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

1711, 2021

DeepSec 2021 Talk: Analyzing Radicalization on the Internet – Method and Results of the COMRAD-Project – Dr. Andreas Enzminger & Dr. Jürgen Grimm

Sanna/ November 17, 2021/ Conference, Internet

Incitement, radicalization, and terror are the buzzwords that currently concern us the most. Right-wing and left-wing extremist groups or religious fundamentalists act as fire accelerators for extremist tendencies, even leading to the use of political violence. In this way, they can also endanger the value-based foundations of democracy in the medium and long term. Although much discussed, the role of the media, especially social media, in radicalization within society remains conceptually and empirically unclear. While there are several case analyses based on violent events, systematic studies have yet to be conducted. To fill this gap, the COMRAD project is dedicated to researching radicalization tendencies in cyberspace, focusing on psychosocial, ideological, and communicative conditioning factors. The focus is on the “open space” of politically left-wing, right-wing, or Islamic Facebook groups, in which recruitment strategies and

1705, 2021

Murder Board Blog Series: Chapter 4 – Trojan Horses or: State Hacking

Sanna/ May 17, 2021/ Internet, Security, Stories

Feeding Pigeons in the Park—Espionage Knowledge is power. Knowing nothing makes one envious when looking at the model of modern information societies. The natural application of networks that transport information is espionage. So the Internet early made acquaintance with it. The aspect of smuggling messages in and out of an area is obvious. It also involves breaking through security measures to gain access to protected information. Whereby large parts of our own information are much less protected than we would like or even be aware of. The e-mails mentioned above are always in plain text and therefore are visible to everyone. An unknown number of third parties read them on the way from sender to recipient and assess this information. And all the information we have in accounts on US platforms (photos, more or

0705, 2021

Murder Board Blog Series: Chapter 3 – Serial Hackers: Organized Crime or Grand Theft Data

Sanna/ May 7, 2021/ Internet, Security, Stories

Motivations and Motifs of the “Cosa Data” Elevate data to a valuable commodity and it gets automatically traded, hoarded, stolen and counterfeited. We can use digital processes both legally and illegally, just like the economy in the physical world. However, cyber crime is about much more than data. Accounts with certain privileges also represent value because they act as a multiplier. For example, a simple e-mail account with stored contacts (address book or even the contact data in existing e-mails). This has several properties at once: Identity, trust and an archive of messages. The archive can be searched directly for valuable data. The identity can be used for fraud with the help of the trust of the contacts to get further access to more accounts and data. Motivation is—on balance—always something like a benefit

2304, 2021

Murder Board Blog Series: Chapter 1 – Traces

Sanna/ April 23, 2021/ Stories

The Time Factor Traces are the “metadata” of an act, a course of action, a communication or even a presence or having been there. They show us that something happened, but often also how something happened. We consider traces always in retrospect, because they have to be there first in order to be considered. The time interval between the emergence of traces and their observation can vary. In 2017, for example, researchers investigated how Ötzi, a mummy from the ice of the Ötztal Alps, came to his death about 5,300 years ago and thus solved a murder with a slight time delay. But some traces also disappear. Not only the well-known traces in the sand … Also we can’t detect e.g. knockout drops in the victim’s blood already 24 hours after they drank them.

0911, 2020

A Story of Crypto Wars, the Growth on the Internet, and possible future Regulations

René Pfeiffer/ November 9, 2020/ Discussion, High Entropy

The discussion about how to tackle end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and how to reconcile it with surveillance is almost 30 years old. The very first Crypto War was sparked by the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act of 1991 (no, there is no mention of cryptography in it, because it was the first draft of a series of legislative texts dealing with a reform of the US justice system; have a look at the author of the act). In the following years things like strong cryptography, export bans on mathematics, or the creation of Phil Zimmerman’s Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) were a follow-up. Even the proposal of having the Clipper chip present in telecommunication devices and the concept of key escrow was discussed in the wake of the reform. Sometimes laws have to grow with the technology. All

