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Crypto breakthrough shows Flame was designed by world-class scientists
- kposehn 14y ago"Flame could only have been developed by a wealthy nation-state" While I do agree that it was indeed developed by one, I'm not sure how it could only have been developed by one. Would it truly take massive levels of money to do or simply some smart, determined people?
- josephagoss 14y agoIts actually a shame, in the pursuit of blaming the USA and/or Israel people lose common sense. Look, It seems that it was certainly USA/Israel, but throwing common sense out the window just so we can make this point is not a good idea. What these people are saying, essentially is that very few countries have lots of smart people in different industry's, which is wrong. The zero days can come from all over, the PLC and SCADA system knowledge is all over the world. meh, I'm rambling now, I agree with you kposehn. Its more obvious that this is the work of USA/Israel simply because they are the ones desperate enough to try anything. I might be wrong but who else is threatening war with Iran?
- johnlepson 14y ago...but the US is not a nation-state.
- archgoon 14y agoYou have repeated this multiple times on this thread. Would you like to explain what you mean?
- choppyeloo 14y agoIf you don't know what a term means, why the fuck are you using it? http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-nation-state.htm http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-nation-state.htm You people are fucking ignorant.
- Symmetry 14y agoThe author of that is wrong to conflate nationality and ethnicity. A nationality is a much more general concept. Because most people in the US would list "American" as their primary group identity, and because the people who don't aren't off in their own geographical areas, the US is more of a nation state than it is anything else. Now, you shouldn't throw around the term nation state unless you deliberately mean to exclude, say, Kenya or the old USSR - but that's a different matter. EDIT: Or compare the US and the EU. The typical New Yorker regards people in Florida as the same sort of person as them, so the permanent fiscal transfers from New York to Florida don't spark the sort of outrage in the US that permanent transfers from Germany to Greece do.
- fnulp 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state notice how a.) it's not even desirable to be a nation state, so untwist your knickers everybody: "The most obvious impact of the nation state, as compared to its non-national predecessors, is the creation of a uniform national culture, through state policy. The model of the nation state implies that its population constitutes a nation, united by a common descent, a common language and many forms of shared culture. When the implied unity was absent, the nation state often tried to create it. It promoted a uniform national language, through language policy. The creation of national systems of compulsory primary education and a relatively uniform curriculum in secondary schools, was the most effective instrument in the spread of the national languages. The schools also taught the national history, often in a propagandistic and mythologised version, and (especially during conflicts) some nation states still teach this kind of history.[10] Language and cultural policy was sometimes negative, aimed at the suppression of non-national elements. Language prohibitions were sometimes used to accelerate the adoption of national languages and the decline of minority languages (see Germanisation)." Sure, when America was by and for white upper class males, it was a nation state, or something. Good for you, can we move to today now? The clincher is the list of examples of nation states on that page. Read it. Notice how the USA isn't on the list. So you can blah blah blah all you want, the downvoted poster is correct, the rest is not. What a surprise ^^
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- dfc 14y agoI'm afraid to ask...but why do you say that?
- eli 14y agoI don't think that's true, but either way it is not helpful to the discussion.
- stcredzero 14y agoThe zero days can come from all over, the PLC and SCADA system knowledge is all over the world. From what I've read, SCADA leaves an aspect of its system wide open and insecure, to make development easier.
- 0x0 14y agoPresumably, if you are not employed by a three-letter agency, and you manage to invent a breakthrough crypto technique, there's more value in publishing it, than sitting on it until you just blow it all away on one exploit anonymously. At least, you would _hope_ criminal enterprises don't actually have the means to fund and recruit their own secret, cutting-edge math research labs/networks :)
- munin 14y agodrug cartels can recruit people to build their own submarines and cell phone networks, so ...
- batista 14y agoThose submarines are crude, has you seen pictures? And submarines and cell phone networks are pretty standard technologies, well understood, that any competent engineer can build off of off the shelve components. It's not like drug cartels are Dr. No like enterprises...
- TeMPOraL 14y ago> And submarines and cell phone networks are pretty standard technologies, well understood,... But what about, well, drugs? Don't drug cartels employ chemists to refine old drugs and develop "better" ones?
- excuse-me 14y agoWell the TPS reports alone would have taken an army of programmers
- batista 14y agoSmart determined people don't come for cheap, and you don't get world class cryptanalysts and mathematicians working on such a specific endeavor out of "determination". Plus, we can all guess what wealthy nation-state developed the software and similar things in the past, let's not be hypocritical here...
- bcrescimanno 14y agoI think the point was more that the amount of money it would take would not necessarily come from a "wealthy nation-state." I'm not arguing over who actually did it; but I agree with the above that it's a pretty big leap to include that only. There are a lot of organizations in the world, corporate, criminal, and otherwise, that can muster say $25 million (which, I admit is a number I just pulled out of my ass) to accomplish a monumental task. I'm just not sure that I'm ready to believe that the money amounts we're talking here are restricted only to the wealthiest of nation states. Is the claim that you would need literally billions of dollars to get the smart people and equipment?
