NCC Group

So it's hard to say that I'm the best person to write a modern C book. A slightly lower bar might be, am I the best person who has actually written a modern C Book? Resume-wise, I've been writing C code since 1985, and I've been an expert on the C Standards Committee (WG14) since 2004. I've written two prior books on C Programming including "Secure Coding in C and C++" and "The CERT C Coding Standard". I also teach Secure Coding in C for NCC Group https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/our-services/cyber-security/security-tra… and I also taught these topics to Computer Science undergraduates and graduate students at CMU for over a decade. So I think I have a good balance of technical skills and communications skills, but you know, pick up a copy and judge for yourself.

If I curl the article's URL, all I get is: <html> <head> <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow"> <script src="/_Incapsula_Resource?SWJIYLWA=5074a744e2e3d891814e9a2dace20bd4,719d34d31c8e3a6e6fffd425f7e032f3"> </script> <body> </body></html> And then if I curl: https://www.nccgroup.trust/_Incapsula_Resource?SWJIYLWA=5074a744e2e3d8… Then I get an obfuscated Javascript blob: http://dpaste.com/2H519EP I can't understand how this page could work on any browser that doesn't enable Javascript. The only possible explanation I can think of is that it must be sending different content based on user agent, or something, though messing around with sending different user agents via "wget -U" gets me more or less the same thing.

In the not so recent past, HN'ers loved to quote tptacek's legendary rant about how in-browser JavaScript crypto is fundamentally broken[0]. What changed? Is that rant finally outdated? Couldn't Mozilla at any time serve a corrupted JS bundle (with or without their knowledge) which would leak the key somewhere, silently replace the encryption by a noop, etc? I ask out of interest, not skepticism. I much prefer an internet where we can trust web apps to do proper crypto than one where we have to depend on some app store to somewhat adequately protect us. [0] https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/a…

A counterpoint could be https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2009/j… Basically, a question about this article and other articles in this vein is who the audience is and what they feel they've learned. I think it's super-great to encourage people to learn and experiment with this stuff, but there's a risk of leading readers to the impression of "oh, that's how I add crypto to my application" rather than "oh, now I know a little bit more about how crypto works". After hearing so much about risks of naive (and even expert) implementations and application choices, I'd like to see introductory crypto articles separate themselves more clearly and explicitly along these lines.

One difference from Docker is that Cappsule uses hardware virtualization, so the isolation is that of a VM rather than kernel namespace. The VM gets a private, copy-on-write instance of the host kernel. From their FAQ: "Docker isn’t meant for security. While a lot of improvements have been made recently in this area, it also relies on Linux namespaces and SECCOMP to ensure container isolation. A single kernel vulnerability allows an attacker to compromise the host. On this topic, the chapter 7 (Understanding Container Threats) of NCC Group Whitepaper Understanding and Hardening Linux Containers is a must-read," https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/our-research/understanding-and-hardening…

I meant that the WebCrypto API does not rely on network transmission and that window.crypto and window.crypto.subtle are read-only properties in compliant implementations. Those two characteristics alone would seem to solve many of the problems enumerated on https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/a… namely the chicken-egg problem of secure javascript transmission and the malleability of the JS runtime. I'd be interested in reading about how SJCL's interface is cryptographically superior. Superior/inferior seem to have a particular definition in this context, and I'm not sure I understand exactly what you mean. I know you're an expert in the field and would love some more context on how I should be cautious with WebCrypto. (Edited for clarity.)

Take a look at this pdf - https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/whitepapers/20… There is also a docker-bench-security tool set worth checking out.

Secure Open Source has completed[1] the following audits. - PCRE v2 audited by Cure53[2] 1 Critical 5 Medium 20 Low 3 Informational - libjpeg-turbo audited by Cure53 1 High 2 Medium 2 Low - phpMyAdmin audited by NCC Group[3] 3 Medium 5 Low 1 Informational [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/MOSS/Secure_Open_Source/Completed [2] https://cure53.de/ [3] https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/

