Cloudflare bug leaked encryption keys, passwords and more – TechSpot

Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy recently reached out to content delivery network and Internet security services provider Cloudflare regarding a serious security issue he stumbled across in which corrupted web pages were being returned by some HTTP requests run through Cloudflare.

As explained by Cloudflares John Graham-Cumming, a minor coding error was causing their edge servers to run past the end of a buffer and return memory that contained private data including encryption keys, passwords, cookies, chunks of POST data and more.

As The Register explains, in laymans terms, one can think of it as sitting down at a restaurant at a supposedly clean table. In addition to being handed a menu, you also receive the contents of the previous diners wallet or purse.

Ormandy notes that once they understood what they were seeing and realized the implications, they immediately reached out to Cloudflares security team which wasted little time in getting to work. Graham-Cumming said that because theyre a service, bugs can go from being reported to fixed in minutes to hours instead of months. In this instance, they were able to mitigate the issue in just 47 minutes and wrap up a global fix in under seven hours.

On Twitter, Ormandy said that the issue has been going on for months with affected clients including 1Password (passwords are not compromised in their case however), Uber, FitBit and OKCupid, among others.

Graham-Cumming said they have not found any evidence of malicious exploits or other reports of its existence. Nevertheless, its probably a good idea to go through and change all of your online passwords. Again.

A list of notable sites and services potentially affected by "Cloudbleed" follows below:

Lead photo courtesy Getty Images

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Cloudflare bug leaked encryption keys, passwords and more - TechSpot

Using SSL for In-Transit Data Encryption to Improve MySQL Security – DZone News

Threats to the security of your online data are everywhere and growing increasingly sophisticated. Yet despite the complex nature of online security, there are basic steps that any developer can and should take when working with a database-as-a-service (DBaaS). The foundation of your security policy should include the use of Secure Socket Layer (SSL), the standard online security technology for encrypting data as it moves between two points.

If you follow a separation of concerns approach with respect to your database and application, there are several reasons why you will want to use SSL when your application communicates with its MySQL database. You can stop intruders from viewing your data as it passes back and forth between your application and your database. You can stop someone from hijacking your connection and altering what gets sent up and down your pipe. You can also increase your level of confidence that youre conversing with the right people or systems.

In order to successfully use SSL with your MySQL database, its helpful to understand its evolution.

Early generations of personal computers were not designed with security in mind. It was assumed that only intended users would have physical access to their machines, so as long as they locked up their floppies, security was covered. Then the widespread adoption of the Internet rapidly changed the state of digital security and introduced new challenges for software developers.

Because early computer-to-computer communications were accomplished through a simple pipe, generally referred to as a socket, which passed raw data back and forth, simple programs like TELNET, one of the earliest terminal programs, passed all data through this network pipe including sensitive information like a users name and password. Once hackers began to tap into and exploit the relaxed security conditions of these early network pipes, it became clear that a more secure solution was required. In response, Netscape introduced a technology called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which provided a way to encrypt data in the pipe. SSL evolved over the years to become part of Transport Layer Security (TLS), which includes a more generic and secure form of the protocol, however, TLS is also commonly referred to as SSL.

To get started with SSL, you need a basic understanding of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and cryptography. With PKI, a Certificate Authority (CA) issues digital keys know as certificates. These certificates include long streams of numbers that are based on very complex mathematical systems designed to be extremely hard to decode.

Certificates use a bit of software magic that makes them useless to intruders. Even if intruders swiped your key, it would not by itself be enough for them to decrypt your SSL connections and either eavesdrop on your communications or inject data into the pipe. They might be able to establish their own secure pipe to your database but would still need your MySQL username and password to view or change data.

To enhance security further, certificates can be stamped with a server name or other information. Attempts to use that certificate may then require verification of the encrypted information contained in the stamp. This could stop someone who steals your key from being able to establish a secured connection to your database.

There are a few basic points to using SSL with your MySQL database.

