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Of course, CNN leaves out the fact that the NSA shares substantial blame for this by putting a back door into Dual_EC.
This is an incredibly poignant example of the inherent danger of any cryptographic back door. It's a real shame that the media is both too technically illiterate and too pro-government to explain that.
Can you explain how they are related?
My understanding of this is that malicious code was deliberately added to Juniper's software, not that it exploited some existing code that Juniper thought was safe. This could happen regardless of what kind of encryption is in use in the surrounding code/infrastructure.
If my understanding is correct, why is Dual_EC relevant?
edit: And a follow on question: If this back door only works by assuming Dual EC is backdoored, is that not incontrovertible proof that the NSA is behind the entire thing, which there is at least some doubt that they are? That, or someone else has found the hypothesized private key in Dual EC. Either scenario seems like far more significant news than this story already is.
Disclaimer: I am by no means a cryptography expert and my understanding of this is based on [1] and [2].
Basically, Juniper used Dual_EC, which they knew was backdoored. Because they knew it was backdoored, they replaced the NSA key with their own, which they thought made it "safe."
Now it turns out that a third actor might have somehow replaced the Juniper key with their own key.
The point is that by using a CSPRNG with a backdoor, even when they tried to close that backdoor, they still left a backdoor open. Dual_EC is relevant because if the USG had never promoted it there never would have been a backdoor to leave open. Another CSPRNG would have been harder to leave insecure.
> If this back door only works by assuming Dual EC is backdoored, is that not incontrovertible proof that the NSA is behind the entire thing, which there is at least some doubt that they are?
Not necessarily. As Juniper is supposedly not using the NSA codepoints, it could have been "any" actor which changed the back door, including but not only the NSA.
Personally, I don't think it is the NSA in this case. If it were, I don't think we'd be reading about it on CNN at all.
[1] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/12/19/juniper.html
[2] https://kb.juniper.net/InfoCenter/index?page=content&id=KB28...
I think it's less of an "NSA directly did this" and more of a "NSA invented cryptography that absolutely no one thought was a good idea."
The juicy bit, and the piece that really is obnoxiously bad, is that NIST, who decides cryptographic standards, contracted out to two agencies when they were looking at introducing new cryptography in 2006. Those two agencies? RSA and NSA. They paid both of these organizations for the privilege of getting insight.
NSA had been pushing for Dual_EC for a couple years at this point, and wanting people to take the bait, they secretly gave $10 million to RSA for them to start using it in some of their products and for them to tell NIST that they thought it was cryptographically sound. All completely behind the back of NIST and the public.
So NIST is consulting out with two of the biggest names in cryptography, one of which had been championing Dual_EC for years (NSA), and one of which started using it in their products (which are primarily sold to government agencies that MUST use NIST-approved crypto, and presumably stood to lose a lot of money by "betting" on Dual_EC).
NIST never saw it coming.
And that's the irony of the whole thing. NSA is supposed to make the US, especially the US government, more technologically secure... yet they directly undermined cryptography that was predominately used by government agencies. Meanwhile the rest of the tech world saw it for the bullshit it was. The only people who were hurt by it was our government.
Thomas Massie gave a great speech to congress about this earlier this year, and pushed through a vote that now prevents NIST from contracting out with NSA. I wish I could find it.
(Aside: Thomas Massie, a congressman from Kentucky, graduated from MIT with a BS in EE and a MS in ME, founded a successful tech startup, and now serves on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology. One of the few cases where I feel someone in our government is adequately educated in what they rule over.)
There are 2 separate, unrelated issues (but described in the same advisory from Juniper).
One is they found code that shouldn't be there, allowing remoe ssh login to attackers. The other is weaknesses in Dual_EC.
if not all the blame.
consider this is nsa backdoor 2.0 and they got caught. wouldn't their answer be exactly what they are saying now? confess nothing and use as a convenient excuse to get more funding and reason to deploy v3.0
Lazy reporting: "The U.S. officials said they are certain U.S. spy agencies themselves aren't behind the back door."
