linux – SSL and internet security news

Cryptkeeper Bug

The Linux encryption app Cryptkeeper has a rather stunning security bug: the single-character decryption key “p” decrypts everything:

The flawed version is in Debian 9 (Stretch), currently in testing, but not in Debian 8 (Jessie). The bug appears to be a result of a bad interaction with the encfs encrypted filesystem’s command line interface: Cryptkeeper invokes encfs and attempts to enter paranoia mode with a simulated ‘p’ keypress — instead, it sets passwords for folders to just that letter.

In 2013, I wrote an essay about how an organization might go about designing a perfect backdoor. This one seems much more like a bad mistake than deliberate action. It’s just too dumb, and too obvious. If anyone actually used Cryptkeeper, it would have been discovered long ago.

infossl February 7, 2017 backdoors, encryption, linux, Security technology, securityengineering Read more >

Firefox Removing Battery Status API

Firefox is removing the battery status API, citing privacy concerns. Here’s the paper that described those concerns:

Abstract. We highlight privacy risks associated with the HTML5 Battery Status API. We put special focus on its implementation in the Firefox browser. Our study shows that websites can discover the capacity of users’ batteries by exploiting the high precision readouts provided by Firefox on Linux. The capacity of the battery, as well as its level, expose a fingerprintable surface that can be used to track web users in short time intervals. Our analysis shows that the risk is much higher for old or used batteries with reduced capacities, as the battery capacity may potentially serve as a tracking identifier. The fingerprintable surface of the API could be drastically reduced without any loss in the API’s functionality by reducing the precision of the readings. We propose minor modifications to Battery Status API and its implementation in the Firefox browser to address the privacy issues presented in the study. Our bug report for Firefox was accepted and a fix is deployed.

W3C is updating the spec. Here’s a battery tracker found in the wild.

infossl November 7, 2016 academicpapers, browsers, firefox, identification, linux, privacy, Security technology, tracking Read more >