You can find detailed instructions on the topic of configuring MySQL to use secure connectionsin the official MySQL documentation.

If youre new to SSL, getting all this to work is a detailed process. Youll need to know the type of certificate, its encryption method, and whether it requires server names to be validated. Certificates also have expiration dates, and repudiation, a mechanism to report them as invalid. The issuer can check if your certificate is valid at the time of the transaction.

So SSL gives you a secure pipe. If others get your private certificate they can have a secure pipe too, but if they dont know your MySQL username and password then they are still not in and cant read your secure connections. If you want to lock things down further, you can stamp your certificate with information that must be validated before the certificate can be used.

SSL provides a great method to prevent spoofing or sniffing a connection but is not a panacea for complete network security in all cases. That said, it does close off many avenues of attack and is highly recommend for use in all cases where it can be deployed. If you do decide to run without the protection of SSL, make sure you understand and are prepared to manage the downstream repercussions.

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Using SSL for In-Transit Data Encryption to Improve MySQL Security - DZone News

ProBeat: SHA-1 encryption is shattered, so stop using it – VentureBeat

Softwares biggest advantage is that innovations can be rapidly adopted. But thats also its biggest downfall: Its incredibly difficult for everyone to move on after that software is no longer deemed safe. SHA-1 is the latest example in a long list of technologies that needs to be abandoned ASAP.

Cryptographic hash functions are used to encrypt traffic and protect the contents of online communications, to locate data records in hash tables, to build caches for large data sets, to find duplicate records, to manage code repositories, and a variety of other uses cases. Whether its validating an update or a credit card transaction, chances are SHA-1 is still in use.

Browsers and websites use hash functions by creating a unique fingerprint and digitally signing each chunk of data to prove that a message has not been altered or tampered with when it passes through various servers. When the Certificate Authority and Browser Forum published their Baseline Requirements for SSL in 2011, the SHA-1 cryptographic hash algorithm was essentially deprecated. They identified security weaknesses in SHA-1 and recommended that all certificate authorities (CAs) transition away from SHA-1 based signatures, with a full sunset date of January 1, 2016. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology banned the use of SHA-1 by U.S. federal agencies back in 2010.

Unfortunately, SHA-1 is still in use today. This is despite years of warnings from network security experts saying SHA-1 is becoming easier and easier to hack due to consistent advancements in computing technology.

Useful hash functions tend to be collision-resistant, which means that it is very hard to find two pieces of data that will generate the same hash value, in part accomplished by generating very large hash values (SHA-1 generates 160-bit values). As computational power increases and as attacks on the mathematical underpinnings improve, collision resistance eventually shatters.

After two years of research by the CWI Institute in Amsterdam andGoogle, the duo this week announced the first SHA-1 collision. In short, they proved it is possible for an attacker to craft a collision that deceives systems relying on SHA-1 into accepting a malicious file in place of its safe counterpart.

Google created a PDF prefix specifically crafted for generating two documents with arbitrary distinct visual contents, but that would hash to the same SHA-1 digest. The company used its cloud infrastructure to compute the collision:

That might seem impractical, but it is more than 100,000 times faster than a brute force attack on SHA-1. Google released the two PDFs that have identical SHA-1 hashes but different content. Following its own vulnerability disclosure policy, the company will wait 90 days before releasing code that allows anyone to create a pair of PDFs that hash to the same SHA-1 sum.

Do not wait 90 days. Ditch SHA-1 now.

ProBeat is a column in which Emil rants about whatever crosses him that week.

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ProBeat: SHA-1 encryption is shattered, so stop using it - VentureBeat

We’re Halfway to Encrypting the Entire Web – EFF

The movement to encrypt the web has reached a milestone. As of earlier this month, approximately half of Internet traffic is now protected by HTTPS. In other words, we are halfway to a web safer from the eavesdropping, content hijacking, cookie stealing, and censorship that HTTPS can protect against.

