against electricity control systems.

That was just a preview of what a cyber attack in a cyberwar means.

In near future we’ll probably see something like ‘virtual custom offices’ at internet borders, defining what get in and what get out like several “not so democratic” countries are doing.

Does the cyberwar will affect digital rights? Probably yes, even i hope not.

Prosecutors and Judge usually does not like being tapped, and so the 1st High Criminal Court ordered an audit of all the recording done by the TIB since 2006.

Read more here.

1st because being busy @work

2nd because my blogging software expired and i hate wordpress editor (i really need a blogging client for my own way of making information).

I use this software called Ecto that cost about 17 EUR and it’s pretty useful to keep blog post editing offline.

I wont comment on the practical implications of useless signature based AV’s and how cyber criminals will never need amateur-ish projects to carry on their malicious tactics.

But what is always interesting is watching the very same people who use billion dollar scare tactics to sell you a perfectly useless piece of software (which will give you a false sense of security, hence will make you more insecure), talking about ethics.

And I am not talking about ZF05 (which was cool reading, even if not as cool as ~El8 was), I am talking about this.

If you’ve lived under a rock during the last few years what this dude did was basically break into .gov computers looking for UFO related material.

Probably the last case of recreational hacking I’ve heard about.

So his case is obviously going to be a classical “Strike one to educate one hundred” kind of message to every hacker attacking american computer systems: we can reach you everywhere you live and have you extradited to our country where we will sentence you to life in prison.

Unless you are a multi millionaire cyber criminal living in Russia or a chinese spy, of course.

FBI and Mcafee are trying to do something, do they will ever succeed?

I don’t think so, it’s a political issue as russia is not going to extradite any cybercriminal and is not going to provide strong international cooperations.

Always remember that in Russia Business Network has been strongly suspected to had done cooperations with Russian government that leveraged in different occasion their power and skills.

Are russian politicians more interested to protect their cyber-warriors skills and activities or to provide international cooperation?

Quite easy to answer…

By tinkering with this code, “a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data,”

So fun, as the Baseband Processor interface of iPhone is precisely the same of Google android and all Windows Mobile powered devices:

Basically the operating system use AT commands (do you remember old hayes modem commands?) with additional parameters documented and standardized by 3GPP that let more deep (but not that much deep) interaction with the mobile networks.

Please note that those AT commands are standard and widely available on all phones and are the interface to the Baseband Processor.

On iPhone that’s the list of commands that an from apple point of view could let “a international hacker to crash the tower software” :

Undocumented commands on iPhone

Damn, those European anarchist of Nokia are providing publicly also their AT command sets, and are AVAILABLE TO ANYONE:

Nokia AT Commands

Oh jesus! Also the terrorist oriented Microsoft corporation let third party to use AT commands:

Windows Mobile AT Commands

It’s absolutely unacceptable that also RIM, canadian funky against USA, provide access to AT commands:

Blackberry AT commands

And it’s unbelivable to see that Google Android also document how the system speak to the Baseband Processor and find on forums that it’s ease to access it:

Google Android Basedband Processor

Not to speak to ALL other mobile manufactuer that use the very same approach and let any party to speak via AT commands to the baseband processor of the phone.

Is the baseband processor of iphone buggy and the AT&T tower software buggy so that it’s dangerous to let the user make experiment with it?

Probably yes, and so those are only excuse because the software involved are not robust enough.

Apple, be careful, you have the trust of your users because you are apple you always have done things for the user advantages.

Users does like telephone companies that are huge lobbies that try to restrict and control users as much as possible.

If you, Apple, start behaving like a phone company users will not trust you anymore.

Be careful with FUD statements.