19 ms·

A case against security nihilism

468 points by feross 5y ago

Animats 5y ago
"the fact that iMessage will gleefully parse all sorts of complex data received from random strangers, and will do that parsing using crappy libraries written in memory unsafe languages." C. 30 years of buffer overflows.
- pradn 5y ago
  50 years!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - drran 5y ago
    49 C is a programming language which born at “AT & T’s Bell Laboratories” of USA in 1972. It was written by Dennis Ritchie.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Buffer overflows are older than C. One of the reasons for the decline of the British computer industry was Tony Hoare, at one of the big companies (Elliott Brothers, later part of ICL), implemented Fortran by compiling it to Algol, and compiled the Algol with bounds checks. This would have been around 01965, according to his Turing Award lecture. They failed to win customers away from the IBM 7090 (according to https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...) because the customers' Fortran programs were all full of buffer overflows ("subscript errors", in Hoare's terminology) and so the pesky Algol runtime system was causing them to abort!
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Yep, making companies liable for damages would incentivize them to stop relying on C for a lot of things. Apple knows full well iMessage has security relevant bugs they just haven't found yet. Hence their attempts to shield it and mitigate those issues with layers of security. However, the appropriate action would be to reimplement it in something less likely to get exploited. That's expensive. Liability would justify this cost. Companies like Google, MS, Apple, etc. rely on large amounts of legacy C code. There are quite a few repeat offenders in terms of having security vulnerabilities exploited in the wild. Basically, my reasoning here is that Apple knows it is exposing users to hacks because of quality issues with this and other components. The fact that they try to fix them as fast as they find them is nice but not good enough: people still get hacked. When the damage is mostly PR, it's manageable (to a point). But when users sue and start claiming damages, it becomes a different matter: that gets costly and annoying real quick. Recently we have seen several companies embrace Rust for OS development. Including Apple even. Both Apple and Google have also introduced languages like Swift and Go that likewise are less likely to have issues with buffer overflows. Switching languages won't solve all the problems but buffer overflows should largely be a thing of the past. So, we should encourage them to speed that process up.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
Apple seems incapable of successfully sandboxing iMessage after years of exploits. At this point I think we just have to assume they just don't care.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  You're not entirely wrong. For a proprietary, closed-source, limited-access system that Apple has complete control of, it's surprisingly vulnerable and slow to be patched.
  - recursive 5y ago
    Also not partially wrong either.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    It's pretty much completely wrong. Apple invests more on this problem than almost any vendor in the world, and no vendor with a comparable footprint fares meaningfully better than they do --- Google surpasses them at some problems, but vice versa. The problems we're dealing with here are basically at the frontier of software engineering and implicate not so much Apple as the entire enterprise of commercial consumer software development, no matter where it's practiced. It's fair to criticize Apple. But you can't reasonably argue that they DGAF.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- skybrian 5y ago
  This doesn’t doesn’t seem like a stable fact about Apple. Their priorities can change. I expect that these recent revelations have gotten the attention of top management and they are likely to get a strong organizational response. (I’m reminded of Google’s responses to the Snowden leak.)
akhilpotla 5y ago
The point that the author makes is very valuable, it is important to not throw out hands in the air. If you are not moving forward, you are falling back. Though one (perhaps nit-picky) point I'd like to make is that these dictators are not dumb. They are incredibly intelligent. They themselves are probably not hackers, but they understand people and power. They are going do what they can to get what they want. We can't ignore the factor they play in creating these problems, and we need to take it just as seriously as we would a technical security exploit.
- spitfire 5y ago
  Not to split hairs here, but lets separate this into a few different traits. Smart, intelligent and cunning. Most dictators are not very intelligent. Just like Donald Trump is not very intelligent. Cunning and with social smarts would be apt. These guys really know how to play people off each other, and manipulate, like, really well.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  You don't have to be "incredibly intelligent" to pay some company to hack a list of your enemies. That just takes money and a list of people you hate, not insight.
smoldesu 5y ago
This article doesn't seem to have a direction, it just seems to be a lump of refutations about how hard it is to maintain a secure system, and how we need to be understanding throughout this process. What it doesn't actually address is security nihilism, so let's expand on the seed he plants in the final section: > It’s the scale, stupid This should 100% be the focus, not how truly amicable Apple's efforts are to improve security. Security nihilism is entirely about scale, and understanding your place in the digital pecking order. The only way to be 'secure' in that sense is to directly limit the amount of personal information that the surrounding world has on you: in most first-world countries, it's impossible to escape this. Insurance companies know your medical history before you even apply for their plan, your employer will eventually learn about 80% of your lifestyle, and the internet will slowly sap the rest of the details. In a world where copying is free, it's undeniable that digital security is a losing game. Here's a thought: instead of addressing security nihilism in the consumer, why don't you highlight this issue in companies? There's currently no incentive to hack your phone unless it has valuable information that can't be found anywhere else: in which case, you have more of a logistics issue than a security one. Meanwhile, ransomware and social-engineering attacks are at an all-time high, yet our security researchers are taking their time to hash out exactly how mad we deserve to be at Apple for their exploit-of-the-week. If this is the kind of attitude the best-of-the-best have, it's no wonder we're the largest target for cyberattacks in the world.
- kaba0 5y ago
  > The only way to be 'secure' in that sense is to directly limit the amount of personal information that the surrounding world has on you I may misunderstand you but this is privacy, not security. The 2 are not completely separated, but that’s another issue.
gnfargbl 5y ago
"What can we do to make NSO’s life harder?" That seems pretty simple to me: We ask Western democratic governments (which include Israel) to properly regulate the cybersecurity industry. This is the purpose of governments; it is why we keep them around. There is no really defensible reason why the chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear industries are heavily regulated, but "cyber" isn't.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  This still leaves us with threats from state actors and cybersecurity firms answering only to Eastern, undemocratic governments.
- tptacek 5y ago
  Nobody has any credible story for how regulations would prevent stuff like this from happening. The problem is simple economics: with the current state of the art in software engineering, there is no way to push the cost of exploits (let alone supporting implant tech) high enough to exceed the petty cash budget of state-level actors. I think we all understand that the medium-term answer to this is replacing C with memory-safe languages; it turns out, this was the real Y2K problem. But there's no clear way for regulations to address that effectively; assure yourself, the major vendors are all pushing forward with memory safe software.
  - contravariant 5y ago
    Well, first of all the NGO group in its current form wouldn't exist if Israel regulated them, at the very least it wouldn't exist as a state-level equivalent actor. Second of all if you can't push the costs high enough then it becomes time to limit the cash budget of state level actors. Which is hardly without precedent. For some reason you seem to only be looking at this as a technology problem, while at the core it is far more political. Sure technology might help, but that's the raison d'etre of technology.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      Sure, you can outlaw NSO itself. I won't complain! But all you're doing is smearing the problem over the globe. You can push this kind of work all the way to "universally acknowledged as organized crime", and it'll still happen, exactly the same way, with basically the same actors. You might even increase the incentives by doing it. Policy is complicated.
dfabulich 5y ago
The article says that although "you can't have perfect security," you can make it uneconomical to hack you. It's a good point, but it's not the whole story. The problem is that state-level actors don't just have a lot of money; they (and their decision makers) also put a much much lower value on their money than you do. I would never think to spend a million dollars on securing my home network (including other non-dollar costs like inconveniencing myself). Let's suppose that spending $1M would force the US NSA to spend $10M to hack into my home network. The people making that decision aren't spending $10M of their own money; they're spending $10M of the government's money. The NSA doesn't care about $10M in the same way that I care about $1M. As a result, securing yourself even against a dedicated attacker like Israel's NSO Group could cost way, way more than a simple budget analysis would imply. I'd have to make the costs of hacking me so high that someone at NSO would say "wait a minute, even we can't afford that!" So, sure, "good enough" security is possible in principle, I think it's fair to say "You probably can't afford good-enough security against state-level actors."
- bitexploder 5y ago
  Most organizations should not really be factoring state level actors into their risk assessment. It just doesn't make sense. If you are an actual target for state level actors you likely will know about it. You will also likely have the funding to protect yourself against them. And if you can't, that isn't a failing of your risk assessment decision making.
  - blowski 5y ago
    What counts as a state-level actor? The NSA, obviously. But a lot of other groups seem to be in more of a grey area.
    - not2b 5y ago
      The corresponding agencies in China and Russia, obviously. But usually a state-level actor wants deniability, which is where the "grey area" hacker teams come in (groups that appear to be state actors but this can be difficult to prove).
Syonyk 5y ago