Mozilla recently reported that the average volume of encrypted web traffic on Firefox now surpasses the average unencrypted volume.

Google Chromes figures on HTTPS usage are consistent with that finding, showing that over 50% of of all pages loaded are protected by HTTPS across different operating systems.

This milestone is a combination of HTTPS implementation victories: from tech giants and large content providers, from small websites, and from users themselves.

Starting in 2010, EFF members have pushed tech companies to follow crypto best practices. We applauded when Facebook and Twitter implemented HTTPS by default, and when Wikipedia and several other popular sites later followed suit. Google has also put pressure on the tech community by using HTTPS as a signal in search ranking algorithms and, starting this year, showing security warnings in Chrome when users load HTTP sites that request passwords or credit card numbers.

EFFs Encrypt the Web Report also played a big role in tracking and encouraging specific practices. Recently other organizations have followed suit with more sophisticated tracking projects. For example, Secure the News and Pulse track HTTPS progress among news media sites and U.S. government sites, respectively.

But securing large, popular websites is only one part of a much bigger battle. Encrypting the entire web requires HTTPS implementation to be accessible to independent, smaller websites. Lets Encrypt and Certbot have changed the game here, making what was once an expensive, technically demanding process into an easy and affordable task for webmasters across a range of resource and skill levels.

Lets Encrypt is a Certificate Authority (CA) run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and founded by EFF, Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai as founding sponsors. As a CA, Lets Encrypt issues and maintains digital certificates that help web users and their browsers know theyre actually talking to the site they intended to. CAs are crucial to secure, HTTPS-encrypted communication, as these certificates verify the association between an HTTPS site and a cryptographic public key. Through EFFs Certbot tool, webmasters can get a free certificate from Lets Encrypt and automatically configure their server to use it.

Since we announced that Lets Encrypt was the webs largest certificate authority last October, it has exploded from 12 million certs to over 28 million. Most of Lets Encrypts growth has come from giving previously unencrypted sites their first-ever certificates.

A large share of these leaps in HTTPS adoption are also thanks to major hosting companies and platforms--like WordPress.com, Squarespace, and dozens of others--integrating Lets Encrypt and providing HTTPS to their users and customers.

Unfortunately, you can only use HTTPS on websites that support it--and about half of all web traffic is still with sites that dont. However, when sites partially support HTTPS, users can step in with the HTTPS Everywhere browser extension.

A collaboration between EFF and the Tor Project, HTTPS Everywhere makes your browser use HTTPS wherever possible. Some websites offer inconsistent support for HTTPS, use unencrypted HTTP as a default, or link from secure HTTPS pages to unencrypted HTTP pages. HTTPS Everywhere fixes these problems by rewriting requests to these sites to HTTPS, automatically activating encryption and HTTPS protection that might otherwise slip through the cracks.

Our goal is a universally encrypted web that makes a tool like HTTPS Everywhere redundant. Until then, we have more work to do. Protect your own browsing and websites with HTTPS Everywhere and Certbot, and spread the word to your friends, family, and colleagues to do the same. Together, we can encrypt the entire web.

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We're Halfway to Encrypting the Entire Web - EFF

Tech Firms Urge Government to Cut Encryption Red Tape – Infosecurity Magazine

Technology trade association techUK has called on government ministers to cut export red tape on products incorporating encryption in order to make the UK more competitive, as a separate white paper urges the European Commission to revise its stance on cybersecurity export controls.

With the digital economy responsible for roughly a quarter of the UKs exports, the nations firms cant afford the lengthy license approvals process needed for many products containing encryption, techUK argued.

With export procedures significantly more liberal in other countries, this is impacting the competitiveness of UK firms, according to the body.

It argued for an Open General Export Licence to cover specific comms equipment alongside clear guidance to help industry better understand which items require licensing.

The news comes as industry group Digital Europe launched a new positioning paper calling on the European Commission to modify its proposals to tighten restrictions on the export of so-called dual-use technologies.

