- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Flaws in Self-Encrypting SSDs Let Attackers Bypass Disk Encryption
by Peter Reutemann 05 Nov '18

05 Nov '18

'Researchers have found flaws that can be exploited to bypass hardware encryption in well known and popular SSD drives. Master passwords and faulty standards implementations allow attackers access to encrypted data without needing to know the user-chosen password. SSDs from Micron (Crucial) and Samsung are affected. These are SSDs that support hardware-level encryption via a local built-in chip, separate from the main CPU. Some of these devices have a factory-set master password that bypasses the user-set password, while other SSDs store the encryption key on the hard drive, from where it can be retrieved. The issue is worse on Windows, where BitLocker defers software-level encryption to hardware encryption-capable SSDs, meaning user data is vulnerable to attacks without the user's knowledge. More in the research paper.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/11/05/213255 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Slashdot poll: What do you make of programming languages and open source organizations adopting a code of conduct?
by Peter Reutemann 05 Nov '18

05 Nov '18

See this link for poll: https://slashdot.org/poll/3103 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Old School 'Sniffing' Attacks Can Still Reveal Your Browsing History
by Peter Reutemann 04 Nov '18

04 Nov '18

'Most modern browsers -- such as Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, and even browsers such as FuzzyFox and DeterFox (different, security-focused versions of Firefox) -- have vulnerabilities that allow hosts of malicious websites to extract hundreds to thousands of URLs in a user's web history, per new research from the University of California San Diego. What's worse, the vulnerabilities are built into the way they structure links, meaning that major structural changes will have to take place in these browsers in order to protect user privacy. The only browser that was immune to the attacks was Tor Browser, as the browser does not keep track of a user's internet history. The vulnerabilities have to do with why, for instance, unclicked links appear blue while visited links appear violet: there's a different set of rules and style that apply to links depending on whether they've been visited or not. However, a bad actor building a web page can manipulate this faster loading time for visited links by "sniffing," or inferting your browsing history. In essence, sniffing is finding and exploiting proxies that reveal your web history. As outlined in the UC San Diego report, this sniffing could happen in a couple of ways: they could force the browser to reload multiple complex images or image transformations that differ based on whether you've visited a link or not, which would create drastic differences in the loading time for each. With this strategy, actors can test 60 sensitive URLs per second. Bad actors could exploit a "bytecode cache," which speeds up the loading time for revisiting a link that you've already visited. "By embedding a special script in a web page, the actor can test how long it takes for a web page to load and infer whether you've visited it or not," reports Motherboard. "Actors can probe 3,000 URLs per second with this method. When the vulnerability was reported to Google, the company marked the issue as "security-sensitive" but "low-priority."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/11/04/0426252 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Intel CPUs fall to new hyperthreading exploit that pilfers crypto keys
by Peter Reutemann 04 Nov '18

04 Nov '18

'Over the past 11 months, the processors running our computers, and in some cases phones, have succumbed to a host of attacks. Bearing names such as Meltdown and Spectre, BranchScope, TLBleed, and Foreshadow, the exploits threaten to siphon some of our most sensitive secrets—say passwords or cryptographic keys—out of the silicon microarchitecture in ways that can’t be detected or stopped by traditional security defenses. On Friday, researchers disclosed yet another leak that has already been shown to exist on a wide range of Intel chips and may also affect other makers, too. PortSmash, as the new attack is being called, exploits a largely overlooked side-channel in Intel’s hyperthreading technology. A proprietary implementation of simultaneous multithreading, hyperthreading reduces the amount of time needed to carry out parallel computing tasks, in which large numbers of calculations or executions are carried out simultaneously. The performance boost is the result of two logical processor cores sharing the hardware of a single physical processor. The added logical cores make it easier to divide large tasks into smaller ones that can be completed more quickly.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/intel-cpus-fall-to-n… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Are Paper Books Still Legal?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Nov '18

04 Nov '18

But how do they charge you the streaming fees? <http://www.dieselsweeties.com/ics/500/>

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Booting a Raspberry-Pi 3B without using a SD-Card
by Ian Stewart 02 Nov '18

02 Nov '18

Hi, If you have a Raspberry Pi Model 3B, then you may be able use it with no micro SD-Card and have it boot Raspbian off a USB flash drive stick. I have found this possible with an Apacer AH356 64GB USB 3.1 Flash Drive<https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/MEMAPC11464/Apacer-AH356-64GB-USB-31-Flash…> stick that I bought from PB-Tech a couple of weeks ago for $21.85. Admittedly you can buy a micro SD-card like the Apacer 64GB microSDXC UHS-I Class10<https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/MEMAPC81064/Apacer-64GB-microSDXC-UHS-I-Cl…> from PB-Tech for $28.75 and put Raspbian onto it. So using the USB flash drive stick only saves a few dollars. However, there may be other advantages over using a USB flash drive vs. a micro SD-Card for the Raspbian OS. For example, you can shutdown the Raspberry Pi and remove the USB stick, take it to another computer, and backup your data. I also installed the Raspbian distro onto WD Elements Portable 2TB 2.5" USB 3.0 External HDD<https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/HDDWDX2621/WD-Elements-Portable-2TB-25-USB…> which PB-Tech sell for $129. The R-Pi (with no SD-Card) would not boot this drive. Possibly because the USB drive is too slow to initialize after power on??? I also found that the R-Pi would not boot up Raspbian on an old 8GB Kingston USB flash drive. Maybe its too slow to initialize??? All the above tests were done using the current latest Raspbian release which is dated 2018_10_09. FYI: Below are details on how to install the Raspbian distro image onto a USB flash drive stick. cheers, Ian. Installing the Raspbian distro onto USB flash drive... Download the latest 1.4GB Raspbian distribution file: 2018-10-09-raspbian-stretch.zip Unzip the file to create a 4.1GB image file: 2018-10-09-raspbian-stretch.img Copy the 4.1GB image to a USB flash drive stick... $ sudo dd bs=4M if=2018-10-09-raspbian-stretch.img of=/dev/sdX status=progress conv=fsync Note: For the device /dev/sdX replace the X with the drive letter of your USB flash drive stick. e.g. /dev/sdc Insert the USB flash drive stick into the R-Pi model 3B. Remove any SD-Card that may be installed in the Raspberry Pi. Power on the R-Pi. After about 10 seconds the colourful POST display will appear, and the USB stick will commence its first boot. It will detect that it is a 4.1GB partition, expand to being a partition that fills the whole of the USB flash drive stick and reboot. The second reboot will be slow and takes about one minute. I assume it is expanding the squashed file system??? Subsequent reboots are faster.