- kposehn 14y agoThat was basically my thinking. The purpose of Flame seems to be clear intelligence gathering, so most likely it is a state actor that wanted it; I wonder however if it was indeed developed by a state or a private group on behalf of a state. Plausible deniability is useful after all.
- bcrescimanno 14y agoAbsolutely. I have very little doubt that it was indeed a nation-state who developed it; but, my main issue is with the distinction of it being a "wealthy" one. Couldn't Flame, perhaps, have been developed by Iran and released on themselves as a means for drumming up anti-Israeli or anti-American sentiment? I realize something like that is totally conjecture; but, I don't see it as any further conjecture than, "it must be the US and / or Israel" [Edit] Since somehow this didn't come across in my post; throwing up conjecture at another possible source of Flame outside of US / Israel doesn't mean I believe any of these explanations--my point was merely that both ideas are pure conjecture with little (at least that I'm aware of) evidence to support the claim.
- johnlepson 14y agoI don't get why he thinks it must have been a nation-state either. Why a nation-state rather than any large country?
- vutekst 14y agoPerhaps I just don't understand the terminology here, but which large countries are not considered nation-states?
- choppyeloo 14y agoThe US is not a nation state. http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-nation-state.htm http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-nation-state.htm If you don't know what the term means, maybe it's best to avoid using it? Or read a fucking book once in a while.
- barrkel 14y agoI think the OP used the term nation state when he meant sovereign state; it was just a mistake of language. johnlepson, on the other hand, seems to have a bee in his bonnet about the US not being a nation state. Whether the US is a nation state or not depends on how multicultural you think it is; it's a political disagreement.
- dfc 14y agoI think the amount of OPSEC that went into this project is sufficient to exclude any group but a wealthy nation state.
- yk 14y agoProbably something like flame does need much money for development. The clearest sign is of course the MD5 collision. For this you need not only the genius who actually devises the attack, but also an entire infrastructure of people who check proofs and chat during coffee breaks on a useful level. So essentially an secret institute for applied cryptography. Atop of this you need to write the rest of the code, which is not at the same level, but still you need at least several programmers. So probably not all suspects are nation-states, but I believe all suspects are rather large organizations.
- acdha 14y agoThere's also the combination of goals and benefits: it's easy to hypothesize a drug cartel or the Russian mafia having enough money to fund something - complicated by the percentage of top-notch crypto people who wouldn't work for an illegal organization - but it's hard to come up with a scenario where they'd be going after Iran rather than, say, compromising a few million credit cards. Industrial espionage would be similar: hard to keep secret, fairly high risk and in most cases it'd be easier and more reliable just to take your megabucks and pay someone for whatever data you want. Why spend millions funding a big R&D team when you could just pay one of your target's sysadmins a million or two to get the data for sure?
- 0x0 14y agoWhat exactly was the requirement for a "0day" MD5 collision attack here; I thought the Terminal Server Licensing thing at Microsoft spat out good-for-code-signing certificates by itself?
- emily37 14y agoThey did, but it seems that those certificates had some extensions that made the code-signing attack difficult to carry out on some versions of Windows, so the collisions were used to generate certs without those extensions. (I read this at http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/06/flame-certificates-collisions-oh-my.html http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/06/flame-certif...)
- 0x0 14y agoI see; on Vista and above, certain fields in the certificate prevent it from being accepted for code signature. So they did a collision attack to create a slightly twisted certificate where all those fields are tucked away in a useless segment and ignored. Are there any details on what's new with this particular attack, compared to the known previously published ones? Why wouldn't earlier public research (such as that ps3 fake SSL CA stunt) suffice?
- marshray 14y agoI believe the phrase you're searching for is "awesome applied crypto research." :-) http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/ http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/ We don't yet have details on the differences. I've looked at the evil colliding cert and, AFAICT, the "MD5 Considered Harmful" technique would probably have been sufficient to pull this off.
- 0x0 14y agoThanks for the clarification. The rogue-ca thing is awesome indeed! :)
- nixle 14y agoHa! Everybody knows that this virus was hand-written by our Great Leader and Horse Rider King Jong Ill, right before he decided to exchange his earthly existence for another greater one.
- jcfrei 14y agoit's always unsettling seeing a governmental or otherwise undisclosed institution developing such cryptographic breakthroughs in secrecy. this leaves me as a developer with inferior tools to protect my data against any kind of intrusion. it’s understandable from a national perspective but unfortunate for the programming community at large. so far we still have bcrypt or scrypt - but who knows, maybe someday we'll have an efficient collision attack there as well...
