Camouflage

Sechuran Fox / Mike Weedon / Wikimedia / CC-BY-SA 3.0
One fine morning, the King summoned Gerrard, Captain of the Guard, to attend to him at Council.

Gerrard bowed as he approached his monarch. “You asked for me, Sire?”

“Gerrard, my good man, I keep hearing stories about a band of smugglers led by a man who calls himself the Fox. I want to know what your men are doing about it.”

“Sire—we have guard posts and roving patrols, and sometimes we catch a smuggler or two, but they move quietly through the woods and brush, wearing camouflage, and they can choose any direction of approach, whereas we have to stretch our forces along the entire border.”

“Very well, Gerrard. I hereby ban the manufacture, sale and use of camouflage clothing except for the needs of the Royal Guard. You are dismissed.”

Three months later, the King summoned Gerrard again.

“I hear that the smugglers are still operating, despite the measures I ordered. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Banning camouflage clothing cut off the smugglers’ supply, but did not prevent them from using what they already had. We made more arrests when they ran out, but then they started making their own out of green, gray and black fabric, and we’re back to square one.”

“Very well. Henceforth, the manufacture and sale of green, gray or black fabric or clothing shall be illegal, except for the needs of the Royal Guard. Get to it, Gerrard.”

Some months later, Gerrard was once again summoned to discuss the matter of the Fox.

“I am very displeased, Gerrard. I would have thought your men would have little trouble catching smugglers now that they can no longer buy or make camouflage clothing. And I have been told that the villagers are restless and discontent.”

“Sire, the smugglers are tying grass, moss and branches to their clothes, and blending in better than ever before! And the villagers are complaining that the ban on camouflage and dark clothing is making it difficult for them to hunt—we forbade them to use vegetation like the smugglers do.”

“There is only one solution, then. Burn down the forests and the brush. Let us see the Fox try to sneak through a charred wasteland!”

“But, Sire—”

“Do not question my orders, Gerrard. Burn it all down.”

“Very well, Sire.”

OpenSSH, PAM and user names

FreeBSD just published a security advisory for, amongst other issues, a piece of code in OpenSSH’s PAM integration which could allow an attacker to use one user’s credentials to impersonate another (CVE 2015-6563, original patch). I would like to clarify two things, one that is already mentioned in the advisory and one that isn’t.

The first is that in order to exploit this, the attacker must not only have valid credentials but also first compromise the unprivileged pre-authentication child process through a bug in OpenSSH itself or in a PAM service module.

The second is that this behavior, which is universally referred to in advisories and the trade press as a bug or flaw, is intentional and required by the PAM spec (such as it is). There are multiple legitimate use cases for this, such as:

  • Letting PAM, rather than the application, prompt for a user name; the spec allows passing NULL instead of a user name to pam_start(3), in which case it is the service module’s responsibility (in pam_sm_authenticate(3)) to prompt for a user name using pam_get_user(3). Note that OpenSSH does not support this.

  • Mapping multiple users with different identities and credentials in the authentication backend to a single “template” user when the application they need to access does not need to distinguish between them, or when this determination is made through other means (e.g. environment variable, which service modules are allowed to set).

  • Mapping Windows user names (which can contain spaces and non-ASCII characters that would trip up most Unix applications) to Unix user names.

That being said, I do not object to the patch, only to its characterization. Regarding the first issue, it is absolutely correct to consider the unprivileged child as possibly hostile; this is, after all, the entire point of privilege separation. Regarding the second issue, there are other (and probably better) ways to achieve the same result—performing the translation in the identity service, i.e. nsswitch, comes to mind—and the percentage of users affected by the change lies somewhere between zero and negligible.

One could argue that instead of silently ignoring the user name set by PAM, OpenSSH should compare it to the original user name and either emit a warning or drop the connection if it does not match, but that is a design choice which is entirely up to the OpenSSH developers.

Update 2015-08-27 NIST rates exploitability as “medium” rather than “low” because an attacker who is able to impersonate the UID used by the unprivileged child can use a debugger or other similar method to modify the username that the child passes back to the parent. In other words, an attacker can leverage elevated privileges into other elevated privileges. I disagree with the rating, but have never had any luck getting NIST to correct even blatantly false information in the past.

SSLv3

UPDATE 2014-10-14 23:40 UTC The details have been published: meet the SSL POODLE attack.

UPDATE 2014-10-15 11:15 UTC Simpler server test method, corrected info about browsers

UPDATE 2014-10-15 16:00 UTC More information about client testing

El Reg posted an article earlier today about a purported flaw in SSL 3.0 which may or may not be real, but it’s been a bad year for SSL, we’re all on edge, and we’d rather be safe than sorry. So let’s take it at face value and see what we can do to protect ourselves. If nothing else, it will force us to inspect our systems and make conscious decisions about their configuration instead of trusting the default settings. What can we do?

The answer is simple: there is no reason to support SSL 3.0 these days. TLS 1.0 is fifteen years old and supported by every browser that matters and over 99% of websites. TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 are eight and six years old, respectively, and are supported by the latest versions of all major browsers (except for Safari on Mac OS X 10.8 or older), but are not as widely supported on the server side. So let’s disable SSL 2.0 and 3.0 and make sure that TLS 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 are enabled.

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DNS improvements in FreeBSD 11

Erwin Lansing just posted a summary of the DNS session at the FreeBSD DevSummit that was held in conjunction with BSDCan 2014 in May. It gives a good overview of the current state of affairs, including known bugs and plans for the future.

I’ve been working on some of these issues recently (in between $dayjob and other projects). I fixed two issues in the last 48 hours, and am working on two more.

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Dark Patterns

The term dark pattern was coined (I believe) by Harry Brignull to describe practices in user interface design intended to make it easy for your users to accidentally select a more profitable (for you) option and hard for them to revert, cancel or unsubscribe.

This is not news. We all know how, for instance, low-cost airlines try to trick you into ordering travel insurance, or software installers try to trick you into installing browser toolbars. But it’s something we usually associate with slightly dodgy outfits like RyanAir or Oracle.

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