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Re: Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole

  • From: Gadi Evron
  • Date: Wed Aug 27 20:54:36 2008

hehe
"new". hehe

Maybe something will change now' though, it was a great and impressive presentation, hijacking the defcon network and tweaking TTL to hide it.





On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Frank wrote:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/revealed-the-in.html

Two security researchers have demonstrated a new technique to stealthily
intercept internet traffic on a scale previously presumed to be unavailable
to anyone outside of intelligence agencies like the National Security
Agency.

The tactic exploits the internet routing protocol BGP (Border Gateway
Protocol) to let an attacker surreptitiously monitor unencrypted internet
traffic anywhere in the world, and even modify it before it reaches its
destination.

The demonstration is only the latest attack to highlight fundamental
security weaknesses in some of the internet's core protocols. Those
protocols were largely developed in the 1970s with the assumption that every
node on the then-nascent network would be trustworthy.  The world was
reminded of the quaintness of that assumption in July, when researcher Dan
Kaminsky disclosed<http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/details-of-dns.html>a
serious vulnerability in the DNS system. Experts say the new
demonstration
targets a potentially larger weakness.

"It's a huge issue. It's at least as big an issue as the DNS issue, if not
bigger," said Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, noted computer security expert and
former member of the L0pht hacking group, who testified to Congress in 1998
that he could bring down the internet in 30 minutes using a similar BGP
attack, and disclosed privately to government agents how BGP could also be
exploited to eavesdrop. "I went around screaming my head about this about
ten or twelve years ago.... We described this to intelligence agencies and
to the National Security Council, in detail."

The man-in-the-middle attack exploits BGP to fool routers into re-directing
data to an eavesdropper's network.

Anyone with a BGP router (ISPs, large corporations or anyone with space at a
carrier hotel<http://www.fubra.com/blog/2007/10/mac-mini-bgp-routers-part-2.html>)
could intercept data headed to a target IP address or group of addresses.
The attack intercepts only traffic headed *to* target addresses, not from
them, and it can't always vacuum in traffic within a network -- say, from
one AT&T customer to another.

The method conceivably could be used for corporate espionage, nation-state
spying or even by intelligence agencies looking to mine internet data
without needing the cooperation of ISPs.

BGP eavesdropping has long been a theoretical weakness, but no one is known
to have publicly demonstrated it until Anton "Tony" Kapela, data center and
network director at 5Nines Data <http://www.5ninesdata.com/>, and Alex
Pilosov, CEO of Pilosoft <http://www.pilosoft.com/>, showed their technique
at the recent DefCon hacker conference. The pair successfully intercepted
traffic bound for the conference network and redirected it to a system they
controlled in New York before routing it back to DefCon in Las Vegas.

The technique, devised by Pilosov, doesn't exploit a bug or flaw in BGP. It
simply exploits the natural way BGP works.

"We're not doing anything out of the ordinary," Kapela told Wired.com.
"There's no vulnerabilities, no protocol errors, there are no software
problems. The problem arises (from) the level of interconnectivity that's
needed to maintain this mess, to keep it all working."

The issue exists because BGP's architecture is based on trust. To make it
easy, say, for e-mail from Sprint customers in California to reach
Telefonica customers in Spain, networks for these companies and others
communicate through BGP routers to indicate when they're the quickest, most
efficient route for the data to reach its destination. But BGP assumes that
when a router says it's the best path, it's telling the truth. That
gullibility makes it easy for eavesdroppers to fool routers into sending
them traffic.

Here's how it works. When a user types a website name into his browser or
clicks "send" to launch an e-mail, a Domain Name System server produces an
IP address for the destination. A router belonging to the user's ISP then
consults a BGP table for the best route. That table is built from
announcements, or "advertisements," issued by ISPs and other networks --
also known as Autonomous Systems, or ASes -- declaring the range of IP
addresses, or IP prefixes, to which they'll deliver traffic.

The routing table searches for the destination IP address among those
prefixes. If two ASes deliver to the address, the one with the more specific
prefix "wins" the traffic. For example, one AS may advertise that it
delivers to a group of 90,000 IP addresses, while another delivers to a
subset of 24,000 of those addresses. If the destination IP address falls
within both announcements, BGP will send data to the narrower, more specific
one.

To intercept data, an eavesdropper would advertise a range of IP addresses
he wished to target that was narrower than the chunk advertised by other
networks. The advertisement would take just minutes to propagate worldwide,
before data headed to those addresses would begin arriving to his network.

