Topics - 10 Point Checklist to Help Secure Your Data - Charity Digital News
Topics - 10 Point Checklist to Help Secure Your Data - Charity Digital News |
- Topics - 10 Point Checklist to Help Secure Your Data - Charity Digital News
- Zerologon – hacking Windows servers with a bunch of zeros - Naked Security
- VMware vSphere Now Supports AMD EPYC's 'Powerful' SEV Features - CRN: Technology news for channel partners and solution providers
| Topics - 10 Point Checklist to Help Secure Your Data - Charity Digital News Posted: 17 Sep 2020 07:01 AM PDT  A data security breach can cost a charity dearly: both in financial terms, and through the harm that it does to the charity's reputation. But there are compelling reasons why charities collect data about their constituents. These include helping with service delivery and fundraising, enabling a data-driven approach to operations, and to allowing marketing teams to personalise their communications. But in order to benefit from this vital data, charities must be able to keep it secure. Under GDPR regulations, people have a lot of control over how their data is shared. They won't want to share it with organisations that they do not trust to keep it safe. That's why data security is so important, and why your charity should be taking the following ten measures to help secure its data: 1. Encrypt, encrypt, encryptIf your data is encrypted then it remains secure even if it falls into the hands of cyber criminals. That's because without the decryption key it is practically impossible for them to read the data. You can encrypt data on laptops and desktop machines using the encryption systems built in o some versions of Windows 10 and MacOS, or with Microsoft's BitLocker program, or third party software such as VeraCrypt. Many endpoint protection software products also include encryption capabilities. Programs like BitLocker and VeraCrypt can also encrypt external drives and USB memory sticks. 2. Use long, complex passwordsMost encryption systems require users to enter a password before their data can be decrypted so that it can actually be used. That means that encryption only provides security if the password is a secure one. In practice, that means a password that is long (at least 12 characters), hard to guess, and which includes a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. You can check how secure any password is using the Kaspersky Password Checker. The most secure passwords are made up of a random sequence of these characters which can be hard to remember, so it is a good idea to use a password manager such as LastPass or DashLane to store them. 3. Use two-factor authentication for added securityPasswords are also used for logging in to various accounts – for example cloud-based services such as Office 365, or internal applications such as a charity CRM system. You can make it harder for hackers or other unauthorised people to access these accounts and the data they contain by enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) if it is available. All good cloud-based services should offer 2FA, and 2FA can usually be implemented on in-house systems. 2FA systems add a step to the logon process by requiring users to enter an access code sent to their phone or a biometric measure such as a fingerprint in addition to a password. 4. Be phishing awarePhishing attacks are designed to trick people into providing their login name and password at fake websites, or to download software which records these details surreptitiously when they are entered. The cyber criminal then harvests those login details and uses them later. Phishing attacks are very dangerous, so it is important that all charity workers are trained not to visit websites or download software via links in emails. Software such as PhishMe can be helpful in maintaining awareness of the threat of phishing attacks 5. Watch out for social engineeringSocial engineering involves convincing charity staff to reveal their passwords or provide access to confidential data by posing as someone else. For example, a common practice is to call up a staff member posing as someone from the IT department and ask them for their password under some pretext. The best way to protect against social engineering attacks is to make it clear to staff that there are no circumstances under which they should reveal confidential information such as a password over the phone or via email. 6. Use a VPNEncryption protects data "at rest" – when it is stored on a computer disk or memory stick. But when charity staff access data over the internet – for example when connecting to office systems from home - then that data also needs to be encrypted "in flight" as it travels over the internet. The best way to do this is by using virtual private network (VPN) software which encrypts the data at the beginning of its journey over the internet, and decrypts it when it leaves the internet. VPN software is often included in larger charities' internet routers, while smaller charities can use a VPN appliance or a security appliance which includes VPN software such as Cisco's AnyConnect Apex VPN. 7. Backup securelyEnsuring that data is backed up regularly is important to protect against the possibility of data loss, for example in the event of a ransomware attack. But backup data needs to be kept just as secure as the original data. That means that encryption should be activated on backup systems, whether they are located locally or in the cloud. 8. Restrict what you share on social networksMany password retrieval systems ask for personal information such as "mother's maiden name" or "name of pet" before allowing users to reset a password. This information is supposed to be impossible for anyone else to know, but often it is available for anyone to see on Facebook or other social networks. Hackers know this and collect many types of personal information about people to use during hacking attempts. For that reason, it is important not to share personal information on social networks that you have used when signing up to online accounts. 