We were asked by one of our customers to provide them with a beSTORM GTP-U fuzzer module. Opening the spec and taking a peek of it revealed that it is a relatively straight forward protocol, though quite well documented, finding the documentation itself is quite hard - as there are multiple specs, which define various “versions” (more like revisions) of the protocol, spanning the 15 years of history behind this protocol.

As this protocol is not currently endorsed by IETF, but rather by the 3GPP group, if you seek the specification for the GTP-U protocol look up 3GPP TS 29.060, it has what you need.

Once we finished building the module we ran some test, it doesn’t look good for the GTP implementors, I guess lack of tools for testing, fuzzing and compliance checking of the GTP infrastructure left a lot of room for the security players to come in and bash their heads.

Good luck with your GTP fuzzing!

My father-in-law is a dedicated Apple fanatic (as are a number of my friends).  Since I had an MS-DOS machine when we first met, he tagged me as an IBM person.  (It was vain to point out that, although I had once installed a Baby 36 for a charity, I did not, in fact, have a System 360 installed in the non-existent basement of my apartment.)  He eventually figured out that Microsoft made the operating system, but, even though I have worked on (among others) a predecessor to AOS(VS), Apple DOS, UNIX, TOPS-10, VMS, JCL, and CP/M, and make no secret of my frustrations with Windows, he still considers me to be one of “the enemy.”

Well, I’ve always wanted to have a crack at Macs.  I got the first one installed in one company I worked for, over twenty years ago, used it for a while, and, despite the frustrations, was still interested in getting one of my own.  So, this year, while I had the need to update at least two machines, and since the price had come down from “completely-out-of-the-question” to merely “obscene,” I decided to get one.

The experience has been interesting.  I shall, no doubt, have more to say about aspects of operation in the future, but it has been an education to get a new Mac (a MacBook Pro laptop) and take it out of the box.

To give credit where credit is due, I’ve got to say that I’ve been impressed with the performance of the Mac and the Safari browser on the Web, which is what I’ve done with it so far.  The overall design is nice, of course.  I like the battery life (so far), and the “sleep” mode performance.  The machine recognized a generic mouse I plugged into it, and happily connected to the Internet when through a wired LAN.  The minimal (well, OK, slightly more than minimal) experience I’ve had with Mac OS X was quite sufficient to get me started on the machine, and I’ve even managed to puzzle out some things with the help of the “Help” system (but more on that later).

The big thing with Mac advertising, and Mac devotees, is that the Mac is easy to use “right out of the box.”  And, yes, that is partially, and possibly even mostly, true.  But not completely.

The reason that I needed to plug in a mouse was that I could not figure out how to “choose” or activate something with the trackpad.  I could move the pointer around, no problem, but then there were no buttons to push.  Tapping didn’t work.  I remembered seeing people tapping hard on the trackpad on Mac laptops, so I tried that.  Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t.

Experienced Mac laptop users will be smirking, of course, knowing what I eventually found out.  You don’t tap the trackpad, or even tap it hard.  You press, deliberately, and you can actually feel a detent “click” when you’ve pressed hard enough.  (And, of course, whatever you wanted to activate gets activated.)  This is sort of implied in the documentation (when I found it), but even there isn’t really made clear.  And it certainly isn’t “intuitively obvious.”

Ah, yes, the documentation.  Once you’ve figured out how to open up the box the laptop comes in, you take the laptop out of the clear cellophane “envelope,” and open it up.  Since it is shipped with the battery charged, as soon as you take the protective foam sheet off the keyboard, and figure out the power button (not *too* hard, if you’ve got good eyes: white on silver is pretty, but not exactly clear) things start happening.  Once you’ve gotten over the excitement, you may notice that there are power cords in a bay at the back of the box.  You are less likely to notice that there is a black cardboard envelope nestled into the black packing material at the front of the box.  Pulling on a tab in just the right way starts to loosen this, although you still seem to have to find a finger hole in the envelope in order to get it out, and then figure out how to open it.  Once you do, you will find a brief booklet which does tell you which of the two power cords is actually a power cord, and which is a mere (and very short) extension cord.  It also tells you a few other things that would have been handy, had I not already figured them out by trial and (mostly) error.  (There is also a CD or DVD which I haven’t yet had the time to try out.)

OK, some of the design is great.  (Not insanely, but great.)  Not all of it.

Crazy busy, this time of year, isn’t it?  That’s why I haven’t gotten back to this until now.

