[GPSCC-chat] Heartbleed is real. Do something real.

Sat Apr 12 12:58:59 PDT 2014

Hi, Cameron:

       Thanks very much for all you've written on this.

       Do you think the Wikipedia article on "Heartbleed" could be 
improved, e.g., by adding a section on "Gravity" (or some similar 
title), explaining what you just said?  I can help you with 
implementation if you don't feel comfortable with the Mediawiki markup 
language and the Wikipedia culture, I can help with that. Additions 
without appropriate citations may be quickly reverted, but balanced 
comments with reasonable citations will likely be retained.  I think 
it's worth doing, because (as I previously noted) this "Heartbleed" 
article received almost 47,000 views on April 11 (UTC), and over 39,000 
on the three previous days combined.

       Example:  17:12 today (5:12 PM, UTC), an anonymous user added a 
comment that, "It is believed that Heartbleed originates from the same 
organisation as stuxnet and duqu."  This comment included a reference to 
an article that mentioned neither stuxnet nor duqu.  It was undone 49 
minutes later.  The article also includes comments that, "According to 
two insider sources speaking to Bloomberg.com, the United States 
National Security Agency was aware of the flaw since shortly after its 
introduction, but chose to keep it secret, instead of reporting it, in 
order to exploit it for their own purposes."  These comments cite 3 
sources and are likely to remain in the article unless none of the 3 
actually mention the NSA.

