8 ms·

Researcher Grabs VPN Password with Tool from NSA Dump

147 points by aestetix 10y ago

acqq 10y ago
> Al-Bassam writes that the tool works by sending a packet to the target machine that makes it dump some of its memory. Included in that dump is the VPN’s authentication password, which is used to log into the device. > Both Al-Bassam and Maksym Zaitsev, another researcher who has been looking into BENIGNCERTAIN, believe that the attack is likely capable of extracting private encryption keys from VPNs as well, which is another, more robust way of authenticating access. Seems similar to the famous "Heartbleed" OpenSSL bug, possibly even easier to achieve. http://heartbleed.com/ http://heartbleed.com/
- bostik 10y ago
  Actually, this tool brings up the question: did NSA discover and exploit Heartbleed years ago? That is not a conspiracy theory, btw. A few weeks back, H.D. Moore of Rapid7/Metasploit fame was on the Risky Business podcast. The topic of the week was bug bounty programs, and in particular the larger programs that aggregate individual vendors under a common umbrella - and notably a common set of guidelines. Moore mentioned that a recurring theme is that when researchers discover a new trick, they will the proceed to apply that trick to every possible vendor on the bounty program, netting 2-3k from each one they pop. In the same vein, I would find it odd if this extraction technique was not applied to every possible encryption target the NSA could think of.
  - larrik 10y ago
    I would imagine that the NSA did discover and exploit Heartbleed years ago, yes. I've generally assumed that sort of thing was very likely, at least.
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-used-heartbleed-bug-exposing-consumers.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-us...
mikegerwitz 10y ago
Don't keep plaintext passwords in memory; treat them like you'd treat your persistent records (e.g. database), because it is one.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  Issuing a disk read every time you need to decrypt data sent over a VPN is not feasible in the slightest. At best you could only keep the key derived from the password, but that's all you'd need to decrypt the traffic.
  - mikegerwitz 10y ago
    I was referring to the password used to log in. You can store a hash in memory for comparison.
    - johncolanduoni 10y ago
      This attack doesn't involve a login password. It's a pre-shared key. If you have the hash, you can both connect and decrypt the connections of others. If it was only needed for comparison, the plaintext password shouldn't even be in a database.
      - mikegerwitz 10y ago
        > Brian Waters, another security researcher, tested BENIGNCERTAIN on his own hardware and managed to obtain the VPN's password, also known as a preshared key. > On Friday, he tweeted a message of the output from his test, which revealed his test password of “password123” among a list of two other possibilities. A password and a pre-shared key can mean the same thing depending on context. Regardless of what it is, the value in memory should not be able to be used externally to log into the system. The article references "password123"---that should not be recoverable from memory.
curiousgal 10y ago
Scary how this serious exploit lied in the crumbs of the files auctioned and even those are possibly mere crumbs of what the NSA has.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  or its all hype and there's little substance left like many movie trailers
  - curiousgal 10y ago
    Sure hope so!
bArray 10y ago
Okay, there's now some credibility to what Shadow Brokers are saying. Watch those bids rise for the rest of the dump! A far fetched tin-foil hat idea - Shadow Brokers made a few exploits themselves and are looking to bring maximum profit from a smaller amount of work. The second tin-foil idea is that the NSA themselves are pretending to leak their old tricks in order to find out who the big players are.
- moyix 10y ago
  More confirmation that it's actually from NSA: https://theintercept.com/2016/08/19/the-nsa-was-hacked-snowden-documents-confirm/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/19/the-nsa-was-hacked-snowd... There's a string ("ace02468bdf13579") that is mentioned in a previously-unreleased document from the Snowden cache and also found in some of the binaries contained in the dump.
  - 88e282102ae2e5b 10y ago
    Is it not possible to replace an existing string in the binary with that one?
    - moyix 10y ago
      To what end?
      - 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
        To connect it with the same speculation that's being made right now?
        moyix 10y ago
