Tories Want To Take Away Your Human Rights

 Politics  No Responses »
Oct 032014
 

According to the Tory party conference, they are planning to “do something” about the European Court of Human Rights, and to stop the British government being overruled by the ECHR. Most of the time we hear about the work of the ECHR through ridiculous stories but the court deals with tens of thousands of cases a year. So most of the time we do not get to hear about it’s work. After all sensible decisions do not make good news stories.

Let’s look at the rights that the ECHR is there to protect :-

  1. respecting rights
  2. life
  3. torture
  4. servitude
  5. liberty and security
  6. fair trial
  7. retroactivity
  8. privacy
  9. conscience and religion
  10. expression
  11. association
  12. marriage
  13. effective remedy
  14. discrimination
  15. derogations
  16. aliens
  17. abuse of rights
  18. permitted restrictions

Which is a long list, and could do with some additional explanation, which can be found here.

The reason the Tories are giving for abolishing our human rights is that they don’t want interference from the European Union in their actions. Which when you come down to it is kind of worrying – our government finds our human rights and the organisation created after World War II to protect those rights “inconvenient”.

There are those who will ramble on about sovereign rights which are important, but not as important as human rights. People are more important than states.

The more the Tories want to evade the oversight of the ECHR, the more I want the ECHR to be keeping an eye on the behaviour of “our” government. The judges of the ECHR may be unelected but they’re more trustworthy than a bunch of corrupt politicians who find our human rights inconvenient.

On Being A Shellshock Rider

 Computing, Security  2 Responses »
Sep 262014
 

(With apologies to John Brunner for stealing and mangling the title of one his books which happens to be a considerably appropriate choice)

What?

The Shellshock vulnerability, where a 23-year old vulnerability in the bash Unix shell can sometimes be exploited by attackers to run their own code on a vulnerable server. So far this vulnerability has been found to be exploitable with certain popular services running on Unix-based systems (including Linux).

Why?

Because I happen to be one of those going around telling people to fix their servers. And because I needed a place to mouth off about some of the more idiotic reactions I have encountered.

How Bad Is It?

Well it’s unlikely that this will cause the collapse of human civilisation, and it’s probable that your fridge will continue to work.

It’s like being asked how long a piece of string is whilst you’re still hauling it in and have not found the other end yet. It could be a great deal worse than expected or a bit of a damp squib :-

  1. The exploits may be much harder to make use of than expected. An attacker needs to find the vulnerable scripts on the web servers out there, and unless a very common web applications is found to be vulnerable, this may not be that easy to find.
  2. There may be a lot more vulnerable devices out there than expected – all of the embedded devices that idiots are assuming are safe because they come with BusyBox could have bash installed as well because some developer found that their script worked with bash and not BusyBox.
  3. An attacker may accidentally release something like SQL Slammer and cause widespread disruption.

Ultimately we have to wait and see how bad it is likely to be. Peering in to a crystal ball is always dangerous but my best educated guess is that :-

  1. We won’t see an Internet melt-down.
  2. Some sites will be broken into and some of those will have data leaked. This will happen anytime between 23 years ago (yes it could have been exploited in the past) and 23 years from now.
  3. Some unexpected ways to exploit this vulnerability will be discovered – for example there are plenty of people who believe that Windows is safe from this; as it happens my Windows 2012 server does have bash installed on it.

Bash? Unix Shell?

Most early operating systems were controlled with some sort of command line where you would enter a command at a terminal, hit return, and then the computer would respond to your commands – a bit like DOS whose descendent can be discovered on a Windows system if you ever run cmd.exe. One of the innovations introduced by Unix was the concept of the user selecting which command processor to use and this command processor become known as the shell.

Most Unix shells allowed some level of programming initially to make repetitive interactive tasks easier to perform, but this eventually become shell scripting where useful functions could be made available persistently and to other users by writing a sequence of commands into a file.