... against nihilism? They're just sort of handwaving and saying, "Well, uh... we should do better, somehow... and expect Apple to do better, and... uh..." How's that any different from saying "The problem is basically impossible"? The core of the problem is complexity. Our modern computing stack can be broadly described as: - Complexity to add features. - Complexity to add performance. - Complexity to solve problems with the features. - Complexity to solve problems created from the performance complexity. - Complexity added to solve the issues the previous complexity created. And this has been iterating over, and over, and over... and over. The code gets more complex, so the processors have to be faster, which adds side channel issues, so the processors get more complex to solve that, as does the software, hurting performance, and around you go again. At no point does anyone in the tech industry seem to step back and say, "Wait. What if we simplify instead?" Delete code. Delete features. I would rather have an iPhone without iMessage zero click remote exploits than one with animated cartoons based on me sticking my tongue out and waggling my eyebrows, to pick on a particularly complex feature. I've made a habit of trying to run as much as I can on low power computers, simply to see how it works, and ideally help figure out the choke points. Chat has gotten comically absurd over the years, so I'll pick on it as an example of what seems, to me, to be needless complexity. Decades ago, I could chat with other people via AIM, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, etc. Those clients were thin, light, and ran on a single core 486 without anything that I recall as being performance issues. Today, Google Chat (having replaced Hangouts, which was its own bloated pig in some ways) struggles to keep up with typing on a quad core, 1.5GHz ARM system (Pi 4). It pulls down nearly 15MB of resources - or roughly 30% of a Windows 95 install. To chat with someone person to person, in the same way AIM did decades ago. I'm more used to lagged typing in 2021 than I was in 1998. Yes, it's got some new features, and... I'm sure someone could tell me what they are, but in terms of sending text back and forth to people across the internet, along with images, it's fundamentally doing the exact same thing that I did 20 years ago, just using massively more resources, which means there are massively more places for vulnerabilities, exploits, bugs, etc, to hide. Does it have to be that huge? No idea, I didn't write it. But it's larger and slower than Hangouts, to accomplish, as far as I'm concerned, the same things. We can't just keep piling complexity on top of complexity forever and expect things to work out. Now, if I wanted to do something like IRC, which is substantially unchanged from the 90s, I can use a lightweight native client that uses basically no CPU and almost no memory to accomplish this, on an old Pi3 that has an in-order CPU with no speculation, and can run a rather stripped down kernel, no browser, etc. That's going to be a lot harder to find bugs in than the modern bloated code that is most of modern computing. But nobody gets promoted for stripping out code and making things smaller these days, it seems. As long as the focus is on adding features, that require more performance, we're simply not going to get ahead of the security bugs. And, if everyone writing the code has decided that memojis are more important than security iMessage against remote zero click exploits, well... OK. But the lives of journalists are the collateral damage of those decisions. These days, I regularly find myself wondering why I bother with computers at all outside work. I'd free up a ton of "overhead maintenance time" I spend maintaining computers, and that's before I get into the fact that even with aggressive attempts to tamp down privacy invasions, I'm sure lots of my data is happily being aggregated for... whatever it is people do with that, send ads I block, I suppose.
roody15 5y ago
I am not convinced apple wasn’t aware of what NSO was doing? Governments want access to spy on people. Apple wants to market and sell a “secure” mobile device. In a way NSO provides apple with a perfect out. They can legally claim they are secure platform and do not work with bad actors or foreign governments to “spy”. Hear no evil see no evil. NSO ability to penetrate iOS gives powerful governments what they want and in a way may keep “pressure” off Apple in providing official back door access.
- tptacek 5y ago
  That would be a surprise to literally every person who works in Ivan's organization at Apple. This is message-board-think, not analysis.
- 3gg 5y ago
  How would Apple benefit from this conspiracy? Apple these days is throwing out the "secure" and "private" PR to differentiate themselves from their surveillance capitalist neighbors. They would never do anything that hurts their PR, and they would always do the bare minimum security and privacy to support it. If they knew of these vulnerabilities ahead of time, I am positive they would have patched them. This is not to say that they are doing everything they can, but I don't see your proposed conspiracy following profit-maximizing corporate logic. Apple isn't there to screw you; they're just there for the big buck.
  - roody15 5y ago
    The benefit would be they could still market the device and the most “secure” but at the same time duck pressure from governments to allow back door access. If Apple truly secured the OS to the point where even state level actors could not access they bring some unwanted attention, regulation, etc from power governmental agencies. Apple has also been interestingly silent /vague on a response to this story.
staticassertion 5y ago
Just the other day I suggested using a yubikey, and someone linked me to the Titan sidechannel where researchers demonstrated that, with persistent access, and a dozen hours of work, they could break the guarantees of a Titan chip[0]. They said "an attacker will just steal it". The researchers, on the other hand, stressed how very fundamentally difficult this was to pull off due to very limited attack surface. This is the sort of absolutism that is so pointless. At the same time, what's equally frustrating to me is defense without a threat model. "We'll randomize this value so it's harder to guess" without asking who's guessing, how often they can guess, how you'll randomize it, how you'll keep it a secret, etc. "Defense in depth" has become a nonsense term. The use of memory unsafe languages for parsing untrusted input is just wild. I'm glad that I'm working in a time where I can build all of my parsers and attack surface in Rust and just think way, way less about this. I'll also link this talk[1], for the millionth time. It's Rob Joyce, chief of the NSA's TAO, talking about how to make NSA's TAO's job harder. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hackers-can-clone-google-titan-2fa-keys-using-a-side-channel-in-nxp-chips/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hacke... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA
- blowski 5y ago
  I was with you until the parsing with memory unsafe languages. Isn’t that exactly the kind of “random security not based on a threat model” type comment you so rightly criticised in the first half of your comment?
  - titzer 5y ago
    Based on the hundreds, perhaps thousands of critical vulnerabilities that are due directly to parsing user input in memory-unsafe languages, usually resulting in remote code execution, how's this for a threat model: attacker can send crafted input that contains machine code that subsequently runs with the privileges of the process parsing the input. That's bad.
  - ExtraE 5y ago
    I mean, the threat model is that 1. Memory leaks/errors are bad 2. Programmers make those mistakes all the time 3. Using memory safe languages is cheap Therefore, 4. We should use memory safe languages more often
nullc 5y ago
> Notably, these targets include journalists and members of various nations’ political opposition parties For all we know it also included cryptographers and security researchers. Unfortunately, the list hasn't been published-- so we only know what the journalists who had access to it cared to look up.
o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
"An entirely separate area is surveillance and detection: Apple already performs some remote telemetry to detect processes doing weird things. This kind of telemetry could be expanded as much as possible while not destroying user privacy. While this wouldn't necessarily stop NSO, it would make the cost of throwing these exploits quite a bit higher - and make them think twice before pushing them out to every random authoritarian government." Apple could do more spying (excuse me, "telemetry") "as much as possible" in addition to NSO... because it would make the the competitor's spying more expensive. This could be a unilateral decision to be made by Apple without input from users, as usual. Any commercial benefits to Apple due to the incresed data collection would be purely incidental, of course. Apple and NSO may have different ways of making money, but they both use (silent) data collection from computer users to help them.
cratermoon 5y ago
> The problem that companies like Apple need to solve is not preventing exploits forever, but a much simpler one: they need to screw up the economics of NSO-style mass exploitation. On the one hand, sure, make it too expensive to do this. On the other hand, how much more expensive is too expensive? When the first SHA1 collision attack was found, it was considered a problem, and SHA1 was declared unsuitable for security purposes, but now it's cheap.
dadrian 5y ago
There's plenty of evidence that this type of attack surface (parsers operating on untrusted data received over the Internet) is fixable, even at Big Tech scale. The most obvious example is Microsoft Office in the early 2000s and the switch to the XML-based format with newer, easier-to-implement and ideally memory-safer parsers. That's not to say there's no bugs in Office anymore, but it's certainly much much better than it was. Microsoft figured it out. Apple can do it, too.
fsflover 5y ago
The only practical security is security through isolation, like what Qubes OS provides. Security through correctness is impossible.
- ttymck 5y ago
  Stupid question: how do you know your isolation is correct?
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Not stupid question at all. Nothing is 100% correct. Instead, you look at the attack surface, which for Qubes is extremely small: no network in AdminVM, only 100k lines of code in Xen supervisor, hardware virtualization with extremely low number of discovered escapes and so on.
    - snvzz 5y ago
      Xen is bloated and has a security hole history. This also ignores the size of the Linux acting as dom0, that is. The only correct answer is formal reasoning, as successfully executed by seL4.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        > Xen is bloated and has a security hole history. This is a useless security nihilism. Xen is much more secure than anything else in terms of hole history. And Qubes relies on hardware virtualization, not software. Most famous escape from it was discovered by the Qubes founder ("Blue Pill"). The size of Linux in dom0 does not matter, because it has no network, does not run any apps and is only used to manage VMs. There is just no way for an attacker to exploit a bug there. >formal reasoning I hope this is the future, but unfortunately it's not the present yet.
        snvzz 5y ago
        >I hope this is the future, but unfortunately it's not the present yet. Qubes devs are welcome to adopt seL4's VMM virtualization solution. In seL4's virtualization design, VMM handles VM exceptions, and yet has no more privileges (capabilities, enforced by seL4, which is thoroughly formally proven) than the VM itself, thus an escape from VM to VMM would yield no fruit.