https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/whitepapers/cr… remember this presentation from a few years ago? The Factoring Dead: Preparing for the Coming Cryptopocalypse. the only reason global mass surveillance is even technically possible os because turnkey mass scale crypto exists. if NSA and FVEYs could not conceal their own penetration and exfiltration of all the world's data, then they would not be able to do it on a scale like we saw reveales in Snowden's leaks. cryptography PROTECTS the Surveillance State MORE than it protects us Plebians. the asymmetrical advantage of weilding cryptographic supremacy is what makes NSA's regime physically possible. all modern crypto is based on a handful of crypto primitive math algorithms. we blindly trust them to be secure because nobody yet knows how to crack them. but if some lone wolf math genius pulled an Isaac Newton and invented a solution to FACTOR and proved P=NP, then crypto as we know it would cease to exist. no more RSA, no more ECC, no more AES, no more SHA3. this wont even require quantum computers, because it is presently unknown whether there exists a classical solution to insoluble problems like FACTOR and P=NP. what if a classical solution does exist? what if it is found in the next 10 years? i believe it will be found. i agree with Snowden's sentiments. the mass surveillance state is an anomaly, a blip of time where a lack of mathematical progress was met with…

A concrete argument for this: Qualcomm recently released a patch for a vulnerability that makes it possible to access private data stored in the TrustZone of many of its SoCs: https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/our-research/private-key-extraction-qual… The patch needs to be provided by phone and tablet manufacturers. Except that many otherwise capable phones are not supported anymore and will not be fixed. Were the firmware of these devices open source, the community could fix this (given that the firmware does not have to be signed, or a signing key can be added). But no, many devices will remain forever vulnerable. Including my phone, 4G RAM, 32G internal storage, excellent battery and screen, great computing capabilities, in a excellent physical shape. Will probably last a few years more. Last updated on November 2017 by its manufacturer. Some parts will never be updated again and there is no way to audit this stuff. This is a shame. Edit: and I'm lucky my phone resembles an Android One phone, so some stuff can be taken from this phone to update mine.

NCC Group (formerly Matasano Security, iSEC Partners, and Intrepidus Group) - Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Sunnyvale, CA It's the time of year when we welcome back the sun, the cherry blossoms, and crippling seasonal allergies. 2 of out 3 ain't bad. Searching for a job that goes 3 for 3? Consider NCC. Cutting-edge research, continuous learning & training, and contributing on interesting client engagements. The elusive triple threat. NCC Group is currently looking for passionate security minds to join our merry crew! We are looking for great people to join our pentesting, DFIR, and Risk Management & Governance teams! What do we do exactly? Penetration testing, security analysis, DFIR, and cutting-edge research into current technologies and attacks (breaking things). You spend most of your day thinking about security systems and how they can break. You get to be creative and have a lot of freedom to be clever while learning new technologies at a very fast pace. Engagements are usually 2-4 weeks long and in a year you will be exposed to 15-20 products and technology stacks. Your work will typically initiate person-months of security improvements in products millions of people use. You will have access to senior engineers/architects and your findings/ideas will be heard by senior decision makers. You will have enormous impact in making the software and products people use safer! All of our consultants are also security…

NCC Group (formerly Matasano Security, iSEC Partners, and Intrepidus Group) - Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Sunnyvale, CA It's nearly time to cease our incessant complaining about the winter cold and begin our incessant complaining about allergy season. Yes, change is in the air. If the return of the warm weather doesn't lift you up like you had hoped, maybe it's time for a bigger change. Consider making a move to a new career path, or transitioning to a growing organization doing important and exciting work... NCC Group! If you’re a tinkerer, you enjoy breaking more than building, or someone who wonders “why” and ends up down the rabbit hole 36 hours later with a disassembled air conditioning unit surrounding them... we’d love to hear from you! Our process welcomes those with years of experience, as well as those with little to no direct experience in what we do. The bottom line: if you love security and research, NCC Group just may be a perfect fit for you. What do we do exactly? Penetration testing, security analysis, and cutting-edge research into current technologies and attacks (breaking things). You spend most of your day thinking about security systems and how they can break. You get to be creative and have a lot of freedom to be clever while learning new technologies at a very fast pace. Engagements are usually 2-4 weeks long and in a year you will be exposed to 15-20 products and technology stacks. Your work will typically…

Sending code to a desktop is easy to detect. Sending code to a non-web-based mobile app is easy to detect. Sending code to a browser isn't even detectable. In practice, no one audits JavaScript. If browsers offered the means to detect changes to cached content, security experts[1][2][3] would be less grim about webpage security. Encryption done in untrusted JavaScript is security theater. If these websites offered privacy policies claiming to never read your data, like Riseup does, the end-result would be the same. Safer, actually, because deploying unnecessary crypto increases the vulnerability risks. Recommending these websites is actively dangerous. Journalists and whistleblowers who take these claims of fraudulent security seriously, are going to be killed. Getting them to understand that email cannot be secured in-browser, is the entire point. That if you have important information to protect, you should be moving onto different approaches. WhatsApp is literally safer than this, and it's more accessible. [1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/08/cryptocat.html [2] https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/a… [3] https://rdist.root.org/2010/11/29/final-post-on-javascript-crypto/

