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Juniper Networks will drop code tied to National Security Agency
- DyslexicAtheist 11y agoany mobile operator that uses Nokia (NSN) equipment would have a massive part of the core network set up with Juniper gear. These things are not "swapped" out for years and given the NDA's and secretive nature of telecoms I doubt that anything Juniper does here will make a difference to these systems already in place. Keep in mind that the number of companies that supply equipment here are very few: - Huawei - Alcatel-Lucent (soon to be part of Nokia) - Ericsson - Nokia so chances that your operator is using Nokia equipment is pretty high (especially in Europe, and large parts of Asia)
- ju-st 11y agoI would say having Juniper gear is an advantage because at least some backdoors are now uncovered and will be closed. And I think a firmware update would be enough, no need to physically swap the routers.
- enlightenedfool 11y agoThis is exactly what NSA wants you to think while they have another more secretive backdoor in.
- pkinsky 11y agoMaybe, but a more secretive backdoor would probably not be used as often (to avoid risk of discovery).
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThat is exactly what the NSA wants you to think. ;).
- dafrankenstein2 11y agoNSA loop
- prolepunk 11y agoI wouldn't believe them unless they are going to open source the code, but I'm not their customer anyways, and I doubt big telcos really care about privacy all that much.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mtgx 11y agoAt least the one we know about.
- hsnewman 11y agohttps://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&client=ubuntu#q=who%20was%20president%20in%202008 https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
- cmrx64 11y agoSo do NSA-approved ciphers such as AES get dropped too? Does anyone have a link to the actual statement by Juniper, not just reporting on it?
- BostonEnginerd 11y agoThey're removing the Dual_EC backdoored PRNG. Press release: http://forums.juniper.net/t5/Security-Incident-Response/Advancing-the-Security-of-Juniper-Products/ba-p/286383 http://forums.juniper.net/t5/Security-Incident-Response/Adva...
- cmrx64 11y agoThanks, I see the misunderstanding now.
- BostonEnginerd 11y agoNo problem!
- HashThis 11y agoThey used Dual Elliptic Curve, which is what they are removing.
- tptacek 11y agoAfter the reversing revelations published at RWC about the 2008 introduction of Dual EC to their code, it's been more or less established that Dual EC was deliberately introduced to their code by their development team as a backdoor. When they reverted the "unauthorized" changes from 2012 (the backdoor in the news from a few weeks back), they were merely reverting to an older backdoor configuration. The Reuters story isn't especially precise. Dual EC, the construction, was designed by NSA (that's the "designed by NSA" referred to by the article. NSA didn't write the code that appeared in ScreenOS in 2008 (or at least there's no evidence that they did). Virtually nobody believes the 2012 Dual EC backdoor was implanted by NSA (Edward Snowden stated on Twitter that he believed NSA notified Juniper of that backdoor). The big question now is how to attribute the 2008 backdoor (the original introduction of Dual EC to the platform). I lean towards believing it was sanctioned by NSA, because the changeset that introduced it included subtle tweaks to the rest of the system to make it easier to exploit, and those tweaks were --- I personally think --- not common knowledge among practitioners in 2008. But there are arguments that it wasn't NSA; in particular, while the tweaks were subtle, the code introducing them is extremely hamfisted, easily reversed, and something of a dead giveaway about the nature of Dual EC, which, while known to be problematic in 2008, wasn't 100% believed to be the key escrow system it turns out to be. If it's not NSA that introduced the original 2008 Dual EC backdoor, that's a devastating argument against policy officials who think we should design crypto backdoors: here's a backdoor concept designed in secret at NSA, turned against the US shortly after its introduction and undiscovered by the "good guys" for almost 10 years.
- revelation 11y agoI think you're referencing this: http://www.realworldcrypto.com/rwc2016/program/rwc16-shacham.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1 http://www.realworldcrypto.com/rwc2016/program/rwc16-shacham... Shame there is no recording (and no paper).
