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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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Re: Excellent piece by Chris Rohlf - " No, LLM Agents can not Autonomously Exploit One-day Vulnerabilities "
by Arun Koshy 24 Apr '24

24 Apr '24

>>What matters is speed of the exploit and speed of patching. And I see the humans (patching) on the losing side of this race. This is probably an independent issue ( imvho ). Re LLMs and present AI / ML regime, my only public comment is that we're in the Hindenburg [1] era .. caveat emptor. Another insightful paper that probably will be ignored this summer: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03762 ( author : https://people.csail.mit.edu/kostas/ ) [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_129_Hindenburg

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A Familiar World of Chaos
by Dave Aitel 23 Apr '24

23 Apr '24

After spending some time looking at "Secure by Design/Default" I have no doubt many of you feel like something is missing - something that's hard to put your finger on. So you go back to the treadmill of reading about bugs in Palo Alto devices, or the latest Project Zero blogpost, or something the Microsoft Threat Team is naming RidonculousBreeze, or whatever. For those of you who chose to read the latest Project Zero post, one way to look at Mateusz Jurczyk's vast destruction <https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-windows-registry-adventu…> of the Windows Registry API, resulting in what can only be described as a "boatload" of Local Privilege Escalations, is that securing legacy code is hard, there's a talent shortage in how many people want to do the reverse engineering work necessary to understand and fix complicated and critical old code, and our investments in automated security engineering toolkits and better software development practices, while valuable, have not paid off in the kind of hardened Rust-only systems we dreamed about. Another way to look at this kind of wholesale destruction, a true tour de force, is that you cannot both put advertisements in your Start menu, and develop a secure operating system, for reasons that are more philosophical than technical. It's ironic that it is often Google that demonstrates this about other vendors, when of course, the lack of any ad blocking in Chrome or Android presents the exact same dilemma. You can't both make your systems secure, and sit beside the great river of Advertising Revenue with a ladle, dipping it in every quarter to fill up a cauldron of greater and greater value for the shareholders. It's hard to draw a straight line from an internal PowerPoint slide saying "Ads in the Start Menu are a good idea, actually" to the inevitable conclusion of 0days, ransomware, and US Government emails are being read by some old Russian who understands cryptography and Azure keys better than you were hoping. But in some respect this cause and effect is as fundamental and simple as how that tattoo on your arm is actually there because one night you decided to start off with shots of Limoncello. When Project Zero started, and even when it got to the towering behemoth of talent that it is now, I knew people in the offensive industry who were quite scared of it - of the possibility that a large and funded team of top researchers, with access to one of the only five real computers on the planet, could drain the lake of software vulnerabilities we all fished in. But I had no such fears. An organization so dependent on advertising revenue to survive can no more fix systemic security issues than a Sperm Whale can medal in Olympic Skiing. It is contrary to their very nature, although they will probably smash a bunch of trees on the way down. Like many of you, I spent my Saturday porting code to use LLAMA3:70b, largely by annoying my 18yo with questions about ollama and Docker, since I find modern Linux system administration as foreign as an octopus finds calculus. But search engines, like surface warships, are clearly on their last legs. They went from something you used every day, multiple times a day, to something your LLM uses for you, as just one tool among many. It is, for reasons that must be obvious even to executives drunk on the heady fumes of their stock options maturing, hard to make money selling advertisements that are only read by LLMs. But having spent the better part of a couple years doing LLM work now, I feel like I understand why these behemoths are investing so much money in them, despite the obvious cannibalization of their cash umbilical. It's because they can! There's just not that many businesses that generate ten billion dollars of revenue year on year to get into. You've got some elements of manufacturing, tech, education, health care, video games. It's not a big list. Apple gave up on manufacturing cars because the niche they wanted (impractably weird and expensive) was already filled by Tesla. But by investing in LLMs and AI in general you kinda get to put your thumbs in every other billion dollars business all at once. It's a straight line shot from something you already know, to the next place. So of course, they are throwing dollars at it like it was the only thing they knew how to do. And what we get is the pretentious superiority of ChatGPT, or the sanctimonious holiness of Claude, or the ever-sadness of Gemini, the impertinence of Mistral or the trollishness that is LLAMA. A world of chaos, yet something so familiar. -dave

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Sophia D'Antoine
by Dave Aitel 17 Apr '24