9. Use data loss protection systemsIt is not always possible to keep hackers out of computer systems, but a data loss prevention (DLP) system makes it hard to steal data when they do break in. A DLP system works by recognising certain types of data such as credit card numbers, or particular file types such as spreadsheets, and blocking any unusual attempts to download large amounts of that type of data from your charity. DLP software, which is often included in endpoint security systems as well as security appliances, can be very effective at limiting the damage that a hacker can cause 10. Delete securelyIf you throw away an old computer or disk drive, then you never know who might retrieve it and what data they may be able to steal from it. So before you discard any computer or storage device make sure that you have deleted its contents securely. Simply deleting the files or reformatting the disk is not sufficient as data can still be retrieved after these actions. The best way to delete the data from a hard disk drive securely is to use a program such as the free open-source DBAN hard drive eraser and data clearing utility which overwrites data multiple times to ensure that it can never be retrieved. Solid state drives (SSDs) require a slightly different treatment: most SSD manufacturers offer free utilities which include a Secure Erase function which deletes all data securely. For USB drives, the simplest option is to format the drive and then to destroy it with a hammer.  |
| Zerologon – hacking Windows servers with a bunch of zeros - Naked Security Posted: 17 Sep 2020 04:13 AM PDT The big, bad bug of the week is called Zerologon. As you can probably tell from the name, it involves Windows – everyone else talks about logging in, but on Windows you've always very definitely logged on – and it is an authentication bypass, because it lets you get away with using a zero-length password. You'll also see it referred to as CVE-2020-1472, and the good news is that it was patched in Microsoft's August 2020 update. In other words, if you practise proper patching, you don't need to panic. (Yes, that's an undisguised hint: if you haven't patched your Windows servers yet from back in August 2020, please go and do so now, for everyone's sake, not just your own.) Nevertheless, Zerologon is a fascinating story that reminds us all of two very important lessons, namely that:
The gory details of the bug weren't disclosed by Microsoft back in August 2020, but researchers at Dutch cybersecurity company Secura dug into the affected Windows component, Netlogon, and figured out a bunch of serious cryptographic holes in the unpatched version, and how to exploit them. In this article, we aren't going to construct an attack or show you how to create network packets to exploit the flaw, but we are going to look at the cryptographic problems that lay unnoticed in the Microsoft Netlogon Remote Protocol for many years. After all, those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it. Authenticating via NetlogonNetlogon is a network protocol that, in its own words, "is a remote procedure call (RPC) interface that is used for user and machine authentication on domain-based networks." At 280 pages, the Netlogon Remote Protocol Specification – it's an open specification these days, not proprietary to Microsoft – is a lot shorter than Bluetooth, but far longer than any programming team can take in over a period of months or years, let alone days or weeks. Its length comes in part from the fact that there are often many different ways of doing the same thing, somtimes with multiple different fallback algorithms that have been kept on to ensure backwards compatibility with older devices. Ironically, perhaps, Section 5, Security Considerations, has just two short parts: a one-page subsection entitled Security Considerations for Implementors, and a brief (though admittedly useful) table called Index of Security Parameters that links to various important sections in the specification.  The highlighted items are the ones we look at in this article. Getting started with NetlogonA client computer that wants to communicate with a Netlogon server such as a Windows domain controller starts by sending eight random bytes (what's often called a nonce, short for number used once) to the server. The server replies with 8 random bytes of its own, as explained in section 3.1.4.1, Session-Key Negotiation: REQUEST --- ClientChallenge (8 random bytes, e.g. 452fdbfd2e38b9e0) --> REPLY <-- ServerChallenge (8 random bytes, e.g. 7696398fe5417372) --- As shown above, Microsoft refers to these nonces as Both sides then scramble up the two random strings together with a shared secret to concoct a one-off encryption key, known as the On a Windows network, the secret component is the domain password of the computer you're connecting from. On the client, this is stored securely by Windows in the registry; on the domain controller, it's stored in the Active Directory database. This The algorithm is specified in section 3.1.4.3.1, AES Session-Key, and in pseudocode it looks like this:
Assuming that the client requesting access has the same password stored locally as the Netlogon server has on record centrally, and given that each side has already told the other its 8-byte random challenge, both sides should now have arrived at the same, one-off This session key setup avoids using the secret password directly in encrypting Netlogon traffic, and ensures a unique key for each session, into which both parties inject their own randomness. (This is a common approach: setting up a WPA-2 wireless connection using a pre-shared key follows a similar process.) In theory, the server could blindly assume that the client knows the real password by simply accepting encrypted function calls immediately; if the client had cheated so far by using a made-up password, the requests wouldn't decrypt properly and the ruse would fail. Good practice, however, says that each end should verify the other first, for example by encrypting a known test string that the other end can validate, and that's what happens next. Obviously, the client can't share the session key directly because that would let anyone else on the network sniff it out and hijack the session. Instead, the client proves that it knows the session key by encrypting the Microsoft calls this the Netlogon Credential Computation, detailed in section 3.1.4.4.1:
