1706, 2024

Online Security is threatened by Politics in the EU

René Pfeiffer/ June 17, 2024/ Communication, Security

A vote for the EU Chat Control disaster is scheduled again. If the vote passes, then this chat control system will destroy the security of communication platforms for all Internet users, organisation, and companies. Chat control basically disables end-to-end-encryption (E2EE). The proposals have been widely discussed, but it seems that the Belgian presidency decided to rush the topic right before the Summer break. Secure communications platforms such as Signal and Threema warned lawmakers. EuroISPA has published a statement of protest as well. E2EE is a cornerstone of information security. The chat control regulation would only affect citizens and businesses. Criminals will always have a way around this. The proposed mass surveillance is a security risk by itself. Nation state conducting espionage will welcome the weakening of the security posture and use it against the

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1611, 2021

DeepSec2021 Talk: QKD-based Security for 5G and Next Generation Networks – Sergiy Gnatyuk, PhD. DSc.

Sanna/ November 16, 2021/ Conference, Security

Modern information and communication technologies (ICT) implementation in all spheres of human activity, as well as the increasing number and power of cyber-attacks on them make the cyber security of the developed digital state vulnerable and weak. Cyber-attacks become targeted (so-called APT-attacks) and attackers carefully prepare them, analyzing the identified vulnerabilities and all possible ways of attack. The security and defense capabilities of the state are considered in an additional fifth domain titled cyberspace (after land, air, water and space). World`s leading states develop strategies to protect cyberspace, create cyber troops, develop and test cyber weapons. A significant number of cyber-attacks today are aimed at critical infrastructures and government organizations. Traditional security methods (in particular, cryptographic algorithms) do not fully protect against all currently known attacks, they are potentially vulnerable to attacks based on

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2709, 2019

DeepSec 2019 Workshop: Attacks on the Diffie-Hellman Protocol – Denis Kolegov & Innokentii Sennovskii

Sanna/ September 27, 2019/ Conference, Security

This workshop is a hands-on task-based study of the Diffie-Hellman protocol and its modern extensions focusing on vulnerabilities and attacks. It is not a full day training, but it will be held during the conference. Everyone interested in applied cryptography and attacks connected to this topics should attend. Seats are limited! Some of the topics that will be highlighted: Diffie-Hellman key exchange Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman Variants of Diffie-Hellman protocol: Ephemeral, static, anonymous, authenticated Diffie-Hellman X3DH, Noise and SIGMA protocols Forward secrecy and post-compromise security Small-subgroup attack Pollard’s rho and lambda algorithms Invalid curve attack Curve twist attack Protocol attacks (MitM, replay, KCI, UKS) Labs: Small subgroup attack against multiplicative group DH Invalid curve attack against ECDH Twist attack KCI attack Key Takeaways Learn about Diffie-Hellman key exchange Learn about applying Diffie-Hellman in modern protocols Hands-on

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2505, 2019

Use Handshake Data to create TLS Fingerprints

René Pfeiffer/ May 25, 2019/ Discussion, Security

While the whole world busily works on the next round of the Crypto Wars, the smart people work on actual information security. TLS has always been in the focus of inspection. Using on-the-fly generated certificates to look inside is a features of many gadgets and filter applications. Peeking at the data is moot if you control either the server or the client. If you have to break TLS on purpose (hopefully) inside your own network, you probably have to deal with software or system you cannot control. In this case TLS is the least of your security problems. Dealing with a lot of network traffic often uses a metadata approach in order not to process gigantic amounts of data. Enter TLS fingerprinting. The TLS handshake contains a lot of parameters such as version numbers,

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0801, 2019

Translated Article: Campaign of the Spy Alliance “Five Eyes” against WhatsApp and Co

Sanna/ January 8, 2019/ Discussion, High Entropy, Security

Feldzug der Spionageallianz „Five Eyes“ gegen WhatsApp und Co for fm4 by Erich Moechel The current scattered news and reports on “encryption” belong together. The military secret services of the “Five Eyes” conduct a global campaign; in Australia they’ve already reached their first milestone. Every two years, around the same time, a campaign of the espionage alliance “Five Eyes” against encryption programs takes place. Unlike in 2016, the new campaign has reached its first goal in a flash. In early December, a bill was passed in the Australian Parliament obliging Internet companies to break up encrypted communications. The providers of Whatsapp, Snapchat, and Co are hereby required to build surveillance interfaces into their apps to give hidden access to the Australian law enforcement. In a parliamentary coup – without discussion or amendments – the “Assistance