(Mind you, last Sunday, at church, the kids put on this play, the point of which was that the “busy” parts of Christmas often aren’t the most important aspects.  The tagline to the play was that you should be busy about the right things, not the wrong ones.  And we’ve mostly been busy with the twins.

For example, #2 Daughter was heavily involved in the local Atom hockey tournament, since #3 Grandson was in one of the teams.  So, we pulled extra babysitting time while she had to be running things, and he *didn’t* have to be there.

The famous Coquitlam Atom Boom Boom Puck Jam Hockey tournament was won, Tuesday, by the Coquitlam Chiefs C1 team in an exciting finish.  Tied after regulation time [with full 15 minute periods, rather than the normal Atom 12, with the third period shortened if anything in the game goes overtime], and still tied after five minutes of 4 on 4 sudden death overtime, the final was won in the second-to-last shot of a shoot-out.

Because of conflicting appointments, Grandpa (of #6, right wing forward) had to travel an hour and a half, taking the Skytrain and bus out to the rink, but is still chuffed 

But the disappointments, of which I speak, had to do with computers.  Part of the pain of buying new stuff, is that things you thought you could rely on, well, it turns out you can’t, anymore.

One of them is NOD32.  Eset does make a good product, although it tends to be fairly greedy for cycles, while operating, and a bit arrogant in terms of what it tells you.  So, when a family member was in trouble over an infection (always embarrassing when your own family doesn’t take precautions, isn’t it?) I had no hesitation in applying NOD32 to try and clean it up.  Well, the machine is older, and slow.  And, hasn’t been updated in a while, so I was trying to fix that, too.  NOD32, even after finishing it’s scan, was interfering with the update process.  So much so, that it got to the point where we thought the machine was unrecoverable.

We did get it back in operation.  (And, first thing, removed NOD32.)  But it’s disappointing when a trusted tool bites you.

(Speaking of the which, I’ve spoken before about MSE, and even mentioned some of the performance degradation it can cause in older machines.  I must say, that, in some recent experiences, I’m more and more impressed with it as a means of rescuing computers that have been infected.)

More closely related to the new computers, one of my favourite places to get computer equipment, over the years, has been a western Canadian drugstore chain called London Drugs, similar (for those of you in the States) to Walgreens, although sometimes London Drugs is closer in scale to Target.  For twenty years I have been sending people to them for good advice, knowledgable staff, and decent prices.

Well, one of the computers I bought, this time around, is a Mac.  I’m not familiar with Macs, so I was relying on their advice.  Actually, the advice that I got from one staffer was quite good.  But, when I went to actually buy the machine, I got it home and found that what I had brought home was not what I’d ordered.  Which reminded me that the last time I needed to get a printer cartridge, again, they gave me the wrong one.  (There is also that fact that, in relying on their advice over what I needed, they sold me some completely unnecessary software, when the function I wanted is already built in to the Mac.)
Overall, I think they still are a reasonably decent place to get stuff, but, obviously, they may be victims of their own success.  Getting a bit careless, perhaps.  So, equally obviously, I can’t just rely on them any more, and will have to be careful about who I send there, as well.
Like I  said, a bit of a disappointment …

I tend to keep computers for far too long.  I’m a great believer in “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” especially if “not fixing it” means I don’t have to spend time on it.  We’re all busy: although we love new technology, we avoid the areas not of immediate interest.

Well, I’ve finally had to buy some new computers.  So I’m going to blog about various aspects of the process.

Not sure what to make of this yet:

“FBI Added Secret Backdoors to OpenBSD IPSEC”

Theo De Raadt seems to be ambiguous about this:

It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company
they worked for) accepted US government money to put backdoors into
our network stack, in particular the IPSEC stack.  Around 2000-2001.

[…]

I refuse to become part of such a conspiracy, and
will not be talking to Gregory Perry about this.

There is something special about Berlin. Just a feeling that can’t be fully explained, that the cold and snowy weather enhances well. But I also can’t help thinking about the Len Deighton cold-war-espionage books, checkpoint Charlie, east and west clashing in this city that was like an explosive tip of a gun powder barrel.

When I grew up, Sting sang “I hope the Russians love their children too” and what he meant was love them enough to not annihilate the entire planet. War was serious, and war between world powers was scary. Remember War Games? You’d think people will be afraid of Kevin Mitnick’s hacking skills, but what they were more afraid of was him starting world war III that would potentially wipe out hundreds of millions of people.