Veserv 5y ago
The article correctly refutes the silly binary argument that many people fall back on that since perfection is impossible, we must accept an imperfect solution. And since the current solutions are clearly imperfect, the status quo must be acceptable since imperfect solutions are acceptable. However, the article falls right into the next failed model of considering everything in terms of relative security. We should make things “better”, we should make things “harder”, but those terms mean very little. 1% better is “better”. Making a broken hashing function take 2x as long to break makes things “harder”, but it does not make things more secure since it is already hopelessly inadequate. The problem with considering things only in relative terms to existing solutions is that it ignores defining the problem, and more importantly, it does not tell you if you solved your problem. The correct model is the one used by engineering disciplines, specifying objective, quantifiable standards for what is adequate and then verifying the solution passes those standards. Because if you do not define what is adequate, how do you know if you have even achieved the bare minimum of what you need and how far your solution may be from that. For instance, consider the same NSO case as the article. Did Apple do an adequate job, what is an adequate job, and how far away are they? Well, let us assume that the average duration of surveillance for the 50,000 phones was 1 year per phone. Now what is a good level of protection against that kind of surveillance? I think a reasonable standard is making it so the phone is not the easiest way to surveil a person for that length of time, it is cheaper to do it the old fashioned way, so the phone does not make you more vulnerable on average. So, how much does it cost to surveil a person and listen in on their conversations for a year the old fashioned way? 1k, 10k, 100k? If we assume 10k, then the level of security needed to protect against NSO type threats and to adequately protect against surveillance is $500M. So, how far away is Apple from that? Well, Zerodium pays $1.5M per iMessage zero click [1]. If we assume they burned 10 of them, infecting a mere 5k per with a trivially wormable complete compromise, that would amount to ~15M at market price. Adding in the rest of the work, it would maybe cost $20M all together worst case. So, if you agree with this analysis (if you do not feel free to plug in your own estimates), then Apple has achieved ~4% of the necessary level and would need to improve processes by 2,500% to achieve adequate security against this type of attack. I think that should make it clear why things are so bad. “Best in class” security needs to improve by over 10x to become adequate. It should be no wonder these systems are so defenseless. [1] http://zerodium.com/program.html http://zerodium.com/program.html
haecceity 5y ago
Should iMessage do what Facebook messenger does and request receiver permission before letting a new contact message them?
bjornsing 5y ago
How does a bug in iMessage lead to my iPhone being completely taken over by Pegasus? I thought apps were sandboxed on iOS. Or can they only monitor SMS/iMessages with this entry point?
- x4e 5y ago
  I imagine they use one exploit to get code execution in iMessage, then another exploit to escape sandbox and execute code in kernel.
  - wepple 5y ago
    Yeah. Here’s a 2016 write up when Pegasus (presumably a different deployment) was leaked and reversed: https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae/ https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphon...
grantwu 5y ago
Can someone explain why Blastdoor has been unsuccessful? Is it too hard a problem to restrict what iMessage can do?
ngneer 5y ago
NSO == arms dealers, by their own admission. They did not create the market for digital arms, but successfully cater to it. No HN comment will change their business model. They benefit from the easy distribution of software twice. Once as an exploit developer, because all target systems look alike (recall hardware and software vendors also want to write hardware and software once and then distribute widely) and therefore an exploit must only be developed once to apply broadly. Then, a second time as a software developer, because they can sell their same software to multiple clients. Having worked on Pegasuses, the thing that is dreaded the most and is very costly is a rewrite. Those get financially prohibitive. If the world was serious about stopping the NSOs of the world, it would work toward efficiently (read: inexpensively) making different individual systems wildly different yet remaining interoperable (because the interoperability is where the network effect comes in, providing value in communication systems and leading to their wider adoption). The conflict to solve is how to make systems interoperable and non-interoperable at the same time. While it is easy to imagine randomized instruction sets, Morpheus-like-blindly-randomize-everything chips and bytecode VMs that use binary translation to modify the phenotype at each individual system, it is not so easy to envision how systems could be written once to interoperate yet prevent BORE-type attacks whereby the one time exploit development cost can be easily offset by repeat exploitation. The only way forward is to find that lever which gives defenders a cheap button to push that forces an expensive Pegasus rewrite.
downWidOutaFite 5y ago
Dumb article. Basically amounts to "Apple should continue to do what they're doing".
ENOTTY 5y ago
The 'economic' argument simply doesn't work. Does the author think that every "tin-pot authoritarian" owns a poor country scrabbling in the unproductive desert for scraps? Of course not! Literally one of the best customers of NSO tools is Saudi Arabia (SA), where money literally bursts out of the ground in the form of crude oil. The market cap of Saudi Aramco is 3x that of Apple's. Good luck making it "uneconomical" for SA to exploit iPhones. I'll even posit that there is literally no reasonable amount where the government of SA cannot afford an exploitation tool. The governments that purchase these tools aren't doing it for shits and giggles. They're doing it because they believe that their targets represent threats to their continued existence. Think of it this way, if it costs you a trillion dollars to preserve your access to six trillion dollars worth of wealth, would you spend that? I would, in a heartbeat.
- refulgentis 5y ago
  100%, the argument is perfect in it's circularity: we should it make it uneconomical for there to be iMessage exploits via fixing iMessage exploits
- roywiggins 5y ago
  The NSO target list has like 15,000 Mexican phone numbers on it. You don't think making exploits more expensive would force attackers to prioritize only the very highest value targets? In the limit, a trillion dollar exploit that will be worthless once discovered will only be used with the utmost possible care, on a very tiny number of people. That's way better than something that you can play around with and target thousands. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/19/fifty-people-close-mexico-president-amlo-among-potential-targets-nso-clients https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/19/fifty-people-cl...
- kragen 5y ago
  Computer security isn't a board game where my unit can Damage your unit if my unit has more Combat than your unit has Defense, and once your unit is Damaged enough you lose it, and you can buy a card with 5 Combat for 5 Gold, and so on. It's not a contest of strength. It's not about who has the most gold. It's about who fucks up. If you follow the guidelines in http://canonical.org/~kragen/cryptsetup http://canonical.org/~kragen/cryptsetup to encrypt the disk on a new laptop, it will take you an hour (US$100), plus ten practice reboots over the next day (US$100), plus 5 seconds every time you boot forever after (say, another US$100), for a total of about US$300. A brute-force attack by an attacker who has killed you or stolen your laptop while it was off is still possible. My estimate in that page is that it will cost US$1.9 trillion. That's the nature of modern cryptography. (The estimate is probably a bit out of date: it might cost less than US$1 trillion now, due to improved hardware.) Other forms of software security are considerably more absolute. Regardless of what you see in the movies, if your RAM is functioning properly and if there isn't a cryptographic route, there's no attack that will allow one seL4 process to write to the memory of another seL4 process it hasn't been granted write access to. Not for US$1B, not for US$1T, not for US$1000T. It's like trying to find a number that when multiplied by 0 gives you 5. The money you spend on attacking the problem is simply irrelevant. Usually, though, the situation is considerably more absolute in the other direction: there are always abundant holes in the protections, and it's just a matter of finding one of them. Now, of course there are other ways someone might be able to decrypt your laptop disk, other than stealing it and applying brute force. They might trick you into typing the passphrase in a public place where they can see the surveillance camera. They might use a security hole in your browser to gain RCE on your laptop and then a local privilege escalation hole to gain root and read the LUKS encryption key from RAM. They might trick you into typing the passphrase on the wrong computer at a conference by handing you the wrong laptop. They might pay you to do a job where you ssh several times a day into a server that only allows password authentication, assigning you a correct horse battery staple passphrase you can't change, until one day you slip up and you type your LUKS passphrase instead. They might steal your laptop while it's on, freeze the RAM with freeze spray, and pop the frozen RAM out of your motherboard and into their own before the bits of your key schedule decay. They might break into your house and implant a hardware keylogger in your keyboard. They might do a Zoom call with you and get you to boot up the laptop so they can listen to the sound of you typing the passphrase on the keyboard. (The correct horse battery staple passphrases I favor are especially vulnerable to that.) They might remotely turn on the microphone in your cellphone, if they have a way into your cellphone, and do the same. They might use phased-array passive radar across the street to measure the movements of your fingers from the variations in the reflection of Wi-Fi signals. They might go home with you from a bar, slip you a little scopolamine, and suggest that you show them something on your (turned-off) laptop while they secretly film your typing. The key thing about these attacks is that they are all cheap. Well, the last one might cost a few thousand dollars of equipment and tens of thousands of dollars in rent. None of them requires a lot of money. They just require knowledge, planning, and follow-through. And the same thing is true about defenses against this kind of thing. Don't run a browser on your secure laptop. Don't keep it in your bedroom. Keep your Bitcoin in a Trezor, not your laptop (and obviously not Coinbase), so that when your laptop does get popped you don't lose it all. You could argue that, with dollars, you can hire people who have knowledge, do planning, and follow through. But that's difficult. It's much easier to spend a million (or a billion, or a trillion) dollars hiring people who don't. In fact, large amounts of money is better at attracting con men, like antivirus vendors, than it is at attracting people like the seL4 team. Here in Argentina we had a megalomaniacal dictator in the 01940s and 01950s who was determined to develop a domestic nuclear power industry, above all to gain access to atomic bombs. Werner Heisenberg was invited to visit in 01947; hundreds of German physicists were spirited out of the ruined, occupied postwar Germany. National laboratories were built, laboratory-scale nuclear fusion was announced to have been successful, promises to only seek peaceful energy were published, plans for a nationwide network of fusion energy plants were announced, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent (in today's money), presidential gold medals were awarded... ...and finally in 01952 it turned out to be a fraud, or at best the kind of wishful-thinking-fueled bad labwork we routinely see from the free-energy crowd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project Meanwhile, a different megalomaniacal dictator who'd made somewhat better choices about which physicists to trust detonated his first H-bomb in 01953.