       Best Wishes,
       Spencer

On 4/12/2014 11:10 AM, Cameron L. Spitzer wrote:
>
> >Alarmists said we should change all our passwords.  I think that's 
> overkill.
>
> I disagree.
> Bruce Schneier is no "alarmist."  He's the author of the standard 
> textbook Applied Cryptography, and a member of the Electronic Frontier 
> Foundation's advisory board.  And he's the best tech writer to general 
> audiences since Carl Sagan.  If you're having trouble with rational 
> risk assessment (a widespread problem among activists), you should 
> read his book /Beyond Fear/ 
> <https://www.schneier.com/book-beyondfear.html>.
>
> This is the worst Internet security problem due to a single 
> programming error that I can remember, ever, because of the 
> circumstances of its deployment and the nature of the exploit.
> When a vulnerability like this one is discovered, you /must/ assume 
> the bad guys have had the use of it since it was deployed.
> It allows not just stealing your password, but stealing the secrets 
> that would make it impossible for your browser to detect an impostor 
> HTTPS site.
> And in the standard deployment, exploiting the bug leaves no trace.
> In this case, the window was wide open for roughly two years. Your 
> passwords have /probably/ been stolen from affected sites.
> Whether you have been managing them well is irrelevant.  Take all the 
> needless risks you like, but don't lead others to take risks by 
> denying them.
>
> Throwaway passwords used only for commenting on newspaper articles 
> (etc) need not be replaced, unless they share recovery secrets with 
> more sensitive accounts.  But /anything/ useful for identity theft 
> poses a risk.
> For example, the attacker might use your account at some ancestry site 
> to discover some non-secret "secret" (e.g., street you lived on as a 
> child, mother's maiden name) to accomplish a password reset on your 
> bank site.  (Next time, /lie/ about your mother's maiden name, and 
> keep the lie someplace safe.) Identity thieves work on thousands of 
> identities at a time, filling in a jigsaw puzzle on each potential 
> victim.  They use efficient, automated, mass production techniques.  
> They rattle /every/ doorknob.  You never know which pieces they 
> already have or still need.
>
> I've been following my employer's well organized response to this 
> problem.  One takeaway is our local experts are not at all concerned 
> about Secure Shell V2.  A long obsolete implementation used SSL, but 
> the one we've been using doesn't.  I had been mistaken about that.  
> They're also pretty confident about password managers that do client 
> side encryption.  E.g., LastPass <https://lastpass.com/> and Kwallet 
> <http://userbase.kde.org/KDE_Wallet_Manager>. These tools make it 
> practical to maintain distinct, strong passwords for each web site and 
> hosted application, so you can stop using "log in with Facebook" type 
> shortcuts.  Of course, LastPass on an unmaintained Windows XP host is 
> only as secure as that host.  If it's full of memory-scraping malware, 
> you've got a local version of Heartbleed.
>
> Rational risk assessment means ignoring irrelevant factors. Mass 
> production identity thieves don't care about your politics.  
> (Spearfishers do.  They use everything they know about you to compile 
> a word list for guessing password and recovery secrets.)  They don't 
> care how paranoid you are about mass surveillance.
>
> Forward this message as you see fit.
> -/Cameron/
>
>
>
> On 04/11/2014 09:33 PM, Spencer Graves wrote:
>> Hi, Cameron, et al.:
>>
>>
>>       A discussion of how to deal with problems like Heartbleed is 
>> now available on Wikiversity, "Managing risk from cyber attacks".
>>
>>
>>       Please revise this as you see fit or send suggestions to me.  
>> Cameron has done a great service in providing his expertise on this 
>> list.  The Wikipedia article on Heartbleed received almost 47,000 
>> views on April 11 (UTC), and over 39,000 on the three previous days 
>> combined.  If this Wikiversity article gets a small portion of that 
>> number of views, it will provide a great service humanity.
>>
>>
>>       Creating that article helped me think through what seemed like 
>> a sensible reaction.  Alarmists said we should change all our 
>> passwords.  I think that's overkill.  Even creating a simple list of 
>> all the accounts and passwords I've created over the years was more 
>> work than I felt justified. And creating such a list would miss the 
>> point.  We need to worry about the financial institutions that manage 
>> savings. If cyber thieves drain those accounts, it could create big 
>> problems for us.  For more, see the Wikiversity article 
>> (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Managing_risk_from_cyber_attacks).
>>
>>
>>       Thanks again, Cameron -- and thanks to John and Drew for their 
>> additional comments.
>>
>>
>>       Spencer
>>
>>
>> On 4/11/2014 3:29 PM, John Thielking wrote:
>>> Sorry to keep dragging this out, but I finally decided to search the 
>>> RT.com web site using the search term "computer hardware" to see if 
>>> I could find an article or two relating to my previous statement 
>>> that RT.com broadcast the claim that computer hardware in general 
>>> has been compromised by the NSA. I did find the following article at
>>>
>>> http://rt.com/op-edge/nsa-hacking-individual-computers-008/
>>>
>>>
>>> that states that some of the material provided by Snowden does in 
>>> fact indicate that some people's computers are implanted with 
>>> special chips to aid the NSA in monitoring them. This may not be 
>>> widespread just yet, but it does fit with previously broadcast info 
>>> from RT.com that was saying that certain people's laptops that have 
>>> been ordered online are sometimes transhipped to special NSA 
>>> facilities where they have their hardware modified to contain 
>>> implanted viruses or malware (in the CMOS perhaps?).  Of course the 
>>> article also says that the NSA may choose to bug all computers sold 
>>> in a specific city, if that city is a region of interest for the 
>>> NSA. I'll bet that Eugene, Oregon (Berkeley North) could be one of 
>>> those places. And who knows, they might put radio bugs in all the 
>>> watches sold there too.
>>>   More to think about I guess.
>>>
>>> A more speculative opinion piece is located here:
>>>
>>> http://rt.com/op-edge/nsa-spying-future-total-952/
>>>
>>>
>>> and a link to the Derspiegal article that this stuff is based on is 
>>> contained here:
>>>
>>> http://rt.com/op-edge/annie-machon-nsa-spying-925/ 
>>> <http://rt.com/op-edge/nsa-spying-future-total-952/>
>>>
>>>
>>> Any further thoughts?
>>>
>>> John Thielking
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Apr 11, 2014 at 2:19 PM, John Thielking 
>>> <peacemovies at gmail.com <mailto:peacemovies at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     Another more specific question for you Cameron:
>>>
>>>     Is the patch for the Heartbleed bug supported for systems
>>>     running Windows XP, which was just barely out of date as of the
>>>     time of broad announcement of the Heartbleed bug, or do the
>>>     people currently running Windows XP also have to upgrade their
>>>     OS?  I know my home computer only has 500 MB of memory so I
>>>     can't just do an easy upgrade to Win 7.  I hope not too many POS
>>>     terminals are also in the same boat. They should upgrade to a
>>>     new OS anyway, but this problem may just compound the problem
>>>     presented by the Heartbleed bug itself.
>>>
>>>     John Thielking
>>>
> ...
>
>
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-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Technology Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567
web:  www.structuremonitoring.com

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