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2012, 2018

Encryption, Ghosts, Backdoors, Interception, and Information Security

René Pfeiffer/ December 20, 2018/ Discussion, High Entropy

While talking about mobile network security, we had a little chat about the things to come and to think about. Compromise of communication is a long-time favourite. Hats of all colours need to examine metadata and data of messages. Communication is still king when it comes to threat analysis and intrusion detection. That’s nothing new. So someone pointed toward a published article. Some of you may have read the article titled Principles for a More Informed Exceptional Access Debate written by GCHQ’s Ian Levy and Crispin Robinson. They describe GCHQs plan for getting into communication channels. Of course, “crypto for the masses” (yes, that’s crypto for cryptography, because you cannot pay your coffee with it) or “commodity, end-to-end encrypted services” are also mentioned. They explicitly claim that the goal is not to weaken encryption

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0611, 2018

Binary Blob Apocalypse – Firmware + Cryptography = less Security

René Pfeiffer/ November 6, 2018/ High Entropy, Security

A couple of years ago we had a chat with one of our sponsors, Attingo. They are specialised in data recovery from all kinds of media and in all kinds of conditions. Since vendors keep secrets from the rest of the world, the data rescuers do a lot of reverse engineering in order to decode the mysteries of firmware blobs. Guess what they recommend: Don’t trust important tasks to firmware code! It’s the worst software written on this planet. If software gets something wrong, firmware is the best candidate for big SNAFUs. Solid state disks (SSDs) have recently joined the gallery of failures. Carlo Meijer and Bernard van Gastel have published an article titled Self-encrypting deception: weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives (SSDs). They analysed the implementation of hardware full-disk encryption of

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1109, 2018

Whatever happened to CipherSaber?

René Pfeiffer/ September 11, 2018/ High Entropy

Some of you still know how a modem sounds. Back in the days of 14400 baud strong encryption was rare. Compression was king. Every bit counted. And you had to protect yourself. This is where CipherSaber comes into play. Given the exclusive use of strong cryptographic algorithms by government authorities, the CipherSaber algorithm was meant to be easy enough to be memorised, and yet strong enough to protect messages from being intercepted in clear. It is based on the RC4 algorithm. According to the designer CipherSaber can be implemented in a few lines of code. Basically you have crypto to go which cannot be erased from the minds of the public, because it is readily available. That’s where the name came from. It is modelled after the light sabers found in the Star Wars

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0609, 2018

DeepSec 2018 Talk: Cracking HiTag2 Crypto – Weaponising Academic Attacks for Breaking and Entering – Kevin Sheldrake

Sanna/ September 6, 2018/ Conference, Security

HiTag2 is an Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology operating at 125KHz.  It is distinguished from many others in the same field by its use of 2-way communications for authentication and its use of encryption to protect the data transmissions – the majority of RFID technologies at 125KHz feature no authentication or encryption at all.  As a result it has been widely used to provide secure building access and has also been used as the technology that implements car immobilisers. In 2012, academic researchers Roel Verdult, Flavio D. Garcia and Josep Balasch published the seminal paper, ‘Gone in 360 Seconds: Hijacking with Hitag2’ that presented three attacks on the encryption system used in HiTag2; in 2016 Garcia et al presented a further attack in ‘Lock It and Still Lose It’.  They implemented their attacks on the Proxmark 3 device

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2303, 2018

Upgrade to HTTP2

René Pfeiffer/ March 23, 2018/ Administrivia

We are busy with a little housekeeping. Among other things we have changed the way you can access our blog. It is now using HTTP2. We also added encryption and redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS. Search engines should update their caches as soon as they refresh the pages. Hopefully this does not break anything. If so, please let us know. The DeepSec blog has been long using HTTP only. This was due to infrastructure constraints. Since future versions of web browsers will give you a warning when surfing to a HTTP site, we decided to change the blog configuration. You might want to do the same before June 2018. Otherwise you might get some enquiries about the security warning. Next stop: TLS 1.3.