amluto 5y ago
One possible technical improvement is high quality honeypots. If Apple tried hard, they could arrange for certain iPhones to have instrumentation intended to detect and characterize these sorts of attacks. If every targeted user has a 0.1% chance of leaking the exploit vector to Apple, then mass exploitation becomes much more complex and expensive. Doing this well would be hard, but even an imperfect implementation would have some value.
- refulgentis 5y ago
  It might be hard to convince the privacy engineers to allow us access to a random sample of message attachments. What if we asked for a temporary 'root' access credential, that is only valid for 3 minutes per day?
  - amluto 5y ago
    Get users to opt in, both to participate and to analyze any given payload?
User23 5y ago
The security attack that scares me more than any other is rough men with guns kidnapping me in the middle of the night and then torturing me until I reveal my security material. While normally torture just results in the victim saying anything to make it stop, in the specific case where the attacker has encrypted material and can test key extraction in real-time torture is highly effective.
- api 5y ago
  There’s a canonical term for this: rubber hose cryptography. That’s when you beat someone with a rubber hose until they give you the key. It’s effective against a wide range of algorithms and constructions.
  - 3gg 5y ago
    https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
  - rocqua 5y ago
    The technical solution is having very available, very believable lies. Something where you can "reveal" false secrets that decrypt to believable data by your attacker. This is generally hard. Because you gotta know, at the time of being tortured, which fake secret will give believable results.
o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
This thread devolved into a debate over C versus Rust or other memory-safe languages. 1. Blaming the language instead of the programmer will not lead to improved program quality. 2. C will always be available as a user's language. Users will still be write programs in C for their own personal use that are smaller and faster than ones written in memory-safe. languages 3. Those in the future who are practiced in C will have a siginificant advantange in being able to leverage an enormous body of legacy code, of which a ton is written in C. Programmers in the future who are schooled only in memory-safety languages may not be able to approach C as a learning resource, and may in fact be taught to fear it. There is a tremendous amount of C code that DOES NOT contain buffer overflows or use-after-free errors. It is amazing how easily that work is ignored in these debates. Find me a buffer overflow or use-after-free in one of djb's programs.
- staticassertion 5y ago
  > 1. Blaming the language instead of the programmer will not lead to improved program quality. I disagree. Blaming the language is critically important. Tony Hoare (holds a turing aware, is a genius) puts it well. > a programming language designer should be responsible for the mistakes that are made by the programmers using the language. [...] > It's very easy to persuade the customers of your language that everything that goes wrong is their fault and not yours. I rejected that... [0] > Users will still be write programs in C for their own personal use that are smaller and faster than ones written in memory-safe. languages Users will always write C. No they won't always be smaller and faster. > 3. Those in the future who are practiced in C will have a siginificant advantange in being able to leverage an enormous body of legacy code Much to society's loss, I'm sure. > and may in fact be taught to fear it Cool. Same way we teach people to not roll their own crypto. This is a good thing. Please be more afraid. > There is a tremendous amount of C code that DOES NOT contain buffer overflows or use-after-free errors. No one cares. Not only is that not provably the case, nor is it likely the case, but it's also irrelevant when I'm typing on a computer with a C kernel, numerous C libraries, in a C++ browser, or texting someone via a C++ app that has to parse arbitrary text, emojis, videos, etc. > Find me a buffer overflow or use-after-free in one of djb's programs. No, that's a stupid waste of my time. Thankfully, others seem more willing to do so[1] - I hate to even entertain such an arbitrary, fallacious benchmark, but it's funny so I'll do it just this once. [0] http://blog.mattcallanan.net/2010/09/tony-hoare-billion-dollar-mistake.html http://blog.mattcallanan.net/2010/09/tony-hoare-billion-doll... [1] http://www.guninski.com/where_do_you_want_billg_to_go_today_4.html http://www.guninski.com/where_do_you_want_billg_to_go_today_...
bogomipz 5y ago
The article states: >"A more worrying set of attacks appear to use Apple’s iMessage to perform “0-click” exploitation of iOS devices. Using this vector, NSO simply “throws” a targeted exploit payload at some Apple ID such as your phone number, and then sits back and waits for your zombie phone to contact its infrastructure." Does anyone have a link or any resources that describe how this “0-click” exploitation" works?
damowangcy 5y ago
An industry exists when there's market, in other words when there's supply and demand. Difficult hacking increases demands and more players will join the game. Until something changes how the Internet works, the very moment we sent something across the Internet through a service, we no longer have control over the data. Pegasus is just the tip of an iceberg and with technology become closer to us, i.e. homepods, smart electronic appliances, it is just time until all the big brands are hiring hackers to spy on their customers so that they can produce better product (make more money). Going forward, privacy is not supposed to be a personal preference like how platforms nowadays makes us click through different settings to opt out, it is supposed to be something we all collective have out of the box and we need to work together towards that goal.
kms_2021 5y ago
The problem is that the recent security company purchases suggest that it costs roughly $100 per month per user to have just basic security. Cost goes up from that exponentially.
throwaway984393 5y ago
"Security nihilism" sounds like a dig, but actually, it's the same thing as "security realism". All security eventually fails, thus all security is eventually meaningless. Not only can you not have perfect security, but the entirety of security is just a hedge against the will of your opponent. Any kind of security - from a file cabinet lock to a nuclear weapon - only stops people less motivated than you. I don't care what thing you think you've created, it can be defeated, one way or another. You know what you could do to make NSO's life harder, other than develop more security? Fight them. Have your politicians attack Israel for allowing the group to operate. Use sanctions, take a proportional response, condemn their actions at the UN, stop protecting them. Block Israel from the Apple Store. It's a more direct route, and more likely to succeed than making your goal "perfect security". (Would there be huge political challenges? Of course; but those are more approachable than "perfect security")
- tester34 5y ago
  >You know what you could do to make NSO's life harder, other than develop more security? Fight them. Have your politicians attack Israel for allowing the group to operate. Use sanctions, take a proportional response, condemn their actions at the UN, stop protecting them. Block Israel from the Apple Store. It's a more direct route, and more likely to succeed than making your goal "perfect security". (Would there be huge political challenges? Of course; but those are more approachable than "perfect security") but it's not just NSO, every reasonable country probably has people like them.
Joker_vD 5y ago
> In a perfect world, US and European governments would wake up and realize that arming authoritarianism is really is bad for democracy Well, they haven't done that since what, the early XX century, what with "he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch"? If the US really cared that much about "democracy", perhaps they'd have by now sorted it out in, say, Mexico already: after all, that's their closest-connected country after Canada, right? Yet the last time I've checked the news about upcoming Mexican elections, there were quite a lot of dead/missing opposition candidates reported (just as it was during the previous elections, and pre-previous, and...) Interestingly enough, the US press doesn't report much on that: apparently things in Afghanistan, across half the globe, are much more important for home security.
ezoe 5y ago
Don't own or relies on phone is the first step of security. We can't trust phone, all of them.
yoaviram 5y ago
The immediate takeaway from this article is that if any of these threat actors are on your radar and you have an I phone then you should delete iMessage.
- username_my1 5y ago
  I just disabled iMessages and FaceTime ... I don't actively use them anyway and I have a feeling Apple applies more scrutiny to 3rds party apps than theirs (Whatsapp , signal ...) I don't know if disabling iMessages is enough though in this case.
jokoon 5y ago
I don't care the slightest about computer security as long as governments won't try to ask experts to write laws and security standards. Same goes for insurance companies, who should try to sell cyber insurance and lobby the government for security standards. There are plenty security standards for many things that are not computers, yet cyber is a weird exception. My understanding is both a liberal silicon valley state of mind, combined with the NSA benefiting from low security standards and having a monopoly on tech companies. In my view, the computer security industry is too blame here, because they benefit from chaos and a lack of government intervention.
Tepix 5y ago
Related: Fuck privacy nihilism https://twitter.com/evacide/status/1416968243642724353?s=21 https://twitter.com/evacide/status/1416968243642724353?s=21 The same logic applies. You will not achieve perfect privacy online but there is plenty you can do to make tracking you so much harder.
adultSwim 5y ago
Treating this like a technology issue is a mistake. Tech fixes are band-aids. This is a social and governance issue that needs social and governance solutions.