The attack is called an IP hijack and, on its face, isn't new.

But in the past, known IP hijacks have created outages, which, because they
were so obvious, were quickly noticed and fixed. That's what occurred
earlier this year when Pakistan Telecom
inadvertently<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7262071.stm>hijacked
YouTube traffic from around the world. The traffic hit a dead-end
in Pakistan, so it was apparent to everyone trying to visit YouTube that
something was amiss.

Pilosov's innovation is to forward the intercepted data silently to the
actual destination, so that no outage occurs.

Ordinarily, this shouldn't work -- the data would boomerang back to the
eavesdropper. But Pilosov and Kapela use a method called AS path prepending
that causes a select number of BGP routers to reject their deceptive
advertisement. They then use these ASes to forward the stolen data to its
rightful recipients.

"Everyone ... has assumed until now that you have to break something for a
hijack to be useful," Kapela said. "But what we showed here is that you
don't have to break anything. And if nothing breaks, who notices?"

Stephen Kent, chief scientist for information security at BBN Technologies,
who has been working on solutions to fix the issue, said he demonstrated a
similar BGP interception privately for the Departments of Defense and
Homeland Security a few years ago.

Kapela said network engineers might notice an interception if they knew how
to read BGP routing tables, but it would take expertise to interpret the
data.

A handful of academic groups <http://www.routeviews.org/> collect BGP
routing information <http://bgpmon.netsec.colostate.edu/index.html> from
cooperating ASes to monitor BGP updates that change traffic's path. But
without context, it can be difficult to distinguish a legitimate change from
a malicious hijacking. There are reasons traffic that ordinarily travels one
path could suddenly switch to another -- say, if companies with separate
ASes merged, or if a natural disaster put one network out of commission and
another AS adopted its traffic. On good days, routing paths can remain
fairly static. But "when the internet has a bad hair day," Kent said, "the
rate of (BGP path) updates goes up by a factor of 200 to 400."

Kapela said eavesdropping could be thwarted if ISPs aggressively filtered to
allow only authorized peers to draw traffic from their routers, and only for
specific IP prefixes. But filtering is labor intensive, and if just one ISP
declines to participate, it "breaks it for the rest of us," he said.

"Providers can prevent our attack absolutely 100 percent," Kapela said.
"They simply don't because it takes work, and to do sufficient filtering to
prevent these kinds of attacks on a global scale is cost prohibitive."

Filtering also requires ISPs to disclose the address space for all their
customers, which is not information they want to hand competitors.

Filtering isn't the only solution, though. Kent and others are devising
processes to authenticate ownership of IP blocks, and validate the
advertisements that ASes send to routers so they don't just send traffic to
whoever requests it.

Under the scheme, the five regional internet address registries would issue
signed certificates to ISPs attesting to their address space and AS numbers.
The ASes would then sign an authorization to initiate routes for their
address space, which would be stored with the certificates in a repository
accessible to all ISPs. If an AS advertised a new route for an IP prefix, it
would be easy to verify if it had the right to do so.

The solution would authenticate only the first hop in a route to prevent
unintentional hijacks, like Pakistan Telecom's, but wouldn't stop an
eavesdropper from hijacking the second or third hop.

For this, Kent and BBN colleagues developed Secure BGP (SBGP), which would
require BGP routers to digitally sign with a private key any prefix
advertisement they propagated. An ISP would give peer routers certificates
authorizing them to route its traffic; each peer on a route would sign a
route advertisement and forward it to the next authorized hop.

"That means that nobody could put themselves into the chain, into the path,
unless they had been authorized to do so by the preceding AS router in the
path," Kent said.

The drawback to this solution is that current routers lack the memory and
processing power to generate and validate signatures. And router vendors
have resisted upgrading them because their clients, ISPs, haven't demanded
it, due to the cost and man hours involved in swapping out routers.

Douglas Maughan, cybersecurity research program manager for the DHS's
Science and Technology Directorate, has helped fund research at BBN and
elsewhere to resolve the BGP issue. But he's had little luck convincing ISPs
and router vendors to take steps to secure BGP.

"We haven't seen the attacks, and so a lot of times people don't start
working on things and trying to fix them until they get attacked," Maughan
said. "(But) the YouTube (case) is the perfect example of an attack where
somebody could have done much worse than what they did."

ISPs, he said, have been holding their breath, "hoping that people don't
discover (this) and exploit it."

"The only thing that can force them (to fix BGP) is if their customers ...
start to demand security solutions," Maughan said.