"We are currently utilizing advanced protocols including double salted hashes" Shudder. Whenever someone starts talking about double salting, triple salting or even just salting, it's usually a sign that they are doing password storage all wrong. Salting only thwarts attacks against pre-computed lookup (i.e rainbow) tables and most attackers don't use rainbow tables nowadays to reverse hashes. Increases in GPU power have meant that it's more practical to just enumerate through all password permutations on-the-fly than do a lookup in an enormous file. If a company is using a modern hashing algorithm purposefully designed for password storage (e.g. PBKDF2, bycrypt or scrypt), they need not even consider salts because they are automatically incorporated into the algorithm and are transparent to the implementor. In my opinion, the best article describing the current state of play with respect to password storage is the following: https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2015/m…

What do you make of the highly critical Assessing Unikernel Security paper [0]? Have things changed since its publication? [0] https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/whitepapers/20… , from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19738905

Yes, my mistake--I was thinking of Rhode Island. I wrote a short bit about this at https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2019/j… if anyone is interested.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-tls-1-3-isnt-in-browsers-yet/ https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-camwinget-tls-use-cases-03.html https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blogs/2019/… Let's agree to disagree.

From one of HN's own stars: Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful: https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/a… There are some out of date bits, but the core of the post is still as true as it was back in 2011.

Reasons I can think of: depends whether you assume TLS is not going to be broken again and whether the TLS termination happens before the component you want to process the data, to do any sort of check, e.g., web application firewall. With the goal of reducing insider threat and reducing exposure of sensitive data to components that don't need to know such data. However usually it's a bad idea to solely rely on javascript crypto: https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/a…

It's mostly marketing bullshit. Apple and Microsoft both tried to build ad businesses, but when they weren't as successful as Google, they turned lemons into lemonade by launching data privacy PR campaigns against Google. Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft quietly censor their products in China, surrender data to Chinese authorities, and now we find Apple is intentionally leaving iCloud data insecure. Presumably Google was under the same pressure from US law enforcement, but somehow Google delivered end-to-end encrypted Android backups in October, 2018. And Google did it without all of Apple's self-congratulatory media hoopla. e2ee: https://security.googleblog.com/2018/10/google-and-android-have-your-b… Third party security audit: https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/our-research/android-cloud-backuprestore…

>What are the most famous companies that perform this sort of work? https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/ https://cure53.de/ >Is it useful? Yes

Finally, read this: "If You’re Typing the Letters A-E-S Into Your Code You’re Doing It Wrong" https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2009/j…

Doing cryptography in the browser is a bad idea: https://tonyarcieri.com/whats-wrong-with-webcrypto Also https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/a…

> Hopefully you don't transmit the password and are doing challenge/response so that you don't even have it when the user logs in. Wasn't challenge/response / SRP authentication debunked ? https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/a… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2859470

Just to point out for the first article (unikernels are undebuggable) - there's been a lot of work done in the past few years that effectively completely nullifies that argument: https://nanovms.com/blog/common-unikernel-debugging-myths-debunked https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2019/j… https://www.linux.com/blog/event/xen-summit/2017/9/uniprof-transparent… https://github.com/rumpkernel/wiki/wiki/Howto:-Debugging-Rumprun-with-…

Software escrow agents are definitely a thing (e.g. https://www.nccgroup.trust/uk/our-services/software-escrow-and-verific… ) (Disclaimer, I work for that company, but not in the escrow area)

Would enjoy a debate between these authors and the authors of https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/whitepapers/20… discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19738905

For avoidance of doubt: it is Ricochet IM that was security audited: https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/our-research/ricochet-security-assessmen… But yes looks like the tweet is @ the wrong account.

True, it's the chicken-egg problem all over again[1]. That said, in theory they could provide a standalone HTML file with all the necessary JS code, which would only do a websocket connection to their servers for the SSH stuff, and would be easier to use in places where you can't install or run binaries. Yes, it could also download malicious code from the server, but then again, so can any ssh binary. [1] https://www.nccgroup.trust/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2011/a…