- baby 11y agosome notes here: http://cryptologie.net/article/321/real-world-crypto-day-2/ http://cryptologie.net/article/321/real-world-crypto-day-2/ paper is on the way
- worried_citizen 11y agoI expect dual_ec to live with us for quite a bit longer, despite the fact that the NIST stopped recommending it. It's just a matter of applying the right leverage to US companies. "Meets all NIST SP800-90 standards" "Meets all NIST SP800-90A standards" Can you spot which product has the back door?
- tptacek 11y agoYes: the ones that use Dual EC. It's not that hard to spot. If nobody is going to take the time to pull apart the firmware, it really doesn't matter what the vendor says. They can say one thing and do another. That's what happened here.
- sandworm101 11y agoLol. This news always comes at end of business friday. NSA, CIA, RSA, Juniper ... if they thought this was in any way good news they were releasing, they would announce it on monday not friday.
- sago 11y ago> which might have been displaced later by other countries' agencies or top-level hackers in 2012 and 2014 Which is why deliberately compromising crypto is short sighted and dangerous. At the moment the faustian bargain looks tempting: access all those secrets for national security. Until the whole compromised stack is exploited by a foreign power, and Mephistopheles will show up on the Senate floor demanding our soul. And the politicians will be clambering over each other to appear like they always thought it was a bad idea.
- drawkbox 11y agoThis is like having many locks, alarm systems, cameras and more on your home and then leaving the key + keycode out back under a rock or over the door. Obfuscated backdoor? Sure, but the key is still in the backyard, anyone can find it and use it. I wish encryption was explained to people in simple terms in the media like keys outback or window left ajar, something that obviously let's people know that it isn't safe to weaken security (for only our gov't which is not possible) otherwise it is pointless.
- finid 11y agoWhat many seem to forget is that when you're accessing "all those secrets for national security", you're hacking other nations. But as far as our elected officials are concerned, that's ok, until we're hacked. Then we can impose sanctions on those countries for following our lead. The emperor is insane!
- dafrankenstein2 11y ago//Still another curve constant, quietly provided by the NSA and required for some federal certification, was exposed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as a key to the back door// for many times,this Snowden guy have made NSA lose some hard work;)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- godgod 11y agoToo little too late.
- tlrobinson 11y ago"Still another curve constant, quietly provided by the NSA and required for some federal certification" Wait... what? Is this suggesting Juniper blindly used a constant supplied by the government without any justification?
- SCHiM 11y agoWhat strikes me is how the 2008 and 2012 back-doors were so much more advanced than the back-door introduced in 2014. I think that they were placed by different actors(assuming 2008 and 2012 are from the same), when the more blatant ssh back-door was found Juniper instigated a internal code review and found the more tricky DualEC weakness. If the inclusion of DualEC itself is not enough to convince you that the code changes in 2008 are in fact back-doors then you should consider the fact that the X9.31-AES that they fed the DualEC output into was modified in such a way that it did not actually perform any cryptographic operations at all. x9.31-AES is now considered to be almost depreciated, with the original variant (x9.32-DES2) being officially depreciated since last year. However the fact remains that an adversary implemented and tweaked 2 different cryptographic circuits in the code. Which, imo, is no mean feat. In comparison, a simple strmp() smack in the middle of the authentication code is a simple trick. But, obviously, in the absolute sense still nothing to sniff at.
- revelation 11y agoJust what kind of shop is Juniper running here? They add the original backdoor. Someone backdoors the original backdoor. Yet another actor unaware of the backdoored backdoor adds the strcmp authentication backdoor. Juniper removes that backdoor and unbackdoors the original backdoor. Now, they remove it altogether. It's been months and they have not come up with a theory on how any of this happened.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jakeogh 11y agoMusing about how it's not x APT because the code/attack is not "advanced enough" or "cheap" ignores plausible deniability.