Nate Lawson and Thomas Ptacek: Predictions: 2008

Thomas Ptacek | February 11th, 2008 | Filed Under: Industry Punditry

We’re more than a month delayed on this post, and it’s mostly my fault, but to compensate:

  • You’re not reading this post alongside every other lame predictions post, and

  • Our predictions are good until February of ‘09.

I note with satisfaction that the TSA has made my ‘07 prediction of laptop searches come true, albeit belatedly.

And so, on to Nate and my 2008 (or, “trailing twelve months from February 2009”) predictions!

Nate: Predicted! Hardware hacks go mainstream

Exciting developments are bringing hardware hacking to the security community. Cheap FPGAs, free JTAG libraries, tutorials, Xbox timing attacks, and open information about silicon all mean the era of software-only protection is over. The Trusted Computing TPM spec says “… to spoof the modifier to the TPM requires more than just a simple hardware attack but would require expertise and possibly special hardware.” That expertise and hardware will see widespread use in 2008.

Thomas: All that reversing work has to go somewhere

A dirty secret: most embedded systems are much less complicated than a PC running Windows. No embedded system gets the attention the Windows X86 runtime does. And when your code runs directly alongside the system scheduler and memory manager, there are entire new classes of vulnerabilities that need to be tested for; for instance, preemption and reentrancy. This is a long-winded way of saying, of course I agree. We’re long past “peak oil” for Windows vulnerabilities; hell, Aitel predicted that two years ago. It’s long past time for the research community to start extracting from the tar sands of peripherals and hardware. I’ll even extend your prediction: the iPhone doesn’t count.

Thomas: Predicted! A hardware hack my mom will understand

Let’s be specific: within the next 12 months of this post, there is going to be a public, trivially-reproduceable break in a security-critical piece of infrastructure. Even more specifically, it’s going to be one of three things:

  • a published break in one of the RF door lock or time card systems that get employees in the doors at multiple Fortune-100 companies,

  • a published break in a toll or billing system, like a mass transit card, mass-market affiliation card, or open lane tolling system (denial of service counts!), or

  • a published break in a deployed advanced metering infrastructure system for a common home utility.

The qualifying vulnerability will be based on fielded hardware (or the protocols they speak, such as RF modulation schemes). It will not be based on some Internet-exposed controls software hosted on an HP box in a data center rack.

Nate: Real-world destruction by hacking still only happens in the movies

Despite all the scare about SCADA, we’ll still avoid any major catastrophe in 2008. Like network security, actual damages end up being kept to a manageable level as protection advances. Sometimes hackers are ahead, sometimes defenders are. Occasional local areas of pain will still appear as disgruntled employees push the Big Red Button, although damage due to mistakes will still far outweigh anything intentional.

Nate: Predicted! Public vulnerability disclosure disappears

In the wake of payola (semi-legit and black market) and hassle, litigation, and lawmaking by companies, system vulnerabilities will cease to be publicly and freely disclosed. Sure, there will still be XSS galore, but systems-level vulnerabilities will only appear in 0days or Microsoft patches. In its place, expect PR-disclosures being used to sell IPS/IDS updates, which are the only place legitimate money is to be made in finding security holes. Flaws in popular devices like the iPhone and minor applications like Facebook Bingo will continue to be publicly disclosed due to notoriety and no one caring, respectively.

Thomas: Not a chance. Vulnerabilities aren’t worth enough.

For this to come true, payola schemes would have to offer enough to counterbalance the reputation benefit that accrues to published researchers. You’re not even following the money: no competent researcher makes more at auction than they can from their base comp. If you’re good enough to rack up enough frequent flier miles with TippingPoint to make car payments, you’re good enough to land an excellent job at any of the major security companies. And that’s just the money; the reality is, if we just wanted to make bank, there’s 10 other technology jobs that pay better that vulnerability research —- like designing social network pet calendars. Too much of this field is about ego and gamesmanship for it to be taken underground by payola. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Thomas: Predicted! No new major web vulnerability class

A vulnerability class is something you have to audit all deployed software to track down and kill. Overflows are a bug class. Integer mishandling is a bug class. In web apps, XSRF is a bug class, as is SQL injection and cross-site scripting. And speaking of those three: 12 months from the time this is posted, these three problems (and Internationalization, which amplifies them) will still be the mainstay of every web app penetration test. Here’s what doesn’t count: exploit techniques like Prototype Hijacking. 12 months is a long time, and Tavis Ormandy and Stefano Di Paola are going to come up with plenty of cool web tricks. But none of them are going to fundamentally change the landscape of web security.

