Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2015 13:43:28 GMT
From: Doug <doug@...dcrypto.com>
To: fulldisclosure@...lists.org
Subject: [FD] Surveillance system used for censorship in Europe - Censorship
 attack combines packet injection and Heartbleed

>>From https://goodcrypto.com/news/2015/03/26/surveillance-system-used-for-censorship-in-europe/

Published here to resist censorship.


Surveillance system used for censorship in Europe

Censorship attack combines packet injection and Heartbleed


We all know there is censorship online. It happens in China. It happens 
to "terrorists". But we don't believe it will happen to us.

As Eben Moglen[1] and Kaspersky[2] have pointed out, companies developing 
crypto are prime targets no matter where they are. So you don't have 
to be a bad guy for the NSA to attack you. You just have to protect 
people from the NSA. Even protecting yourself is often enough. NSA 
prefers their victims to be defenseless.

Detection in the wild

In early 2015 people were still downloading our ISO file for GoodCrypto. 
But suddenly installations stopped.

After a lot of checking we noticed that the downloads got HTTP 200 
result codes, but the lengths were all too short. This isn't supposed 
to happen. A 200 result means success. These weren't successful 
downloads, but the web logs said they were. Ordinary log checks didn't 
show the bug.

Finding the vuln

Downloads from goodcrypto.com to goodcrypto.com worked. Downloads from 
another site at a different datacenter in the same country worked. A 
little further away in the network, downloads failed but the server 
logged a "Success" status code.

The obvious answer was a server misconfiguration. We couldn't find one. 
A server side packet dump showed the client just dropped the 
connection in the middle of the download.

We couldn't get a browser to download the whole ISO file. The browser 
thought it came in fine, but the file was incomplete.

So was it a browser bug? We tried other browsers. They couldn't 
download either.

The wget program often helps debug downloads. It doesn't have the same 
malware issues as browsers, because wget doesn't support malware 
vectors such as javascript, java, and css. It also retries failed 
downloads, and often tells you why it failed.

When we tried wget, it detected errors, retried, and finally succeeded. 
It said the error was a bad length field in a TLS packet. That didn't 
make sense at first because we thought TLS packets were error corrected 
by TCP.

We searched for other bug reports like this. They were all during 
session initiation, not in the middle of a long download.

But our searching led to Heartbleed. Modifying SSL/TLS length fields 
is exactly how it works.

Wasn't Heartbleed fixed in 2014?

In 2014 when we all heard about Heartbleed many servers were 
vulnerable. But OS providers fixed it fast. Our own servers get regular 
security updates.

How were we seeing it now?

Servers around the world were fixed fast, but clients were vulnerable 
too. The Heartbleed news coverage was all about servers. Servers got 
fixed. Many clients didn't. A client side Heartbleed attack is 
sometimes called Reverse Heartbleed.

Packet evidence shows MITM

Was our server cracked? We're pretty careful, so that doesn't happen 
often. But we checked, and checked again. Even though we don't usually 
have any packet logs, we ran download tests with simultaneous packet 
logs on both the server and client.

The server packet logs showed an ordinary number of bad packets, all 
error corrected. During the download the client dropped the connection.

The client packet logs were very different. There was a surprising 
number of bad incoming packets. Almost none of these bad packets 
showed in the server logs for the same session. These packets appeared 
to be injected into the packet stream. This is an MITM/MOTS attack, 
specifically a packet injection attack.

Finally wget reported that a TLS packet with a bad length field got 
through and caused the TLS connection to break. Now we knew this was a 
MITM variant of Reverse Heartbleed.

Working around the censorship

We added simple instructions to our Download[3] page:

    Somebody (Hi NSA!) is trying to censor GoodCrypto downloads.

    But don't worry. The workaround for their super duper advanced 
    network attack is: Just use wget.

    If you're on windows you need wget.exe[4].

    At a command prompt:

             wget --no-check-certificate (URL appeared here)

    Because you will verify the file hash, "--no-check-certificate" is 
    ok in this rare case, and Windows needs it.

We also strengthened the encouragement to verify the file, and asked 
visitors to let us know[5] when the attackers change tactics.

False Flag

The attacker injected packets by forging our site's IP address. If a 
site visitor notices the packets, they will think that the attack is 
from us. The attacker didn't just shift blame away from themselves. 
They framed someone they don't like. Faking the evidence to blame an 
attack on someone else, especially someone the attacker doesn't like, 
is a classic False Flag operation.

An MITM attack like this requires impersonation, so the benefits to the 
attacker of a False Flag are built right in.

One way to censor anyone is to attack their reputation.

Censorship by a nation state

Even though the download broke, the browser didn't complain. It looked 
like a successful download. The server showed an HTTP 200 result code. 
Neither the client nor server detected the attack.

Server packet logs didn't show anything unusual except the abrupt 
client disconnection. The attack didn't show at all during downloads 
from a client that was close to the server in network space, such as 
another nearby datacenter. It wasn't an attack on the server or the 
hosting provider.

We set up another server in a different country and the attack 
continued. It wasn't an attack by the hosting country. We were nowhere 
near our transfer limits for either server, so it was not traffic 
shaping by hosting providers.

The clients were all over the world. It wasn't separate attacks 
launched from close to individual clients.

The attack appears to be from someone sitting on the net pipes and 
injecting packets. This requires huge resources. The U.S., U.K., 
Canadian, and Chinese spooks do this. Ordinary criminals don't have 
the ability.

Because the goodcrypto.com servers are in Europe, China is an unlikely 
suspect. GCHQ and CSE are dependent on the U.S. for their QUANTUM 
capability. That means it was likely an NSA attack, either directly or 
by proxy.

But which nation really doesn't matter. There is no known way to 
protect against specific nations. You have to protect against all or 
none.

Who is vulnerable

Anyone who publishes on the web is vulnerable to this form of 
censorship. Even if you just use HTTP, the Chinese censorship method of 
a simple RST works.
 

Update: The attack is now intermittent. Exposing them often helps. When 
it's paused they may be avoiding forensics, or just changing tactics. 
Let us know.[5]

    [1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/27/-sp-privacy-under-attack-nsa-files-revealed-new-threats-democracy
    [2] http://www.kaspersky.com/about/news/virus/2015/equation-group-the-crown-creator-of-cyber-espionage
    [3] https://goodcrypto.com/server/download/
    [4] https://goodcrypto.com/redirect-offsite/https://eternallybored.org/misc/wget/wget.exe
    [5] https://goodcrypto.com/contacts/ 
    

GoodCrypto warning: Anyone could have read this message. Use encryption, it works.

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