The concept of replaceable shells allowed early Unix users to chose between various different shells – initially the Bourne shell (sh), and the C-Shell (csh), with improved shells coming along over time – the TENEX C-Shell (tcsh), the Korn shell (ksh), my shell of choice: Z-shell (zsh), and of course the Bourne Again Shell (bash).

The Vulnerability

Unix (and Linux … and Windows too) have the concept of environment variables where variables can be set to some value and that value will be available to child processes. As an example, the PATH environment variable is set when someone logs in, and is used to specify where to search for programs that are not supplied with a full pathname.

For instance, if you were to enter the command ls into a terminal window, this would be translated to the absolute path /bin/ls or c:\cygwin\bin using a the PATH environment variable.

Bash has a feature where it allows shell functions to be defined within an environment variable; however trailing code following the function is run.

Normally that would not matter, but when an attacker can provide the contents of the environment variable, then that attacker has a way of running their own code where they should not be able to.

Because it is the most serious way of exploiting this vulnerability discovered so far, everyone has concentrated on exploiting this vulnerability through a web server.

Most web servers use environment variables as a way of passing information about a request (i.e. data supplied by an attacker) to any scripts they run; when this script is a bash script or the non-bash script invokes another program via bash (very common amongst lazy programmers) then an attacker can run their own code on the server.

So What Is Vulnerable? And Exploitable?

Let us distinguish between vulnerable where a program with a serious flaw is installed, and exploitable where an attacker can make use of that vulnerability. Because if you just fix situations where a known exploit exists, you are still exposed to unknown exploits. And it is distinctly possible that attackers will develop more and more ways of exploiting this vulnerability over time.

The short answer to the question of what is vulnerable is that every device with bash installed is vulnerable.

To those thinking that only Linux servers are vulnerable, the list of what is vulnerable will probably come as a bit of a surprise :-

  1. It should be assumed that all iThingies (iPhones, iPads, etc.) have bash installed. After all, OSX has been confirmed to be vulnerable and the iThingies run something very similar.
  2. Android phones can run bash and it may be installed by default. If it is, then it is vulnerable.
  3. Windows machines do not come with bash installed by default, but that does not mean that it has not been installed at a later date. Any large corporate application that started life as a Unix-based application may well have an installation of bash lurking somewhere within it.
  4. Similarly for any other non-Unix based servers (VMS, IBM Mainframes, etc.). In fact I would not be surprised if the proportion of IBM mainframes with a vulnerable version of bash installed is surprisingly large.
  5. Embedded devices, or the Internet of Things. One of my pet peeves is the assumption that because people usually find BusyBox installed on devices they are familiar with, that they assume that all IoT devices have BusyBox and not bash. All it takes is one developer who finds their funky script doesn’t work with BusyBox but does with bash to result in an IoT device to have bash installed.

In the long term, it is possibly the last category that is the most exploitable because such devices are rarely updated, are assumed to be safe, and are frankly the most likely to be running rancid code that is easily exploitable.

Mitigations

With worms actively exploiting this hunting down all the vulnerable web servers, it’s time to ask about means to limit the damage :-

  1. Why haven’t you patched yet? Hasn’t the vendor released the patch? If not, go and shout at them.
  2. Turn off any services that you don’t need. Now.
  3. Why does your web server need to make connections to the outside world? First indications are that the worms out there at present download a second stage to start behaving badly. If your server can just do it’s job but cannot download stuff then any worm won’t be able to fully activate. This is not a panacea as you can still be exploited, but you cannot be automatically exploited.

In The Wake of The Scottish Independence Referendum

 Politics  2 Responses »
Sep 202014
 

Well we’ve lost our brief opportunity to send scad loads of illegal immigrants back home north in the window between Scotland becoming independent and it joining the European Union 🙂

Now thing get interesting … because of the promises of the “No” campaigners, Scotland has been given some vague promises of greater devolution with more powers for the Scottish parliament.

Which has been immediately seized upon by the Welsh parliament and the Northern Ireland parliament as justifying extra powers for their own parliaments.

But what about an English parliament? The Tories have ruled that out straight away. I’m not sure I want an English parliament, but I do know that I would like to have a discussion on the merits of one. Ruling out the option of an English parliament is representative of the contempt the Tories have for the will of the people.