        It's the timing that makes the connection. The sequence of events is: 1. Snowden leaves NSA with documents. Some of these (but, crucially, not all) are published. 2. Shadow Brokers release something claiming to be NSA hacking tools containing ace02468bdf13579 string. 3. The Intercept looks in the unreleased parts of the Snowden documents and finds the same string. Thus, the fact that the leaked tools contain non-public NSA-specific information is what makes it clear the tools originate from NSA. The only other possibility is that the Shadow Brokers also had access to the full set of Snowden documents and decided to use them to fake the dump, which is much, much less likely. You could start dropping ace02468bdf13579 into binaries willy nilly now, but it wouldn't do much, because that's now public information. Or am I missing something?
givinguflac 10y ago
What more reason could we possibly need to be against the NSA's data collection at this point? They clearly can't keep themselves secure, so why should we allow them to keep a profile of everything everyone does? They're simply collecting the most dangerous database in history and can't even keep the doors locked. I can't imagine how dangerous these tools and all our personal data could be in some other, also wrong hands.
- onewaystreet 10y ago
  It's pretty easy to pick a lock but you don't remove the locks from your house because of it. No one is 100% secure, not even the NSA.
  - johncolanduoni 10y ago
    The analogy isn't clear to me. If the NSA's data collection opens up additional avenues for breaches of private data, how does stopping this equate to removing a lock?
  - unprepare 10y ago
    which is why i dont even go out and buy things like gold bars, large diamonds, etc because they are essentially bait for thieves the NSA has collected all of our bait, and put it in one insecure location. If they had built fort knox of network security maybe there would be less concern about data getting out, but regardless of how secure it is, it never needed to be collected, certainly not collected then stored insecurely.
  - givinguflac 10y ago
    No one said anything about removing locks. My point is exactly that- no one is ever truly 100% secure. In my opinion that makes it only a matter of time and willpower for some nefarious group to have access to the largest tracking database of all time. Which is exactly why we should never have started collection in the first place. There has never been an attack prevented from this information, so why is it being collected?
  - et-al 10y ago
microcolonel 10y ago
Is it legally dubious for a U.S. citizen to download that torrent?
- dogma1138 10y ago
  I don't see on what grounds they can charge anyone. The documents are not classified, they weren't claimed as official USG property by the NSA, and downloading the torrent is any more or less illegal than reading the leaked Snowden power points online.
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    > The documents are not classified They are not marked as classified. That is something different than not being classified. Any US person with any sort of national security-related job, or any hopes of ever getting one, should think twice. It's like having a stealth fighter crash in your back yard (this has happened). The pieces are not marked as being classified, but selling them on ebay isn't going to win you friends.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      That could go also for reading the material released by Snowden not to mention wikileaks. But overall I don't think this would affect you having a security clearance in the future, this isn't the first time leaks happened and I somehow doubt that it would affect security screening. You are asked a question along the lines of "have you been ever exposed to classified information without having an explicit permission" if you say yes it was on cover of the goddamn washington post they can't do much. Saying that it was leaked all of the internet, reported by 100's of news sources, fully analysed and you've looked at it yourself to see if you can learn anything from it isn't going to hurt you either. But overall this isn't like a stealth fighter crashed in your backyard, it's like a stealth fighter crashed in China, they reverse engineered it, mass produced it, it was reviewed by everyone on the planet and you got one to try it out.
      - 10y ago
micro_softy 10y ago
IPsec.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cnntth 10y ago
Slightly unrelated - Mustafa Al-Bassam, the researcher quoted, was TFlow, one of the younger LulzSec members. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Al-Bassam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Al-Bassam
kchoudhu 10y ago
Shadow Brokers => Mass Effect fans? Can't say I approve of these tools being leaked, but you have to admire their style.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  > Shadow Brokers => Mass Effect fans? Well, if you're familiar with that fictional universe, the name they chose for themselves definitely makes sense.
jstewartmobile 10y ago
Just one more nugget of evidence that our government exists not to keep the citizenry safe, but to keep it in its place. If the NSA really wanted to keep us safe, they would focus their efforts on patches instead of exploits.
based2 10y ago
https://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3650 https://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3650

