Category: Cyber security

On Apple’s Bug bounty program

The Head of Security Engineering and Architecture at Apple, Ivan Krstić, announced to Black Hat attendees last week, that Apple will begin offering cash bounties of up to $200,000 to researchers who discover vulnerabilities in its products.

Krstić’s talk at Black Hat was definitely interesting and covered a good breadth of the technical measures that Apple has been taking in making iOS secure, from grounds up. The presentation also included a level of technical detail and disclosure of security—here, related to AutoUnlock, HomeKit, and iCloud Keychain—that has been mostly absent in the past at conferences, according to those present.

Apple being so open and forthcoming, about their security architecture, is somewhat unusual, but definitely welcoming.

Now, about the the bounty program itself, it will initially be limited to about two dozen researchers who Apple will invite to help discover difficult-to-uncover security bugs in five specific categories:

Screen Shot 2016-08-24 at 9.18.30 PM

Each of these aspects represent key threat vectors for attacks by governments and criminals alike. While iOS has never had exploits spread significantly in the wild, jailbreaking the software has made use of various methods of running arbitrary code in iOS. In another Black Hat presentation, the makers of the Pangu jailbreak for iOS 9 (fixed in 9.2), described how they achieved that kind of code execution.

Until now, there’s been no known extraction of data from Secure Enclave, the dedicated hardware in iOS devices with an A7 or newer processor that acts as a one-way valve to store fingerprint characteristics and certain data associated with Apple Pay. It is also used to prevent downgrading iOS to exploit a bug in a previous release. iCloud, which has been in the media sometimes for the wrong reasons, have had some accounts compromised in the past through certain weak password entry endpoints and social engineering of celebrity accounts, there has been no reported breach of iCloud servers itself.

Going by these clearly laid out vulnerability categories and qualification parameters, I see that Apple’s program sets clear objectives – find exploitable bugs in key areas. It makes complete sense, because proving exploitability with a repeatable proof of concept, takes lot more effort than merely finding a vulnerability. If the bug is found to have significant impact on security, then Apple will pay the researchers a fair value for their work. By doing this, Apple aims to learn how to improve a bug bounty program, over a period of time, and derive maximum value out of it.

The end result is – high-quality vulnerabilities (and their respective exploits) discovered, by researchers and developers who Apple believes have the skills and the right intentions to help advance product security. Bounty fees at other companies range from a starting point from $100 to $500, and are capped at from $20,000 at Google to $100,000 at Microsoft, clearly indicating the focus being quantity, unlike Apple’s focus on quality and difficult to discover, exploit and reproducible vulnerabilities.

Many major tech companies, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, have been running Bounty programs for years. But there is a reason for Apple not getting into the Bounty business until now, even if security has always been a priority for them and iOS is way more secure, grounds up, than other competing mobile OS platforms today. That reason is primarily to ward off governments and underground hackers who merely want to make money, by not being in a position to negotiate with them. The disclosure by the United States government on last week that an unknown third party had approached it — and not Apple — to help open a controversial iPhone only highlights how the giant company approaches bug-hunting efforts and security differently from the rest of the tech industry.

Asked by the audience at Black Hat why Apple waited so long to launch a bounty program, Krstić said the company has heard from researchers that finding critical vulnerabilities is increasingly difficult, and it wanted to reward those who take the time to do it.

I have been following Apple closely since 2009, when I bought my first Apple product – an iPhone 4 (the last phone Steve Jobs personally launched). Being a Security Consultant myself, I have always wondered to how Apple builds their software to be far more secure than other operating system platforms. And this has been true from the very beginning of Mac (built on a strong Unix base), And so I have always tried to understand iOS and Mac security a bit deeper, but Apple has always been secretive about sharing information, just the way they are about their product strategy and roadmap. So this new development with the Bounty program and the overall incharge for Product security at Apple making a presentation at Blackhat, is very exciting to me.

I am looking forward to understanding how Operating System security is best handled, from a company that makes the best software and hardware in the world today.

Notes:

  1. Krstić’s presentation at Black Hat is available here
  2. The video of the talk has been published recently on YouTube

 

Feature Image courtesy: blackhat.com

Need a security expert? You got to hire a coder!

As security (cyber) becomes more and more important, to businesses, governments, and also to our personal lives, the need for good security engineers and researchers is increasing at a rapid pace.

This is true whether one is working in an entry-level position or is already a senior researcher.

It is often said in the security industry that “It is easier to teach a developer about security than it is to teach a security researcher about development (coding).”