At the other end, the server does the same thing in reverse, and verifies that the original At this point, it looks as though an imposter client is stuck. Without the right secret password, which you can only get by already having administrator-level access to a trusted computer on the network, you won't get the same session key as the server. Without the right session key, you won't produce an encrypted version of your original 8-byte random string that the server will accept to authenticate you. A chink in the armourAt this point, if you're interested in cryptography, you're probably wondering, "What on earth is the encryption algorithm dubbed Let's investigate. AES, short for Advanced Encryption Standard, sounds like a good choice because it's currently accepted as a strong algorithm with no known security holes. Also, a key size of 128 bits is currently regarded as satisfactory because it would take too long to try all possible 2128 keys, even if you harnessed all of the world's computing power for yourself. For the record: AES doesn't use any internal calculations that could be sped up with so-called quantum algorithms, so it is considered post-quantum secure. Even if a truly powerful quantum computer were built tomorrow, it wouldn't be of any special use, so far as we know, in cracking AES faster than we can with regular computers today. But algorithms like AES can be used in many different modes, and not all of them are suitable for all purposes. The best-known mode, which you can think of as "straight encryption", is called Note that we've simplified these diagrams by pretending that AES-128 works on 4 bytes (32 bits) at a time instead of 16 bytes (128 bits), but the underlying principles are still perfectly clear:
ECB stands for Electronic Code Book, because the cipher in this mode does indeed work like an unimaginably large codebook. The codebook moniker is entirely theoretical. In practice, you would need a different codebook for every one of the 2128 different keys, with each book listing every one of the encryption values for each of the 2128 different 16-byte input strings. And you would need a further 2128 (that's 300 million million million million million million) codebooks to list all the possible decryptions, too, if you ever had the space or time to unscramble what you had previously encrypted. Unfortunately, the simplicity of codebook mode is also a weakness, because any time there is repeated text in one of the input blocks, you'll know because you'll get a repeat in the ciphertext, too:
At best, ECB leaks whether there are any patterns in the input, something that an encryption algorithm should conceal. At worst, it means that if ever you figure out what the plaintext was in one part of the input – a chapter heading, for example, or part of a Bitcoin address – you will automatically be able to decrypt that text everywhere else it appears. Various solutions exist to use block-based encryption algorithms so they don't reveal repeated patterns, and one of them is Cipher Feeback (CFB) mode, which works like this:
Instead of encrypting the plaintext blocks with AES each time, you encrypt the last block of ciphertext instead, and then XOR that "keystream" with the next block of plaintext. That way, even if you get two identical plaintext blocks in a row, the ciphertext won't repeat. Of course, there is no ciphertext block to use at the outset, so Note that the IV can, and usually is, shared along with the ciphertext – the IV doesn't need to be kept secret, because the secrecy of the encryption is provided by the key that controls the AES encryption engine. Nevertheless, a CFB initialisation vector should be chosen randomly, and should never be re-used, especially with the same AES key. CFB8 explainedOne disadvantage that AES-ECB and AES-CFB have in common is that until you have a full 16-byte block of input, you can't produce any output, because they can't work on partial blocks – AES is designed to mix-and-swap-and-mince-and-munge chunks of 128 bits at a time. That also means you are stuck if you have any leftover bytes at the end, for example if you have 67 bytes to encrypt, which is 4×16 + 3. You need to figure out a way to pad out the last block to the right size, and then reliably work out whether there were any extra bytes added on that need to be stripped off when you decrypt the data. One solution to this is AES-CFB8, a mode that we have never heard of anyone using in real life before, but that is designed to use a full 128-bit AES mixing cycle for every byte of input, so you can encrypt even just a single character without any padding. Instead of encrypting the last full block of ciphertext to create the next full block of keystream data, you use just the first byte of the keystream each time and XOR it with one plaintext byte rather than a 16-byte plaintext block. Then you chop off the keystream byte you just used and add the new ciphertext byte on at the end of the keystream, giving you a full block of data to encrypt to generate the next keystream byte:
