This normally works pretty well, but there's a court case in Brisbane right now about a hotel giving a room key to someone who ended up sexually attacking the woman who had rented the room.

In civil action launched yesterday, the woman alleges the man was given the spare access key to her room by a hotel staffer.

The article doesn't say what kind of authentication the hotel requested or received.

Skein is our submission (myself and seven others: Niels Ferguson, Stefan Lucks, Doug Whiting, Mihir Bellare, Tadayoshi Kohno, Jon Callas, and Jesse Walker). Here's the paper:

Executive Summary

Skein is a new family of cryptographic hash functions. Its design combines speed, security, simplicity, and a great deal of flexibility in a modular package that is easy to analyze.

Skein is fast. Skein-512 -- our primary proposal -- hashes data at 6.1 clock cycles per byte on a 64-bit CPU. This means that on a 3.1 GHz x64 Core 2 Duo CPU, Skein hashes data at 500 MBytes/second per core -- almost twice as fast as SHA-512 and three times faster than SHA-256. An optional hash-tree mode speeds up parallelizable implementations even more. Skein is fast for short messages, too; Skein-512 hashes short messages in about 1000 clock cycles.

Skein is secure. Its conservative design is based on the Threefish block cipher. Our current best attack on Threefish-512 is on 25 of 72 rounds, for a safety factor of 2.9. For comparison, at a similar stage in the standardization process, the AES encryption algorithm had an attack on 6 of 10 rounds, for a safety factor of only 1.7. Additionally, Skein has a number of provably secure properties, greatly increasing confidence in the algorithm.

Skein is simple. Using only three primitive operations, the Skein compression function can be easily understood and remembered. The rest of the algorithm is a straightforward iteration of this function.

Skein is flexible. Skein is defined for three different internal state sizes -- 256 bits, 512 bits, and 1024 bits -- and any output size. This allows Skein to be a drop-in replacement for the entire SHA family of hash functions. A completely optional and extendable argument system makes Skein an efficient tool to use for a very large number of functions: a PRNG, a stream cipher, a key derivation function, authentication without the overhead of HMAC, and a personalization capability. All these features can be implemented with very low overhead. Together with the Threefish large-block cipher at Skein core, this design provides a full set of symmetric cryptographic primitives suitable for most modern applications.

Skein is efficient on a variety of platforms, both hardware and software. Skein-512 can be implemented in about 200 bytes of state. Small devices, such as 8-bit smart cards, can implement Skein-256 using about 100 bytes of memory. Larger devices can implement the larger versions of Skein to achieve faster speeds.

Skein was designed by a team of highly experienced cryptographic experts from academia and industry, with expertise in cryptography, security analysis, software, chip design, and implementation of real-world cryptographic systems. This breadth of knowledge allowed them to create a balanced design that works well in all environments.

Here's source code, text vectors, and the like for Skein. Watch the Skein website for any updates -- new code, new results, new implementations, the proofs.

NIST's deadline is Friday. It seems as if everyone -- including many amateurs -- is working on a hash function, and I predict that NIST will receive at least 80 submissions. (Compare this to the 21 submissions NIST received -- five were rejected as not being complete -- for the AES competition in 1998.) I expect people to start posting their submissions over the weekend. (Ron Rivest already presented MD6 at Crypto in August.) Probably the best place to watch for new hash functions is here; I'll try to keep a listing of the submissions myself.

The selection process will take around four years. I've previously called this sort of thing a cryptographic demolition derby -- last one left standing wins -- but that's only half true. Certainly all the groups will spend the next couple of years trying to cryptanalyze each other, but in the end there will be a bunch of unbroken algorithms; NIST will select one based on performance and features.

NIST has stated that the goal of this process is not to choose the best standard but to choose a good standard. I think that's smart of them; in this process, "best" is the enemy of "good." My advice is this: immediately sort them based on performance and features. Ask the cryptographic community to focus its attention on the top dozen, rather than spread its attention across all 80 -- although I also expect that most of the amateur submissions will be rejected by NIST for not being "complete and proper." Otherwise, people will break the easy ones and the better ones will go unanalyzed.