468 points by feross 5y ago

"the fact that iMessage will gleefully parse all sorts of complex data received from random strangers, and will do that parsing using crappy libraries written in memory unsafe languages." C. 30 years of buffer overflows.

pradn 5y ago
50 years!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- drran 5y ago
  49 C is a programming language which born at “AT & T’s Bell Laboratories” of USA in 1972. It was written by Dennis Ritchie.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Buffer overflows are older than C. One of the reasons for the decline of the British computer industry was Tony Hoare, at one of the big companies (Elliott Brothers, later part of ICL), implemented Fortran by compiling it to Algol, and compiled the Algol with bounds checks. This would have been around 01965, according to his Turing Award lecture. They failed to win customers away from the IBM 7090 (according to https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...) because the customers' Fortran programs were all full of buffer overflows ("subscript errors", in Hoare's terminology) and so the pesky Algol runtime system was causing them to abort!
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Yep, making companies liable for damages would incentivize them to stop relying on C for a lot of things. Apple knows full well iMessage has security relevant bugs they just haven't found yet. Hence their attempts to shield it and mitigate those issues with layers of security. However, the appropriate action would be to reimplement it in something less likely to get exploited. That's expensive. Liability would justify this cost. Companies like Google, MS, Apple, etc. rely on large amounts of legacy C code. There are quite a few repeat offenders in terms of having security vulnerabilities exploited in the wild. Basically, my reasoning here is that Apple knows it is exposing users to hacks because of quality issues with this and other components. The fact that they try to fix them as fast as they find them is nice but not good enough: people still get hacked. When the damage is mostly PR, it's manageable (to a point). But when users sue and start claiming damages, it becomes a different matter: that gets costly and annoying real quick. Recently we have seen several companies embrace Rust for OS development. Including Apple even. Both Apple and Google have also introduced languages like Swift and Go that likewise are less likely to have issues with buffer overflows. Switching languages won't solve all the problems but buffer overflows should largely be a thing of the past. So, we should encourage them to speed that process up.

deleted 5y ago

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tick_tock_tick 5y ago

Apple seems incapable of successfully sandboxing iMessage after years of exploits. At this point I think we just have to assume they just don't care.

smoldesu 5y ago
You're not entirely wrong. For a proprietary, closed-source, limited-access system that Apple has complete control of, it's surprisingly vulnerable and slow to be patched.
- recursive 5y ago
  Also not partially wrong either.
- tptacek 5y ago
  It's pretty much completely wrong. Apple invests more on this problem than almost any vendor in the world, and no vendor with a comparable footprint fares meaningfully better than they do --- Google surpasses them at some problems, but vice versa. The problems we're dealing with here are basically at the frontier of software engineering and implicate not so much Apple as the entire enterprise of commercial consumer software development, no matter where it's practiced. It's fair to criticize Apple. But you can't reasonably argue that they DGAF.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
skybrian 5y ago
This doesn’t doesn’t seem like a stable fact about Apple. Their priorities can change. I expect that these recent revelations have gotten the attention of top management and they are likely to get a strong organizational response. (I’m reminded of Google’s responses to the Snowden leak.)

akhilpotla 5y ago

The point that the author makes is very valuable, it is important to not throw out hands in the air. If you are not moving forward, you are falling back. Though one (perhaps nit-picky) point I'd like to make is that these dictators are not dumb. They are incredibly intelligent. They themselves are probably not hackers, but they understand people and power. They are going do what they can to get what they want. We can't ignore the factor they play in creating these problems, and we need to take it just as seriously as we would a technical security exploit.

spitfire 5y ago
Not to split hairs here, but lets separate this into a few different traits. Smart, intelligent and cunning. Most dictators are not very intelligent. Just like Donald Trump is not very intelligent. Cunning and with social smarts would be apt. These guys really know how to play people off each other, and manipulate, like, really well.
pessimizer 5y ago
You don't have to be "incredibly intelligent" to pay some company to hack a list of your enemies. That just takes money and a list of people you hate, not insight.

smoldesu 5y ago

This article doesn't seem to have a direction, it just seems to be a lump of refutations about how hard it is to maintain a secure system, and how we need to be understanding throughout this process. What it doesn't actually address is security nihilism, so let's expand on the seed he plants in the final section: > It’s the scale, stupid This should 100% be the focus, not how truly amicable Apple's efforts are to improve security. Security nihilism is entirely about scale, and understanding your place in the digital pecking order. The only way to be 'secure' in that sense is to directly limit the amount of personal information that the surrounding world has on you: in most first-world countries, it's impossible to escape this. Insurance companies know your medical history before you even apply for their plan, your employer will eventually learn about 80% of your lifestyle, and the internet will slowly sap the rest of the details. In a world where copying is free, it's undeniable that digital security is a losing game. Here's a thought: instead of addressing security nihilism in the consumer, why don't you highlight this issue in companies? There's currently no incentive to hack your phone unless it has valuable information that can't be found anywhere else: in which case, you have more of a logistics issue than a security one. Meanwhile, ransomware and social-engineering attacks are at an all-time high, yet our security researchers are taking their time to hash out exactly how mad we deserve to be at Apple for their exploit-of-the-week. If this is the kind of attitude the best-of-the-best have, it's no wonder we're the largest target for cyberattacks in the world.

kaba0 5y ago
> The only way to be 'secure' in that sense is to directly limit the amount of personal information that the surrounding world has on you I may misunderstand you but this is privacy, not security. The 2 are not completely separated, but that’s another issue.

gnfargbl 5y ago

"What can we do to make NSO’s life harder?" That seems pretty simple to me: We ask Western democratic governments (which include Israel) to properly regulate the cybersecurity industry. This is the purpose of governments; it is why we keep them around. There is no really defensible reason why the chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear industries are heavily regulated, but "cyber" isn't.

fennecfoxen 5y ago
This still leaves us with threats from state actors and cybersecurity firms answering only to Eastern, undemocratic governments.
tptacek 5y ago
Nobody has any credible story for how regulations would prevent stuff like this from happening. The problem is simple economics: with the current state of the art in software engineering, there is no way to push the cost of exploits (let alone supporting implant tech) high enough to exceed the petty cash budget of state-level actors. I think we all understand that the medium-term answer to this is replacing C with memory-safe languages; it turns out, this was the real Y2K problem. But there's no clear way for regulations to address that effectively; assure yourself, the major vendors are all pushing forward with memory safe software.
- contravariant 5y ago
  Well, first of all the NGO group in its current form wouldn't exist if Israel regulated them, at the very least it wouldn't exist as a state-level equivalent actor. Second of all if you can't push the costs high enough then it becomes time to limit the cash budget of state level actors. Which is hardly without precedent. For some reason you seem to only be looking at this as a technology problem, while at the core it is far more political. Sure technology might help, but that's the raison d'etre of technology.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Sure, you can outlaw NSO itself. I won't complain! But all you're doing is smearing the problem over the globe. You can push this kind of work all the way to "universally acknowledged as organized crime", and it'll still happen, exactly the same way, with basically the same actors. You might even increase the incentives by doing it. Policy is complicated.

dfabulich 5y ago

The article says that although "you can't have perfect security," you can make it uneconomical to hack you. It's a good point, but it's not the whole story. The problem is that state-level actors don't just have a lot of money; they (and their decision makers) also put a much much lower value on their money than you do. I would never think to spend a million dollars on securing my home network (including other non-dollar costs like inconveniencing myself). Let's suppose that spending $1M would force the US NSA to spend $10M to hack into my home network. The people making that decision aren't spending $10M of their own money; they're spending $10M of the government's money. The NSA doesn't care about $10M in the same way that I care about $1M. As a result, securing yourself even against a dedicated attacker like Israel's NSO Group could cost way, way more than a simple budget analysis would imply. I'd have to make the costs of hacking me so high that someone at NSO would say "wait a minute, even we can't afford that!" So, sure, "good enough" security is possible in principle, I think it's fair to say "You probably can't afford good-enough security against state-level actors."

bitexploder 5y ago
Most organizations should not really be factoring state level actors into their risk assessment. It just doesn't make sense. If you are an actual target for state level actors you likely will know about it. You will also likely have the funding to protect yourself against them. And if you can't, that isn't a failing of your risk assessment decision making.
- blowski 5y ago
  What counts as a state-level actor? The NSA, obviously. But a lot of other groups seem to be in more of a grey area.
  - not2b 5y ago
    The corresponding agencies in China and Russia, obviously. But usually a state-level actor wants deniability, which is where the "grey area" hacker teams come in (groups that appear to be state actors but this can be difficult to prove).

