6 ms·

They reset the passwords on Friday. Even assuming that they've been working for the last four days on discovering the extent of the intrusion, there's a pretty

They reset the passwords on Friday. Even assuming that they've been working for the last four days on discovering the extent of the intrusion, there's a pretty big gap between Friday's announcement: "This activity appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access the account of one of our customers. This customer is aware of this activity and we have determined its extent and impact. We have found no evidence that any Linode data of any other customer was accessed. In addition, we have found no evidence that payment information of any customer was accessed. ... Out of an abundance of caution, however, we have decided to implement a Linode Manager password reset," and their disclosure today. I find that I'm uncertain whether they would've released today's disclosure if it weren't for the IRC chat log getting passed around online. I don't get why they thought it would be prudent to reset everyone's manager passwords "out of an abundance of caution", but didn't bother to mention the possible leak of payment information. We don't have any information on the strength of the passphrase used (nor can they provide any, of course); we have no idea how feasible it might be to brute-force it. Even if the full credit card numbers are never broken, the last four digits are still available in the clear. That has been enough to give unauthorized persons access to accounts on other services in the past (see the Matt Honan thing from last year: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/all/ http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-hona...). Depending on what other information was stored in the database, customers may be at risk of having accounts compromised elsewhere using the billing information from Linode. Linode really should have included that information in Friday's announcement. Also, ColdFusion has had 103 different CVEs going back to 1999 (http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=coldfusion http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=coldfusion). Adobe doesn't really have a sterling record when it comes to this stuff. A nice example is the recent CVE-2013-0632 (http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2013-0632 http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2013-0632), a remote code execution exploit that was discovered already in use back on January 4th but didn't have a fix available until January 15th. Linode -- and their customers -- are a really big, juicy target for future CF vulnerabilities.

corford 14y ago
This is what Caker (founder of Linode IIRC?) has to say about the strength of the passphrase: "our private key is stored only in encrypted format. The passphrase is not guessable, sufficiently long and complex, not based on dictionary words, and not stored anywhere but in our heads." [1] [1] http://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/comment-page-1/#comment-419022 http://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/c...
- UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
  A single private key passphrase is all that stands between a bad guy and everyone's credit card information... Well I know I feel better... But jokes aside, there is a huge gap between the strongest and weakest algorithms used to passphrase protect a private key. I wish they gave us more information about the certificates. Including: is it ONE private certificate for everyone? Or one per client/customer? How was the key pair generated? When was the key pair generated? Which algorithms does it utilise and at what key length?
  - darkarmani 14y ago
    > A single private key passphrase is all that stands between a bad guy and everyone's credit card information... Well I know I feel better... Where do you get that from? They encrypt all of the CC info using the public key. You need the private key AND the private key passphrase -- and one of them isn't stored on a computer.
    - corford 14y ago
      I'm pretty sure UnoriginalGuy understands that. What he says is correct, the attackers now have the private key file so all that prevents them from decrypting the CC data is the passphrase. They don't know what this is but they can try and brute force it which is why it's relevant to wonder what cipher the key uses, how many bits and how long, random and complicated the passphrase text is. Hopefully, they used 4096 bits and a random >20 char string as the passphrase. That combined with a standard cipher algorithm (DSA, RSA) should be enough to keep us safe.
jberryman 14y ago
> we have no idea how feasible it might be to brute-force it. Sorry to be morbid, but... there's also rubber hose cryptanalysis. Whether the payoff or actors involved here make that a legit concern I don't know.
blantonl 14y ago
Honestly, the gap can probably be attributed to them not knowing what exactly happened. Figuring out that you were compromised by a zero day vulnerability isn't an easy process to work through.

corford 14y ago

This is what Caker (founder of Linode IIRC?) has to say about the strength of the passphrase: "our private key is stored only in encrypted format. The passphrase is not guessable, sufficiently long and complex, not based on dictionary words, and not stored anywhere but in our heads." [1] [1] http://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/comment-page-1/#comment-419022 http://blog.linode.com/2013/04/16/security-incident-update/c...

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
A single private key passphrase is all that stands between a bad guy and everyone's credit card information... Well I know I feel better... But jokes aside, there is a huge gap between the strongest and weakest algorithms used to passphrase protect a private key. I wish they gave us more information about the certificates. Including: is it ONE private certificate for everyone? Or one per client/customer? How was the key pair generated? When was the key pair generated? Which algorithms does it utilise and at what key length?
- darkarmani 14y ago
  > A single private key passphrase is all that stands between a bad guy and everyone's credit card information... Well I know I feel better... Where do you get that from? They encrypt all of the CC info using the public key. You need the private key AND the private key passphrase -- and one of them isn't stored on a computer.
  - corford 14y ago
    I'm pretty sure UnoriginalGuy understands that. What he says is correct, the attackers now have the private key file so all that prevents them from decrypting the CC data is the passphrase. They don't know what this is but they can try and brute force it which is why it's relevant to wonder what cipher the key uses, how many bits and how long, random and complicated the passphrase text is. Hopefully, they used 4096 bits and a random >20 char string as the passphrase. That combined with a standard cipher algorithm (DSA, RSA) should be enough to keep us safe.

jberryman 14y ago

> we have no idea how feasible it might be to brute-force it. Sorry to be morbid, but... there's also rubber hose cryptanalysis. Whether the payoff or actors involved here make that a legit concern I don't know.

blantonl 14y ago

Honestly, the gap can probably be attributed to them not knowing what exactly happened. Figuring out that you were compromised by a zero day vulnerability isn't an easy process to work through.