Complicating factors is the impact (or lack thereof) of incidents on stock price.  Many researchers who identify themselves with the New School of Information Security (yours truly included) want to immediately look at stock price as a bell-weather metric for incident impact.  I think this stems from our days of slinging FUD, back when we could scream “Buy a firewall or we’ll have an incident and you’ll be on the front page of the paper and the stock price will go down!”  But these days notable incidents seem to suggest that the impact on stock price for an incident is short lived.  With qualifications, of course.

So what would/should we make of this from Money.co.uk?

£12million ($24m) Wiped off Helphire Stock after Malicious Email Sent to Clients

Car hire firm Helphire have taken Google to court after a malicious email sent from a Gmail account saw their shares plummet £12million in a single day.

The Bath-based business who specialise in providing replacement cars to ‘no-fault’ drivers involved in accidents on behalf of car insurance companies, initiated legal proceedings against the search engine giant as part of their attempt to find out who is responsible for sending the defamatory mailing.

Google are now known to have complied with the court order and have controversially supplied details of the email account and ISP used by the meddler.

Written under the psudoname Peter Franks, the 1200 word email is know to have been sent from a gmail account that was opened specifically for this purpose and closed a few minutes after the damage had been done…

…The misdemeanour couldn’t have come at a worse time for the struggling firm who have undergone a £45million rights issue and seen a 75% drop in the value of their stock already this year.

That last paragraph, for me, explains some of the difficulty in tying reputation damage to stock decreases.  It’s like when you read the headlines from Bloomberg about why the days stocks (or commodity) prices are up or down.  You know, the “Oil closes $3 higher on news that a notable South American dictator has a rather unpleasant boil in a very uncomfortable area” type of headlines.  You really do have to question the causality and correlation.  So in the Helphire case above - is this new drop in stock really because of the email sent?  If so, should we view that $24mil number as an independent data point to describe this sort of attack on reputation, or is the magnitude aggravated due to the long-term trend of stock price?

Even when we have “Objective Data” (an in-joke for Adam S.) like this decline in stock price, it is really difficult to provide any sort of precise estimate or measurement - about the future, present or past.  The best we can do is use ranges, distributions, that are reasonable based on evidence and observation.

So it’s worth filing away this sort of datum for future use - while dutifully acknowledging the qualifiers we might place around it.

So the questions I ask here - what should we make of this new information, and how should we view the $24million drop - they’re not rhetorical.  I am very interested in your views and welcome your comments!

In particular, SSL certificates (as used to identify https websites) might contain one of these weak keys — and so it would be possible for an attacker to successfully impersonate a secure website. Of course the attacker would need to persuade you to mistakenly visit their site — but it just so happens that one of the more devastating attacks on DNS has recently been discovered; so that’s not as unlikely as it must have seemed back in May.

Anyway, my old friend Ben Laurie (who is with Google these days) and I have been trawling the Internet to determine how many certificates there are containing these weak keys — and there’s a lot: around 1.5% of the certs we’ve examined.

But more of that another day! because earlier this week, Ben spotted that one of the weak certs was for Sun’s “OpenID” website, and that two more OpenID sites were weak as well (by weak we mean that a database lookup could reveal the private key!)

OpenID, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is a scheme for allowing you to prove your identity to site A (viz: provide your user name and password) and then use that identity on site B. There’s a queue of people offering the first bit, but rather less offering the second : because it means you rely on someone else’s due diligence in knowing who their users are — where “who” is a hard sort of thing to get your head around in an online environment.

The problem that Ben and I have identified (advisory here), is that an attacker can poison a DNS cache so it serves up the wrong IP address for openid.sun.com. Then, even if the victim is really cautious and uses https and checks the cert, their credentials can be phished. Thereafter, anyone who trusts Sun as an identity provider could be very disappointed. There’s other attacks as well, but you’ve probably got the general idea by now.