Netlogon CFB8 considered harmfulSadly, the way that Netlogon uses Secura researchers spotted the problem very quickly when perusing the Microsoft documentation, where the algorithm is not defined generically (as we listed it above), but given in a dangerously simplified form. Section 3.1.4.4.1 specifies the AES Credential [Computation] process as follows: If AES support is negotiated between the client and the server, the Netlogon credentials are computed using the AES-128 encryption algorithm in 8-bit CFB mode with a zero initialization vector. [Sk below is short for SessionKey] ComputeNetlogonCredential(Input, Sk, Output) SET IV = 0 CALL AesEncrypt(Input, Sk, IV, Output) You probably spotted the cryptographic blunder already: "the credentials are computed […] with a zero initialization vector." As we already mentioned, IVs are supposed to be randomly chosen, and used only once with any key – indeed, that's why they are often referred to as nonces, for numbers used once. But there's an even bigger problem with an all-zero IV in CFB8 mode, as Secura discovered. You can visualise the problem if you use an all-zero IV plus an all-zero block of plaintext bytes:
Because AES is a high-quality cipher with no known statistical biases, you can put in any input and encrypt it with any key, and the chance of each individual bit in the output being zero (or one) is 50%. Every output bit's value is like a digital coin toss. So the chance of the first output byte being zero is the same as the chance that the first 8 output bits are all zero, which is 50% × 50% × 50% … eight times over (50% is just another way of writing 0.50, which is the same as 1/2). 50%8 is 2-8, or 1/256. Remember that probability. In the diagram above we've assumed that the first output byte did indeed come out as zero, and you can see that if that happens, the entire encryption process essentially gets "locked into" an all-zero state. The keystream byte (black) comes out as 00, so when you XOR it with the first plaintext byte (pink) of 00 you get a ciphertext byte (red) of 00. Then, when you chop the first 00 off the left hand end of the IV (white) and append the new ciphertext 00 at the end, you are right back where you started, with another all-zero IV and a remaining plaintext buffer of all zeros. When you encrypt the "new" IV with the key, you get exactly the same result as before, because all your inputs are the same again, and out comes another keystream byte of 00, which XORs with the next plaintext 00 to produce another ciphertext byte of 00, which feeds back into the IV to make it all zero again. How to trick NetlogonSecura's researchers quickly realised what would happen if they tried to authenticate to a Netlogon server over and over again using a Roughly once in every 256 times the server would randomly concoct a session key for which the correctly-encrypted version of their all-zero …would itself be all zeros.  One in 256 times the key chosen gave all-zero output too. In other words, by submitting a Simply put, 1/256 of the time, they ended up in a situation where they could always produce correctly-encrypted data to transmit to the server, without having a clue what the password or session key was, as long as they only ever needed to encrypt zeros! Better yet, the server would automatically notify them when they hit the jackpot by accepting their credential submission. Surely that's not exploitable?By now you are probably thinking, "What's the chance that every time they needed to submit an encrypted authentication token or to supply encrypted password data, they'd only ever need to encrypt zeros?" We wondered that too, but our intrepid researchers found a way. One of the Netlogon password functions, This function, which does what its name suggests and changes the server password, requires the caller to correctly encrypt two chunks of data:
The $ date --utc +%s 1600300026 Posix time denotes the number of seconds since the start of the Unix epoch, which began, by definition, at 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z, a date now more than 50 years in the past. The researchers found themselves on the horns of a dilemma: the …and therefore the attackers would need the original session key after all, and to get the session key they would need to know a valid password for a suitable computer on the network. What to do? Well, the researchers just pretended it was 1970 all over again, used a timestamp of zero added to a …and the server didn't mind – there was apparently no check to see if the timestamp was decades in the past. Of course, the 516 all-zero bytes that the researchers now needed to supply in the encrypted password buffer forced them to specify a password length of zero, which you might think would be disallowed by the server. But the researchers tried it anyway… …and the server didn't mind that either, setting its own Active Directory password to <no password at all>. What next?Happily – or perhaps slightly less unhappily – the password change that they were able make didn't reset the server's actual login password, so the researchers couldn't simply login directly and take over the server via a conventional Windows desktop. However, they did report that by changing the Active Directory password of the domain controller itself, they were able to:
In other words, complete network compromise. All because of an over-simplified cryptographic specification that involved the cardinal sin of an all-zero initialisation vector every time. Of course, that flaw was compounded by several other programmatic oversights where stricter attention to security and correctness could have prevented this attack, including:
What to do?This bug opens a serious security hole to anyone already inside your organisation, and perhaps even to outsiders, depending on the topology of your network. If you haven't applied the August 2020 patch yet, you need to do so – you aren't just letting yourself down, you're letting everyone else down too by making your network an easier target for crooks, and therefore making it more likely that you will be the source of security problems for other people. In addition:
But the big thing to remember here is: patch early, patch often.  |