Like the Wassenaar Arrangement, the proposals are designed to limit the export of technologies such as intrusion software, to repressive regimes which may use them to monitor dissidents and activists.

However, the Commissions proposals could create legal uncertainty and problems for harmonization across Europe thanks to poor definitions for terms like cyber-surveillance technologies, licensing criteria, and Intangible Technology Transfers, techUK argued.

Poorly defined catch-all controls and technical assistance will actually work to restrict the ability of firms to export tools to enhance cybersecurity without safeguarding human rights around the world, it added.

Whats more, the proposals arent even in line with the Wassenaar Arrangement, and feature a newly created category, Annex 1 category 10, which will make it difficult for exporters to align with the countries theyre dealing with, the tech group said.

This area continues to prove a major stumbling block around the world, with the negotiators failing to find a breakthrough last year in discussions on the 41-country Wassenaar pact despite the US leading efforts to agree on new language.

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Tech Firms Urge Government to Cut Encryption Red Tape - Infosecurity Magazine

Google just cracked one of the building blocks of web encryption (but don’t worry) – The Verge

Today, Google made major waves in the cryptography world, announcing a public collision in the SHA-1 algorithm. Its a deathblow to what was once one of the most popular algorithms in cryptography, and a crisis for anyone still using the function. The good news is, almost no one is still using SHA-1, so you dont need to rush out and install any patches. But todays announcement is still a major power play from Google, with real implications for web security overall.

Like most cryptography, it can get a little complicated, so its probably best to start from the very beginning...

Google publicly broke one of the major algorithms in web encryption, called SHA-1. The companys researchers showed that with enough computing power roughly 110 years of computing from a single GPU for just one of the phases you can produce a collision, effectively breaking the algorithm. Weve known this was possible for a while, but nobody has done it, in part because of the possible fallout.

A deathblow to a once-popular algorithm

In accordance with its disclosure policy, Google is waiting 90 days to say exactly how they did it but once the proof-of-concept is out, anyone with enough computing power will be able to produce a SHA-1 collision, rendering the algorithm both insecure and obsolete.

Its hard to say if Googles researchers are the first people to do this ( NSA ), but theyre the first ones to talk about it, which has major implications for anyone still using SHA-1.

SHA-1 is a hashing function, which produces a digital fingerprint from a given file. That lets you verify a files integrity without exposing the entire file, simply by checking the hash. If the hash function is working properly, each file will produce a unique hash so if the hashes match, the files themselves will also match. Thats particularly important for login systems, which need to verify that a password is correct without exposing the password itself.

A collision is what happens when a hashing function breaks, and two files produce the same hash. That could allow an attacker to smuggle in a malicious file because it shares its hash with a legitimate file. As proof-of-concept for todays announcement, Google published two PDF files that, run through SHA-1, produce the same hash.

In practical terms, a broken hash function could be used to break HTTPS, the encryption system that now protects more than half the web. You can learn more about that system from the podcast below (theres a whole pie-ribbon-curse metaphor; its great), but the gist is that it guarantees that the content you see at Wikipedia.com is really coming from Wikipedia and hasnt been tampered with along the way. If that system breaks, it would be easy for criminals to insert malware into web traffic from a compromised ISP or other network provider.

Unless you make a habit of clicking through those scary red screens, youll be fine. Cryptographers have been predicting a collision like this for years, making ever more specific predictions about how youd produce one and how much computing power it would take. This is the first time anyones burned the server time to actually do it, but weve known something like this was possible for a while.

As a result, most sites have already dropped SHA-1. As recently as 2014 it was being used for as much as 90 percent of the encryption on the web, but its been mostly abandoned in the years since. As of January 1st, every major browser will show you a big red warning when you visit a site secured by SHA-1. Its hard to say how many of those sites are left, but anyone with a halfway decent certificate provider is already safe.