17 Apr '24

On Monday, I and 400 other people, including many on this mailing list, attended Sophia's funeral in a huge church in the upper east side of NYC. Although I grew up in a Jewish household, I am not religious, and the last time I went to a church was also with Sophia, in Jerusalem, where we wandered through various landmarks until we ended up at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the holiest sites for Christianity. We waited in a line of fellow pilgrims, the room lit only by echos and dim lamps to touch the Stone of Anointment, where Jesus's body was said to have been prepared for burial. The rock was wet, from some unknown source below. We each knelt and touched it briefly, respectfully. The concept of prayer is foreign to me, but I spoke to myself for a moment with my hand on the slick rock, and tried to feel. Afterwards, Sophia said to me, "You can't expect to _feel_ anything.", something I've often pondered since that moment. Sophia had many friends, and for many people, Sophia was one of their closest friends. No one person can own her memory, but like many others, the moments I had with her were important to me. Now that she's gone, these moments are what we have left. The community that came to NYC to support Sophia's family, and each other, was just as stunned as I am. When not sharing memories about Sophia, we talked about exploits, and large language models. I saw people I hadn't seen for over a decade, or people I knew, but had no idea knew Sophia. Some people traveled from across the entire globe to say goodbye. The community was all on the same path, and the many photos of Sophia laid out on the reception tables were like a shattered mirror portal into her life. Woven into the fabric of who she was, was Sophia's work, and her desire to do what was necessary to get the work done. She did not start a company to get rich. She lived a life of quiet professionalism and when global events moved, she was often part of that fell force that moved them. The shape of the world is a part of her legacy, but even more so I see her legacy as an example that you can live a life of sacrifice and integrity. You can be there for people. You can make it look effortless. This week the Host gathered around a silence folding endlessly upon itself. I feel privileged to have known her, to have shared the time we shared. I know those of you reading this who were also a part of her life feel the same. Rest in Peace, Sophia. We miss you. -dave

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do androids dream of electric sheep in JSON or XML?
by Dave Aitel 02 Apr '24

02 Apr '24

[image: image.png] Like everyone I know, I've been spending a lot of time neck deep in LLMs. As released, they are fascinating and useless toys. I feel like actually using an LLM to do anything real is your basic nightmare still. At the very minimum, you need structured output, and OpenAI has led the way in offering a JSON-based calling format which allows you to extend it with functions that cover the things an LLM can't really do (i.e. math, or access the web or your bash shell). In real life you are going to use this through LangChain or some similar library. You can do this sort of thing with Claude (a better model than GPT-4 in many respects for code), but it's janky as the model wasn't specifically fine tuned for this purpose yet. Your best bet, as you see everyone do, is to force it to start its reply with a curly bracket "{", but even then it's going to pontificate about its reply after it sends you the JSON object you want, if you're lucky and it uses your format at all. Claude is more based on XML than JSON, which, if you think about how LLMs work, makes a ton of sense. To an LLM, {' may be one token, or {{{{ may be a token. In fact, let's test that: >>> import tiktoken >>> encoding = tiktoken.encoding_for_model("gpt-4") >>> encoding.encode("{") [90] >>> encoding.encode("{{") [3052] >>> encoding.encode("{{{") [91791] #one token >>> encoding.encode("{{{{") [3052, 3052] #two tokens >>> encoding.encode("{{{{{") [3052, 91791] #two tokens >>> encoding.encode("{{{{{{") [3052, 3052, 3052] #three tokens >>> encoding.encode("{'") [13922] #{ ' is one token Yeah, so like, on one hand, that's great. Very optimized compression on token lengths. But on the other hand, it is very confusing for the model to train on and understand! You can see why XML would be much more natural! < SOME WORD > is more likely to be three tokens, which makes creating clean output much easier. Claude's focus on XML probably makes it "smarter" in some ways that are hard to prove with math. >>> encoding.encode("<high>") [10174, 1108, 29] >>> encoding.encode("<html>") [14063, 29] >>> encoding.encode("</html>") [524, 1580, 29] >>> encoding.encode("/html") [14056] >>> encoding.encode("</high>") [524, 12156, 29] >>> encoding.encode("high") [12156] Also, of course, I highly recommend Halvar's latest talk (which is highly relevant): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA-ns0zi0k0&t=4s -dave

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Bugdoor vs Backdoor
by Dave Aitel 01 Apr '24

