Category Archives: Security

cURL and libcurl, Security, Web

httpstate cookie domain pains

Back in 2008, I wrote about when Mozilla started to publish their effort the “public suffixes list” and I was a bit skeptic.

Well, the problem with domains in cookies of course didn’t suddenly go away and today when we’re working in the httpstate working group in the IETF with documenting how cookies work, we need to somehow describe how user agents tend to work with these and how they should work with them. It’s really painful.

The problem in short, is that a site that is called ‘www.example.com’ is allowed to set a cookie for ‘example.com’ but not for ‘com’ alone. That’s somewhat easy to understand. It gets more complicated at once when we consider the UK where ‘www.example.co.uk’ is fine but it cannot be allowed to set a cookie for ‘co.uk’.

So how does a user agent know that co.uk is magic?

Firefox (and Chrome I believe) uses the suffixes list mentioned above and IE is claimed to have its own (not published) version and Opera is using a trick where it tries to check if the domain name resolves to an IP address or not. (Although Yngve says Opera will soon do online lookups against the suffix list as well.) But if you want to avoid those tricks, Adam Barth’s description on the http-state mailing list really is creepy.

For me, being a libcurl hacker, I can’t of course but to think about Adam’s words in his last sentence: “If a user agent doesn’t care about security, then it can skip the public suffix check”.

Well. Ehm. We do care about security in the curl project but we still (currently) skip the public suffix check. I know, it is a bit of a contradiction but I guess I’m just too stuck in my opinion that the public suffixes list is a terrible solution but then I can’t figure anything that will work better and offer the same level of “safety”.

I’m thinking perhaps we should give in. Or what should we do? And how should we in the httpstate group document that existing and new user agents should behave to be optimally compliant and secure?

(in case you do take notice of details: yes the mailing list is named http-state while the working group is called httpstate without a dash!)

Linux, Open Source, Security

null-prefix domino

dominos

At the end of July 2009, Scott Cantor contacted us in the curl project and pointed out a security flaw in libcurl (in code that was using OpenSSL to verify server certificates). Having read his explanation I recalled that I had witnessed the discussion on the NSS list about this problem just a few days earlier (which resulted in their August 1st security advisory). The problem is basically that the cert can at times contain a name with an embedded zero in the middle, while most source code assumes plain C-style strings that ends with a zero. This turns out to be exploitable, and is explained in great detail in this document (PDF).

I started to work on a patch, and in the mean time I talked to Simon Josefsson of the GnuTLS team to see if GnuTLS was fine or not, only to get him confirm that GnuTLS did indeed have the same problem.

So I contacted vendor-sec, and then on the morning of August 5 I thought I’d just make a quick check how the other HTTPS client implementations do their cert checks.

Wget: vulnerable

neon: vulnerable

serf: vulnerable

So, Internet Explorer and Firefox were vulnerable. NSS and GnuTLS were. (OpenSSL wasn’t, but then it doesn’t provide this verifying feature by itself) (lib)curl, wget, neon, serf were all vulnerable. If that isn’t a large amount of the existing HTTPS clients then what is? I also think that this shows that it would be good for all of us if OpenSSL had this functionality, as even if it had been vulnerable we could’ve fixed a busload of different applications by repairing a single library. Now we instead need to hunt down all apps that use OpenSSL and that verify certificate names.

Quite clearly we (as implementers) have all had the same silly assumptions, and quite likely we’ve affected each other into doing these sloppy codes. SSL and certificates are over and over again getting hit by this kind of painful flaws and setbacks. Darn, getting things right really is very very hard…

(Disclaimer: I immediately notified the neon and serf projects but to my knowledge they have not yet released any fixed versions.)

cURL and libcurl, Security

Making better advisories

A while ago yet another security flaw was discovered in curl (actually the tenth flaw in more than eleven years) by Scott Cantor. He reported it privately to us. We worked on the issue and in the end I posted an official project cURL security advisory about it. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary really. Scott did great and we fixed the problem rather promptly and in coordination with vendor-sec etc.

After a security advisory and the accompanying release, something particular always happens. It’s the same every time I’ve done this and there’s really no surprise: one by one the different Linux distros and similar parties start to ship their security advisories and alerts about the same problem and they offer their upgrade paths for their users to get a corrected version of the package.

But I’ll tell you why I think those advisories tend to make me really sad. It’s not because of the flaws they fix or how fast or slow they are to appear. It’s entirely due to the contents of them or perhaps in many times the lack of contents.

When the first distro-based advisory comes out, they often tend not to use the phrasing used in the original advisory (which we’ve crafted on for weeks and coordinated with vendor-sec) but they instead offer their own interpretation. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when the guys simplify matters they tend to blur out the actual cause and make the real issue hard to understand. Not to mention that when the first guy had done a mistake, most others just repeat that without thinking.