Syonyk 5y ago

... against nihilism? They're just sort of handwaving and saying, "Well, uh... we should do better, somehow... and expect Apple to do better, and... uh..." How's that any different from saying "The problem is basically impossible"? The core of the problem is complexity. Our modern computing stack can be broadly described as: - Complexity to add features. - Complexity to add performance. - Complexity to solve problems with the features. - Complexity to solve problems created from the performance complexity. - Complexity added to solve the issues the previous complexity created. And this has been iterating over, and over, and over... and over. The code gets more complex, so the processors have to be faster, which adds side channel issues, so the processors get more complex to solve that, as does the software, hurting performance, and around you go again. At no point does anyone in the tech industry seem to step back and say, "Wait. What if we simplify instead?" Delete code. Delete features. I would rather have an iPhone without iMessage zero click remote exploits than one with animated cartoons based on me sticking my tongue out and waggling my eyebrows, to pick on a particularly complex feature. I've made a habit of trying to run as much as I can on low power computers, simply to see how it works, and ideally help figure out the choke points. Chat has gotten comically absurd over the years, so I'll pick on it as an example of what seems, to me, to be needless complexity. Decades ago, I could chat with other people via AIM, Yahoo, MSN, IRC, etc. Those clients were thin, light, and ran on a single core 486 without anything that I recall as being performance issues. Today, Google Chat (having replaced Hangouts, which was its own bloated pig in some ways) struggles to keep up with typing on a quad core, 1.5GHz ARM system (Pi 4). It pulls down nearly 15MB of resources - or roughly 30% of a Windows 95 install. To chat with someone person to person, in the same way AIM did decades ago. I'm more used to lagged typing in 2021 than I was in 1998. Yes, it's got some new features, and... I'm sure someone could tell me what they are, but in terms of sending text back and forth to people across the internet, along with images, it's fundamentally doing the exact same thing that I did 20 years ago, just using massively more resources, which means there are massively more places for vulnerabilities, exploits, bugs, etc, to hide. Does it have to be that huge? No idea, I didn't write it. But it's larger and slower than Hangouts, to accomplish, as far as I'm concerned, the same things. We can't just keep piling complexity on top of complexity forever and expect things to work out. Now, if I wanted to do something like IRC, which is substantially unchanged from the 90s, I can use a lightweight native client that uses basically no CPU and almost no memory to accomplish this, on an old Pi3 that has an in-order CPU with no speculation, and can run a rather stripped down kernel, no browser, etc. That's going to be a lot harder to find bugs in than the modern bloated code that is most of modern computing. But nobody gets promoted for stripping out code and making things smaller these days, it seems. As long as the focus is on adding features, that require more performance, we're simply not going to get ahead of the security bugs. And, if everyone writing the code has decided that memojis are more important than security iMessage against remote zero click exploits, well... OK. But the lives of journalists are the collateral damage of those decisions. These days, I regularly find myself wondering why I bother with computers at all outside work. I'd free up a ton of "overhead maintenance time" I spend maintaining computers, and that's before I get into the fact that even with aggressive attempts to tamp down privacy invasions, I'm sure lots of my data is happily being aggregated for... whatever it is people do with that, send ads I block, I suppose.

roody15 5y ago

I am not convinced apple wasn’t aware of what NSO was doing? Governments want access to spy on people. Apple wants to market and sell a “secure” mobile device. In a way NSO provides apple with a perfect out. They can legally claim they are secure platform and do not work with bad actors or foreign governments to “spy”. Hear no evil see no evil. NSO ability to penetrate iOS gives powerful governments what they want and in a way may keep “pressure” off Apple in providing official back door access.

tptacek 5y ago
That would be a surprise to literally every person who works in Ivan's organization at Apple. This is message-board-think, not analysis.
3gg 5y ago
How would Apple benefit from this conspiracy? Apple these days is throwing out the "secure" and "private" PR to differentiate themselves from their surveillance capitalist neighbors. They would never do anything that hurts their PR, and they would always do the bare minimum security and privacy to support it. If they knew of these vulnerabilities ahead of time, I am positive they would have patched them. This is not to say that they are doing everything they can, but I don't see your proposed conspiracy following profit-maximizing corporate logic. Apple isn't there to screw you; they're just there for the big buck.
- roody15 5y ago
  The benefit would be they could still market the device and the most “secure” but at the same time duck pressure from governments to allow back door access. If Apple truly secured the OS to the point where even state level actors could not access they bring some unwanted attention, regulation, etc from power governmental agencies. Apple has also been interestingly silent /vague on a response to this story.

staticassertion 5y ago

Just the other day I suggested using a yubikey, and someone linked me to the Titan sidechannel where researchers demonstrated that, with persistent access, and a dozen hours of work, they could break the guarantees of a Titan chip[0]. They said "an attacker will just steal it". The researchers, on the other hand, stressed how very fundamentally difficult this was to pull off due to very limited attack surface. This is the sort of absolutism that is so pointless. At the same time, what's equally frustrating to me is defense without a threat model. "We'll randomize this value so it's harder to guess" without asking who's guessing, how often they can guess, how you'll randomize it, how you'll keep it a secret, etc. "Defense in depth" has become a nonsense term. The use of memory unsafe languages for parsing untrusted input is just wild. I'm glad that I'm working in a time where I can build all of my parsers and attack surface in Rust and just think way, way less about this. I'll also link this talk[1], for the millionth time. It's Rob Joyce, chief of the NSA's TAO, talking about how to make NSA's TAO's job harder. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hackers-can-clone-google-titan-2fa-keys-using-a-side-channel-in-nxp-chips/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hacke... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA

blowski 5y ago
I was with you until the parsing with memory unsafe languages. Isn’t that exactly the kind of “random security not based on a threat model” type comment you so rightly criticised in the first half of your comment?
- titzer 5y ago
  Based on the hundreds, perhaps thousands of critical vulnerabilities that are due directly to parsing user input in memory-unsafe languages, usually resulting in remote code execution, how's this for a threat model: attacker can send crafted input that contains machine code that subsequently runs with the privileges of the process parsing the input. That's bad.
- ExtraE 5y ago
  I mean, the threat model is that 1. Memory leaks/errors are bad 2. Programmers make those mistakes all the time 3. Using memory safe languages is cheap Therefore, 4. We should use memory safe languages more often

nullc 5y ago

> Notably, these targets include journalists and members of various nations’ political opposition parties For all we know it also included cryptographers and security researchers. Unfortunately, the list hasn't been published-- so we only know what the journalists who had access to it cared to look up.

o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago

"An entirely separate area is surveillance and detection: Apple already performs some remote telemetry to detect processes doing weird things. This kind of telemetry could be expanded as much as possible while not destroying user privacy. While this wouldn't necessarily stop NSO, it would make the cost of throwing these exploits quite a bit higher - and make them think twice before pushing them out to every random authoritarian government." Apple could do more spying (excuse me, "telemetry") "as much as possible" in addition to NSO... because it would make the the competitor's spying more expensive. This could be a unilateral decision to be made by Apple without input from users, as usual. Any commercial benefits to Apple due to the incresed data collection would be purely incidental, of course. Apple and NSO may have different ways of making money, but they both use (silent) data collection from computer users to help them.

cratermoon 5y ago

> The problem that companies like Apple need to solve is not preventing exploits forever, but a much simpler one: they need to screw up the economics of NSO-style mass exploitation. On the one hand, sure, make it too expensive to do this. On the other hand, how much more expensive is too expensive? When the first SHA1 collision attack was found, it was considered a problem, and SHA1 was declared unsuitable for security purposes, but now it's cheap.

dadrian 5y ago

There's plenty of evidence that this type of attack surface (parsers operating on untrusted data received over the Internet) is fixable, even at Big Tech scale. The most obvious example is Microsoft Office in the early 2000s and the switch to the XML-based format with newer, easier-to-implement and ideally memory-safer parsers. That's not to say there's no bugs in Office anymore, but it's certainly much much better than it was. Microsoft figured it out. Apple can do it, too.

fsflover 5y ago

The only practical security is security through isolation, like what Qubes OS provides. Security through correctness is impossible.

ttymck 5y ago
Stupid question: how do you know your isolation is correct?
- fsflover 5y ago
  Not stupid question at all. Nothing is 100% correct. Instead, you look at the attack surface, which for Qubes is extremely small: no network in AdminVM, only 100k lines of code in Xen supervisor, hardware virtualization with extremely low number of discovered escapes and so on.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    Xen is bloated and has a security hole history. This also ignores the size of the Linux acting as dom0, that is. The only correct answer is formal reasoning, as successfully executed by seL4.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      > Xen is bloated and has a security hole history. This is a useless security nihilism. Xen is much more secure than anything else in terms of hole history. And Qubes relies on hardware virtualization, not software. Most famous escape from it was discovered by the Qubes founder ("Blue Pill"). The size of Linux in dom0 does not matter, because it has no network, does not run any apps and is only used to manage VMs. There is just no way for an attacker to exploit a bug there. >formal reasoning I hope this is the future, but unfortunately it's not the present yet.
      - snvzz 5y ago
        >I hope this is the future, but unfortunately it's not the present yet. Qubes devs are welcome to adopt seL4's VMM virtualization solution. In seL4's virtualization design, VMM handles VM exceptions, and yet has no more privileges (capabilities, enforced by seL4, which is thoroughly formally proven) than the VM itself, thus an escape from VM to VMM would yield no fruit.

