Holy Jesus that's a lot of money. Has anyone credible ever done any market sizing of the btc services or hardware markets? At first blush it is hard for me not to estimate the btc specific hardware market as being less than 200MM even when you add up everyone's revenue since the dawn of time. It looks like avalon's total sales so far has been less than $10MM.
I assume this has to be about inventory - some kind of line of credit that allows them to offer customer financing, shift away from their pre-order system, or some kind of upfront cost associated with a process upgrade.
It's hard to believe there is much money to be spent on R&D for asic hashing, or that they would gain much via some big marketing campaign.
Wow, the US Attorney is really going out of his way to fill this one up with bullshit. I knew something was very wrong when goodin claims hundreds of millions in losses on a carding ring and it didn't take long to find it. The only people that would pay $50 for anything having anything to do with credit cards would be fbi investigators. Hell they're the only ones that would pay one tenth that.
software is fundamentally broken in some way that it just gets harder and harder to keep a lid on the more effort we make. There is money to be made selling inflatable rafts before a tsunami, but it's pretty depressing work and pretty much everyone is still going to die. The only semi-workable answers are air gapping and drastically reducing the size of your code base, and neither are working that awesome for people or is anyone much willing to do it. Look at google chromeos. One of the lowest attack surface pcs on the market and it was designed from the ground up assuming they'd get owned regularly. Very few other orgs are doing either one.
"...the erosion of confidence in the ability of the United States to do anything discreetly or keep anything secret."
An amusingly worded statement perfectly delivered in intelligence speak. Because Mr. Hayden is so crucially aware of how improbable it is for anyone to keep anything secret at all anymore, he's only worried about people's misplaced confidence in secrecy being rationalized. The IC banks on people's impression that secrecy is still practical, but certainly once you realize that if the people most aware of the porous nature of data networks can't even stop their secure side documents from leaking en masse nobody less focused will consider their documents private.
It's a classic double edged sword - the intelligence community had been the primary driver of innovation in computer and network defense strategies. But somewhere between the beginning and the end of the development of TPM they decided that insecure computers were so valuable as an asset that it couldn't be risked that they might fund research that might accidentally result in some real level of defense.
If general Alexander spent a tenth the money on defense as he does on offensive teams and research and bugs maybe they'd actually have more advanced strategies than air gap and pray. But once the basic judgement was made that software quality issues appeared to make computer security np complete they basically gave up on the problem. Thus began the race to exploit and backdoor the world that we took an early lead in but has lead to a lot of blowback when not everyone was as concerned as we were with not sharing the benefits with private industry. Now the big states know more or less everything about each other, while US multinationals essentially have to horse trade for even basic information sharing about active intrusions on their networks. Meanwhile the only people left in the dark are members of the public that are trying to play by the rules.
What percentage of those android phones would you say are upgraded to a level where they don't have any publicly announced cve's against them that allow for rce or close enough? Like 5 or 10 percent? I agree that it's better than a single secret, but how does a soft toekn count as "something you have" if it can be stolen from your phone and not end up "missing"? My google auth secret continued to work without a hiccup after apple repaired and wiped my phone and i restored from their cloud backup service. That's not too bad for keeping my voice mail private, but it's a pretty weak protection for sudoers on boxes that are pretty much critical to your company existing.
The idea that a serious compromise will present a clear path back to a specific ssh key that got used by the attackers and that you'll possibly be able to stop it just by turning off that key is pretty laughable. But then again, so is protecting your core infrastructure with 1.5 factor android soft tokens. Google isn't even willing to make it sound like especially strong protection for your gmail account. How much for a CAC style pki infrastructure? Hard to believe it's more than $50-$100/seat for a small organization. If you're worried about figuring out which employee got his phone dropped after your whole backend got molested perhaps an actual security posture would be more suitable.
Out of curiosity, how do those krait cores compare to the exynos a15 based cores that samsung is shipping in volume? I've been very impressed with their performance on chromeos as compared to older ip. With xen now building with a15 hvm support it would seem to make it easier to make use of that 2g of ram. It's hard to believe that android is really going to do much with that aside from the browser.