01 Apr '24

[image: image.png] The security community (aka, all of us on this list) still rages with the impact of Jia Tan putting a sophisticated backdoor into the XV package, and all of the associated HUMINT effort that went into it. And I realized from talking to people, especially people in the cyber policy realm but also technical experts, about it that there's a pretty big gap when it comes to understanding why someone would put in a backdoor at all, instead of adding many bugdoors. Some Background: 1. A post <https://cybersecpolitics.blogspot.com/2019/05/hope-is-not-nobus-strategy.ht…> on what NOBUS means when it comes to backdoors. 2. Responsible offense from a bunch of Americans <https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/responsible-cyber-offense> 3. Responsible offense from the UK <https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/responsible-cyber-power-in-pract…> 4. Responsible offense from the Germans <https://www.stiftung-nv.de/sites/default/files/snv_active_cyber_defense_tow…> 5. A university banned from Linux <https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22410164/linux-kernel-university-of-minn…> for contributing backdoors as part of a research project So as with all areas of responsible offense, there is a tight connection and contention between good OPSEC and responsible operations. In particular, it is very easy to get yourself on a team for a big project, and add code that introduces exploitable conditions, perhaps handles input in a way that causes a memory corruption, or does authentication slightly wrong in certain circumstances. From an operational security standpoint, these bugdoors are easy to introduce, and I don't know of a serious hacking group that hasn't played with this - if for no other reason than to fix bugs that cause crashes while you are trying to exploit some other, better bug. Reading the original UMN paper, (which was under-appreciated for its time, despite getting them banned from Linux!) you can see that it is not really always about adding bugs, but often about adding enabling features for bugs that already exist in the codebase, making them more reachable. In some ways, attacking the open source community by hacking into developers or repositories has been the traditional way of ancient Unix 90's hackers, who understand a web of trust the way a Polynesian navigator understands the swells and currents between islands. From an opsec perspective though, bugdoors have limits. Fuzzers can find them, other hackers can find them, and once found, they can be used by anyone with the skill to write the exploit. Likewise, using them is risky: No memory corruption is 100% reliable, and when they fail, *they fail in the worst way, in the worst place, at the worst time*. Likewise, the traffic you may have to do to shape memory in the target host is likely to be anomalous, and easily signatured. And from a responsible offensive cyber operation perspective, bugdoors cannot mathematically demonstrate that they can protect the hosts you target from third parties. *Bugdoors are never a NOBUS capability.* Ideally a NOBUS capability would allow you and only you to get in and avoid replay attacks, but a close second is a simple asymmetric key of some kind where the target ID is used as part of the scheme. The XZ backdoor used an Elliptic Curve with a signature that included the target's SSH public key <https://github.com/amlweems/xzbot>. Thanks, Dave

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t2'24: Last Dance
by Tomi Tuominen 27 Mar '24

27 Mar '24

Dear Daily Dave, For a hacker conference, twenty years is a huge achievement — for a small conference, even more so. Over these years we’ve enjoyed speakers showcasing results from cutting-edge research, seen thought-provoking keynotes and bonded with other like-minded people from all over the world. If we had to summarize the experience with one word, it would be gratitude. The speakers, repeat speakers, first timers or regular attendees, and friends of t2 — you have made the event and its atmosphere. This was always a true community event – it’s organized for hackers, by hackers. The Advisory Board’s motivation and main driver was our love for the game. Creating a small event with a curated program, offering a backdrop for lobby bar and coffee break discussions was (and still is) our vision of a perfect infosec con. The chance to network with your industry peers was as integral part of t2, as the high quality content. It’s rare you get the same level of interaction with current/former speakers and attendees alike at any other conference. Tomi has fond memories of pretty much each and every year. Starting from the humble beginnings, when the legendary Phenoelit guys were kind enough to come and present at a conference that back then had no history nor reputation. How the Toolcrypt guys dominated the stage for years with their absolutely amazing research, and how Ivan Krstić (now Apple’s security samurai) shared his ideas on how modern security architectures should be built (iDevices anybody?), how the InversePath crew delivered some of the most enjoyable and hardcore research ever and well, you get the idea – the list just goes on and on – there are simply too many good memories to list here. Mikko remembers learning from Ludde (during a t2 coffee break) how he works at Spotify. Then Mikko explained how impressed he was with Spotify’s early beta version, especially how you could skip parts of a song and it would still continue streaming instantly. Ludde nodded…and said ‘yeah…I coded that’. Henri still reminisces how Halvar Flake took the time after his talk in 2010 to have a chat with him and Esa Etelävuori (RIP), despite Halvar feeling slightly under the weather in the midst of what later turned out to be the Zynamics acquisition by Google. In 2017 we enjoyed the late night/very early morning pizza in the hotel lobby bar with Dave Aitel, after proving him wrong. Instead of dropping a surprise announcement sometime next year, or silently disappearing into the crowd, we wanted to let everyone know before this year’s t2 infosec that 2024 will be our last dance. We have truly enjoyed the past two decades of world class cyber in Helsinki – all good things come to an end eventually. From the bottom of our hearts, a big thank you to all of you who made this happen. We are privileged to be able to call many of you out there our friends. This goes especially to Dave, thank you for treating us so well over the years. Tomi Tuominen Mikko Hyppönen Henri Lindberg