Information security professionals are used to seeing, experiencing and talking about failures in the industry. This usually leads them to assume that badly written (vulnerable) code is always the product of unskilled developers. If these professionals have never been exposed to software development, even at a small scale, then they do not have a fair understanding of the complex challenges that developers face in secure code development. And I think that a security professional cannot be effective in designing detective and preventive security controls (tools, architectures, processes) if he or she doesn’t appreciate these challenges.

Let me illustrate that with an example- ‘code injection” attacks against NoSQL databases versus SQL databases. Simply put, SQL and NoSQL databases both collect, organize and accept queries for information, and so both are exposed to malicious code injections. So, when NoSQL databases became popular, people were quick to predict that NoSQL injection would become as common as SQL injection. Though that is theoretically true, developers know that it’s not that simple.

If you take sometime out understanding NoSQL databases, you will quickly realize that there are a wide variety of query formats, from SQL like queries (Cassandra), to JSON based queries (MongoDB, DynamoDB), and to assembly like queries (Redis). And so security recommendations and tools for a NoSQL environment have to be targeted to the individual server that is underneath. Also, your security testing tools must have the injection attacks that are in the format of that specific database. And so one cannot blindly recommend controls or preventive measures, without understanding that the vulnerabilities are not available on all platforms. Encoding recommendations for data will be specific to the database type as well. This OWASP article explains how one can test for noSQL injection vulnerabilities.

This is all the knowledge that one can learn by digging deep into a subject and experimenting with technologies at a developer level. And so people with development backgrounds can also, often times, give better technical advice.

If one looks at the people leading security programs or initiatives at companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, and other large successful tech companies, many of them are respected because they are also keeping their hands on the keyboards and are speaking from direct knowledge. They not only provide advice and research but also tools and techniques to empower others in the same industry.

So to summarise, I would like to say that whether one is a newly graduated engineer or a senior security professional or a security researcher, one should never lose sight of the code, as that is where it all begins!

 

 

Picture courtesy: http://www.icd10forpt.com

Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo

TechCrunch just reported that Verizon has acquired Yahoo for $4.83 billion. 

This definitely is a shocker and I am sure many would agree with me. Not many of us were expecting Marrisa Mayer to call it a day by dropping the ball so soon. 

One of the most important companies of the first dot-com boom, Yahoo, has reached the end of its life as an independent company. This deal represents a stunnin decline for a company that was valued at more than $100 billion at its its peak in 2000. 

Marissa’s roots as an engineer at Google, definitely helped in improving the brand value with software programmers and technology users alike, and she did make an effort to beef up Yahoo’s technical talent. She instituted a regorous recruitment process and it worked hard at hiring computer scientists from some of the best universities. But there is little sign that these moves changed the culture at Yahoo or improved morale among the programmers working there. They always saw and projected themselves as a “media company” and not a “technology company”. I am not sure if it played out well for them, as its attempt to be a tech company and a media company at the same time, resulted in an organisation that was less than the sum of its parts. 

I strongly believe that one reason why Verizon was a strong contender was that they have done this before; Verizon acquired another struggling Internet company last year. Like AOL, Yahoo makes a lot of money by creating Internet  content and selling ads against it. So from Verizon’s perspective, this definitely looks like a logical step.

With respect to Mayer’s future at Yahoo, I am sure she is pursuing opportunities outside, as the statement that Yahoo released about this deal, “Yahoo will be integrated with AOL under Marni Walden, EVP and President of the Product Innovation and New Businesses organisation at Verizon”, makes it evident that Marissa Mayer’s future lies outside of Yahoo. 

I wish her all the best, and am sure she will build something very interesting soon in the tech business.



Picture courtesy: TechCrunch.com

Cyber weapons and Nuclear weapons

A good essay pointing out the weird similarities between cyber weapons and nuclear weapons. 

On the surface, the analogy is compelling. Like nuclear weapons, the most powerful cyberweapons — malware capable of permanently damaging critical infrastructure and other key assets of society — are potentially catastrophically destructive, have short delivery times across vast distances, and are nearly impossible to defend against. Moreover, only the most technically competent of states appear capable of wielding cyberweapons to strategic effect right now, creating the temporary illusion of an exclusive cyber club. To some leaders who matured during the nuclear age, these tempting similarities and the pressing nature of the strategic cyberthreat provide firm justification to use nuclear deterrence strategies in cyberspace. Indeed, Cold War-style cyberdeterrence is one of the foundational cornerstones of the 2015 U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Strategy.

However, dive a little deeper and the analogy becomes decidedly less convincing. At the present time, strategic cyberweapons simply do not share the three main deterrent characteristics of nuclear weapons: the sheer destructiveness of a single weapon, the assuredness of that destruction, and a broad debate over the use of such weapons.