If you train your users to accept self signing you might as well just give up on pki. It appears from the chromium pinning list that they really do let anyone add a pinning rule for themselves if they want to, that would probably be the most practical. I'm not sure of the status of pinning support in other browsers.
I wish cnet didn't write this article like they thought they were CNN or USA Today. What are we supposed to make of the phrase "master keys"? It doesn't seem like they are talking about root ca's. Is it really practical to try to collect and use all of the multitude of last link in the chain endpoint certificate keys? Those seem to change quite often and can be quite numerous. Demanding sub-ca or company wide middle chain keys would seem to be more manageable, but that would suggest that both they're really worried about people watching for signing chain anomalies since presumably they have at least a few root ca privates and that they are willing to sit in the middle rewriting traffic.
Perhaps this is a response to growing use of certificate pinning? Facebook apparently has joined google in using pins, and I was recently told that microsoft is enabling pinning as an option in EMET4. But if that was the issue, that would tend to suggest they had been previously accustomed to rewriting some of these providers traffic with unlikely root ca's, something which people have been keeping an eye out for and to my knowledge has never been caught in the wild.
an egregious violation of investor trust and ethics.
I agree that this kind of behavior is too obvious and not socially acceptable or common practice. But the concept of the modern style of silicon valley private equity industry (of which angels are obviously within the broad ecosystem) as that operates with any substantial amount of ethics or is deserving of or even expecting trust is so far from my experiences as to be laughable. They just are very loathe to be as obvious, or apply pressure without sufficient supporting influence.
If you've been sitting at the poker table for 30 minutes and you can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.
and yet when the service binds to localhost instead of a local, private routable address that clearly exists as you're tunneling to the internet, it has said "hey, look, whatever im doing i dont want any other computer anywhere to be able to connect. localhost is identical on everything explicitly so it has zero chance of routing. Why not open tunnels to whatever routable private ip you have up?
And while a bit toung in cheek, i'm not too aware of this whole ip address scarcity thing. I've got a decent chunk of a /29, if you could use a /48 or ten for your local networks just ask! Or would it be tough to squeeze down to only 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 local addresses?
The anti-virus age may be over, but if the supporting evidence is that host based signature products don't provide an effective defense against a variety of common security threats then the anti-virus age was over a long, long time ago. Like back to when things propagated for moths or years autonomously without any modifications to the main component - the stuff that actually matched the term "virus" that we now use as a synonym for malware.
The last time that such items were anything but an unusual novelty was something like 2003. The last time they were the most substantial threat was sometime in the 1990's. And while it typically wasn't viral, a variety of naive threats produced by amateurs continued to be a good portion of the threat landscape until around the middle of the last decade.
That isn't to say database driven signature systems never stop any attacks. They just provide such a small amount of defense and so consistently unable to identify well publicized threats months after their public use in the wild that there is little to any statistical difference in compromise between a well configured and patched system with an av engine and the same system without an av engine.
But while their product is ineffective, they are far from alone in the security industry. IDS systems are wildly ineffective in any configuration that isn't custom tuned for defending an extremely limited network that exclusively transports a few specific protocols in very predictable ways - mostly backend networks in datacenters. Typical edge firewalls defend against a threat primarily exists because they enable it - clients are so vulnerable on local networks that can't survive that way on open networks. But without them we'd have just reduced the attack surface like we;ve done with public facing servers. As nearly every compromise includes a service that's intentionally exposed or intentionally allowed through the edge, they at best are a limited crutch to avoid having to ensure each computer is as minimally exposed to start with. If your firewall allows you to be an extra soft target once an attacker has established a foothold inside it's arguable that you'd have been better off totally exposed so that you limit the number of additional systems that exist in radically insecure postures.
The only automated system that comes to mind that ive seen provide any real amount of value are the expensive and exclusive block list subscriptions that contain databases of actively operating C&C servers and similar active apt sources. But these would become worthless if any of them ever enjoyed widespread adoption, as they'd simply stop being lazy and using the same servers all the time.
ASLR, DEP and even managed code to a certain extent all are similarly ineffective in that while making exploits more complicated they've had no impact on the rate of compromise.
The simple fact is that offensive security has won for the forseeable future and defensive security has lost entirely, with no real hope of change without dramatic practice shifts.