147 points by aestetix 10y ago

acqq 10y ago

> Al-Bassam writes that the tool works by sending a packet to the target machine that makes it dump some of its memory. Included in that dump is the VPN’s authentication password, which is used to log into the device. > Both Al-Bassam and Maksym Zaitsev, another researcher who has been looking into BENIGNCERTAIN, believe that the attack is likely capable of extracting private encryption keys from VPNs as well, which is another, more robust way of authenticating access. Seems similar to the famous "Heartbleed" OpenSSL bug, possibly even easier to achieve. http://heartbleed.com/ http://heartbleed.com/

bostik 10y ago
Actually, this tool brings up the question: did NSA discover and exploit Heartbleed years ago? That is not a conspiracy theory, btw. A few weeks back, H.D. Moore of Rapid7/Metasploit fame was on the Risky Business podcast. The topic of the week was bug bounty programs, and in particular the larger programs that aggregate individual vendors under a common umbrella - and notably a common set of guidelines. Moore mentioned that a recurring theme is that when researchers discover a new trick, they will the proceed to apply that trick to every possible vendor on the bounty program, netting 2-3k from each one they pop. In the same vein, I would find it odd if this extraction technique was not applied to every possible encryption target the NSA could think of.
- larrik 10y ago
  I would imagine that the NSA did discover and exploit Heartbleed years ago, yes. I've generally assumed that sort of thing was very likely, at least.
ashitlerferad 10y ago
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-used-heartbleed-bug-exposing-consumers.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-11/nsa-said-to-have-us...

mikegerwitz 10y ago

Don't keep plaintext passwords in memory; treat them like you'd treat your persistent records (e.g. database), because it is one.

johncolanduoni 10y ago
Issuing a disk read every time you need to decrypt data sent over a VPN is not feasible in the slightest. At best you could only keep the key derived from the password, but that's all you'd need to decrypt the traffic.
- mikegerwitz 10y ago
  I was referring to the password used to log in. You can store a hash in memory for comparison.
  - johncolanduoni 10y ago
    This attack doesn't involve a login password. It's a pre-shared key. If you have the hash, you can both connect and decrypt the connections of others. If it was only needed for comparison, the plaintext password shouldn't even be in a database.
    - mikegerwitz 10y ago
      > Brian Waters, another security researcher, tested BENIGNCERTAIN on his own hardware and managed to obtain the VPN's password, also known as a preshared key. > On Friday, he tweeted a message of the output from his test, which revealed his test password of “password123” among a list of two other possibilities. A password and a pre-shared key can mean the same thing depending on context. Regardless of what it is, the value in memory should not be able to be used externally to log into the system. The article references "password123"---that should not be recoverable from memory.

curiousgal 10y ago

Scary how this serious exploit lied in the crumbs of the files auctioned and even those are possibly mere crumbs of what the NSA has.

cloudjacker 10y ago
or its all hype and there's little substance left like many movie trailers
- curiousgal 10y ago
  Sure hope so!

bArray 10y ago

Okay, there's now some credibility to what Shadow Brokers are saying. Watch those bids rise for the rest of the dump! A far fetched tin-foil hat idea - Shadow Brokers made a few exploits themselves and are looking to bring maximum profit from a smaller amount of work. The second tin-foil idea is that the NSA themselves are pretending to leak their old tricks in order to find out who the big players are.

moyix 10y ago
More confirmation that it's actually from NSA: https://theintercept.com/2016/08/19/the-nsa-was-hacked-snowden-documents-confirm/ https://theintercept.com/2016/08/19/the-nsa-was-hacked-snowd... There's a string ("ace02468bdf13579") that is mentioned in a previously-unreleased document from the Snowden cache and also found in some of the binaries contained in the dump.
- 88e282102ae2e5b 10y ago
  Is it not possible to replace an existing string in the binary with that one?
  - moyix 10y ago
    To what end?
    - 0x6c6f6c 10y ago
      To connect it with the same speculation that's being made right now?
      - moyix 10y ago
        It's the timing that makes the connection. The sequence of events is: 1. Snowden leaves NSA with documents. Some of these (but, crucially, not all) are published. 2. Shadow Brokers release something claiming to be NSA hacking tools containing ace02468bdf13579 string. 3. The Intercept looks in the unreleased parts of the Snowden documents and finds the same string. Thus, the fact that the leaked tools contain non-public NSA-specific information is what makes it clear the tools originate from NSA. The only other possibility is that the Shadow Brokers also had access to the full set of Snowden documents and decided to use them to fake the dump, which is much, much less likely. You could start dropping ace02468bdf13579 into binaries willy nilly now, but it wouldn't do much, because that's now public information. Or am I missing something?