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Blockchain For International Trade
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Nov '18

01 Nov '18

ASB is close to offering a general blockchain-based service for international trading payments, starting with this <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=121526…>: ... the transaction was a landmark because the blockchain-based service meant digital payment and paperwork for the deal were wrapped up in an hour - compared to the two to four days it would take to process using more traditional means. Also: Trade is currently paperwork-heavy, Beehre says, making it susceptible to fraud or human error. Which is odd, because isn’t it precisely the point of all that paperwork to reduce the chance of fraud or human error? However: ... blockchain also appealed because of[sic] the technology was created to be unhackable. Every time I hear the word “unhackable”, I reach for my ... never mind.

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IBM To Buy Red Hat, the Top Linux Distributor, For $34 Billion
by Peter Reutemann 01 Nov '18

01 Nov '18

'International Business Machines (IBM) is acquiring software maker Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion, the companies said Sunday. From a report: The purchase, announced on Sunday afternoon, is the latest competitive step among large business software companies to gain an edge in the fast-growing market for Internet-style cloud computing. In June, Microsoft acquired GitHub, a major code-sharing platform for software developers, for $7.5 billion. IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers. >From a press release: This acquisition brings together the best-in-class hybrid cloud providers and will enable companies to securely move all business applications to the cloud. Companies today are already using multiple clouds. However, research shows that 80 percent of business workloads have yet to move to the cloud, held back by the proprietary nature of today's cloud market. This prevents portability of data and applications across multiple clouds, data security in a multi-cloud environment and consistent cloud management. IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Together, they will help clients create cloud-native business applications faster, drive greater portability and security of data and applications across multiple public and private clouds, all with consistent cloud management. In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation. IBM's and Red Hat's partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, collaborating with Red Hat to help develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. These innovations have become core technologies within IBM's $19 billion hybrid cloud business. Between them, IBM and Red Hat have contributed more to the open source community than any other organization.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/10/28/1859245 That completely flew under the radar! I still remember from my Unix sysadmin course at uni back in the days (using IBM's AIX), when an IBM guy came in for some guest lectures and mentioned that they are ramping up their investment in Linux and also offer Linux next to their own AIX Unix systems. Well, Linux has definitely come a long way! Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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'Open Source Creators: Red Hat Got $34 Billion and You Got $0. Here's Why.'
by Peter Reutemann 31 Oct '18

31 Oct '18

'Donald Fischer, who served as a product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux during its creation and early years of growth, writes: Red Hat saw, earlier than most, that the ascendance of open source made the need to pay for code go away, but the need for support and maintenance grew larger than ever. Thus Red Hat was never in the business of selling software, rather it was in the business of addressing the practical challenges that have always come along for the ride with software. [...] As an open source developer, you created that software. You can keep your package secure, legally documented, and maintained; who could possibly do it better? So why does Red Hat make the fat profits, and not you? Unfortunately, doing business with large companies requires a lot of bureaucratic toil. That's doubly true for organizations that require security, legal, and operational standards for every product they bring in the door. Working with these organizations requires a sales and marketing team, a customer support organization, a finance back-office, and lots of other "business stuff" in addition to technology. Red Hat has had that stuff, but you haven't. And just like you don't have time to sell to large companies, they don't have time to buy from you alongside a thousand other open source creators, one at a time. Sure, big companies know how to install and use your software. (And good news! They already do.) But they can't afford to put each of 1100 npm packages through a procurement process that costs $20k per iteration. Red Hat solved this problem for one corner of open source by collecting 2,000+ open source projects together, adding assurances on top, and selling it as one subscription product. That worked for them, to the tune of billions. But did you get paid for your contributions?' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/10/31/1520256 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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The CAP Theorem Strikes Again
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Oct '18

31 Oct '18

There is a fundamental rule with distributed databases: you can pick any two of: * Maintaining data Consistency across the entire network * Maintaining data Availability across the entire network * Being able to deal with a Partitioning of the network into two or more disconnected pieces but you can never have all three. An example of this is the outage at GitHub earlier this month <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/31/github_lost_a_network_link_for_43_…>. A link broke between the east-coast and west-coast halves of their network, and in an effort to maintain ongoing service availability on both sides of the partition, they ended up sacrificing consistency of the data. Which came back to bite them when the link was re-established, and the inconsistency could not easily be resolved.

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