Nate: The old ones are still everywhere

I’m not a big Web guy so I honestly don’t track the prevalence of known bugs. But, a quick browse of recent Bugtraq archives shows that they’re still appearing at the historic rate. Since I think most new software development is in web-based applications, that’s likely the place the most bugs are being introduced by emergency hires that happen to have Rails on Resume.

Nate: Predicted! Watermarks first used successfully

Everyone thinks watermarks are a failed technology, and they are in their current form. However, people have recently been talking about forensic marks, where the method of embedding data is content-dependent and the detector is kept private. This is different from the previous approach, where the detector is present in every piece of equipment and the default is “play if watermark not detected”. Such systems are obviously permanently broken since you can take a piece of content and make small random modifications until it finally plays.

I predict that forensic marks will be successful in 2008 where watermarks failed. By succeed, I mean have some slight limiting effect on piracy from a given source due to a perceived threat to anonymity. If you knew that Apple embedded an encrypted version of your user ID in each song you downloaded (but not where), it would definitely make you think twice before posting that song online.

Thomas: You’d know better than I would

Every time I try to play the “analog gap” card in arguments with you, you bust out with forensic watermarking.

You have an interesting point: the major breaks in watermarking schemes (at least, the schemes that we know about) have all happened on the attackers’ turf: the system told you when you beat the mark. And, like the SPDC VM in BD+, you’d think that watermarking schemes are painlessly renewable; as long as the system isn’t using them to allow playback, but only to help the lawyers track you down on BitTorrent, it feels like this one gets fought on the defenders’ turf.

Thomas: Predicted! The year of the uninitialized variable vulnerability

You clearly can’t call this a new vulnerability class, because it’s many years old. But as an attack vector, it’s undervalued. Here’s a trick for reading specifications, standards, and documentation like a security researcher: when something has an “undefined” value, that means “a value defined by your attacker”. Here’s a perfect storm of software insecurity: a shortcut taken by virtually every developer in every C/C++ project ever fielded, an obvious-in-retrospect means of exploiting it, and just enough mitigation (compiler warnings) to throw casual researchers off the scent. Here’s what I think: the people who excel at inventing bug classes aren’t the same people who excel at using those inventions to find flaws, and the best hunters aren’t the same people who excel at writing exploits. Those stars will align this year, and the same people who comb Freshmeat looking for KDE video player software to bust shells with will have enough sample code to start exploiting this problem everywhere.

Nate: Not until fuzzers for it become more common

I don’t think you’ll see widespread exploitation until there’s a recipe. Just like with buffer overflows, then integer overflows, uninitialized variable attacks still need more tools for automated discovery, say with a modified Valgrind. You not only need to find uninitialized use of a variable but also a trace of memory fingerprints to find how you can fill that area with your own data. Then, you have to figure out what you can do with that variable. I’m not saying it’s too hard, just that the tools haven’t caught up yet to make this a fruitful area. Maybe in 2009.

Nate: Predicted! Ed Felten wrong about DRM

Every year, Ed Felten predicts that DRM will fail to prevent widespread infringement. He’s been right up to this point, but 2008 will change that in one area. So far, the Blu-ray content protection (BD+) has prevented high-def rips of Fox discs from hitting BitTorrent. The ones that have appeared have been sourced from HD-DVD, which only has a traditional encryption/revocation protection scheme. In 2008, we’ll see the first released BD+ titles cracked (probably by SlySoft, who has already invested four months in analyzing those titles) but new discs will continue to be protected for the key release window. Rips of just the main feature via direct video capture will be the main source of piracy for protected titles (see watermarking prediction above.)