SHA-1 is still used in a couple places outside web encryption particularly Git repositories but given how long the algorithm has been deprecated, the broader impact shouldnt be that widespread.

The short version is, they wanted to win the argument. Dropping SHA-1 took a lot of time and effort across the industry, and not everyone was eager to do it. The result has been a running fight over how fast make the switch with Googles Chrome Security Team providing one of the loudest voices for a faster transition. Chrome was forcing websites away from SHA-1 as early as 2014, long before other browsers started cracking down. Firefox caught on fairly quickly, too, with Microsofts Edge and IE bringing up the rear.

This is a fight about how secure the web needs to be

Chromes early moves caused a lot of grief among certificate providers but now that theres a proof-of-concept collision out there, the Chrome Security Team looks pretty smart. If wed listened to the slowpokes, this collision could have been a major problem! Instead, the industry moved fast, everyones safe, and we have to write blog posts to explain why it matters at all.

In a broader sense, this is a fight about how secure the web needs to be. If youre making smartphones or selling apps, you might not think its worth it to force the entire web off of a shaky algorithm. What does it matter if a few janky websites are slow to make the switch? But Google still a web advertising company, and that means any breakdown in web security is an existential threat. Whenever an algorithm like SHA-1 breaks, ad networks are among the first to be targeted, so Googles heavily invested in making sure those encryption systems work. And since Googles ads are served across the entire web, they need to make sure everyones on board. Sometimes that means cracking a few heads!

So while it might seem like a mathematical curiosity, this is really a victory lap for Google and one that cost quite a bit of server time. People have been saying SHA-1 was shaky for years, and now we all know they were right. Luckily, we all listened to the crypto folks, and nothing too serious got broken. Youre welcome.

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Google just cracked one of the building blocks of web encryption (but don't worry) - The Verge

More Than Half of All Web Traffic Now Encrypted – PC Magazine

Data from Chrome and Firefox shows that more than 50 percent of all web traffic now uses HTTPS.

More than half of all web page traffic is now encrypted, a milestone in an effort backed by everyone from Google to the federal government to encrypt the entire Internet.

The figure is based on a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation released this week using data from the Chrome and Firefox web browsers. Mozilla and Google track the usage of the standard HTTPS encryption protocol based on data from users who opt in to share information.

As of Feb. 21, 51.3 percent of web pages that Firefox loads use HTTPS, according to results from Mozilla's Telemetry data-sharing program. Likewise, HTTPS covers more than half of the web pages loaded in Chrome across all operating systems, including Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

As TechCrunch notes, the encryption rallying cry has been taken up by organizations large, small, public, and private. And while encrypting more than half of all websites is significant, the modest and incremental goals that many of the organizations have set are an indication of the task's enormity.

For example, the Obama administration previously mandated that all federal websites using the .gov domain use HTTPS by the end of 2016. That didn't happen, but the General Services administration is still working on it. Meanwhile, Google last year announced plans to place increasingly noticeable warning labels on unencrypted sites in Chrome, although they will gradually roll out across several successive Chrome builds.

In the meantime, the EFF offers an add-on for most mainstream browsers called HTTPS Everywhere that can force websites to serve HTTPS pages even if they would otherwise default to plain HTTP. It's a stopgap measure, though, according to the EFF.

"Our goal is a universally encrypted web that makes a tool like HTTPS Everywhere redundant," EFF researcher Gennie Gebhart wrote in a blog post. "Until then, we have more work to do."