For client security the only things that have provided clear and practical benefits have been a) reducing the attack surface by mass removal of services and features and b) building the system withe the expectation of regular compromise, and including an easy and reliable way to wipe and restore. Oh and forced automatic patching.
The ChromeOS team gets it. The windowsrt team gets it. ios gets it. Anyone producing a client OS that is feature rich, highly configurable strives for easy out of the box use should be considered systemically insecure at this point. Any motivator attacker will succeed against it 99%+ of the time.
But since there are really no other options for so many people and tasks, it's very uncomfortable to explain to someone that they are able to do little to nothing about it that won't involve draconian systems users would refuse to use, and that compromise is at some point essentially inevitable.
So you tell them to run anti-virus. It's like children hiding under their desks in the event of nuclear war. It helps avoid some amount of existential crisis.
That's why the anti-virus age won't be over for a long, long time. Because if you don't have a replacement that's actually good, and no one even has a clue what that would look like, you still need to tell people to use their AV. Just like you need to tell people there is heaven.
If there is one thing that I have considered a flaw in computing, it's that there have been few ways for inexperienced developers and users to use one simple system which allowed them to circumvent their host based firewall, their network IDS, their edge based UTM and the OS security assumptions around localhost being a protected, private interface. The value of a point and click system to expose these directly to the internet and a domain that serves as a collection point for them can not be understated.
If a service is bonding only to ::1, and not 0.0.0.0 or your current routable ip it's explicitly deciding that it shouldn't be accessible from beyond the local computer. And in a lot of cases, it's right even if it doesn't explain why exactly. When exactly did we decide local port forwarding was too hard even for technical people? Or, I dunno, servers?
You pretty much nailed how it's done, good show for off the cuff. Encrypt file with large symmetric key. Slice into n pieces, where n is like 5-10 or more. Distribute a few copies of each slice to reliable people unlikely to directly conspire. Distribute encrypted file widely. Give instructions on how to gather as a group based on some basic trigger. The chance of the gathered group missing every copy of one of the slices is pretty low as long as nobody gets a master list of key holders.
I completely agree with you. I am very appreciative of being able to read these documents, but it clearly will cause little or no harm to the us or the intelligence community.
About the only thing that was in the manning cache that probably significantly bruised US operating power was the diplomatic cables. And that was just because the publicity and bluntness undoubtedly lead to some personal grudges that closed some doors for entirely human and entirely undiplomatic reasons.
The only people that didn't know everyone was listening to everyone were members of the public who didn't want to know. Now that they know they just don't care.
Economic power surely is the only killer. Mass espionage programs are probably quite beneficial economically, or at least if you're willing to share state and private intelligence like a large number of countries are. I would be very surprised if the US doesn't adopt that practice more and more over time. It's essentially already begun - if you run large networks data sharing is quid pro quo for heads up on state intrusion activity and reports of data exfiltration. We just don't steal secrets and give them out for favors yet.
Countries do occasionally commit suicide though. While a popular revolution in the US feels inconceivable at any point within our lives, the primary factor behind them is usually way too many pissed off poor people and radical imbalance in wealth and little room for economic advancement. As US economics begin to resemble japan's more and more you might have the potential for a forceful rejection of policy being so captured by wealth and neo-liberal philosophy. Hard to imagine though. Globalization seems to have ended that whole concern.
The way these things work is no one person actually has the whole key - portions of it are distributed to various people you trust but may otherwise be unlikely to conspire. They might not even know who has the other parts. The idea is it takes an extreme event to bring them together to decide to combine the key. That way no one is in danger of being intimidated etc. into revealing the key by a hostile party.
I'm sure nobody doubts there is an encrypted file with unreleased documents and that the key has been split and distributed. The only question is, exactly what is it that is in that cache and how damaging would it be to be released publicly.
The element of the unknown in terms of what precisely stays unreleased is the primary nexus point in US policy here. Even if they believe nothing of considerable value is left, anyone the gambles there and loses no longer has a career in the us government. Providing any specific damaging proof to them alone is only helpful to them - it allows them to confirm how accurate they've been at estimating the leak, and they can preemptively act to diffuse the impact or provide disinformation. And they get a good read on what the higher end of the stuff he has is.