Questions to ask before you get your first Threat Intel data source

Anton Chuvakin (one of the leading Gartner experts in the Threat Detection space) had a recent blog post on some of the key questions one must ask while identifying the first threat Intel data source. 

Here is the list

  • What is the my primary motivation for getting TI, such as better threat detection, improved alert triage or IR support?
  • Where do I get my first threat intel source [likely, a network indicator feed, IP/DNS/URL]?
  • How do I pick the best one(s) for me?
  • Where do I put it, into what tool?
  • How do I actually make sure it will be useful in that tool?
  • What has to happen with the intelligence data in that tool, what correlation and analysis?
  • What specifically do I match TI against, which logs, traffic, alerts?
  • What you have to do with the results of such matching? Who will see them? How fast?
  • How to I assure that the results of matching are legitimate and useful?
  • What do I do with false or non-actionable matches?
  • How do I use intel to validate alerts producted by other tools?
  • Do I match TI to only current data or also to past log/traffic data? How far in the past do I go?

The post is worth a read, as he has linked his earlier posts on this topic in this blog post. Do note that the white papers he has has linked requires GTP access. 

A great list of curated Threat Intel resources

I recently found this Github Repo, put together by Herman Slatman, which consists of a list of very useful and curated Threat Intelligence resources.

The list is broken down into following five categories:

  • Sources
  • Formats
  • Frameworks
  • Tools
  • Research, Standards & Books

This is a great resource for anybody starting to dwell into the Threat Intelligence discovery, consumption and classification, as it is an ocean out there, and a lot of these “Indicators” can be noise.

 

Picture Courtesy: depositphotos.com

Interesting Data Science projects of 2015

Here is a list of some really interesting Data Science projects of 2015. Thanks to Jeff Leek from @simplystatistics for putting this together. 
Some of my picks from the list are:

* I’m excited about the new R Consortiumand the idea of having more organizations that support folks in the R community.

* Emma Pierson’s blog and writeups in various national level news outlets continue to impress. I thought this oneon changing the incentives for sexual assault surveys was particularly interesting/good.

* As usual Philip Guo was producing gold over on his blog. I appreciate this piece on twelve tips for data driven research.

* I am really excited about the new field of adaptive data analysis. Basically understanding how we can let people be “real data analysts” and still get reasonable estimates at the end of the day. This paper from Cynthia Dwork and co was one of the initial salvos that came out this year.

* Karl Broman’s post on why reproducibility is hard is a great introduction to the real issues in making data analyses reproducible.

* Datacamp incorporated Python into their platform. The idea of interactive education for R/Python/Data Science is a very cool one and has tons of potential.

Picture Courtesy: kdnuggets.com

Adopting OODA Loop in Intrusion Detection & Response – it’s more than speed

Here is a great post by Richard able, on the concept of using OODA loop in Intrusion Detection and Response.

I have included some interesting lines here:

It is not absolute speed that counts; it is the relative tempo or a variety in rhythm that counts. Changing OODA speed becomes part of denying a pattern to be recognized…

The way to play the game of interaction and isolation is [for our side] to spontaneously generate new mental images that match up with an unfolding world of uncertainty and change…

Why we must encrypt

Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting post on his blog, about encryption, recently. This one is targeted towards the masses and so it touches upon the basics. He starts of by introducing the fundamental reasons for the use of encryption. But he also highlights some interesting facts about the concept of Encryption.

If we only use encryption when we’re working with important data, then encryption signals that data’s importance. If only dissidents use encryption in a country, that country’s authorities have an easy way of identifying them. But if everyone uses it all of the time, encryption ceases to be a signal. But if everyone uses it all of the time, encryption ceases to be a signal. No one can distinguish simple chatting from deeply private conversation. The government can’t tell the dissidents from the rest of the population. Every time you use encryption, you’re protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive.

Encryption is the most powerful technology tool we have that can help us protect our privacy against cyber adversaries and also against the surveillance programs run by governments. And as Bruce also points out, the relevance of encryption has become the most, in today’s world, as countries like the US, UK, China and Russia are either talking about or implementing policies that limit strong encryption.

Here is a report which is the result of a collaboration between Privacy International, ARTICLE 19, and the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) at Harvard Law School. It explores the impact of measures to restrict online encryption and anonymity in four particular countries – the United Kingdom, Morocco, Pakistan and South Korea. It is a definite read.

Title Image courtesy: carra-lucia-ltd.co.uk