Passwords

Heartbleed For Poets And Other Must-Reads

It’s H-Day + 2 – two full days since we learned that one of the pillars of online security, OpenSSL, has contained a gaping security hole for the past two years that rendered its protections illusory. As I wrote over on Veracode’s blog today: this one hurts. It exposes private encryption keys, allowing encrypted SSL sessions to be revealed. Trend Micro data suggests around 5% of one million Internet top-level domains are vulnerable.  IOActive notes that Heartbleed also appears to leave data such as user sessions subject to hijacking, exposes encrypted search queries and leaves passwords used to access online services subject to snooping, provided the service hasn’t updated their OpenSSL instance to the latest version. In fact, its safe to bet that the ramifications of Heartbleed will continue to be felt for months – even years to come. In the meantime, there is a lot of interesting coverage and […]

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The Heartbleed OpenSSL Flaw: What You Need To Know

There’s a serious vulnerability in most versions of the OpenSSL technology that requires an immediate update to avoid exposing sensitive information and Internet traffic to snooping. In response, the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC) has raised its InfoCon (threat) level to “Yellow,” indicating that…well…the Internet’s not as safe a place today as it was yesterday, before the vulnerability was released. Here’s what we know right now: + Researcher Neel Mehta of Google Security discovered the vulnerability, which was apparently introduced with a OpenSSL update in December, 2011, but only fixed with the release of OpenSSL 1.0.1g on Monday. + Dubbed “heartbleed” (thank the Codenomicon marketing department for that one), the vulnerability (CVE-2014-0160) is described as a TLS heartbeat read overrun. TLS stands for Transport Layer Security. According to OpenSSL.org, vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software have version numbers ranging from 1.0.1 and 1.0.2-beta. + Codenomicon described the vulnerability as an “implementation problem” […]

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Web to Wheels: Tesla Password Insecurity Exposes Cars, Drivers

We’ve interviewed security researcher Nitesh Dhanjani before. In the last year, he’s done some eye-opening investigations into consumer products like the Philips HUE smart lightbulbs. We did a podcast with Nitesh in December where we talked more generally about security and the Internet of Things. Now Dhanjani is in the news again with research on one of the most high-profile connected devices in the world: Tesla’s super-smart electric cars. In a presentation at Black Hat Asia on Friday, he  released findings of some research on the Tesla Model S that suggests the cars have a weakness common to many Web based applications: a weak authentication scheme. (A PDF version of the report is here.) Specifically: Tesla’s sophisticated cars rely on a decidedly unsophisticated security scheme: a six-character PIN. Dhanjani’s research discovered a variety of potentially exploitable holes that would give even an unsophisticated attacker a good chance at breaking into […]

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Snowden RSA Controversy Just One Of Many Facing Security Industry

In a little more than a week, executives from world’s leading technology firms will gather in San Francisco for the RSA Conference, the cyber security industry’s biggest show in North America. No hacker con, RSA is something akin to corporate speed dating for companies in the security industry. But, like so much else in the technology world, this year’s conference has become mired in controversy stemming from Edward Snowden’s leak of classified documents related to government surveillance. In December, Reuters broke the story that, among the documents leaked by Snowden was evidence that RSA, the security division of EMC and parent company to the conference, accepted a $10m payment from the NSA to implement what turned out to be a vulnerable encryption algorithm as the default option for its BSafe endpoint protection product. RSA, the security division of EMC, has denied the allegations that it accepted the money while knowing that […]

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Vulnerability Undermines WordPress Two-Factor Plugins

The firm Duo Security* said that it has discovered a vulnerability that affects a range of two-factor authentication plugins for the WordPress content management platform. The vulnerability could allow a malicious insider to use credentials for one WordPress site to log into a different site that is part of a ‘multi-site’ WordPress deployment without needing to pass a multi-factor authentication test. In a blog post on Thursday, DUO co-founder and CTO Jon Oberheide said that the vulnerability was discovered as part of an internal review of DUO’s two factor WordPress plugin, but that researchers realized it affects at least two other multi-factor plugins. DUO issued a warning to users of its plugin. The company also reached out to WordPress and to the publishers of other multi factor authentication plugins to address the issue, Oberheide wrote. DUO makes multi-factor authentication technology that allows users to log-in using a combination of username, […]

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