givinguflac 10y ago

What more reason could we possibly need to be against the NSA's data collection at this point? They clearly can't keep themselves secure, so why should we allow them to keep a profile of everything everyone does? They're simply collecting the most dangerous database in history and can't even keep the doors locked. I can't imagine how dangerous these tools and all our personal data could be in some other, also wrong hands.

onewaystreet 10y ago
It's pretty easy to pick a lock but you don't remove the locks from your house because of it. No one is 100% secure, not even the NSA.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  The analogy isn't clear to me. If the NSA's data collection opens up additional avenues for breaches of private data, how does stopping this equate to removing a lock?
- unprepare 10y ago
  which is why i dont even go out and buy things like gold bars, large diamonds, etc because they are essentially bait for thieves the NSA has collected all of our bait, and put it in one insecure location. If they had built fort knox of network security maybe there would be less concern about data getting out, but regardless of how secure it is, it never needed to be collected, certainly not collected then stored insecurely.
- givinguflac 10y ago
  No one said anything about removing locks. My point is exactly that- no one is ever truly 100% secure. In my opinion that makes it only a matter of time and willpower for some nefarious group to have access to the largest tracking database of all time. Which is exactly why we should never have started collection in the first place. There has never been an attack prevented from this information, so why is it being collected?
- et-al 10y ago

microcolonel 10y ago

Is it legally dubious for a U.S. citizen to download that torrent?

dogma1138 10y ago
I don't see on what grounds they can charge anyone. The documents are not classified, they weren't claimed as official USG property by the NSA, and downloading the torrent is any more or less illegal than reading the leaked Snowden power points online.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  > The documents are not classified They are not marked as classified. That is something different than not being classified. Any US person with any sort of national security-related job, or any hopes of ever getting one, should think twice. It's like having a stealth fighter crash in your back yard (this has happened). The pieces are not marked as being classified, but selling them on ebay isn't going to win you friends.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    That could go also for reading the material released by Snowden not to mention wikileaks. But overall I don't think this would affect you having a security clearance in the future, this isn't the first time leaks happened and I somehow doubt that it would affect security screening. You are asked a question along the lines of "have you been ever exposed to classified information without having an explicit permission" if you say yes it was on cover of the goddamn washington post they can't do much. Saying that it was leaked all of the internet, reported by 100's of news sources, fully analysed and you've looked at it yourself to see if you can learn anything from it isn't going to hurt you either. But overall this isn't like a stealth fighter crashed in your backyard, it's like a stealth fighter crashed in China, they reverse engineered it, mass produced it, it was reviewed by everyone on the planet and you got one to try it out.
    - 10y ago

micro_softy 10y ago

IPsec.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

cnntth 10y ago

Slightly unrelated - Mustafa Al-Bassam, the researcher quoted, was TFlow, one of the younger LulzSec members. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Al-Bassam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Al-Bassam

kchoudhu 10y ago

Shadow Brokers => Mass Effect fans? Can't say I approve of these tools being leaked, but you have to admire their style.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
> Shadow Brokers => Mass Effect fans? Well, if you're familiar with that fictional universe, the name they chose for themselves definitely makes sense.

jstewartmobile 10y ago

Just one more nugget of evidence that our government exists not to keep the citizenry safe, but to keep it in its place. If the NSA really wanted to keep us safe, they would focus their efforts on patches instead of exploits.

based2 10y ago

https://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3650 https://www.debian.org/security/2016/dsa-3650