Veserv 5y ago

The article correctly refutes the silly binary argument that many people fall back on that since perfection is impossible, we must accept an imperfect solution. And since the current solutions are clearly imperfect, the status quo must be acceptable since imperfect solutions are acceptable. However, the article falls right into the next failed model of considering everything in terms of relative security. We should make things “better”, we should make things “harder”, but those terms mean very little. 1% better is “better”. Making a broken hashing function take 2x as long to break makes things “harder”, but it does not make things more secure since it is already hopelessly inadequate. The problem with considering things only in relative terms to existing solutions is that it ignores defining the problem, and more importantly, it does not tell you if you solved your problem. The correct model is the one used by engineering disciplines, specifying objective, quantifiable standards for what is adequate and then verifying the solution passes those standards. Because if you do not define what is adequate, how do you know if you have even achieved the bare minimum of what you need and how far your solution may be from that. For instance, consider the same NSO case as the article. Did Apple do an adequate job, what is an adequate job, and how far away are they? Well, let us assume that the average duration of surveillance for the 50,000 phones was 1 year per phone. Now what is a good level of protection against that kind of surveillance? I think a reasonable standard is making it so the phone is not the easiest way to surveil a person for that length of time, it is cheaper to do it the old fashioned way, so the phone does not make you more vulnerable on average. So, how much does it cost to surveil a person and listen in on their conversations for a year the old fashioned way? 1k, 10k, 100k? If we assume 10k, then the level of security needed to protect against NSO type threats and to adequately protect against surveillance is $500M. So, how far away is Apple from that? Well, Zerodium pays $1.5M per iMessage zero click [1]. If we assume they burned 10 of them, infecting a mere 5k per with a trivially wormable complete compromise, that would amount to ~15M at market price. Adding in the rest of the work, it would maybe cost $20M all together worst case. So, if you agree with this analysis (if you do not feel free to plug in your own estimates), then Apple has achieved ~4% of the necessary level and would need to improve processes by 2,500% to achieve adequate security against this type of attack. I think that should make it clear why things are so bad. “Best in class” security needs to improve by over 10x to become adequate. It should be no wonder these systems are so defenseless. [1] http://zerodium.com/program.html http://zerodium.com/program.html

haecceity 5y ago

Should iMessage do what Facebook messenger does and request receiver permission before letting a new contact message them?

bjornsing 5y ago

How does a bug in iMessage lead to my iPhone being completely taken over by Pegasus? I thought apps were sandboxed on iOS. Or can they only monitor SMS/iMessages with this entry point?

x4e 5y ago
I imagine they use one exploit to get code execution in iMessage, then another exploit to escape sandbox and execute code in kernel.
- wepple 5y ago
  Yeah. Here’s a 2016 write up when Pegasus (presumably a different deployment) was leaked and reversed: https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae/ https://citizenlab.ca/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphon...

grantwu 5y ago

Can someone explain why Blastdoor has been unsuccessful? Is it too hard a problem to restrict what iMessage can do?

ngneer 5y ago

NSO == arms dealers, by their own admission. They did not create the market for digital arms, but successfully cater to it. No HN comment will change their business model. They benefit from the easy distribution of software twice. Once as an exploit developer, because all target systems look alike (recall hardware and software vendors also want to write hardware and software once and then distribute widely) and therefore an exploit must only be developed once to apply broadly. Then, a second time as a software developer, because they can sell their same software to multiple clients. Having worked on Pegasuses, the thing that is dreaded the most and is very costly is a rewrite. Those get financially prohibitive. If the world was serious about stopping the NSOs of the world, it would work toward efficiently (read: inexpensively) making different individual systems wildly different yet remaining interoperable (because the interoperability is where the network effect comes in, providing value in communication systems and leading to their wider adoption). The conflict to solve is how to make systems interoperable and non-interoperable at the same time. While it is easy to imagine randomized instruction sets, Morpheus-like-blindly-randomize-everything chips and bytecode VMs that use binary translation to modify the phenotype at each individual system, it is not so easy to envision how systems could be written once to interoperate yet prevent BORE-type attacks whereby the one time exploit development cost can be easily offset by repeat exploitation. The only way forward is to find that lever which gives defenders a cheap button to push that forces an expensive Pegasus rewrite.

downWidOutaFite 5y ago

Dumb article. Basically amounts to "Apple should continue to do what they're doing".

ENOTTY 5y ago

The 'economic' argument simply doesn't work. Does the author think that every "tin-pot authoritarian" owns a poor country scrabbling in the unproductive desert for scraps? Of course not! Literally one of the best customers of NSO tools is Saudi Arabia (SA), where money literally bursts out of the ground in the form of crude oil. The market cap of Saudi Aramco is 3x that of Apple's. Good luck making it "uneconomical" for SA to exploit iPhones. I'll even posit that there is literally no reasonable amount where the government of SA cannot afford an exploitation tool. The governments that purchase these tools aren't doing it for shits and giggles. They're doing it because they believe that their targets represent threats to their continued existence. Think of it this way, if it costs you a trillion dollars to preserve your access to six trillion dollars worth of wealth, would you spend that? I would, in a heartbeat.

refulgentis 5y ago
100%, the argument is perfect in it's circularity: we should it make it uneconomical for there to be iMessage exploits via fixing iMessage exploits
roywiggins 5y ago
The NSO target list has like 15,000 Mexican phone numbers on it. You don't think making exploits more expensive would force attackers to prioritize only the very highest value targets? In the limit, a trillion dollar exploit that will be worthless once discovered will only be used with the utmost possible care, on a very tiny number of people. That's way better than something that you can play around with and target thousands. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/19/fifty-people-close-mexico-president-amlo-among-potential-targets-nso-clients https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/19/fifty-people-cl...
kragen 5y ago
Computer security isn't a board game where my unit can Damage your unit if my unit has more Combat than your unit has Defense, and once your unit is Damaged enough you lose it, and you can buy a card with 5 Combat for 5 Gold, and so on. It's not a contest of strength. It's not about who has the most gold. It's about who fucks up. If you follow the guidelines in http://canonical.org/~kragen/cryptsetup http://canonical.org/~kragen/cryptsetup to encrypt the disk on a new laptop, it will take you an hour (US$100), plus ten practice reboots over the next day (US$100), plus 5 seconds every time you boot forever after (say, another US$100), for a total of about US$300. A brute-force attack by an attacker who has killed you or stolen your laptop while it was off is still possible. My estimate in that page is that it will cost US$1.9 trillion. That's the nature of modern cryptography. (The estimate is probably a bit out of date: it might cost less than US$1 trillion now, due to improved hardware.) Other forms of software security are considerably more absolute. Regardless of what you see in the movies, if your RAM is functioning properly and if there isn't a cryptographic route, there's no attack that will allow one seL4 process to write to the memory of another seL4 process it hasn't been granted write access to. Not for US$1B, not for US$1T, not for US$1000T. It's like trying to find a number that when multiplied by 0 gives you 5. The money you spend on attacking the problem is simply irrelevant. Usually, though, the situation is considerably more absolute in the other direction: there are always abundant holes in the protections, and it's just a matter of finding one of them. Now, of course there are other ways someone might be able to decrypt your laptop disk, other than stealing it and applying brute force. They might trick you into typing the passphrase in a public place where they can see the surveillance camera. They might use a security hole in your browser to gain RCE on your laptop and then a local privilege escalation hole to gain root and read the LUKS encryption key from RAM. They might trick you into typing the passphrase on the wrong computer at a conference by handing you the wrong laptop. They might pay you to do a job where you ssh several times a day into a server that only allows password authentication, assigning you a correct horse battery staple passphrase you can't change, until one day you slip up and you type your LUKS passphrase instead. They might steal your laptop while it's on, freeze the RAM with freeze spray, and pop the frozen RAM out of your motherboard and into their own before the bits of your key schedule decay. They might break into your house and implant a hardware keylogger in your keyboard. They might do a Zoom call with you and get you to boot up the laptop so they can listen to the sound of you typing the passphrase on the keyboard. (The correct horse battery staple passphrases I favor are especially vulnerable to that.) They might remotely turn on the microphone in your cellphone, if they have a way into your cellphone, and do the same. They might use phased-array passive radar across the street to measure the movements of your fingers from the variations in the reflection of Wi-Fi signals. They might go home with you from a bar, slip you a little scopolamine, and suggest that you show them something on your (turned-off) laptop while they secretly film your typing. The key thing about these attacks is that they are all cheap. Well, the last one might cost a few thousand dollars of equipment and tens of thousands of dollars in rent. None of them requires a lot of money. They just require knowledge, planning, and follow-through. And the same thing is true about defenses against this kind of thing. Don't run a browser on your secure laptop. Don't keep it in your bedroom. Keep your Bitcoin in a Trezor, not your laptop (and obviously not Coinbase), so that when your laptop does get popped you don't lose it all. You could argue that, with dollars, you can hire people who have knowledge, do planning, and follow through. But that's difficult. It's much easier to spend a million (or a billion, or a trillion) dollars hiring people who don't. In fact, large amounts of money is better at attracting con men, like antivirus vendors, than it is at attracting people like the seL4 team. Here in Argentina we had a megalomaniacal dictator in the 01940s and 01950s who was determined to develop a domestic nuclear power industry, above all to gain access to atomic bombs. Werner Heisenberg was invited to visit in 01947; hundreds of German physicists were spirited out of the ruined, occupied postwar Germany. National laboratories were built, laboratory-scale nuclear fusion was announced to have been successful, promises to only seek peaceful energy were published, plans for a nationwide network of fusion energy plants were announced, hundreds of millions of dollars were spent (in today's money), presidential gold medals were awarded... ...and finally in 01952 it turned out to be a fraud, or at best the kind of wishful-thinking-fueled bad labwork we routinely see from the free-energy crowd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huemul_Project Meanwhile, a different megalomaniacal dictator who'd made somewhat better choices about which physicists to trust detonated his first H-bomb in 01953.

