My Own Worst Enemy "Butterfly"

In July 2008, a group a researchers from Princeton University released a paper that described a new technique that recovered encryption keys from volatile memory on a freshly rebooted laptop. This technique is now known as a cold boot attack. These findings went against a long standing assumption that once power was cut to this type of memory, all data would be lost almost immediately.

Volatile memory, commonly known as RAM or Random Access Memory, is used by a computer to store data it needs temporarily for computational activities. Long term data storage is done with non-volatile memory, such as a hard drive or USB key fob. A frequent way to describe the difference between the two is to say that volatile memory loses its data when a computer is turned off, but non-volatile memory does not.

This distinction is often used when computer software is designed. For example, when an application stores passwords on a hard drive they are (hopefully) encrypted; when those passwords are moved into memory, they are typically stored in plain-text. It was generally assumed that this was a safe practice, and in defense of this type of thinking, encrypted data has to decrypted at some point in time and non-volatile memory is the safer place to store the plain-text.

To prevent attackers from grabbing passwords and other sensitive information from running memory , developers began clearing, or wiping, the areas of non-volatile memory that contained the sensitive data once it is no longer needed. Some operating systems also provide an additional level of protection by preventing other running application from accessing the memory locations where the sensitive data reside.

The decrypt and wipe process works fairly well for applications that only need to use the password or key once at start up, or intermittently during user activity, but for high performance applications that need a password or cryptographic key for every transaction, it may not be feasible from a performance stand-point. One such application is full disk encryption.

Modern hard drives are capable of transferring 80 or more megabytes of data per second, so you will see a pretty substantial performance decrease every time the operating system has to transfer encrypted data to or from the hard drive. If you have to decrypt and then wipe the encryption key every time you read or write data, you make these performance problems much worse.

To reduce this additional overhead, most whole disk encryption software loads the plain-text encryption keys in memory at startup and rely on the assumption that the key is erased when the computer is shutdown or loses power. Which leads us back to the Princeton researchers.

What the researchers discovered is that non-volatile memory actually loses its data slowly and predictably over a time frame of a few seconds to a few minutes. This allows an attacker to cut power to a computer and reboot it with a specially designed operating system and extract the encryption keys from memory before the data has time to fade away.

Additionally, they found that when the memory chips where cooled to -50 °C, you have more than enough time to remove the memory chip and read it on another computer or device. This can be accomplished by spraying the chip with an upside down canned-air spray duster, such as Dust-Off. For more advanced attackers, the chip can be cooled with liquid nitrogen to increase the decay time to a few hours.

The writers of this episode got most of their facts right, but in the first clip, the tech guy says that cooling the memory chips enables you to extract the keys, which is not correct because you can actually perform that attack without doing so.

The second clip shows one of the agents pulling a single cooled memory chip from a server and putting it into a device that extract the encryption keys. In this scenario, the cooling would be important to give the agent time to remove the chip and install it in the second computer.

The problem I have with this scene is that, unlike laptops, servers usually have several memory chips to provide redundancy and additional capacity. Depending on how the server spreads the data out across the individual chips, pulling out only one chip, or pulling out one chip at a time, would probably not get you the encryption key. To make things worse, the agent pulls the chip out of what appears to be a running system, which would potentially introduce unpredictable errors into the memory and would likely cause a complete system failure unless the system had hot swappable memory.

The only way to ensure that the keys would be extracted in the short period of time that agent had, rebooting the server with the special operating system would be the only viable approach.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent "Legacy"

Criminal Intent is one of the half-dozen or so spin-offs of the ever popular procedural drama Law & Order. The series follows a group of detectives--members of the NYPD's Major Case Squad--who are dedicated to bringing New York City's worst criminals to justice.

In this episode, the elite crime fighting squad get called to a prestigious private school to investigate a murder that was made to look like a suicide. During the course of their investigation, they find a laptop belonging to one of the suspects, and like all good television detectives, they turn it over to a nerdy guy named Ira for analysis.

As this plot line develops, the writers introduce two of my favorite gimmicks: the nonsensical technical monologue and the explain it in English one-liner:

"Kiana used data utility wiping freeware but it performs like malware."
"In English, Ira."
"She download a free program to permanently delete a video file but it just moved it to another part of her hard drive."

I'm not really sure what "data utility wiping freeware" is exactly, but from the English explanation, I can only assume that it is a program that permanently deletes files off of a computer's hard drive, otherwise know as a disk or file wiping utility.