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,

0104, 2019

Network Security right from the Beginning – Introducing DHCP-over-TLS (DoT)

René Pfeiffer/ April 1, 2019/ High Entropy

Every security researcher knows: If you want to secure a system, do it as early as possible. This is why Trusted Computing, Secure Boot, Trusted Execution Technology, and many more technologies were invented – to get the operating system safely off the ground right at boot time. After the booting process additional components have to be initialised. Dependencies are common in this stage. The second most important resource next to the local machine is the network. Most modern programming languages highly rely on network connection to get any work done. Local storage and memory is merely a big cache for temporary data to them. So how do you create a trusted boot process beyond the initial network configuration? The answer is easy. You just combine two highly mature and reliable protocols – Dynamic Host

1107, 2018

Infrastructure Update – Privacy Shield, Call for Papers, DNSSEC, ROOTS, and Humidity

René Pfeiffer/ July 11, 2018/ Administrivia, High Entropy

Our blog has been a bit silent in the past weeks, because we had to move some stuff around and rearrange our infrastructure. The old office had a problem with too much water. Leaking is for whistleblowers, not water pipes. Rain is fine if the water can get to the drains. If you take a look at the photograph, imagine the scene with Summer temperatures and a high dose of humidity. Moving infrastructure around is a lot more fun when having APIs, lots of bandwidth, and server minions to take care of the storage. This wasn’t the case with our office infrastructure in meatspace. So we did a bit of a workout. It’s amazing what ancient hardware you can find when sorting through real storage space. Remember AUI Ethernet connectors with matching network interface

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.

2601, 2018

Secret Router Security Discussion in Germany

René Pfeiffer/ January 26, 2018/ Internet, Security

Routers are the main component when it comes to connect sites, homes, and businesses. They often „just“ take care of the access to the Internet. The firewall comes after this access device. The German Telekom suffered an attack on their routers on 2016. The German Federal Office for Information Security now tries to create a policy for securing these critical systems. In theory this should add a set of documents on how to securely operate a router for the last mile access. Information security basically runs on checklists and policies. The trouble starts with the firmware. In Germany these is a discussion about using alternative devices as access components, enabling customers and organisations to use products of their own choice. Since firmware is the worst code on this planet, changing models and code is

2601, 2017

The Sound of „Cyber“ of Zero Days in the Wild – don’t forget the Facts

René Pfeiffer/ January 26, 2017/ Discussion, High Entropy

The information security world is full of buzzwords. This fact is partly due to the relationship with information technology. No trend goes without the right amount of acronyms and leetspeaktechnobabble. For many decades this was not a problem. A while ago the Internet entered mainstream. Everyone is online. The digital world is highly connected. Terms such as cyber, exploit, (D)DoS, or encryption are used freely in news items. Unfortunately they get mixed up with words from earlier decades leading to cyber war(fare), crypto ransom(ware), dual use, or digital assets. Some phrases are here to stay. So let’s talk about the infamous cyber again. In case you have not seen Zero Days by Alex Gibney, then go and watch it. It is a comprehensive documentary about the Stuxnet malware and elements of modern warfare (i.e.

1910, 2016

DeepSec 2016 Talk: TLS 1.3 – Lessons Learned from Implementing and Deploying the Latest Protocol – Nick Sullivan

Sanna/ October 19, 2016/ Conference, Development, Internet, Security

Version 1.3 is the latest Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, which allows client/server applications to communicate over the Internet in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery. TLS is the S in HTTPS. TLS was last changed in 2008, and a lot of progress has been made since then. CloudFlare will be the first company to deploy this on a wide scale. In his talk Nick Sullivan will be able to discuss the insights his team gained while implementing and deploying this protocol. Nick will explore differences between TLS 1.3 and previous versions in detail, focusing on the security improvements of the new protocol as well as some of the challenges his team faces around securely implementing new features such as 0-RTT resumption. He’ll also demonstrate an attack on the way some

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