royce

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

The rest of the snark/ bitterness aside ... NTP takes latency as a constraint, and accommodates for it.

And far from a disgrace, NTP was a brilliant design for its time, and has proven to be far more future-proof than should have been expected.

royce

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

Someone seems to have dropped the "EXCEPT EUROPA" part. ;)

royce

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

I work in telco, too - by my read, they're not disagreeing:

  Although Diameter was intended to replace RADIUS, the
  protocol itself offers no security when used over TCP. As a
  result, RFC 6733 suggests that Diameter messages should
  be secured using TLS or DTLS; 5G has replaced Diameter
  with signaling over HTTP/2 [30].

Edit: here's ref [30]: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/radext/Zcuud3GyG221DXn...

"5G completely replaced DIAMETER with signaling over HTTP/2. DIAMETER is only used in legacy systems that has not yet been updated. Early 5G can be deployed as Non-standalone (NSA) or standalone (SA). NSA means a 4G core with 5G radio while SA means both 5G core and 5G radio. NSA has a lot of severe limitations. Many networks are already SA and the rest are working on rolling out SA."

royce

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

The paper https://www.blastradius.fail/pdf/radius.pdf) explicitly states DIAMETER "never replaced RADIUS for many common use cases" and "the protocol itself offers no security when used over TCP". So unless the DIAMETER traffic is isolated or tunneled, it's arguably less secure than RADIUS/TLS.

royce

vor 2 Jahrendiscuss

CVE: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2024-3596

Nothing on oss-security list yet, but it'll appear here: https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2024/07/09/

Essential reading is this FAQ from DeKok, FreeRADIUS maintainer who revised the RADIUS UDP approach to mitigate: https://www.inkbridgenetworks.com/blastradius/faq

royce

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Naively, would there be any value in providing an RSS feed of new adds, date changes, etc. ?

royce

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

"[PATCH] socks: return error if hostname too long for remote resolve

Prior to this change the state machine attempted to change the remote resolve to a local resolve if the hostname was longer than 255 characters. Unfortunately that did not work as intended and caused a security issue."

royce

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

That's an entirely different threat model. hotpotamus is right - the article, and the threat model, are about offline attack of back-end password hashes, after they've been stolen or leaked. The speeds against fast hashes are indeed measured in the billions or trillions on ordinary commodity hardware.

Further, password hashes are not "decrypted" - they are cracked, because it's not reversing anything - https://www.techsolvency.com/passwords/dehashing-reversing-d... (disclaimer: my explainer)

royce

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Being able to firmly reject all unauthenticated messages is still the target end state. The risk of a threat actor sending an email that looks completely legit, and simply asking the user to "check their spam folder", is very real.

royce

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Site author here. Thanks for helping to get the word out - every bit may help someone.

While I consider my page to provide useful color, and I validate and summarize and cache info updates locally to add value ... it won't scale for long. It's really a stopgap - to buy defenders time until better efforts emerge.

A few efforts likely to become higher leverage than mine, because they can be driven by pull requests:

* https://github.com/NCSC-NL/log4shell - already quite comprehensive

* Whatever CISA may spin up - https://github.com/cisagov/log4j-affected-db

* Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) - turns out he worked with CISA on this

That being said, I'll keep working on mine as long as it still provides value; updates/corrections welcome.

royce

vor 5 Jahrendiscuss

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds a lot like how pyramid schemes work?

royce

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

It's now been cracked - and now we know why it took so long:

https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2019-October/019124.h...

royce

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

It depends on the organization. Some larger financial institutions are sometimes more likely - or even bound by internal policy - to simply trigger their standard card-cancellation procedures.

Instead, one could present the financial institution with the hypothetical question, and then only give the specifics if the institution's policies are non-destructive.

If the finder is a decent sort, and has the time to try alternatives, I'd rather get the cards back intact than to have to do the cancellation dance.

royce

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Or Alaska or Hawaii - same problem (shipping restrictions invisible until checkout). It's insane. They know exactly where I live.

royce

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

The superset of all of the original CSRG-shipped cracking-eligible descrypt hashes is actually about 1400 hashes, drawn from a slightly smaller number of overlapping accounts among releases. Many of them appear to have been temp/test/throwaway with generic usernames and short, simple passwords.

royce

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I'm startled that there's no mention of app whitelisting yet.

Code signing reduces ops overhead and latency in environments that are using app whitelisting.

If the code is signed, then the signing certificate can be trusted once. All upgrades and patches that are signed with that certificate can be automatically whitelisted, with no intervention from teams managing the whitelisting.

But if the code isn't signed, then if even a single byte changes in the executable, it must be re-whitelisted - usually manually.

The more signed apps there are, the easier it is for companies to start using application whitelisting, the fewer people are needed to maintain it, and the faster patches to those applications can be deployed. Making it easier for companies to move to whitelisting increases security for the ecosystem in the aggregate.

royce

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Yep, that was exactly why (or at least, very strong circumstantial evidence):

https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/websearch/H4XbbwWmtAY...

I don't think it was ever officially announced/admitted anywhere, though. But it was exactly around the time that Google+ was rolled out.

royce

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

Now that Google+ is going away, can we have the +string operator back in Google Search, to force inclusion of a single string (instead of having to use double quotes)?

royce

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

For us (early regional ISP, mid-'90s), a lack of separate per-service hostnames caused significant scaling fragility.

In the initial rollout, all services were served from a single physical host with just one listening IP, which the bare 'example.net' resolved to. (Was this naive of us? You bet.) Other service hostnames (www., smtp., etc) were all just either CNAMEs to that hostname, or A records to that IP.

When our SMTP usage started to exceed the capacity of that single host, we tried to move 'smtp.example.net' to a different host. This is when we we discovered that many users were configured to use 'example.net' for SMTP instead. We had to update all of those users' configs before we could turn down SMTP on the original host. (We couldn't afford big-iron load balancers, and they were less common then - we just used DNS round-robin for load distribution).

At that point, we realized that customers were using bare "example.net" for everything - homepage, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, FTP, DNS, shell access - you name it. It was easy to remember - and it worked. So it was hard-coded everywhere - FTP scripts, non-dynamic DNS settings, etc. And this was looong before email clients had automatic configuration detection, so that was all hard-coded, too.

So we had to painfully track down all the users who were still hitting 'example.net' for SMTP, and help them update their configs before we could turn down SMTP on the original ancient host. The other services had to go through a similar painful transition.

We concluded that the only way to prevent this from happening again was to make sure that the bare hostname never offered any services at all - except for a single HTTP service whose sole purpose was to redirect 'example.net' to 'www.example.net'.

From then on, each new vISP domain had the same non-overlapping service namespace ... so that the otherwise inevitable configuration drift would be impossible.

Later, with the rise of things like email autoconfiguration, load balancers, and POP/IMAP multiplexors (like 'smunge'), we had more options. But at the time, avoiding services on 'example.net' was the only way to go (for us). Having a bare 'example.com' as the sole hostname in the browser bar was a sign of brokenness. :)

royce

vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

If someone is developing web applications in such a way that they need support from their browser vendor to make them work properly ... they're doing it wrong.

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A call to bring hash substring search into password cracking

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