Credit to the doers

The craft of hunting down security problems in software and the art of then creating a fix for that problem is very time consuming and takes a fair amount of skill and patience. Yet some people do this. Some of those even track down problems in open source code bases and tell the projects about the issues to give them a chance to fix them before they’re made public.

Those people are good people that we need.

In the open source world, and in fact in a lot of other places too, the just about only reward we can offer guys who do outstanding work like this is with attribution. Give credit where credit is due. Mention the guy who did the job!

Distro advisories are not good

Very often the subsequent advisories go the lazy route and they borrow their advisory explanation from another distro’s advisory. Still not using the original explanation. They like short and not too detailed explanations. Factual errors seem to not be too important.

Very few distro-advisories give any credit to the original guy who found the error. The only one thing we can offer as payment is then neglected and this is more of an established practice than a mistake. All distros do this. At best they refer to a CVE number for the flaw, but CVE numbers have the great disadvantage that they very rarely reveal any particular details about the flaw until a long time after the advisory is made.

Not only do they often not credit the originator, they also rarely link back to the original advisory or even the advisory the originator sent out (sometimes they’re sent out independently) – so getting the full description from the actual upstream project is harder than it has to be. They do however generally  link to their own site, using their own issue number for the security problem. If things are good, you can find references to the original in that web page they link to. I’ve also seen several distro advisories that simply don’t at all mention what patches they’ve applied or what particular upstream changset they’ve backported.

In this latest advisory from curl, the common repeated mistake was that the certificate flaw concerned the Common Name field (and it implied that it was only about that field) which is wrong, and which is why the original advisory didn’t explicitly mention that field. It also affects the subjectAltName field and that’s at least – if not more – as important to address for this particular flaw. The flaw also only concerned curl built to use OpenSSL, which was a fact that was often not mentioned at all.

What I suggest!

That every vendor and Linux distro that ship security advisories do this:

  1. credit the original problem founder/researcher. This way the glory and fame goes to the person(s) who often did a lot of research and hard work.
  2. link to the original advisory so that everyone who wants to can get the info and details from the upstream project and their ideas of what the problems are and what the best fixes or work-arounds might be
  3. fact-check your error/solution description better and don’t just repeat what someone else wrote unless you know that’s an accurate description
  4. don’t repeat others’ simplifications and errors. The act of duplicating someone else’s description is pretty low in general and it would often only be a signal that you haven’t understood the issue in the first place. If you have a rule to not copy others you won’t risk copying their mistakes.
libssh2, Open Source, Security

Slacka-fun!

A bunch of the local OpenBSD fans here in Stockholm run this one-day event every year, called Slackathon. I missed it last year, but in 2007 I was there (and I did a little talk about open source management) and this year I was eager to participate again.

This year, the event was scheduled to take place immediately after a bunch of core OpenBSD developers had had their “hackathon f2k9” in Stockholm, so they could now boast with a series of very well known and very knowledgeable OpenBSD kernel hackers. As I am really not more than a distant observer of the OpenBSD project this of course put the lights on a lot of dusty corners I had no previous idea about. I’m not really a stranger to kernels and kernel hacking in general, and I must confess I had a great time and the team who spoke of various very detailed kernel topics are charismatic and put on a great show.

So I learned about the terrors of the VFS layer and hacking it (and how they’re working on making all the involved caches dynamically sized). I learned how to do active-active syncing  of pf-based firewalls (basically using two independent firewalls in front of something), or at least how the guys made it work fairly well. Or how the pf firewall was optimized to double its forwarding performance. And I got to hear a few wise words from Theo de Raadt and learn not only about their 6 month release schedules but also their plans and ideas around solving problems with livelocking and more. Not to mention the talk about managing physical memory, or the work to get OpenBSD ported to sparc64s with hardware-based virtualization support.

Taken all the hardcore kernel talks into account, I think my own talk on libssh2 (just before dinner) felt like a very light snack to chew and possibly a tiny bit out of the general topic… Anyway, I gave a quick overview of the project, how it started, why it was started, what it is and a bit how it works etc.

The slides from my slackathon talk. I expect to re-use a fair bunch of that, with some improvements and additions, in my libssh2 talk at FSCONS later this year.

Looking forward to Slackathon 2010!

Pictures from Slackathon 2009 by Vladimir Bogodist.