If you're not going to provide context or get a quote from a disinterested party, then just omit the US saying the US didn't do it.
It is guaranteed that they would say that regardless of the truth, so the quote source is irrelevant really.
Of course they said that...
This feels incredibly uncomfortable to say but in a decade or two it seem possible or maybe even likely that China, Russia and South Korea may have an edge in encryption technology and products by virtue of them actually being secure. I mean if they take cyberwar seriously, and think their economy has anything to do with national security, they'll pour energy into securing their businesses whereas the west does the opposite.
Lazy? Try spoon-fed. This whole piece stinks of astroturf.
They're always certain about who was not behind something. Those statements never have supporting evidence.
We clearly need to give up more privacy and add more fast-lane backdoors to protect against these attacks.
I know talking politics on this site is taboo, but this is a nice segue into a conversation about who is everyone voting for... There doesn't appear to be a serious contender on either side that isn't making ridiculous claims about the dangers of encryption.
The audacity of Hilary Clinton last night, admitting she doesn't know a whole lot about encryption, but thinks for some reason that the tech community is on her side, because... ISIS?
Is there anyone in tech that actually agrees with these people? I'm being serious, am I just shielded from that side of the conversation? Are there educated people, who understand encryption, that don't work for NSA, that think key escrow is a reasonable request?
It leads me to the conclusion that policymakers are that out of touch with the world.
Indeed! The best thing to do would to be to ban encryption all together! /s
Who are these "officials" and why are they anonymous here?
Anyway, what's most likely to have happened is that other nation-states discovered NSA's own backdoors and started using them. The NSA then freaked out and told Juniper it's ok to patch them now. The reason why I'm implying cooperation between Juniper and NSA is because Juniper keeps refusing to eliminate the well known Dual_EC backdoor from their systems and are giving stupid reasons for keeping it.
Could there be a legal case involved here? I mean if I as a customer paid for a door-lock which was marketed as "secure" and you knowingly shipped me a door-lock which can be subverted by tools some particular burglars are known to have access to? That sounds quite malicious to say the least.
Sure... "The U.S. officials said they are certain U.S. spy agencies themselves aren't behind the back door." because if they were they would immediately tell everyone. It's not like they have a political agenda to both deny involvement and blame foreign agencies... /s
Either way this will have a big economic impact for Juniper. In no way are they going to win the next big banking or government contracts.
> Either way this will have a big economic impact for Juniper. In no way are they going to win the next big banking or government contracts.
If I were in a three-letter position at any big company, I'd choose Juniper over Cisco gear now. Juniper has proven they do code audits and throw such stuff out if they find it. Cisco, not so much.
I like the reassurance of Juniper doing code audits. If they do them regularly, though, why did it take them over three years to find this "unauthorized code"?
> Note that a skilled attacker would likely remove these entries from the log file, thus effectively eliminating any reliable signature that the device had been compromised
Sending logs off as they're written to a centralized logging server or a time-series database would have been useful in this context.
> Sending logs off as they're written to a centralized logging server or a time-series database would have been useful in this context.
Schneier & Kelsey's paper Secure Audit Logs to Support Computer Forensics[1] seems relevant here. At the time I know that they wished to patent the work; does anyone know if a patent were granted, and if so when it expires?
[1] https://www.schneier.com/cryptography/paperfiles/paper-audit...
I would also assume you could do a blockchain-type log -- ie the hash of an entry includes the hash of the previous entry so that if one entry is removed, the whole thing is tamper-evident.
Of course, then you need to ensure the integrity of the latest hash (if you can change one log, you can change them all). If the centralized logging server(s) are protected with the same rooted ssh, then it's just an additional step for our sophisticated state-sponsored boogeyman.
Why would anyone choose to use Dual_EC even with their own keys unless they are completely ignorant or coerced? It is especially galling for people who sell supposedly secure products. I can't imagine that any competent CTO/CSO would sign off on such a stupid choice.
Does Juniper not have source control? Don't they know who inserted this code?
