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It is related in that there has never been a release of OpenSSL that was secure. Not one. Ever. The known vulnerabilities list for OpenSSL has never had a rele

by drakaal 13y ago

It is related in that there has never been a release of OpenSSL that was secure. Not one. Ever. The known vulnerabilities list for OpenSSL has never had a release that didn't have a flaw that allowed some amount of "backdooring", Dataextraction, or data manipulation. (as opposed to just a path for a DoS attack) >Don't make things up - I don't have to make things up. The CIA and FBI keep a list of known vulnerabilities, publicly and not publicly documented. They use this information for doing investigations. I have personally run in to issues where I was contacted by FBI because we had created fixes for our deployments and they contacted us to "unfix" them, because their warrants were "no knock" and they didn't wish to tell us who they were attempting to do surveillance on. Feel free to Google me (Brandon Wirtz) if you need some background on my credentials in the security space. But thanks for jumping to I make stuff up. The mis-information that is out there is that OpenSSL has ever been secure. I'm more sad nobody beyond XKCD did a good job explaining how the bug works, or doing the demonstration I like where you bash on the server and do data alignment to show a couple of gigs worth of data from a single server. People aren't scared enough of this stuff. All those people saying "change your passwords on every site", but nobody is creating a huge public list of which sites are currently not patched. so >bad enough without misinformation No. People are too complacent and the OpenSource community doesn't own up to the things they let slip by. The "smart" guys at CDN's and Banks, were never at risk because they use proxies that have extremely short "memory life" because data is streaming through rather than stored (by the time you could get a second value to do finger printing everything would have changed), and are running NSS, or Matrix or Polar. Hearbleed is an issue because too many people are too complacent, too trustworthy, and too uninformed.

itsnotvalid 13y ago
Which kind of proxies? What are they using them actually?
- drakaal 13y ago
  Just one example, but this is a typical setup. http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/interfaces_modules/services_modules/ace/v3-00_A2/configuration/ssl/guide/sslgd/terminat.html http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/interfaces_modules/serv... I don't suggest doing the Clear Text between server and proxy, but the idea is the same. You use a proxy so that you don't ever have user names or passwords in memory longer than a few ms. Once a user is authenticated data passes through quickly making it very very difficult to do a fingerprint match of the data you do extract. Also because you can load balance across proxies you may not even hit the same machine with a second "hear beat". The Cert still has to be there somewhere, so you could still end up giving up a cert, and you could give away anything that fits on a single HTML page as it is flying by in the stream... But most sites know better than to display a password, or a username and a bank account number at the same time (not all, but most). Heart Bleed is more of an issue because too many people built monoliths, rather than compartmentalizing. The Titanic didn't sink because it was compartmentalized, it sank because the man at the Wheel didn't know to let one compartment take all of the force, and instead spread it over a larger surface. Your proxy should be disposable. Nothing of value should be on the thing that talks to the user, and shouldn't retain data for any length of time.
  - nl 13y ago
    This is a great example of why a little knowledge is a bad thing. It almost sounds like you know what you are talking about, which probably confuses people. Heartbleed is dangerous because it exposes private keys, and that let's you decrypt SSL traffic. That in turn may let you read passwords. Don't conflate the two separate things. Compartmentizing is good, but doesn't protect against Heartbleed. Disposable proxies don't protect you. Perfect Forward Secrecy does protect you because the private keys aren't reused. It is notable that you didn't mention the one technique that actually helps. To me that shows you misunderstand what heartbleed is. Some if your critisms of OpenSSL are valid, but not for the reasons you claim.
    - drakaal 13y ago
      The Private key thing is "bad" but far less bad than the user data that is being exposed. The Private Key Exposure lets you do impersonation, but you would have to do something with DNS, or such to get it to work. Where as me getting your user/pass, or account information has immediate impact, and can't be "undone". PS Conflate doesn't mean what you think it does. Conflate has to be wrapper for several topics or ideas that are related. I can't "conflate" two unrelated things because conflation is by default "true". If we were discussing Gentrification, and Inflation in the housing market of San Francisco then we be talking about the conflated issue of "The San Francisco Housing Crisis". Just as you can't "inflate" something with a vacuum or sand, or peanut butter, you can't conflate it with something that is unrelated. This issue of the understanding of the word conflate comes from the fact that people think that "confused" sounds so much like it, and when they are trying to sound smart they use the word conflate when they really mean confuse, and think the two are synonyms. -Brandon Wirtz PlexiNLP (I know my words)
      - ksenzee 13y ago
        "Conflate" is very often, and properly, used to mean "treating two unrelated things as though they were related," which I believe is exactly what the poster meant to say you are doing. You can make an argument that "trying to conflate" would be more accurate, but only if you're more of a linguistic prescriptivist than most editors.
codesuela 13y ago
So would you say Polar SSL is less likely to contain exploitable code?
- drakaal 13y ago
  It seems to have a history of having fewer exploits that can result in leaking data. It has had more DoS exploits (I think) but most of them could be mitigated through configuration. I think that the revenue model for Polar has put more money in to making sure it is secure. OpenSSL has always suffered from the fact that it is mostly "leach Ware". People use but they don't contribute because it isn't related to their core competency, so they don't mod or upgrade it. Polar on the other hand has people paid to test, patch and maintain the code.
midas007 13y ago
To paraphrase Thomas, a core issue is getting the right eyes auditing code. We need more CTFs that offer cred and prizes to keep projects honest. Also, important core projects like OpenSSH, OpenSSL, GnuPG and core projects like zlib need to be held to a greater deal of scrutiny and adversarial reporting. But as it stands now, projects like zlib dont even bother GPG sign releases, so how much confidence can you have in the rest of their security posture? This is failure by way of academic happy-clappy laziness waiting to happen. Also other important projects like Glibc that were massive big balls of mud are likely to conceal all sorts of vulns by their enormous codebase and number of features AND poor support history, hence Debian's selection of eglibc. So in conclusion there are a number of hard but necessary steps to reduce the threat surface from this sort of thing ever happening again. Because doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the literal definition of "stupid." FOSS is part of the economy and important projects should be treated with the seriousness, responsibility and customer service of a business, even if the sale price is $0.