Me in front of the projector screen doing libssh2 talk

cURL and libcurl, Security

curl fooled by null-prefix

We’ve just now released a security advisory on curl and libcurl regarding how a forger can trick libcurl to verify a forged site as having a fine certificate if you just had a CA create one for you with a carefully crafted embedded zero…

I think this flaw brings the light so greatly on the problems we deal with to maintain code to be safe and secure. When writing code, and as in this case using C, we might believe we’re mostly vulnerable to buffer overflows, pointer messups, memory leaks or similar. Then we see this fascinatingly imaginative “attack” creep up…

The theory in short and somewhat simplified:

A server certificate is always presented by a server when a client connects to it using SSL. The certificate contains the servers name. The client verifies that A) the cert is signed by the correct authority and B) that the cert has the correct name inside.

The A) thing works because servers buy their cert from a CA authority that has its public signature in all browsers, and thus we can be “cryptographically safe” when we see a match.

This last flaw was in the naming part (B). Apparently someone managed to trick a CA to hand out a cert to them using an embedded zero byte. Like if haxx.se would buy the cert, we’d get it with an embedded zero like:

“example.com\0.haxx.se”

Now, this works fine in certificates since they store the string and its length separately. In the language C we’re used to have strings that are terminated with a trailing zero… so, if we would take over the “example.com” HTTPS server we could put our legitimately purchased certificate on that server and clients would use strcmp() or the equivalent to check the name in the certificate against the host name they try to connect to.

The embedded zero makes strcmp(host, certname) return MATCH and the client was successfully fooled.

curl is no longer vulnerable to this trick since 7.19.6, and we have released a boatload of patches for older versions in case upgrading is not an option.

IT Politics, Security, Technology, Web

User data probably for sale

It’s time for a little “doomsday prophesy”.

Already seen happen

As was reported last year in Sweden, mobile operators here sell customer data (Swedish article) to companies who are willing to pay. Even though this might be illegal (Swedish article), all the major Swedish mobile phone operators do this. This second article mentions that the operators think this practice is allowed according to the contract every customer has signed, but that’s far from obvious in everybody else’s eyes and may in fact not be legal.

For the non-Swedes: one mobile phone user found himself surfing to a web site that would display his phone number embedded on the site! This was only possible due to the site buying this info from the operator.

While the focus on what data they sell has been on the phone number itself – and I do find that a pretty good privacy breach in itself – there’s just so much more the imaginative operators just very likely soon will offer companies who just pay enough.

Legislations going the wrong way

There’s this EU “directive” from a few years back:

Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC

It basically says that Internet operators must store information of users’ connections made on the net and keep them around for a certain period. Sweden hasn’t yet ratified this but I hear other EU member states already have it implemented…

(The US also has some similar legislation being suggested.)

It certainly doesn’t help us who believe in maintaining a level of privacy!

What soon could happen

There’s hardly a secret that operators run network supervision equipments on their customer networks and thus they analyze and snoop on network data sent and received by each and every customer. They do this for network management reasons and for such legislations I mentioned above. (Disclaimer: I’ve worked and developed code for a client that makes and sells products for exactly this purpose.)

Anyway, it is thus easy for the operators to for example spot common URLs their users visit. They can spot what services (bittorrent, video sites, Internet radio, banks, porn etc) a user frequents. Given a particular company’s interest, it could certainly be easy to check for specific competitors in users’ visitor logs or whatever and sell that info.

If operators can sell the phone numbers of their individual users, what stops them from selling all this other info – given a proper stash of money from the ones who want to know? I’m convinced this will happen sooner or later, unless we get proper legislation that forbids the operators from doing this… In Sweden this sell of info is mostly likely to get done by the mobile network operators and not the regular Internet providers simply because the mobile ones have this end user contract to lean on that they claim gives them this right. That same style of contract and terminology, is not used for regular Internet subscriptions (I believe).

So here’s my suggestion for Think Geek to expand somewhat on their great shirt:

i-read-your-everything

(yeah, I have one of those boring ones with only the first line on it…)

Security, Technology

Haxx for you

1 Comment

So our company is named Haxx and it has been named like this for more than a decade, but the name is considered by some people be a mark of evil or something.

In my closest circle of friends we’ve kind of “always” liked using silly names and we’ve since long had a fascination with double Xes. Once upon the time in the early 90s we teamed up under the name Frexx and we did some funky programs on the Amiga. Most notably a programming language called FPL and the text editor FrexxEd.

When we then during the second half of the 90s needed to start an actual company to easier cater for our “spare time businesses” we wanted a new name but still one in a similar spirit. Being big friends and practitioners of writing “quick hacks” (“hack” in the sense that it is a quickly done program/script that perhaps isn’t always written very solidly or nice but works for the moment) to solve our own problems both at work and at home, we found Haxx to be a perfect name for us – Hack in pluralis, spelled with double-x.

