What's my take on the summary of changes? Most merchants will be pleased to see that these are relatively minor changes...]]> Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:00:00 +0000 payment card industry data security standard release represents version pci dss summary october pdf minor PCI Compliance: Reaction to the Summary of Changes http://securityratty.com/article/a930349b033e6f56c6098e0b152daddf http://securityratty.com/article/a930349b033e6f56c6098e0b152daddf Meraki reworks product line, drops new sales of community flavor: The cheap mesh router company has mutated slightly once again. The partly-Google-backed firm founded by MIT RoofNet "graduates" built the company on the notion that they could sell $50 routers that could mesh with each other, and use a robust central management system they developed. Over time, the $50 price didn't hold up for commercial networks of scale. Last October, the company mishandled a change in its business model when they abruptly announced a $100 increase in price for newly purchased nodes under their Meraki Pro level for any network that wanted to control whether or not ads appeared, have user accounts, and charge for service. (They eventually recovered, apologized, and reworked some of the transition details.) The company continued to offer a $50 indoor and $100 outdoor Standard level nodes for networks that required ads and had other limits. As of a few days ago, Standard is dead, and the Meraki mini has been upgraded to the Meraki Indoor ($150). The Indoor has signal strength LEDs on the side for better help in placing units, an internal antenna, and better resilience against power fluctuations. The company explains its move in eliminating Standard by noting that most customers moved to Pro. It's not precisely the end of idealism (nor did that happen last October), as Meraki is still one of the major commercial mesh vendors, and their products are still vastly easier and a fraction of the cost of higher-end competitors.

New life for dead Tempe network? Another firm has expressed interest in buying the pennies on the dollar assets that remain of the former Kite Networks installation in Tempe from the firm that financed the venture as long as they can negotiate a new, more favorable deal with the city for mounting and removal rights. CTC, Inc., which the East Valley Tribune reports runs networks in the Kansas City, Mo., area, thinks there's an opportunity. The article notes that reception problems were due in part to the prevalence of stucco in Tempe, common in the southwest. Stucco walls layer plaster or other materials on a wire mesh for strength that turns a house into a bit of an accidental Faraday cage, partially shielding the home from electromagnetic radiation. (Could I go so far to say that Tempe's network could be a phoenix? Ouch.)

Wake up, you darn computer: Intel's new Remote Wake motherboards won't work with Wi-Fi, it's important to note. The feature, announced today, will let an incoming VoIP call (the articles all say "phone call over the Internet") to wake a computer, as long as the call comes from a particular source. Of course, the standard SIP protocol for VoIP doesn't have the kind of security and integrity that would allow this; Intel has to overcome the problem with network address translation that renders most computer unreachable from outside the local network without a separate service like GoToMyPC or LogMeIn; and it will only work for computers connected via Ethernet to a local network, because Wi-Fi is off when a computer sleeps, while Ethernet can remain lightly active. I don't have the protocol details yet, but there's long been a Wake on LAN protocol that required support in a router, operating system, and Ethernet card; Intel may be leveraging this.

Here's the story. Every Oyster card has a radio-frequency identification chip that communicates with readers mounted on the ticket barrier. That chip, the "Mifare Classic" chip, is used in hundreds of other transport systems as well — Boston, Los Angeles, Brisbane, Oslo, Amsterdam, Taipei, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro — and as an access pass in thousands of companies, schools, hospitals, and government buildings around Britain and the rest of the world.

The security of Mifare Classic is terrible. This is not an exaggeration; it's kindergarten cryptography. Anyone with any security experience would be embarrassed to put his name to the design. NXP attempted to deal with this embarrassment by keeping the design secret.

The group that broke Mifare Classic is from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. They demonstrated the attack by riding the Underground for free, and by breaking into a building. Their two papers (one is already online) will be published at two conferences this autumn.

The second paper is the one that NXP sued over. They called disclosure of the attack "irresponsible," warned that it will cause "immense damages," and claimed that it "will jeopardize the security of assets protected with systems incorporating the Mifare IC." The Dutch court would have none of it: "Damage to NXP is not the result of the publication of the article but of the production and sale of a chip that appears to have shortcomings."

Exactly right. More generally, the notion that secrecy supports security is inherently flawed. Whenever you see an organization claiming that design secrecy is necessary for security — in ID cards, in voting machines, in airport security — it invariably means that its security is lousy and it has no choice but to hide it. Any competent cryptographer would have designed Mifare's security with an open and public design.

Secrecy is fragile. Mifare's security was based on the belief that no one would discover how it worked; that's why NXP had to muzzle the Dutch researchers. But that's just wrong. Reverse-engineering isn't hard. Other researchers had already exposed Mifare's lousy security. A Chinese company even sells a compatible chip. Is there any doubt that the bad guys already know about this, or will soon enough?

Publication of this attack might be expensive for NXP and its customers, but it's good for security overall. Companies will only design security as good as their customers know to ask for. NXP's security was so bad because customers didn't know how to evaluate security: either they don't know what questions to ask, or didn't know enough to distrust the marketing answers they were given. This court ruling encourages companies to build security properly rather than relying on shoddy design and secrecy, and discourages them from promising security based on their ability to threaten researchers.

It's unclear how this break will affect Transport for London. Cloning takes only a few seconds, and the thief only has to brush up against someone carrying a legitimate Oyster card. But it requires an RFID reader and a small piece of software which, while feasible for a techie, are too complicated for the average fare dodger. The police are likely to quickly arrest anyone who tries to sell cloned cards on any scale. TfL promises to turn off any cloned cards within 24 hours, but that will hurt the innocent victim who had his card cloned more than the thief.

The vulnerability is far more serious to the companies that use Mifare Classic as an access pass. It would be very interesting to know how NXP presented the system's security to them.

And while these attacks only pertain to the Mifare Classic chip, it makes me suspicious of the entire product line. NXP sells a more secure chip and has another on the way, but given the number of basic cryptography mistakes NXP made with Mifare Classic, one has to wonder whether the "more secure" versions will be sufficiently so.

This essay originally appeared in the Guardian.

So, here is my next monthly "Security Warrior" blog round-up of top 5 popular posts and topics.

1. As you can easily, easily guess, the  #1 spot this month is taken by my irreverent comments on a Terry Childs saga. Namely, "On Doomsaying (Terry Childs case)", "So ... Am I? Maybe I Am!" and "Admins , Good Guys or "I am NOT an Idiot!""
2. Obviously, my earlier post/rant called "You Are "A Security Idiot" If ..." takes the #2 spot. Yes, we all like to point out other people's problems, especially when they are epically huge :-)
3. Next up is my post "11 Signs That Your SIEM Is A Dog or "Raffy, You Killed SIM!"". It is both humorous and sadly true (and backed up by other sources)
4. Also popular is my post "Log Management - Day 1," which talks about the very first thing you do when embarking on a journey to log management.
5. Finally, again this month, my logging polls took the #1 spot!  Poll #8 that covered context data for log analysis is analyzed here. Other popular polls include a controversial Windows Log Collection Poll (which is a poll #7)  and poll #6 about logs that people actually look and poll #5 about logging challenges.
6. Strangely, a lot of people wanted to "Which Blogs Do I Read?" - so my brief post on that made it to the top.

See you in August, unless you are all on vacations, that is :-)

Possibly related posts / past monthly popular blog round-ups:

• Monthly Blog Round-Up - June 2008
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - May 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - April 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - March 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - February 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - January 2008  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - December 2007  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - November 2007  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - October 2007  
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - September 2007
• Monthly Blog Round-Up - August 2007