| Posted: 16 Sep 2020 02:33 PM PDT  VMware vSphere now supports "powerful" silicon-level security features enabled by AMD's second-generation EPYC processors that protects the hypervisor and virtual machines from each other using full in-memory encryption, giving AMD a one-up over rival Intel in the virtualization market. Support for AMD EPYC's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Encrypted State (SEV-ES) was announced Wednesday as part of the VMware vSphere 7 Update 1 rollout that coincided with a wider launch of new releases for several VMware products the day before. [Related: AMD's Xbox, PlayStation Work Led To A Big Security Feature In EPYC] VMware's support for AMD's SEV features comes as the chipmaker is gaining data center market share against Intel, which has fallen behind AMD in using next-generation manufacturing processes and is turning to new design methodologies to drive more performance and new features. But AMD's traction in the virtualization market hasn't been completely smooth, with VMware deciding earlier this year to essentially the double the software licensing costs for AMD's higher-core processors. In a blog post Wednesday, Bob Plankers, a technical marketing architect at VMware, said vSphere 7 is the first hypervisor to provide support for both SEV and SEV-ES, offering users advanced security on top of ESXi software-based layers of isolation that separate the hypervisor from guest VMs. The difference, he said, is that VMware's software-based isolation doesn't address security issues at the hardware level, including the CPU, memory controllers and other PCIe bus controllers. AMD's SEV and SEV-ES features are made possible by an Arm-based secure co-processor inside EPYC processors that generates and manages encryption keys to provide encryption to both the hypervisor and guest VMs, preventing each party from accessing their respective keys. Plankers singled out SEV-ES as something VMware customers should embrace and said it offers a "very powerful protection against entire classes of vulnerabilities, both in hardware and in the hypervisor." This form of protection takes things a step further than SEV by encrypting all the contents of the CPU registers, preventing any leakage of information from VMs to the hypervisor. "A compromised hypervisor could read or modify that register data, either to steal the data itself, steal things like encryption keys that are held in CPU registers (to decrypt a disk, for example), or to alter the behavior of the VM itself," Plankers wrote in the blog post. "None of those things are good. With SEV-ES, the hypervisor does not have access to the encryption keys for a guest unless the guest explicitly allows it, greatly reducing the attack surface." One of the bonuses of AMD's SEV and SEV-ES features is that they don't require modifications to applications to work, according to Plankers. The features are also flexible and can be enabled and disabled for any workload without any consequences. "This technology isn't all or nothing, even on a single host," he said. "You can enable it for certain workloads, leave it disabled for others, and they all coexist peacefully. That flexibility means that enabling and deploying this technology can be done at your own pace." One downside, however, is that cutting off the hypervisor's access to the VM's memory does prevent certain vSphere features, like vMotion, memory snapshots, hot add of devices, suspend and resume, Fault Tolerance and hot clones, Plankers said. But losing vMotion may not be an issue because good design can make applications and services resilient to maintenance operations, he added, plus vSphere with Tanzu doesn't use the vMotion function for Kubernetes workloads. To take advantage of AMD's SEV and SEV-ES features in vSphere, users need to use the chipmaker's second-generation of EPYC processors that launched last year, according to Plankers. They also require support from the guest operating system, which currently includes some Linux distributions and kernels. "AMD has demonstrated considerable thoughtfulness towards consumers with how they've designed these features, and their ideals mesh well with our work to make security extremely easy to use inside vSphere," Plankers said. "It's always nice to have these types of tools in our collective security toolbox, helping to reduce risk, and we at VMware are proud to lead the industry in championing them." While AMD's SEV features are available across its entire AMD EPYC stack, Intel's equivalent technology, Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX), isn't available yet in most Xeon processors, limiting the options for vSphere users who want to take advantage of Intel SGX. It's one reason why Google Cloud decided to use SEV for its new Confidential Virtual Machines product. Worth Davis, president of the solution provider business for Computex Technology Solutions, a Houston, Texas-based VMware partner, welcomed AMD's increasing competitiveness and told CRN that silicon-level vulnerabilities like Meltdown and Spectre that emerged in 2018 have shown the need to have more hardware-based security in processors. "I think these are important features in systems today since Spectre and other variant issues that cropped up a few years ago," he said in an email. "Price and Performance will always be the driving factors in platform consideration, but security definitely has a weight and requirement as well. It's good to see competition overall as it benefits all consumers of data center-grade processing." In an interview with CRN last year, top AMD executive Forrest Norrod predicted that SEV will eventually become a must-have feature in the near future. "I think that it in three to four years, it will be ridiculous to even consider deploying a [virtual machine] in the cloud if you can't control and isolate that thing cryptographically from the cloud provider," he said. "I think that your risk management guys [will say], 'What are you talking about?'"  |
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