In principle Sun should make a replacement certificate and that should be it (and so they have — read Robin Wilton’s comments here). Except that they need to put the old certificate onto a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) because otherwise it will still be trusted from now until it expires (a fair while off). Sadly, many web browsers, and most of the OpenID codebases haven’t bothered with CRLs (or they don’t enable their checking by default so it’s as if it wasn’t there for most users).

One has to conclude that Sun (and the other two providers) should not be trusted by anyone for quite a while to come. But does that matter ? Since OpenID didn’t promise all that much anyway, does a serious flaw (which does require a certain amount of work to construct an attack) make any difference? At present this looks like the modern equivalent of a small earthquake in Chile.

“You’re hired on at a new company placed in charge of securing their online business (websites). You know next to nothing about the technical details of the infrastructure other than they have no existing web/software security program and a significant portion of the organizations revenues are generated through their websites.

What is the very first thing do on day 1?”

At about the same time, I saw a message posted to one of the mailing lists where the poster wondered: "I’ve been asked to look into finding a replacement to our current log management/auditing system.  This is a field I haven’t even come close to touching before, and really don’t know the ideal things to look for (or ignore), etc. I’ve been searching through SANS site as well as googling, and I’m not coming up with a lot of great starter information. " And then he asks "Where should I start?"

This is indeed a really good question!  Let's rephrase the above for the case of logging:

"You’re hired on at a new company placed in charge of TAKING CONTROL OVER THE LOGS. You know next to nothing about the technical details of the infrastructure other than they have no existing LOG MANAGEMENT process and tools... What is the very first thing do on day 1?”

So the "Day 1" of log management project. What's up?!

The very first thought that should cross you mind before you even do whatever first thing you wanted to do is "WHY?" (don't people hate those 'Why?" questions - focusing on "What?" or "How?" is soooooooo much easier....)

"Log management" is a solution, not a problem. What is your problem that you now have a mandate to solve?

Logs don't just drop on people :-) Well, not often.

What is it that motivated your boss (or his boss, or whoever) to decide to "address this", to "take control over logs?" Was it a new compliance mandate, PCI perhaps? Was it a recent incident where investigation hit the wall due to utter lack of logs? Was it a new corporation-wide IT efficiency improvement project? Was it a lawsuit where an e-discovery request was not satisfied and thus fine was levied? Was it a hot IT project that is impossible to complete without having a tool to analyze logs?

This "need" is very important since logging is a huge realm and not focusing on the need is akin to starting a journey into a hostile wilderness without  a map - in other words, it might be fun for a while, but it can end badly :-)

Next, what do you actually do first? Figure out what logs are needed for this effort and what systems produce them (and who "owns" them!) Analyzing SAP logs for J-SOX is a VERY different effort from analyzing Cisco ASA logs for network troubleshooting.

Only at this point you can start thinking about "tools:" parsers, logs, databases, reports, alerts, indexing and other technical thingies as well as capacity planning, scalability, etc. This is the stage where you learn the lingo and learn to cut through marketing messaging to get to the actual tool capabilities.

So, remember: given mandate to "tame the logging monster", think "WHY?" first!

If you read my blog, or know me, you probably know I do NOT like software (and it usually doesn’t like me). So, I’d be the first to jump on the ‘anti-software-peer-based-NAC’ train, but I think we have to be informed before we jump to conclusions and hop on any trains.

Mirage’s recent blog post on Symantec’s ‘Silly SNAC’ was certainly a result of a mis- (or un-) informed person. Tim did a much better job on his mention of SNAC in the NWW blog, but all the dots still aren’t connected. It proves the point that sometimes we (as bloggers) tend to write based on a feeling and sometimes don’t dig for the fact.