If the Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish are mature enough for the responsibility of devolved powers, shouldn’t the English be considered mature enough too? Admittedly, the English do have a tendency to send too many vote the Tories’ way, but perhaps giving us some additional responsibility will lead us to leave our childish ways behind us.

But perhaps England is too large a unit rub shoulders with Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland in a UK parliament. Perhaps we should be considering a larger number of smaller sub-countries. Vehement English nationalists would be up in arms at the suggestion that we can sub-divide England – which by itself is a reason to consider the idea.

England as a country is an artificial creation brought about through conquest, and there is no reason to devolve powers to England if those powers could be devolved to smaller and more sensibly sized sub-countries. As an example, what about :-

  • Cornwall (and probably Devon too).
  • Wessex (Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Sussex, Kent, Dorset, Somerset, and Gloucester)
  • Northumbria (Lancaster, Yorkshire, Durham, and Cumbra)
  • Mercia (the bits in the middle)
  • London.

In the same sense that the UK is too large for us to feel connected to the government, so would England be.

If we are going to look again at how the UK is structured, we need to look closely at all the options no matter how radical. It’s all too possible that the politicians will do as little as possible to keep their comfortable lives the same.

Naked Celebrities!

 General, Media, Security  No Responses »
Sep 042014
 

So apparently a whole bunch of celebrities have had their naked selfies leaked by some “hacker”. As to how this was done, we don’t really know and will probably never know given that Apple is so secretive. But we can guess some possibilities :-

  1. The hacker built up a list of possible account names – jennifer (Jennifer Lawrence) might be a good one to try – and then tried the top 100 dumbest passwords against each one in turn. You would not get every single account this way, and a fair few would turn out to be a fan of Jennifer Lawrence rather than the celebrity herself. But you would get a few that way.
  2. The hacker targeted the celebrities with a phishing attack – basically asking the celebrity what their account password is. This sounds too unlikely to succeed, but with a plausible looking login page it does work surprisingly often. It’s not just the terminally stupid that fall victim to such attacks; the victims are really those who are too trusting and often in too much of a hurry.
  3. The next method a hacker might use is to tackle Apple’s password reset service which uses “memorable information” such as the name of your first school, your mother’s maiden name, etc. There is always a bit of a problem with “memorable information” such as this – it isn’t really that private, and a celebrity is likely to have “leaked” all such private information over time.
  4. Through some unknown vulnerability in Apple’s iCloud service. Given that we suspect that iCloud has certain “issues” with security (apparently Apple has no intruder lock out to make password guessing attacks harder), this isn’t impossible but I would guess that it is less likely that the two more obvious attacks above.

There’s a great deal of hateful “slut-shaming” going on over this celebrity leak which apart from anything else is really missing the point. It may be embarrassing for naked selfies to be leaked, but other personal information could be dangerous if leaked – the celebrity’s home address and alarm codes?

It is not the victim’s fault; it’s the fault of the anonymous (at the moment) hacker.

But the victim can improve their behaviour to make it harder to victimise them :-

  1. First of all if you’re called Jennifer Lawrence, don’t use any permutation of your name as a username; or even enter that as your full name into any cloud service. Make one up.
  2. Make sure you are using a sensible password. It needn’t be excessive, but anything that is just a single word is just not good enough.
  3. Be less trusting with your acount credentials. Make sure you know what the location bar in your browser is and where it is, and check it when you login. And don’t click on links in emails.
  4. If the service you are using offers two-factor authentication, turn it on.
  5. Learn about security; you are a target. Don’t go overboard (but see step 6), but spend an hour a week doing a little reading and taking steps to improve your personal security.
  6. Hire or befriend a geek who can act as your early warning system for threats. And someone you can go to for advice.

Note that I haven’t said “don’t take naked selfies” – it may be a bit foolish, but a life without a bit of foolishness is hardly a life at all.

And of course most of those suggestions work for ordinary people and not just celebrities!

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