amluto 5y ago

One possible technical improvement is high quality honeypots. If Apple tried hard, they could arrange for certain iPhones to have instrumentation intended to detect and characterize these sorts of attacks. If every targeted user has a 0.1% chance of leaking the exploit vector to Apple, then mass exploitation becomes much more complex and expensive. Doing this well would be hard, but even an imperfect implementation would have some value.

refulgentis 5y ago
It might be hard to convince the privacy engineers to allow us access to a random sample of message attachments. What if we asked for a temporary 'root' access credential, that is only valid for 3 minutes per day?
- amluto 5y ago
  Get users to opt in, both to participate and to analyze any given payload?

User23 5y ago

The security attack that scares me more than any other is rough men with guns kidnapping me in the middle of the night and then torturing me until I reveal my security material. While normally torture just results in the victim saying anything to make it stop, in the specific case where the attacker has encrypted material and can test key extraction in real-time torture is highly effective.

api 5y ago
There’s a canonical term for this: rubber hose cryptography. That’s when you beat someone with a rubber hose until they give you the key. It’s effective against a wide range of algorithms and constructions.
- 3gg 5y ago
  https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- rocqua 5y ago
  The technical solution is having very available, very believable lies. Something where you can "reveal" false secrets that decrypt to believable data by your attacker. This is generally hard. Because you gotta know, at the time of being tortured, which fake secret will give believable results.

o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago

This thread devolved into a debate over C versus Rust or other memory-safe languages. 1. Blaming the language instead of the programmer will not lead to improved program quality. 2. C will always be available as a user's language. Users will still be write programs in C for their own personal use that are smaller and faster than ones written in memory-safe. languages 3. Those in the future who are practiced in C will have a siginificant advantange in being able to leverage an enormous body of legacy code, of which a ton is written in C. Programmers in the future who are schooled only in memory-safety languages may not be able to approach C as a learning resource, and may in fact be taught to fear it. There is a tremendous amount of C code that DOES NOT contain buffer overflows or use-after-free errors. It is amazing how easily that work is ignored in these debates. Find me a buffer overflow or use-after-free in one of djb's programs.

staticassertion 5y ago
> 1. Blaming the language instead of the programmer will not lead to improved program quality. I disagree. Blaming the language is critically important. Tony Hoare (holds a turing aware, is a genius) puts it well. > a programming language designer should be responsible for the mistakes that are made by the programmers using the language. [...] > It's very easy to persuade the customers of your language that everything that goes wrong is their fault and not yours. I rejected that... [0] > Users will still be write programs in C for their own personal use that are smaller and faster than ones written in memory-safe. languages Users will always write C. No they won't always be smaller and faster. > 3. Those in the future who are practiced in C will have a siginificant advantange in being able to leverage an enormous body of legacy code Much to society's loss, I'm sure. > and may in fact be taught to fear it Cool. Same way we teach people to not roll their own crypto. This is a good thing. Please be more afraid. > There is a tremendous amount of C code that DOES NOT contain buffer overflows or use-after-free errors. No one cares. Not only is that not provably the case, nor is it likely the case, but it's also irrelevant when I'm typing on a computer with a C kernel, numerous C libraries, in a C++ browser, or texting someone via a C++ app that has to parse arbitrary text, emojis, videos, etc. > Find me a buffer overflow or use-after-free in one of djb's programs. No, that's a stupid waste of my time. Thankfully, others seem more willing to do so[1] - I hate to even entertain such an arbitrary, fallacious benchmark, but it's funny so I'll do it just this once. [0] http://blog.mattcallanan.net/2010/09/tony-hoare-billion-dollar-mistake.html http://blog.mattcallanan.net/2010/09/tony-hoare-billion-doll... [1] http://www.guninski.com/where_do_you_want_billg_to_go_today_4.html http://www.guninski.com/where_do_you_want_billg_to_go_today_...

bogomipz 5y ago

The article states: >"A more worrying set of attacks appear to use Apple’s iMessage to perform “0-click” exploitation of iOS devices. Using this vector, NSO simply “throws” a targeted exploit payload at some Apple ID such as your phone number, and then sits back and waits for your zombie phone to contact its infrastructure." Does anyone have a link or any resources that describe how this “0-click” exploitation" works?

damowangcy 5y ago

An industry exists when there's market, in other words when there's supply and demand. Difficult hacking increases demands and more players will join the game. Until something changes how the Internet works, the very moment we sent something across the Internet through a service, we no longer have control over the data. Pegasus is just the tip of an iceberg and with technology become closer to us, i.e. homepods, smart electronic appliances, it is just time until all the big brands are hiring hackers to spy on their customers so that they can produce better product (make more money). Going forward, privacy is not supposed to be a personal preference like how platforms nowadays makes us click through different settings to opt out, it is supposed to be something we all collective have out of the box and we need to work together towards that goal.

kms_2021 5y ago

The problem is that the recent security company purchases suggest that it costs roughly $100 per month per user to have just basic security. Cost goes up from that exponentially.

throwaway984393 5y ago

"Security nihilism" sounds like a dig, but actually, it's the same thing as "security realism". All security eventually fails, thus all security is eventually meaningless. Not only can you not have perfect security, but the entirety of security is just a hedge against the will of your opponent. Any kind of security - from a file cabinet lock to a nuclear weapon - only stops people less motivated than you. I don't care what thing you think you've created, it can be defeated, one way or another. You know what you could do to make NSO's life harder, other than develop more security? Fight them. Have your politicians attack Israel for allowing the group to operate. Use sanctions, take a proportional response, condemn their actions at the UN, stop protecting them. Block Israel from the Apple Store. It's a more direct route, and more likely to succeed than making your goal "perfect security". (Would there be huge political challenges? Of course; but those are more approachable than "perfect security")

tester34 5y ago
>You know what you could do to make NSO's life harder, other than develop more security? Fight them. Have your politicians attack Israel for allowing the group to operate. Use sanctions, take a proportional response, condemn their actions at the UN, stop protecting them. Block Israel from the Apple Store. It's a more direct route, and more likely to succeed than making your goal "perfect security". (Would there be huge political challenges? Of course; but those are more approachable than "perfect security") but it's not just NSO, every reasonable country probably has people like them.

Joker_vD 5y ago

> In a perfect world, US and European governments would wake up and realize that arming authoritarianism is really is bad for democracy Well, they haven't done that since what, the early XX century, what with "he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch"? If the US really cared that much about "democracy", perhaps they'd have by now sorted it out in, say, Mexico already: after all, that's their closest-connected country after Canada, right? Yet the last time I've checked the news about upcoming Mexican elections, there were quite a lot of dead/missing opposition candidates reported (just as it was during the previous elections, and pre-previous, and...) Interestingly enough, the US press doesn't report much on that: apparently things in Afghanistan, across half the globe, are much more important for home security.

ezoe 5y ago

Don't own or relies on phone is the first step of security. We can't trust phone, all of them.

yoaviram 5y ago

The immediate takeaway from this article is that if any of these threat actors are on your radar and you have an I phone then you should delete iMessage.

username_my1 5y ago
I just disabled iMessages and FaceTime ... I don't actively use them anyway and I have a feeling Apple applies more scrutiny to 3rds party apps than theirs (Whatsapp , signal ...) I don't know if disabling iMessages is enough though in this case.

jokoon 5y ago

I don't care the slightest about computer security as long as governments won't try to ask experts to write laws and security standards. Same goes for insurance companies, who should try to sell cyber insurance and lobby the government for security standards. There are plenty security standards for many things that are not computers, yet cyber is a weird exception. My understanding is both a liberal silicon valley state of mind, combined with the NSA benefiting from low security standards and having a monopoly on tech companies. In my view, the computer security industry is too blame here, because they benefit from chaos and a lack of government intervention.

Tepix 5y ago

Related: Fuck privacy nihilism https://twitter.com/evacide/status/1416968243642724353?s=21 https://twitter.com/evacide/status/1416968243642724353?s=21 The same logic applies. You will not achieve perfect privacy online but there is plenty you can do to make tracking you so much harder.

adultSwim 5y ago

Treating this like a technology issue is a mistake. Tech fixes are band-aids. This is a social and governance issue that needs social and governance solutions.