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while True:
by Dave Aitel 24 Mar '24

24 Mar '24

There seem to be a lot of people who think the problem with cyber security is we aren't paying lawyers enough. This results in the current push for software liabilities, or the need to click accept on cookies before we use every website. It is natural for lawyers to want to feed the next generation of associates, by regurgitating legal koans into their mouths. These vomitous truisms pass for thought leadership when you go high enough into the cyber policy clouds. "We don't know what we don't know!", "You can't manage what you can't measure!" , "We need to be Secure to Market not First to Market!", "Crawl, Walk, Run!" These statements are the opposite of haikus, which when done right are one crystalized emotional moment. This is why I think maybe we should hire more poets to do cyber policy, instead of lawyers. What is "*i carry your heart with me(i carry it in*" other than the first line to an exploit written in a bash script we all forgot existed but our spirits remembered? When LSD-PL said: bn,a bn,a call did that not carry with it an emotive punch? When we hack, do we not reach within our internal well of hate to pull forth a tiny amount of darkness and then send it into the world on tiny flaxen wings? I cannot do a survey on this in any language that matters, but I look into the net and see all the ancient hackers I grew up with still crouched in full armor, their ocher swords smoldering. This week in between cyber policy calls at 0500, I sat for hours, choking on the byzantine syntax of LangChain attempting to wrestle an LLM into submission. I kept thinking, what would Horizon do? What would Shubs do? What would James Kettle do? What would Tiraniddo do? What would Chompie do? What would Skylar do? I told myself: They would *continue*, is what they would do. -dave

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Value of the [leaked] Windows source
by Konrads Klints 06 Mar '24

06 Mar '24

Windows XP and Windows 2003 partial source code is out there on github. With such a rich corpus of known vulnerabilities in those OS'es and source code availability, surely there should be an amazing amount of SAST/semgrep/codeql rules that take as input existing known exploits and then do rules that find similar things, yet I don't seem to be able to find such projects Surely, these two code bases should be the foundation of most good CS/cyber courses - like students finding new bugs, etc. Is source code junk?

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0xC15A: Secure By Design and Secure by Default
by Dave Aitel 24 Jan '24

24 Jan '24

So I have a ton of thoughts on the CISA Secure by Design and Secure by Default push that is ongoing, as I am sure many of you do. And the first thought is: This is not a bad way to go about business as a government agency in general. I think it's easy to ignore how fast the USG has changed its business practices, showing an agility that few large organizations can match. In particular using Secure By Design as a case example. 1. Massive outreach to garner feedback (including at defcon, but also via email, etc.) 2. Multiple rounds of editing of proposals 3. Actual people you could call and talk to about the proposal, with their faces and positions listed right in the papers and blogs and lawfare podcasts. If you were in DC today you could probably hit one of them up for drinks or lunch or whatever. 4. Interaction across multiple stakeholder groups, including internationally 5. The "right people" involved - and you can tell their backgrounds from what they are annoyed about during their podcasts and other presentations. (i.e. Bob Lord is very annoyed about XSS and obsessed with car safety, which I'll dig into later). But also Jack Cable, Lauren Zabierek and Grant Dasher are all worth listening to. 6. Clear executive support So that's all good stuff. I thought I would post it as its own note because it's rare to spend a moment to look at the government process, and not see literally sausage being made. :) -dave

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