I'm 90% sure this is what the leak of the Brussels/EU tap and intrusion documents were about. They were released soon after the cache was first mentioned, and at a time he was being effectively held captive in an airport as every sympathetic country was suddenly being offered huge incentives to turn their backs.
It certainly served as proof some highly damaging documents still had been held back. It may not have softened US rhetoric much, but it may have been effective in convincing the us to stop applying as much pressure on potential sources of asylum.
The biggest problem is that the NSA really isn't super worried about what the public finds out as much as they are institutionally built to be worried about what other foreign services learn. They have to assume that somebody has or will get the whole cache privately - either covertly or as a trade for passage etc. And while they aren't happy about it becoming public either, it isn't the end of the world. After all, the same year they got caught illegally wiretapping everyone they got the telecoms blanket immunity and were at that very moment developing PRISM. The NSA leaks have been huge, yet there are no serious calls for congressional hearings, the executive isn't disowning it, there is zero risk the public is about to stage a revolution and most significantly - they haven't even said they're going to stop doing any of it.
While Alexander will probably be losing his job, the publicity may even end up as a net positive for surveillance USA. Now that its out in the open and not resulted in any apparent systemic meltdown in sigint - it only makes it easier to start the next even more expansive program. After all, whoever they go to will know that Schmidt and Zuckerberg ended up just fine, and people barely even remember that verizon gave away cdr for every customer call without question. I bet there hasn't even been a blip in verizon subscriber numbers.
They really have carte-blanche now, and tons of people in the community were expecting that these leaks would have a great deal more blowback.
This play is straight out of the wikileaks playbook that they used almost verbatim when the us was making a lot of noise about assange. It appeared to be effective, in that US intelligence took the threat seriously and were concerned about the ramifications of what might be included. One element of that was the belief that those docs included some kind of "kill shot" class leak that would pretty much sink Bank of America.
There were certainly elements of truth to all of these things - there was a document cache, it was encrypted, people did have split keys, it probably did include elements of what was revealed as the robosigning scandal.
But from hearing discussion about it the subject, I think that US Intelligence now more or less holds the opinion that it was a bluff. Nothing of significant harm was included in the unreleased documents, though I think that's informed speculation and not some kind of confirmed fact.
All of a sudden after Snowden was getting helped by wikileaks and he was under a lot of pressure, the revelation of a similar encrypted cache of documents distributed widely was given to a lot of news agencies, and has regularly come up at opportune times in friendly media outlets.
I haven't been told this by anyone, but I'm pretty sure the intelligence community isn't buying it. Reports by greenwald were somewhat inconsistent with idea that there is a large cache of even more damning documents left. He's been travelling internationally, was staying in hong kong where many services operate openly, and presumably under pressure from a variety of security services and states as he tries to escape moscow and secure a safe place to live. It is hard to keep secret keys and documents secure under the best of conditions, and those are about the worst conditions possible.
The only reasonable thing to assume here is that it's all burned - everything snowden walked away with is or will be in the hands of foreign states and anything particularly damning will likely end up in the press sooner or later.
So if you believe that, that there is no way to unring this bell, the last thing you're going to do is spend any time being concerned about a dead man's crypto cache.
If you're willing to do enough horse trading to close the entire european airspace to a single individual, you're pissed and you're gonna do whatever it is you want to do. That's not going to include killing him, simply because the cost is high and the benefit is low. But they are clearly going to exert an inhuman amount of resources into making him regret being born.
And that's absolutely unrelated to Mr. Snowden. That's all for the effect it will have on anyone having similar thoughts. I think he's awesome and did Americans and the world a great favor, and that's he's really brave. And yet after seeing this go down if I was ever in a position to consider doing something like this there is no fucking way I'd ever think I could handle this kind of heat. Not a chance, no question.
I assume this has to be about inventory - some kind of line of credit that allows them to offer customer financing, shift away from their pre-order system, or some kind of upfront cost associated with a process upgrade.
It's hard to believe there is much money to be spent on R&D for asic hashing, or that they would gain much via some big marketing campaign.