Techno-gibberish aside, I understand why the plot needs the girl to use a this type of program--it shows that she understands what she did was wrong--but there is no reason for the program to be malware, or for her to even use it, to have the same plot outcome.

Let me explain.

When someone edits a documents, especially with video editing software, temporary files are created to help keep track of changes for rollbacks (undo) or to preserve changes in the event of a system crash.

An every day example of this is when you have auto-save enabled in Microsoft Word. If you look in the directory of the document you are editing, you can see a series of temp files that look like ~wrdxxxx.tmp. Another exampleare the temporary files that the operating system creates when you print a document--this is known as print spooling. These files usually get deleted by the application or operating system when they are no longer needed, but sometimes they don't.

This can create a serious problem if you want to encrypt or permanently delete a file. Most people assume that the file they just encrypted or deleted is the only copy on the disk drive, but in some cases it is not.

Additionally, most people assume that when you empty the trash everything in it is permanently deleted, when in reality, these files are very easy to recover if the computer is not used heavily after the deletion.

So, a more likely scenario for recovering the file would be Ira using a data recovery application or finding a temporary file that the suspect didn't know was there. The data wiping utility malware angle, while possible, just does not seem likely.

Burn Notice "Good Soldier"

Hollywood has always had a love affair with biometrics. They were a mainstay of military, spy, and science fiction movies long before they were included on consumer laptops and door locks.

Because Hollywood got such a jump start on biometrics, most people's expectations have been set by these fictional depictions. In reality, the effectiveness of most biometric systems do not come close to what you see in movies and television.

An unfortunate side effect of this is that corporations have spent millions of dollars promoting and implementing these ineffective systems and, more discouragingly, governments have based public policy on these Hollywood induced misconceptions.

If you remember back to the Burn Notice pilot, the protagonist--black listed spy Michael Weston--opens a biometric safe with a print he lifted off of its finger print reader.

This episode shows an attack against another biometric security mechanism, this time a facial recognition system that is designed to generate an alert when an unauthorized person enters a room.

Earlier this year, the Japanese government introduced regulation that allows for the prosecution of vending machine companies that sell cigarettes to persons under the age of 20.

Long before facial recognition became fashionable, 41 states and the District of Columbia implemented policies that restricted the sales of cigarettes through vending machines, in some cases these policy resulted in a complete ban on the practice.

These policies were implemented based on years of research that suggested that younger children where more likely to obtain cigarettes from vending machine than any other source, including friends and family. Additionally, subsequent research data has shown that a complete ban on cigarette machines in places frequented by young children is significantly more effective than alternatives such as device locks.

So why did the Japanese government choose not to ban vending machines? While I am no expert in Japanese politics, I suspect that a vending machine company named Fujitaka convinced the regulating body that they could accurately judge the age of a purchaser by using biometrics--at least 90% of the time.

What Fujitaka and the Japanese regulators soon found out was that a 3-inch magazine photo placed in front of the camera would fool the system into selling cigarette to underage kids. Oops.

This is exactly what Michael Weston does to gain entry to the hotel room of his sexy nemesis Carla. Armed with a 8x10 head shot of the room service guy, he easily gains entry into the room without setting off the alarm. Sound familiar? You can thank a bunch of Japanese school girls for this one.

Burn Notice "Turn and Burn"

Steganography, for those of you who don't know, is the art of hidden writing. While cryptography scrambles or obscures the content of a message, steganography attempts to hide the fact that a message is being sent. The example used in this episode shows a message hidden in a crossword puzzle, but modern techniques have been developed that allow messages to be hidden in everything from digital photographs to common network protocols.

In steganography the message is hidden by a technique, or process, but does not use a key in the same way that cryptography does, so once the encoding technique is discovered you can extract the plain text from the stegotext without any additional information. With cryptography, on the other hand, you would need both the method and a key to extract the plaintext message.

When the episode's opening voice-over tells the audience that "unless you have the key" you won't wont be able read the message, it is a little misleading because the differences between steganography and cryptography is not explained.

It may have been better to say that without knowing how or where the message is hidden, you would even know its there. Better yet, you could have bored the audience with a lengthy explanation of the history of steganography and how it differs from cryptography.

WarGames 25th Anniversary

Looks like they are going to re-release WarGames into theaters for one night to coincide the with the release of the direct-to-video sequel to this 1983 classic.