- dfc 14y agoThe "programming community's" threat model in cyberspace is no different than anyone's threat model in meatspace. If a well funded government decides you are an enemy of the state they can harm you in meatspace or cyberspace. Are you staying up at night worried about a hellfire missile coming in your window?
- vecinu 14y agoHis fear stems from the fact that most people believe they have a right to the Internet and are essentially anonymous. To respond to your hellfire missile analogy, if I am in Canada or the US, I'm not worrying about it but if I'm in the middle east, it's a different story.
- dfc 14y agoAnd I am saying that he does not have to worry about NSA, Mossad or The Secret Army of Northern Virginia spending years to develop Flame 2.0 so they can read his email. On the flip side if you are a high level enemy of the state you should still be worried if you are in Topeka or Ottawa; if its not a hellfire coming in the window it will be equally lethal scary rough men dressed in black.
- danielharan 14y agoIf your government starts sending hellfire missiles in people's homes (well, on your territory), that might get peopled worked up. But if it's something that can evade detection for years, you have no idea you're being spied on. That's slightly unsettling, no?
- fleitz 14y agoHmm... if only there was some sort of National Security Agency that employed cryptographers so we'd know about these things first and could protect us from these attacks.
- pjscott 14y agoWho says they didn't know? The attack was non-destructive and primarily targeted at Iran, which is something the NSA is probably not too upset about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_(malware)
- huhtenberg 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm ;)
- TeMPOraL 14y agoAnd once again, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poes_law ;).
- dfc 14y agoWere you targeted?
- DrJ 14y agois he Iran ;)?
- joejohnson 14y agoMaybe the NSA is the "wealthy nation-state." It's not a stretch to imagine this attack was the NSA.
- ajross 14y agoClearly posters aren't getting the sarcasm, so I'll spell it out: the NSA is clearly suspect number one. What's more interesting to me, though, isn't that they had this technique, it's that they let it out for ... what? It seems like this is a garden variety public worm. One would think that if the NSA had the ability to forge windows code signatures like this, they would have used it more selectively. Some spook is in deep trouble about this.
- DanielRibeiro 14y agoWell, MD5 attacks are actually quite old news[1,2,3,4]. There even are some open source projects to help you find them[5]. Would love to hear more details on what was the breakthrough that Flame introduced. Edit: The breakthrough that Flame introduced can be read here[8, 9] SHA-1 is not yet broken, as MD5 is, but fortunately we are having the SHA-3[6] competition (like we had for AES[7]). [1] http://www.springerlink.com/content/d7pm142n58853467/?MUD=MP http://www.springerlink.com/content/d7pm142n58853467/?MUD=MP [2] http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/CIS.2009.214 http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/CIS.2009... [3] http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/643 http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/643 [4] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1999824/whats-the-shortest-pair-of-strings-that-causes-an-md5-collision http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1999824/whats-the-shortes... [5] http://code.google.com/p/hashclash/ http://code.google.com/p/hashclash/ [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha3 [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard [8] http://www.cwi.nl/news/2012/cwi-cryptanalist-discovers-new-cryptographic-attack-variant-in-flame-spy-malware http://www.cwi.nl/news/2012/cwi-cryptanalist-discovers-new-c... [9] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4080240 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4080240
- dfc 14y agoDid you read the article or the mailing list threads? This attack is hardly old news.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- doe88 14y agoThat depends when this attack was first conducted and when this variant of the cryptanalysis on MD5 was made as Marc Stevens sums up [1]: More interestingly, the results have shown that not our published chosen-prefix collision attack was used, but an entirely new and unknown variant. Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume that the particular chosen-prefix collision attack variant underlying Flame had already been in development before June 2009. This has led to our conclusion that the design of Flame is partly based on world-class cryptanalysis. [1] http://www.cwi.nl/news/2012/cwi-cryptanalist-discovers-new-cryptographic-attack-variant-in-flame-spy-malware http://www.cwi.nl/news/2012/cwi-cryptanalist-discovers-new-c...
- loceng 14y agoCool.
- Achshar 14y agoI think it makes sense that a well funded government was behind flame, but it makes me wonder, there is nothing that explicitly calls for huge funding. Nothing is very costly other than talent. So just a hypothetical situation here but why can't a hypothetical real life Tony Stark make it? (not rich like Stark but intelligent like Stark) Just a one or two people in a garage on their PC. What makes it impossible for that to be the case?
- ertdfgcb 14y agoTime? But besides that, I can't really think of anything. Some guy on NPR was talking about how it might be some professional developers who did this in their free time, so that would kind of make sense.
- Achshar 14y agoIf someone is capable of doing stuff that flame is doing, he/she might as well do it in 2 months time. The thing is we are unaware of the exact capabilities of the author of the code, so it can be a very intelligent person doing it in a few weeks or a group of smart people doing in a few years. But the problem with later is that the more people know about it and the longer it takes to make such malware, the higher are the chances of a pre release leak, or some double agent doing his work. So one or two very intelligent people doing it in very small time make more practical sense for a covert mission.