by drakaal 13y ago

itsnotvalid 13y ago

Which kind of proxies? What are they using them actually?

drakaal 13y ago
Just one example, but this is a typical setup. http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/interfaces_modules/services_modules/ace/v3-00_A2/configuration/ssl/guide/sslgd/terminat.html http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/interfaces_modules/serv... I don't suggest doing the Clear Text between server and proxy, but the idea is the same. You use a proxy so that you don't ever have user names or passwords in memory longer than a few ms. Once a user is authenticated data passes through quickly making it very very difficult to do a fingerprint match of the data you do extract. Also because you can load balance across proxies you may not even hit the same machine with a second "hear beat". The Cert still has to be there somewhere, so you could still end up giving up a cert, and you could give away anything that fits on a single HTML page as it is flying by in the stream... But most sites know better than to display a password, or a username and a bank account number at the same time (not all, but most). Heart Bleed is more of an issue because too many people built monoliths, rather than compartmentalizing. The Titanic didn't sink because it was compartmentalized, it sank because the man at the Wheel didn't know to let one compartment take all of the force, and instead spread it over a larger surface. Your proxy should be disposable. Nothing of value should be on the thing that talks to the user, and shouldn't retain data for any length of time.
- nl 13y ago
  This is a great example of why a little knowledge is a bad thing. It almost sounds like you know what you are talking about, which probably confuses people. Heartbleed is dangerous because it exposes private keys, and that let's you decrypt SSL traffic. That in turn may let you read passwords. Don't conflate the two separate things. Compartmentizing is good, but doesn't protect against Heartbleed. Disposable proxies don't protect you. Perfect Forward Secrecy does protect you because the private keys aren't reused. It is notable that you didn't mention the one technique that actually helps. To me that shows you misunderstand what heartbleed is. Some if your critisms of OpenSSL are valid, but not for the reasons you claim.
  - drakaal 13y ago
    The Private key thing is "bad" but far less bad than the user data that is being exposed. The Private Key Exposure lets you do impersonation, but you would have to do something with DNS, or such to get it to work. Where as me getting your user/pass, or account information has immediate impact, and can't be "undone". PS Conflate doesn't mean what you think it does. Conflate has to be wrapper for several topics or ideas that are related. I can't "conflate" two unrelated things because conflation is by default "true". If we were discussing Gentrification, and Inflation in the housing market of San Francisco then we be talking about the conflated issue of "The San Francisco Housing Crisis". Just as you can't "inflate" something with a vacuum or sand, or peanut butter, you can't conflate it with something that is unrelated. This issue of the understanding of the word conflate comes from the fact that people think that "confused" sounds so much like it, and when they are trying to sound smart they use the word conflate when they really mean confuse, and think the two are synonyms. -Brandon Wirtz PlexiNLP (I know my words)
    - ksenzee 13y ago
      "Conflate" is very often, and properly, used to mean "treating two unrelated things as though they were related," which I believe is exactly what the poster meant to say you are doing. You can make an argument that "trying to conflate" would be more accurate, but only if you're more of a linguistic prescriptivist than most editors.

codesuela 13y ago

So would you say Polar SSL is less likely to contain exploitable code?

drakaal 13y ago
It seems to have a history of having fewer exploits that can result in leaking data. It has had more DoS exploits (I think) but most of them could be mitigated through configuration. I think that the revenue model for Polar has put more money in to making sure it is secure. OpenSSL has always suffered from the fact that it is mostly "leach Ware". People use but they don't contribute because it isn't related to their core competency, so they don't mod or upgrade it. Polar on the other hand has people paid to test, patch and maintain the code.

midas007 13y ago

To paraphrase Thomas, a core issue is getting the right eyes auditing code. We need more CTFs that offer cred and prizes to keep projects honest. Also, important core projects like OpenSSH, OpenSSL, GnuPG and core projects like zlib need to be held to a greater deal of scrutiny and adversarial reporting. But as it stands now, projects like zlib dont even bother GPG sign releases, so how much confidence can you have in the rest of their security posture? This is failure by way of academic happy-clappy laziness waiting to happen. Also other important projects like Glibc that were massive big balls of mud are likely to conceal all sorts of vulns by their enormous codebase and number of features AND poor support history, hence Debian's selection of eglibc. So in conclusion there are a number of hard but necessary steps to reduce the threat surface from this sort of thing ever happening again. Because doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the literal definition of "stupid." FOSS is part of the economy and important projects should be treated with the seriousness, responsibility and customer service of a business, even if the sale price is $0.