In this post I want to add (yet) another perspective, motivated by a disclosure procedure which just happened recently.
todb’s article, R7-2015-23: Comcast XFINITY Home Security System Insecure Fail Open is a well planned public forum vulnerability disclosure. The article itself is very well done: It gives credit to the researcher who discovered the vulnerability and it shows a vulnerability disclosure timeline where Rapid7 reached out to Comcast (the vendor). They even go a step further and publish the link showing the process for discovered vulnerabilities in a Rapid7 product as well as how Rapid7 handles disclosing those vulnerabilities they find in external products. For their internal disclosure process, they make sure to release a patch before “publicly announcing the vulnerability in the release notes of the update”(rapid7 disclosure).
Given there’s quite some speculation and, as we think, misinformation going around we think it’s helpful to add/clarify the following information:
we fully comply with the injunction and we have no intentions to violate it. we do not plan to publish any technical information besides the report (agreed upon with FireEye themselves) and the slides (based on the former) anyway. No 3rd parties except for the ones involved (FireEye, lawyers) have received any additional technical information from our side, let alone an earlier version of the report.
the injunction covers accompanying details mostly within the architecture space, but not the core vulnerabilities themselves. Those are not part of the injunction.
we stand by the timeline as provided below. In particular, the following two points:
– FireEye received a draft version of the report which had the objectionable material (as identified by the cease and desist letter) fully removed on August 11th.
– according to the cease and desist letter FireEye’s lawyer sent us, they were informed – from our side – about the planned talk at 44CON on Jul 23rd.
there’s an injunction, but not a lawsuit. I used the term “sue” after consulting Merriam-Webster which states: “sue: to seek justice or right from (a person) by legal process”, but this might have been misinterpreted by some readers. As stated, there’s a pending injunction, but not a lawsuit.
Please note that we won’t share legal documents with 3rd parties or publish them as we consider this inappropriate.
Please note further that, during the whole process, our goal was to perform a responsible disclosure procedure with its inherent objectives (namely vulnerability remediation by vendor and education of various stakeholders involved, see also here or here). We consider this disclosure process as concluded. We don’t see a need to add technical details from our side as we feel that the objectives of responsible disclosure are met (not least as patches are released since quite some time and both vendor & finder have released reports).
Some of you might use WebEx in their daily life. And some of you might use Linux (as I and many of us do). However, this combination often results in issues with your PC’s sound or microphone use in a WebEx session.
The problem here is that WebEx won’t run as intended with Firefox and JRE x64. But the solution is quite easy! Use the x86-versions of each.
In this post I’ll discuss some aspects of vulnerability disclosure. I don’t want to delve into an abstract & general discussion of vulnerability disclosure (for those interested here’s some discussion in the context of Google’s Project Zero, this is the well-known CERT/CC approach, this a paper from WEIS 2006 laying out some variants, and finally some statement by Bruce Schneier back in 2007). Instead I will lay out which approach we followed in the past (and why we did so) and which developments make us consider it necessary to re-think our way of handling. The post is not meant to provide definitive answers; it was also written not least to provide clarity for ourselves (“write down a problem in order to better penetrate it”) and, maybe, to serve as a starting point for a discussion which will help the community (and us) to find a position on some of the inherent challenges.
We’re sometimes approached with the question “Which IPv6 mailing lists do you guys read/subscribe to?” – here’s a quick overview of the main ones guys like Christopher, Patrick, Rafael, Antonios and myself are periodically lurking at, to discuss IPv6 (network|security) related stuff with other practitioners and to learn from them:
Just recently, Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit(TM) (CTU) researchers published details (see http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/threats/skeleton-key-malware-analysis/ ) on a especially nasty piece of malware that bypasses authentication on Active Directory (AD) systems which implement single-factor (password only) authentication. Once deployed the malware stays quite noiseless in the Domain Controller´s (DC) RAM, and the DC´s replication issues caused by it weren´t interpreted – in this case – during months as a hint for system compromise. Probably the malware´s modification on the LSASS process reduced the DC´s ability to perform DC-to-DC authentication, but this is only speculation and not where we would like to go today.
As we historically have a strong connection to network technologies (not surprising, given the “NW” in “ERNW” stands for “Networks”), I developed a small script to create RFC-style ASCII representations of protocol schemes. The following listing shows an example created for a fictitious protocol:
A few weeks ago I gave a presentation with the above title at some corporate infosec event. Given I’ve been asked for the slides many times now, I’ve converted them to a PDF which can be found here.
We hope to contribute to the necessary debate thereby…
Reading this article from the Guardian, on this guy apparently being banned from fully discussing research results in his talk at upcoming USENIX Security, leaves me scratching my head once more. Things might (as so often) be more complex than they seem, but this looks like yet-another misconception as for the contribution of security research (and its public discussion) to the greater good of us all. Which is unfortunate for the speakers (I’ve been in a similar situation once, receiving a threatening legal letter from a very large organization one day before one of our Black Hat presentations and can tell you that stuff like that doesn’t add to one’s anticipation of the talk or the event…), for the audience (including some ERNW guys who will be a USENIX-SEC, so, btw, expect a summary post here) and for the whole community of security researchers.