Even with all of its technical inaccuracies and idealistic plot, this movie did for hacking in the '80s what Gidget did for surfing in the '60s.

In the mayhem that ensued from this hacker renaissance, a writer for Newsweek magazine suggested that parents should lock up modems like they would firearms--they were simply that dangerous. The nerve. Imagine if the ghost of hacking future had given him a peak at what was in store with the Internet!

Much of the cold war paranoia and fear will not play as strongly with a modern audience, but if you're looking for a trip down memory lane, this might be the ticket for you.

http://www.fathomevents.com/details.aspx?eventid=724

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

A recent study conducted in London showed that 21% of the 578 people stopped on the street by the researchers where willing to reveal their passwords in exchange for a chocolate bar. The obvious flaw in this study is the fact that the researchers had no way of verifying that the passwords provided were real, but I wonder how many people are devious enough to realize that giving a fake password will still get them that little piece of heaven.

The Incredible Hulk was already in the can when this study was released, so I have to give Zak Penn (or Edward Norton who apparently did an uncredited rewrite of the script) credit for coming up with a similar social engineering technique. Towards the end of the movie Bruce Banner, played by Edward Norton, needs to get into a high security university research building to gain access to a computer network. How does he do it (spoiler)? He brings several pizzas from the pizzeria that he was hiding out in and uses them to bribe a security guard and a graduate student into looking the other way while he accesses the network with his ex-girlfriend's user name and password.

In real life this probably would not have worked on a trained security guard--I recently saw someone try something very similar and fail--but there is no doubt in my mind that the graduate student would have handed over the keys to the kingdom for a free pizza.

Firewall (2006)

This film garnered a significant amount of criticism in the computer community for its presumed technical inaccuracies, most notably for how Harrison Ford's character used his daughters iPod to store bank account numbers. However, as Roger Ebert correctly pointed out in his review of the film, "...an iPod can do that -- act as a backup hard drive...."

With a few Google queries, its easy to figure out that you can connect digital cameras to iPods and use them to store images, so, its not that far of a stretch to assume that the scanner acted in the same way. Come on people, get a grip.

To that point, I have been finding that critics, like screen writers, have gotten into a bad habit of assuming that the general public's lack of knowledge somehow negates their responsibly to know how a technology works before they write about. This was painfully obvious in the criticism of Untraceable, and just as evident in the focus of the criticism of this movie. I'm not saying that this movie isn't flawed, just that the true flaws were overlooked.

The most obvious flaw, from my perspective, shows up about 7 minutes into the film. While too short to be called a technical monologue, the following lines start things off:

"Let's try a rule change on him and see what he does. I'll put in an IPS signature that black holes the pattern...see if that slows him down."

Possibly afraid that Harrison Ford's delivery of the line would not play on its own, the film makers quickly cut to a shot of him typing commands into a computer:

For those of you who don't immediately see the problem, I may need to explain what IPS is.

Intrusion prevention systems, or IPS, are inline intrusion detection systems that monitor traffic looking for specific signatures, or patterns, in network packets and attempt to block attacks. Traditional IDS simply send alerts when they detect patterns, but do not attempt to stop the attack.

The following is an example of an intrusion detection signature, or rule, that would detects brute force logins to a Web application, which is similar to what is describe in the dialog:

alert tcp $WEB_SERVERS 80 -> $EXTERNAL_NET any (msg:"WEB AUTH LOGON brute force attempt"; flow:from_server,established; content:"Authentication unsuccessful"; offset:54; nocase; threshold:type threshold, track by_dst, count 5, seconds 60; classtype:suspicious-login; sid:2275; rev:2;)

The first thing that you will notice is that the IDS rule looks nothing like what is being typed into the administrative console. What they shown in the film is actually a Cisco ACL (Access Control List) that blocks all traffic from the 172.16.2.0 subnet, not an IPS signature. This would be resilient to false positives, but wouldn't stop an attacker coming from Hong Kong, Korea, and Malaysia.

The other problem, which is not as obvious, is that the traffic that they are showing is unencrypted HTTP. Needless to say, this is not something you want to do when you are running a banking Web site.

An interesting thing about that, however, is that intrusion detection systems are not very effective with encrypted traffic. There are things you can do to make it work, but in real life, brute force login attempts would most likely be tracked and blocked by the Web application, not something that monitors the network.