So I must admit I’m slightly amused by the threats of ‘cyberwar’. Lets assume for a minute John Lennon was wrong and there will never be ‘peace on earth’. Lets assume that whether it’s because of testosterone, ego, or some other reason taught in psychology 101, nations will continue to fight each other. If that’s the case, what better way to do that than on the Internet? Have them hack each other Ad Nauseam; bring down computers or networks, plant Trojan Horses and steal sensitive data. Assuming the current superpowers are China and the US, isn’t cyberwar the perfect way to ventilate mutual aggression without human casualties?

Of course, there’s a worse case scenario where that stops being funny: if cyberwar can be used to shut down critical infrastructure, people will get killed. But that doesn’t seem to be the direction this “war” is going. Nations fighting on the Internet? I say bring it on.

On a related note, check out Richard Stiennon’s new book about Cyberwar. And if you are in DC, go hear him speak on Thursday about Google Aurora, Stuxnet, and the wikileaks DoS attacks. Really fascinating stuff.

Despite what Dilbert Comic Strips may teach you, our job as security professional is to enable information services – not prevent them.

The bad guys do evil: we try to prevent it (or clean-up after) so that users can continue and use systems as if there is no evil in the world. If IT security had a Hippocratic oath, it would probably be along those lines.

Here’s a recent example. This morning I got a call from my credit card company asking me if I’d done some transactions that seem suspicious. I hadn’t, and so they will cancel the transactions (and unfortunately, cancel my credit card and send me a new one). I’m not going to stop using my credit card, and will probably completely forget about this incident. I didn’t lose any money, and the inconvenience was minimal: this is all thanks to the people that chase up the credit card fraud and enable customers around the world to use their cards despite countless attacks on credit card users, some (as my example shows) successful.

Things are not so simple in the email war front. When SMTP was introduced, it described a simple, reliable, scalable system for communication. Almost 30 years after that, we stripped email of some of its most important features. By we, I mean the IT security world. In fact, we’re slowly doing to SMTP what TSA is doing to air travel.

First, the major feature of SMTP: sending and receiving emails. This is probably our biggest failure today: There is no guarantee you will be able to send or receive emails. In fact, if you communicate with the external world, it is almost guaranteed that you will not receive a certain percentage of your emails, and that some emails you send will not arrive. Sure, there are legitimate reasons: we need to protect from spam, viruses and phishing. But the bottom line is that SMTP was designed to reliably deliver an email from point A to point B. Today, we send an email and then call to verify it was received (or send a second email which mysteriously arrives after the first one was blocked).

Next, we kill useful SMTP features. Remember the days when you got an email ‘bounce’ when mistyping the email recipient’s address? Forget about it; those days are long gone. I’m not sure what Spamcop’s exact mission statement is, but it might as well be “make email unuseful”. They have outlawed email bounces (which, by the way, are required by the SMTP RFC) and continued to take out all auto-responders.

Remember read-receipt? Gone. The postal service had this feature in 1841, but we can’t have it in 2010. Do you want to know if a certain email exists? You can’t.  Want to send email directly from your computer without using a mail relay? A non-starter. Ever heard of email fragmentation? This is an awesome feature of SMTP but don’t waste time learning it – it won’t work on the Internet today (and this time we share some of the blame).

Look at HTTP. You click on a link, and you get to the page. If you get an error, you know it’s the web site’s fault. An attack on NCSA’s httpd server is one of the first documented buffer overflow attacks, and yet attacks on modern HTTP servers are practically non-existent. SQL injection and XSS are everywhere and yet users surf dynamic pages all the time without being blocked. We’re doing a good job fixing up HTTP without being a “Mordac”. Too bad we couldn’t do it with SMTP.

Is there hope for SMTP? I think there is. Last decade the doctors were ready to pull the plug on email: spam and viruses were so frequently in the users’ inbox that email was on the verge of being unusable: You had to spent a noticeable percentage of your day clicking the ‘del’ button. These days are over: you rarely see spam in your inbox today, and if you’re like me, you get more irritating chain letters from family members you can’t block (hi mom) than shady ads for pills.

This war can be won. We just need to remember the Hippocratic oath for the IT security world and enable reliable communication again.

Bruce Schneier suggests closing the Washington Monument:

An empty Washington Monument would serve as a constant reminder to those on Capitol Hill that they are afraid of the terrorists and what they could do. They’re afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism — or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity — they will be branded as “soft on terror.”

Damn right.