Thomas: I know you have a dog in this hunt, but DRM is going to fail elsewhere

The best “breaks” of iTunes Fairplay barely qualify today (audio capture? Come on). Within 12 months of this post, there will be a freely downloadable tool that converts protected M4P audio files to unprotected AAC files, without decoding and playing sped-up audio.

Thomas: Predicted! A game-over bug class in a scripting language kernel

It has to happen. People have been claiming that high-level languages like Perl are immune to runtime security vulnerabilities —- most notably memory corruption —- for the past 14 years. People like us have been saying they’re wrong, but we’ve had precious little ammunition to back up that argument. Here’s what a game-over scripting kernel bug class is:

  • something that occurs commonly, that a “competent developer skilled in the art” is likely to accidentally introduce

  • something you have to audit bulk Python, Ruby, or Perl code to eradicate

  • something that isn’t easily fixed by patching the language kernel

  • something that isn’t domain-specific (for instance, SQL Injection doesn’t qualify)

Within the next 12 months, someone is going to disclose a bug that totally screws over Python, Ruby, or Perl devs. If I was looking (and I’m not), the first two places I’d pay attention to are regular expression engines and threading.

Nate: Bug of the Year… if it happens

Sounds impressive and feasible, but not likely to happen this year.

Nate: Predicted! first Facebook app 0day

I consider Facebook the proverbial canary in the coal mine when it comes to Web 2.0 valuations. As soon as startup companies figure out they’ll never make money porting 1980’s text games to Facebook, we’re at the start of the next dotcom crash. Anyway, just like the Myspace worm, a popular Facebook app will have a 0day bug that tries to steal passwords or other important private information. Making private profiles public does not count as we’ve already seen that numerous times.

Thomas: This is a lay-up

We’re already feeling the tremors on this one; look what happened to Google’s Orkut social network. A simple web vulnerability in an Orkut feature, the ability to use Orkut to send email teasers to your friends list, and boom. Mass casualty. What’s better is, your Facebook password is probably the same as your Yahoo Mail password. This is too tempting a target. Sometime within the next 12 months, one single social network vulnerability is going to compromise between 500,000 and 1,000,000 web email accounts, and because they’re all searchable, multiple percentage points of those accounts are going to be converted into bank account compromises.

Thomas: Predicted! The death of the Network Access Control “market”

Do you know anybody who is rolling these products out network-wide? Here’s the pitch: you deploy, oh, I don’t know, 100 crappy new 1U security boxes across your network, and in return, your VP/Sales can’t get to the CRM server anymore. Also, you get fired. Even if this technology worked well, it wouldn’t solve much: the host-level vulnerabilities enterprises care about now are clientsides, and we find too many of them every month for anyone to believe that some 4-person “research team” at a 10MM/yr NAC startup is really going to keep on top of them. The drumbeat of IT security is now how many times a year you have to medevac the last version of Adobe Reader, and while pure-play NAC vendors promise the moon here, none of them lessen that customer pain. Meanwhile, the big problems in security are moving towards the web; no NAC vendor has any answer to the Big Problem, which is that any XSS vulnerability in any internal web app probably hands an attacker every other web app, including payroll.

I do have a point: within 12 months, two (2) NAC startups —- I’m not naming names, but I’m definitely thinking them —- are going to turn the lights out: no major product announcements or customer wins for 4 months. NAC will underperform Data Loss Prevention this year, and next year, and every year after that, leaving aside whatever Cisco and Juniper bake into their gear.

Nate: Agreed, but NAC will be reduced to an integrated feature, not disappear

There’s no reason to deploy some small company’s NAC boxes, absolutely. But IT people have a thing for control and policy. You don’t see the death of AV file scanning even though floppies are no longer how you get viruses, email is. This kind of vantage point tends to survive longer than its importance. So I agree that a lot of the startups will disappear, a few will be acquired, and NAC becomes merely a feature of edge switches with the heavyweight clientside logic left to the AV companies.

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