- eli 14y agoIt's also the timing. The assumption is that since this is a novel attack and apparently not based on Marc Stevens' attack which was published in 2009, that it therefore was likely developed prior to 2009.
- Fando 14y agoWow that's incredible! Ground breaking mathematics and cryptography techniques, sounds so interesting. I would love to understand it all.
- dkarl 14y agoIntelligence agencies and criminal hackers use the same techniques that white hat security researchers do, so every time I read about an attack like this, I wonder who else discovered it and reverse-engineered it, when, and how they used the knowledge. Imagine the irony (assuming Flame is an American product) if China had discovered Flame first and used its technology to conduct industrial espionage against U.S. companies. In fact, getting first crack at advanced technology is great incentive for rival powers or criminals to cooperate with targeted nations. Our next target might solicit the help of Chinese or Russian hackers, government-affiliated or not, who might be very happy to help so they could reverse-engineer the attack and replicate it themselves. Even worse -- and this is off-topic so I'll keep it brief -- I don't know if the intelligence gleaned from this operation would produce any benefit at all. Theoretically, if we discovered that Iran's nuclear program wasn't a threat, we could save ourselves a lot of worry. It might save a lot of time and money, and possibly even save lives if it prevented military action. But after Iraq who can be confident that an accurate assessment of the threat from Iran would have any effect on policy? We might be disseminating dangerous knowledge for nothing.
- eli 14y agoI really don't think that the failure of accurate intelligence to drive policy in the past suggests we should give up on trying to have policies driven by facts.
- alan_cx 14y agoReading tech news these days is getting too close to reading Jane's Defence Weekly for my liking.
- its_so_on 14y agostupid. "There were mathematicians doing new science to make Flame work." the government thinks that this is just like normal weapons research. what they don't realize is that "secure-enough" crypto is far more important to the world economy than their small use in breaking it. if a government could spend $800B and prove/create a machine that makes asymmetric cryptography impossible - and will be reverse-engineered and known to the world within 3 years of when they start using it, they probably would. meanwhile, the world loses a lot more than $800B if you can't do anything secure over the public Internet anymore, or have to have previously exchanged a one-time pad to anyone you want a secure connection with. this isn't just another weapon. mathematics is a public good. Of course, if you can spend $800B on new math and then break it, then in some sense it was "always broken." In another sense, however, that's not true at all. Quit messing it up for everyone.
- InclinedPlane 14y agoCan't say I don't disagree. It seems as though the governments of western democracies are spending a lot more effort on digital swords to stab at our enemies than on digital shields to protect their citizens.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- smallblacksun 14y agoThe NSA says that about 1/3 of their budget is put towards protecting US government systems and data (though there is no way to verify that). It is extremely difficult for them to even attempt to protect non-governmental systems. The NSA was involved in SELinux, and designed the SHA family of hash functions. This, along with their certification of various cryptographic standards as acceptable for government use, seems to me to be about all they could do defensively without requiring them to have access to private systems and data.
- snowwrestler 14y agoTo put this in perspective, it is an attack against MD5, which we have known for years now is not secure anymore.
- niels_olson 14y agoHi honey, what did you do today? Oh, this and that. Let's see what's in the news, shall we?
- zaroth 14y agoNews from a few days ago made it sounds like MS left their cert wide open to using it to sign code and make it look like it came from Microsoft. Now this news comes out that they used a pretty powerful crypto attack to essentially create their own trusted root to be able to sign their code to make it look like it came from Microsoft. Why would you need both vectors? It seemed (yesterday) that the Microsoft bug alone was enough to trick Windows Update into installing your code.
- fennecfoxen 14y agoEarlier information linked to from this site suggested that Flame was able to spread by some quirk involving using Terminal Services licenses as signing keys (instead of just licenses) and continuing up a trust chain. Was that information accurate? Is this an additional technique Flame uses for its attack? Or is it the only attack?
- shareme 14y agoThe countries interested in the Middle east time ZOne and AutoCad blueprints: 1.China 2.Russia 3.USA 4.India 5.Pakistan 6.Saudi Arabia 7.Israel ...its a long list...but the most infections happen in Iran and only a few countries have both interests in Iran and the spy infrastructure to get the infection spread to a network of computers as it was not internet spread. What should concern NSA and US citizens is that it was attacks against some systems that wee air-gapped just like USA military systems in war zones...ie in other words NSA just advertised that anyone can do it..not too bright of advertisement
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mmcnickle 14y ago"Flame could only have been developed with the backing of a wealthy nation-state" Further to other people's comments here; Has anyone seen an estimated cost to produce something like Flame or Stuxnet?