Lots of source control systems don't offer that level of verification. Even Git, with SHA-1 hashes everywhere, lets you claim to be anybody when you write a commit. The only thing you can verify the origin of in Git is the author of a tag signature, for tags that are signed with a PGP key.
One would hope. Yet, SCM security is so lax and such an afterthought that Wheeler had to write a whole piece on it:
http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/scm-security.html
After all that, only one OSS project responded with claims to meet many of the requirements. I figure the commercial situation isn't much better with most "benefits" existing on paper rather than with strong security.
To top it off, anyone defending against nation-states must remember they always attack what's below and around the software. Possessing 0-days in OS or management software should let them bypass build-system security to insert stuff in. I'd say OpenBSD, memory-safe implementation, and highly-assured guard for protocol-level at a minimum if better stuff wasn't available.
If you have access to the build server you can modify the code, after pulling from the repo.
Or, if you have access to the binary repo where the code is pushed by the build server after building (often just a file server and FTP) then you can place your own binary.
Of course it us possible to use crypto hashes throughout the process to prevent these kinds of hacks from working, but...
If you do that, then the security process itself is what hackers will attack.
To prevent installation of exploits you really need to pay serious attention to the whole release process and not assume that anything is simple or secure. Only the paranoid can succeed in security.
Might be the NSA, might be a foreign competitor to the NSA. In any case, don't do to others, what you wouldn't want done to you!
Right, that's the spy agency moto, isn't it?
One can start to question using proprietary security software and devices with closed source vs using opensource.
If its one device, it may be in others.
Open source is not a panacea. It doesn't matter if the code is perfect, if the algorithm it implements is flawed.
Can we have a discussion about not every nation state being NSA and what that means?
Juniper is providing crucial Radio-access and backhaul security features to mobile network vendors such as in Nokia / NSN equipment. would be interesting to understand how these are impacted.
http://www.lightreading.com/mobile/mobile-security/nsn-junip...
CNN is the People magazine of cable network news. I suppose this story is important because it's exposing this issue to the wider American audience, but anyone who is reading HN already knows about this issue.
I hope this may let them think more seriously about the potential security threat that a so-called "governamento backdoor" would pose.
> A senior administration official told CNN, "... The administration remains committed to enhancing our national cybersecurity by raising our cyber defenses"
I hope you can see my eyes because I'm rolling them as hard as I can.
This does raise the question of whether the US government is foolish enough to use insecure US made electronics. And I suppose answers it.
Oops, we didn't notice that China/Whoever was using our own back door for 3 years!
Clearly we need even MORE back doors! /s
Is that a big deal? after all, it's common knowledge that the US spy routinely on their allies [1,2]. Nobody really seemed to care at the time.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/08/nsa-tapped-ge... [2] https://wikileaks.org/nsa-france/
I think the undercurrent that in implied is that there are countries like China who don't play by the normal rules of international espionage. Since they are so tightly coupled to Chinese industry they abuse their resources and power to feed domestic industry. To most people this seems very scummy.
Are there examples the other way? Where the US stole secrets and then handed them off to domestic companies? Maybe in defense? but otherwise?
You can't consistently maintain that real or alleged spying by NSA is a big bad deal, but the same thing happening to the US isn't a big bad deal, unless you just make a special exception for the sake of anti-Americanism.
Well, it is an American news outlet. I'm pretty sure media outlets in other countries report stuff from that country's point of view...
Occam's Razor would say that the code was modified by a disgruntled employee just before leaving, no? Why is the jump being made to foreign governments?
Occam's Razor is heavily abused. It has a specific definition, and is typically used for scientific and metaphysical hypothesis [1], not human behavior, which is not a universal law. It is used as "a heuristic technique" and "is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result." Occam's Razor says nothing about what the actual truth is - it's just a tool use when choosing hypotheses to pursue.
Even if we were to contort Occam's Razor into this use-case, there is countless evidence for state actors adding or requesting back doors to major routing hardware.
Bypassing VPN encryption is only broadly useful if you can get access to packets in transit. Nation-state agencies are the only actors that probably already have such wiretaps. (As discussed here: https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/12/19/juniper.html)