So, in an effort to make sure I understood this new peer-based NAC, I reached out to Patrick Wheeler, Symantec’s Senior Product Manager for Network and Endpoint Security. Based on my conversations with him, and a pretty detailed investigation into the options and configurations of their NAC products, I have some slightly more informed opinion to share with you now.

Symantec has a variety of NAC enforcement components and options. I’m going to keep all the software-type-stuff out of this conversation for the time being. They have (among other things) the NAC Enforcer, an appliance similar to the other NAC controllers we see from traditional hardware vendors. Just like it’s counterparts, Symantec’s NAC Enforcer can be configured for DHCP, inline or 802.1X based enforcement.

The piece that’s different is the integration of the NAC Enforcer with Symantec’s Endpoint Protection Manager server that hosts the policies for the NAC. It’s similar to the management-enforcement configuration we see from other vendors, only the management piece is housed on a server instead of another appliance.

And, just as other vendors offer some type of endpoint integrity agent, the Symantec agent comes in the form of the Symantec NAC Client, which can be used by itself, or integrated with the Symantec Endpoint Protection Client for an even more robust feature-set. (The Endpoint Protection Client offers some additional host-based firewall features that the NAC can leverage).

So, what about the Peer-Based NAC? Ah, well that’s just the first iteration of a ‘vision’ to address mobile corporate users. If employees have laptops in an ad-hoc situation outside of the enterprise infrastructure (and therefore, outside of enterprise enforcement), then the peer-based NAC can port the enforcement rules set at the ‘mothership’ and enforce them individually. The peer-based NAC can protect mobile assets in their most vulnerable situation, outside the security of the corporate network. But, the rules are still set centrally and the peer-based NAC was designed to be just one step towards an added layer of protection, not as a replacement for network-based NAC.

For now, I’ll stay off the hate train, since the peer-based NAC is more of a supplement to a more robust traditional NAC solution. If they move to a fully-host-enforced product, I’ll buy my tickets…

Image shown is copyright of Symantec Corporation.

# # #

So what motivates me to attend BlackHat? The #1 reason for me is networking — meeting new people and catching up with old friends and colleagues. Despite our best intentions, we are all busy and our networks are constantly expanding, making it increasingly difficult to stay in touch with old friends in the industry. Twitter and other forms of microblogging help you chip away at the communication gaps; you get a glimpse into peoples’ lives but it’s no replacement for a real conversation.

Obviously, the briefings themselves are a major draw. Even though it’s expanded to over 10 tracks now, the quality hasn’t really suffered. This year’s experiment with allowing paid delegates to vote on speakers seems to have produced a good lineup, though I’m sure there was still a selection committee that could and probably did overrule the votes in some cases. Either way, BlackHat presentations are a decent indicator of the overarching themes that will be prevalent in information security for the upcoming year or two.

When I first started attending BlackHat, I was drawn to the talks discussing 0-day vulnerabilities, tool releases, shellcode tricks, and the like. These days, anything relating to static analysis, automation, and of course web security are most interesting to me. I also consider who’s speaking, regardless of the topic (e.g. one of these guys presents, I’m there). In general, I’ll try to gauge how much value the speaker will add to the presentation — in other words, what do I gain by attending the talk vs. flipping through the slides later? I never attend every time slot; sometimes the hallway conversation is just more interesting.

Some of my other reasons for attending, in no particular order, most of which fall under the “networking” umbrella:

• The parties (duh)
• The Pwnie Awards
• Meeting fellow security bloggers
• Recruiting speakers for SOURCE
• Finding future Veracode employees
• Trading war stories
• Picking up vendor schwag for my kids (RSA is much better for this one)
• Meeting current and former customers — and future ones, hopefully

Things I could do without:

• The cigarette smoke
• The heat
• Quark’s

I’ve stuck around for DEFCON a couple times in the past, but I don’t anymore. I fly out Friday morning or early afternoon so I get home in time to spend the weekend with the family. Personally, three days in Vegas is plenty for me.

When it gets closer to BlackHat time, I’ll post my picks from the briefings schedule.