Tom is PCMag's San Francisco-based news reporter. He got his start in technology journalism by reviewing the latest hard drives, keyboards, and much more for PCMag's sister site, Computer Shopper. As a freelancer, he's written on topics as diverse as Borneo's rain forests, Middle Eastern airlines, and big data's role in presidential elections. A graduate of Middlebury College, Tom also has a master's journalism degree from New York University. Follow him on Twitter @branttom. More

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More Than Half of All Web Traffic Now Encrypted - PC Magazine

Gmail 7.2 APK Hints At Possible S/MIME Encryption – Android Headlines

Some code found by XDA Developers in a teardown of version 7.2 of Googles Gmail APK seems to hint at enhanced encryption features planned for a future version of the app. To be clear, the mobile variant of the application already has some level of security with TLS encryption enabled by default. However, the discovered code hints at the addition of support for an enhanced encryption protocol S/MIME which is already available in the web-based version of Gmail. Bearing in mind that items found in APK teardowns dont always come to fruition, the addition of more security on the mobile side of things would match the companys goals to both make Android the most secure mobile platform and to bring more unification across its platforms.

S/MIME effectively works by creating, sending, and checking signature certificates tied to an email, so that users can verify that the sender of any such communication was actually where the message originated from. In the web-based version of Gmail, verification is shown in the form of a green lock symbol on a given email. XDA Developers conducting a teardown first noticed a block of code Enhanced encryption (S/MIME). The otherlines of code in that section appear to be related to user-side messages also linked to S/MIME encryption. It can reasonably be assumed that Google will use the same symbols in the mobile application as those used in the web version of Gmail. So the strings, as code stored in text format is called, would most likely be shown to end-users click alongside associated emails. Presumably, S/MIME messages could work similarly to how current messages relating to security do. For example, some spam emails in the current Gmail app show a boxed message which generally appears at the top of the email with a statement relating to how the message was determined to be spam in the first place and including precautions that should be taken.Layout files which generally correspondto user interface management were also discovered. The naming conventions used with the files directly correlate to those found in the encoded string messages and are listed by XDA asfz_details.xml, fz_failure.xml, fz_details_item.xml, fz_details_divider.xml, and fz_failure_background.xml.

It is always worth reiterating that not all of the code found in any APK will eventually make its way to users.However, the sheer number of discoveries in version 7.2 of the mobile application really seems to indicate very strongly that a future version will come with the advanced protocol activated. Considering the current security-minded atmosphere surround technologies in general, that would ultimately be a win-win for everybody involved.

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Gmail 7.2 APK Hints At Possible S/MIME Encryption - Android Headlines

WhatsApp launches feature called Status which copies Snapchat Stories but with encryption – Technology Zimbabwe

WhatsApp, the hugely popular Instant Messaging platform is continuing on its path to release new service and feature updates.

The latest release is a new feature called Status which was announced by the WhatsApp team earlier this week.

Its essentially a pimped up version of that Status tab that been previously used for text messages like Hey Im On WhatsApp or At The Gym. The new Status allows users toshare photos, videos emojis and GIFs. The status updates also disappear after 24 hours.

For people on Snapchat and Instagram, all of this ought to be very familiar now. Its what Snapchat introduced to us as Snapchat Stories and was also appropriated by Facebook-owned Instagram.

It looks like WhatsApp, which is also part of Facebook, continues to beinspired by Snapchat (remember that photo art feature), though its been quick to express its point of difference. Your Status is secured through its End to End Encryption (E2EE).

The feature is being rolled out to iOS, Windows and Android gradually and you dont have to update your version for it. It just shows up and when it has been activated youll know by changes in the Status tab that include a camera icon.

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WhatsApp launches feature called Status which copies Snapchat Stories but with encryption - Technology Zimbabwe

Gmail v7.2 Prepares to Add Support for S/MIME Enhanced Encryption – XDA Developers (blog)


XDA Developers (blog)
Gmail v7.2 Prepares to Add Support for S/MIME Enhanced Encryption
XDA Developers (blog)
For a while, users of the Android app could only send messages over the default TLS encryption (enabled by default), but in version 7.2 of the Gmail application, it appears that support for sending messages with this enhanced S/MIME encryption may soon ...

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Gmail v7.2 Prepares to Add Support for S/MIME Enhanced Encryption - XDA Developers (blog)