WPA hack

Posted on November 28, 2008 by wunderbarb

You probably noticed that I have some delays in reporting news. This month was rather busy for me. I could not avoid to say some words about WPA attack.

Ars Technica made an excellent coverage of the attack. In addition, they provide a short history of the Wifi encryption story.

Are we safe? I am sure that you are all using WPA2 or at least WPA with AES. In that case, you are perfectly safe. The attack works on TKIP without AES and only for short packets. That means it is not possible to decrypt a complete normal stream WPA protected. Nevertheless, the attack is a first hit to WPA. The attack was extremely clever and required a deep knowledge of the different 802.11 flavors.

Some people may question the interest of attacking a protocol that is quasi obsolete in the field (hopefully, most Wifi networks should be WPA2 and AES). Any exploit is a new lesson on how a protocol is attacked. Next generation of protocols should be resistant to this type ofg exploits. Thus, it is always useful to increase the knowledge in security, and widen the database of attacks.

Probably a topic for next newsletter.

Wizzgo: Last round?

Posted on November 26, 2008 by wunderbarb

Last week, I reported the latest court decision that banned Wizzgo to offer its service for TF1, France Television and NT1 channels.

Latest episode occurred yesterday. Wizzgo has been sentenced to pay 480,000€ (about $600,000) in damages to M6 for infringement. They will soon have a similar sentence for TF1, France Television and NT1. The judge did not consider that Wizzgo was doing private copy. A private copy has to be done by the user of the private owner, and not by a third party.

The sentence is heavy and will probably sign the death of Wizzgo. Wizzgo stopped its service. They will have to provide to broadcasters the description of their advertisement revenues to estimate the losses they may have generated for broadcasters.

The message in favor of respect of copyright laws is also extremely strong.

Doom9 and BD+

Posted on November 25, 2008 by wunderbarb

It is now public knowledge. Doom9 hackers have reverse engineered the virtual machine at the core of BD+ protection (See issue #7 of security newsletter about more information on SPDC). The work is a master piece of reverse engineering (although the VM is rather simple and very near old 8-bit assembly language). Reading the thread of Doom9 is extremely instructive. You see how they operate and confirm our law #1.

One of the interesting lesson is the use of CRI’s patent to help understanding how it works. We always face the dilemna between securing Intellectual Property Rights through a patent or keeping trade secrets.

Can we claim that BD+ is broken? The answer is no. It would be similar to state that Java cards are broken because you have the java virtual machine. Paul Kocher’s team was wise enough no to base the trust model on the secrecy of the VM. I had discussion with him on that topic. The fight will now be at the level of the BD+ application. They will have to distinguish between good guys and bad guys. This will be the new arm race. The objective of BD+ designers will be to force to require a new pirate application for each title.

The speed of “erosion” of the different protections is impressive. We will follow the story.

The evolution of copyright

Posted on November 22, 2008 by wunderbarb

Andy Oram published a very interesting document that describes the history of copyright laws. It explains how it drifted with time and what are the internal concepts of copyright. For instance, he highlights the difference between patent and copyright. Patent protects a function whereas copyright protects an expression. You have to fight to get the protection of patent whereas you have to fight to leave the protection of copyright (that is “on” by default)
The document is really interesting to read if you are interested to understand what copyright is, and how it arrived where it is. The only critic is that (as for many paper on this subject) is mainly US centric.

The address of the paper is How copyright got to its current state

Thank you Jean Jacques for the pointer. :Wink:

On the Death Of The Music CD Business

Posted on November 21, 2008 by wunderbarb

An extremely interesting post on Techcrunch about the death of music (See http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/ian-rogers-on-the-death-of-the-music-cd-business-i-dont-care/)
Ian Rogers predicts no the death of music but the death of CD business. He predicts that the ecosystem will change. Distributors will earn less and artists may get rid of the distributors to directly sell to the public. Once more, we see the holy grail of disintermediation. Sell directly, earn more.
To prove his forecasts, he presented two artists Brian Eno and David Byrne who made money with direct sales. The problem with this holy grail is that we underestimate the value of the promotion done by distributors. Ian Rogers used as example already established artists. The same is true for Radio Head. But how many non established artists have made enough money to survive and are now widely known?
One thing is sure: the equilibrium point between artists, distributors and consumers will change. And probably a new breed of “distributors” such as Topspin (the company of Ian Rogers) will raise.

Lenovo distribution with virus

Posted on November 21, 2008 by wunderbarb

On a regular basis, the security newsletter reports devices that are distributed with viruses. That CE devices are not security aware can be understood (although not excusable). But when a serious PC company delivers some software packages with malware in it, this is not acceptable. This what happened to Lenovo for their Lenovo Trust Key software for Windows XP. (Trust key with malware :Sad: ! Law 4: Trust no one is really true)
It would be interesting to learn when the malware infected the package. Nevertheless, it highlights that the package was not thoroughly tested before signature.
This must be the fear of any product line manager: shipping an infected software to the customers. The remedy is known: check all the package with a maximum of anti virus software before signature. This of course requires some financial investment (low compared to the cost in reputation) and some time investment. The databases of each anti-virus software have of course to be up to date. The remedy is so simple.
This highlights the need of security awareness at every level of an organization. Security is not stronger than its weakest link.

Newsletter #11 is available!

Posted on November 19, 2008 by wunderbarb

With some delays, we have issued the fall version. This quarter you will discover some news, more about Defcon and Black hat conferences (from one attendee with a liking for reverse engineering), more about the famous DNS weakness, and some thoughts about fighting piracy on P2P (with some explanations about French HADOPI, a story that is regularly followed in this blog).

You may find it at Security Newsletter #11
Do not hesitate to post your comments and remarks here.

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