3010, 2017

The only responsible Encryption is End-to-End Encryption

René Pfeiffer/ October 30, 2017/ High Entropy, Security

Last week the Privacy Week 2017 took place. Seven days full of workshops and presentations about privacy. This also included some security content as well. We provided some background information about the Internet of Things, data everyone of us leaks, and the assessment of backdoors in cryptography and operating systems. It’s amazing to see for how long the Crypto Wars have been raging. The call for backdoors and structural weaknesses in encryption was never silenced. Occasionally the emperor gets new clothes, but this doesn’t change the fact that some groups wish to destroy crypto for all of us. The next battle is fought under the disguise of responsible encryption. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein invented this phrase to come up with a new marketing strategy for backdoors. Once you have backdoors in any

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2510, 2017

DeepSec 2017 Talk: BitCracker – BitLocker Meets GPUs – Elena Agostini

Sanna/ October 25, 2017/ Conference

Encryption and ways to break it go hand in hand. When it comes to the digital world, the method of rapidly using different keys may lead to success, provided you have sufficient computing power. The graphics processing units (GPUs) have come a long way from just preparing the bits to be sent to the display device. Nowadays GPUs are used for a lot of computational expensive tasks. At DeepSec 2017 you will hear about keys, encryption, and storage encryption – all with the use of GPUs, but forthe purpose of cracking keys. BitLocker (formerly BitLocker Drive Encryption) is a full-disk encryption feature available in recent Windows OS (Vista, 7, 8.1 and 10). It is designed to protect data by providing encryption for several types of memory units like internal hard disks or external removable

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2505, 2017

The Future of Entangled Security States – Quantum Computing Conference in Berlin

René Pfeiffer/ May 25, 2017/ Conference, Security

Quantum computing is a fashionable term these days. Some IT news articles are talking about post-quantum cryptography, qbits, and more quantum stuff. If you don’t know how the terms relate to each other, what entangled states in quantum physics are, and what everything has to do with computing, then you will have a hard time figuring out what it means for you and your infrastructure. The relationship to cryptography is yet another matter best explored after you know the basics. Using quantum effects in computing and cryptography is already done. The best example are some hardware random generators which use properties of, well, the hardware to harvest entropy. And then there is quantum key distribution (QKD). It is a method to ensure secure communication between two or more nodes. Vienna even had a working

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2504, 2017

Applied Crypto Hardening Project is looking for Help

René Pfeiffer/ April 25, 2017/ High Entropy, Internet

Hopefully many of you know the Applied Crypto Hardening (ACH) project, also known as BetterCrypto.org. The project was announced at DeepSec 2013. The idea was (and is) to compile hands-on advice for system administrators, dev ops, developers, and others when it comes to selecting the right crypto configuration for an application. The BetterCrypto.org document covers far more protocols than HTTPS. OpenSSH, OpenVPN, IPsec, and more topics are described in the PDF guide. The project is run by volunteers. This is where you come in. The ACH project needs more volunteers to keep going. New GNU/Linux distributions are around the corner (the apt store never sleeps). Some vendors really do upgrade their code base. Libraries change and bleed less. Algorithms get tested, improved, and re-evaluated. The field of cryptography is moving forward, as it should.

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2101, 2017

Putting the Context into the Crypto of Secure Messengers

René Pfeiffer/ January 21, 2017/ Communication, Discussion, Internet

Every once in a while the world of encrypted/secure/authenticated messaging hits the wall of usability. In the case for email Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is an ancient piece of software. These days we have modern tools such as GnuPG, but the concept of creating keys, verifying identities (i.e. determining who is to trust), synchronising trust/keys with communication partners, and handling the software in case something goes wrong is quite a challenge. Plus things might change. People revoke their keys, devices get lost, data gets deleted, people create new keys or even (digital) identities, or do lots of things that is either anticipated by the software developers or not. Communication is not static. There are moving parts involved, especially the communication partners might move a lot. So crypto is hard, we know this. Discussing secure

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