Already at the time we took the name we knew about this bad habit at places that seemed to lump Hackers with Crackers or similar so we knew there would be a risk that some could assume us to be something else based on our name, but what the heck, we liked the name and we are and were hackers and we do and did a lot of hacks. Haxx it was. Haxx it is.

These days we get some minor problems due to this. At some companies (let’s not name any specific but you know the kind) they have black-listed haxx.se web sites (presumably because of the name ‘haxx’ in the domain name), some people get mails from us our the mailing lists we host easier filtered as spam and we get our share of strange suggestions etc.

I guess the upside of it is that we get our chances to whine on people and systems who decide to filter contents purely based on the presence of a single 4-letter word, either in a domain name or in web page or mail contents, and that is actually hilariously stupid.

Haxx

cURL and libcurl, Security

curl 7.19.4

curl and libcurl 7.19.4 has just been released! This time I think the perhaps most notable fix is the CVS-2009-0037 security fix which this release addresses. A little over 600 days passed since the previous vulnerability was announced.

Other than that major event, there are a bunch of interesting changes in this release:

  • Added CURLOPT_NOPROXY and the corresponding –noproxy
  • the OpenSSL-specific code disables TICKET (rfc5077) which is enabled by default in openssl 0.9.8j
  • Added CURLOPT_TFTP_BLKSIZE
  • Added CURLOPT_SOCKS5_GSSAPI_SERVICE and CURLOPT_SOCKS5_GSSAPI_NEC – with the corresponding curl options –socks5-gssapi-service and –socks5-gssapi-nec
  • Improved IPv6 support when built with with c-ares >= 1.6.1
  • Added CURLPROXY_HTTP_1_0 and –proxy1.0
  • Added docs/libcurl/symbols-in-versions
  • Added CURLINFO_CONDITION_UNMET
  • Added support for Digest and NTLM authentication using GnuTLS
  • CURLOPT_FTP_CREATE_MISSING_DIRS can now be set to 2 to retry the CWD even when MKD fails
  • GnuTLS initing moved to curl_global_init()
  • Added CURLOPT_REDIR_PROTOCOLS and CURLOPT_PROTOCOLS

We also did at least 15 documented bugfixes in this release and 25 people are credited for their help to make it happen.

cURL and libcurl, Linux, Security

Linux distros consolidate crypto libs

For a while already, the Fedora distribution has fought battles, done lots of work and pushed for a consolidation of all packages that use crypto libs to completely go with Mozilla’s NSS.

Now it seems to be OpenSUSE’s turn. The discussion I link to here doesn’t make any definite conclusions but they seem to lean towards NSS as well, claiming it has the most features. I wonder what they base that statement on – if there’s a public doc anywhere that state exactly which has what that makes any contender better than any other for them?

In the Fedora case it seems they’ve focused on the NSS FIPS license as the deciding factor but the license issue is also often brought up in this discussion.

I’ve personally been pondering on writing some kind of unified crypto layer that would expose a single API to an application and handle the different libs as backends, pretty much the same way we do it internally in libcurl at the moment. It hasn’t taken off (or even been started) since I’ve not had the time nor energy for it yet.

Network, Security, Web

Fun with executable extensions in viewvc

A few years ago I wrote up silly little perl script (let’s call it script.pl) that would fetch a page from a site that returns a “random URL off the internet”. I needed a range of URLs for a test program of mine and just making up a thousand or so URLs is tricky. Thus I wrote this script that I would run and allow to get a range of URLs on each invoke and then run it again later and append to the log file. It wasn’t a fancy script, but it solved my task.

The script was part of a project I got funded to work on, that was improving libcurl back in 2005/2006 so I thought adding and committing the script to CVS felt only natural and served a good purpose. To allow others to repeat what I did.

Fast forward to late 2008. The script is now browsable via viewvc on a site that… eh, doesn’t have “.pl” disabled as a cgi extension in its config! The result of course is that each time someone tries to view the script using the web interface, the web server invokes the script locally!

All of a sudden I get a mail from someone, who apparently is admin or something of the site this old script was using, and he mentions that a machine on our network is hammering his site with many requests per second (38 requests/second apparently) and asked me to stop this. It turns out a search engine crawler has indexed the viewvc output several times, and now some 8 processes or so were running this script.pl and they were all looping around getting a page, outputting the URL, getting another page…

While I think 38 requests second is a bit low to even be considered a DOS, it certainly wasn’t intended nor friendly and I was greatly surprised when I slowly realized how it all came to end up like this! Man I suck! It reminds me of my other extension mess from just a few months ago…

Maybe I’ll learn how to do things right in the future when I grow up!