Internet security

The Acropalypse vulnerability in Windows Snip and Sketch, lessons for developer-centered security

Acropalypse is a vulnerability first identified in the Google Pixel phone screenshot tool, where after cropping an image, the original would be recoverable. Since the part of the image cropped out might contain sensitive information, this was a serious security issue. The problem occurred because the Android API changed behaviour from truncating files by default to leaving existing content in place. Consequently, the beginning of the resulting image file contains the cropped content, but the end of the original file is still present. Image viewers ignore this data and open the file as usual, but with some clever analysis of the compression algorithm used, the original image can (partially) be recovered.

Shortly after the vulnerability was announced, someone noticed that the Windows default screenshot tool, Snip and Sketch, appeared to have the same problem, despite being an entirely unrelated application on a different operating system. I also found a similar problem back in 2004 relating to JPEG thumbnail images. When the same vulnerability keeps re-occurring, it suggests a systemic problem in how we build software, so I set out to understand more about the reasons for the vulnerability existing in Windows Snip and Sketch.

A flawed API

The first problem I found is that the modern Windows API for saving files had a very similar problem to that in Android. Specifically, existing files would not be truncated by default. Arguably the vulnerability was worse because, unlike Android, there is no option to truncate files. The Windows documentation is, at best, unclear on the need to truncate files and what code is needed to achieve the desired result.

This wasn’t always the case. The old Win32 API for saving a file was (roughly) to show a file picker, get the filename the user selected, and then open the file. To open a file, the programmer must specify whether to overwrite the file or not, and example code usually does overwrite the file. However, the new “more secure” Universal Windows Platform (UWP) sandboxes the file picker in a separate process, allowing neat features like capability-based access control. It creates the file if needed and returns a handle which, if the selected file exists, will not overwrite the existing content.

However, from the documentation, a programmer would understandably assume, however, that the file would be empty.

“The file name, extension, and location of this storageFile match those specified by the user, but the file has no content.”

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A well-executed exercise in snake oil evaluation

In the umpteenth chapter of UK governments battling encryption, Priti Patel in September 2021 launched the “Safety Tech Challenge”. It was to give five companies £85K each to develop “innovative technologies to keep children safe when using end-to-end encrypted messaging services”. Tasked with evaluating the outcomes was the REPHRAIN project, the consortium given £7M to address online harms. I had been part of the UKRI 2020 panel awarding this grant, and believed then and now that it concerns a politically laden and technically difficult task, that was handed to a group of eminently sensible scientists.¹ While the call had strongly invited teams to promise the impossible in order to placate the political goals, this team (and some other consortia too) wisely declined to do so, and remained realistic.

The evaluation results have now come back, and the REPHRAIN team have done a very decent job given that they had to evaluate five different brands of snake oil with their hands tied behind their backs. In doing so, they have made a valuable contribution to the development of trustworthy AI in the important application area of online (child) safety technology.

The Safety Tech Challenge

The Safety Tech Challenge was always intellectually dishonest. The essence of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is that nothing² can be known about encrypted information by anyone other than the sender and receiver. Not whether the last bit is a 0, not whether the message is CSAM (child sexual abuse material).³ The final REPHRAIN report indeed states there is “no published research on computational tools that can prevent CSAM in E2EE”.

In terms of technologies, there really also is no such thing as “in the context of E2EE”: the messages are agnostic as to whether they are about to be encrypted (on the sender side) or have just been decrypted (on the receiving side), and nothing meaningful can be done⁴ in between; any technologies that can be developed are agnostic of when they get invoked.

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Pre-loading HSTS for sibling domains through this one weird trick

The vast majority of websites now support encrypted connections over HTTPS. This prevents eavesdroppers from monitoring or tampering with people’s web activity and is great for privacy. However, HTTPS is optional, and all browsers still support plain unsecured HTTP for when a website doesn’t support encryption. HTTP is commonly the default, and even when it’s not, there’s often no warning when access to a site falls back to using HTTP.

The optional nature of HTTPS is its weakness and can be exploited through tools, like sslstrip, which force browsers to fall back to HTTP, allowing the attacker to eavesdrop or tamper with the connection. In response to this weakness, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) was created. HSTS allows a website to tell the browser that only HTTPS should be used in future. As long as someone visits an HSTS-enabled website one time over a trustworthy Internet connection, their browser will refuse any attempt to fall back to HTTP. If that person then uses a malicious Internet connection, the worst that can happen is access to that website will be blocked; tampering and eavesdropping are prevented.

Still, someone needs to visit the website once before an HSTS setting is recorded, leaving a window of opportunity for an attacker. The sooner a website can get its HSTS setting recorded, the better. One aspect of HSTS that helps is that a website can indicate that not only should it be HSTS enabled, but that all subdomains are too. For example, planet.wikimedia.org can say that the subdomain en.planet.wikimedia.org is HSTS enabled. However, planet.wikimedia.org can’t say that commons.wikimedia.org is HSTS enabled because they are sibling domains. As a result, someone would need to visit both commons.wikimedia.org and planet.wikimedia.org before both websites would be protected.

What if HSTS could be applied to sibling domains and not just subdomains? That would allow one domain to protect accesses to another. The HSTS specification explicitly excludes this feature, for a good reason: discovering whether two sibling domains are run by the same organisation is fraught with difficulty. However, it turns out there’s a way to “trick” browsers into pre-loading HSTS status for sibling domains.

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Still treating users as the enemy: entrapment and the escalating nastiness of simulated phishing campaigns

Three years ago, we made the case against phishing your own employees through simulated phishing campaigns. They do little to improve security: click rates tend to be reduced (temporarily) but not to zero – and each remaining click can enable an attack. They also have a hidden cost in terms of productivity – employees have to spend time processing more emails that are not relevant to their work, and then spend more time pondering whether to act on emails. In a recent paper, Melanie Volkamer and colleagues provided a detailed listing of the pros and cons from the perspectives of security, human factors and law. One of the legal risks was finding yourself in court with one of the 600-pound digital enterprise gorillas for trademark infringement – Facebook objected to their trademark and domain being impersonated. They also likely don’t want their brand to be used in attacks because, contrary to what some vendors tell you, being tricked by your employer is not a pleasant experience. Negative emotions experienced with an event often transfer to anyone or anything associated with it – and negative emotions are not what you want associated with your brand if your business depends on keeping billions of users engaging with your services as often as possible.

Recent tactics employed by the providers of phishing campaigns can only be described as entrapment – to “demonstrate” the need for their services, they create messages that almost everyone will click on. Employees of the Chicago Tribune and GoDaddy, for instance, received emails promising bonuses. Employees had hope of extra pay raised and then cruelly dashed, and on top, were hectored for being careless about phishing. Some employees vented their rage publicly on Twitter, and the companies involved apologised. The negative publicity may eventually be forgotten, but the resentment of employees feeling not only tricked but humiliated and betrayed, will not fade any time soon. The increasing nastiness of entrapment has seen employees targeted with promises of COVID vaccinations from employers – who then find themselves being ridiculed for their gullibility instead of lauded for their willingness to help.

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Thoughts on the Future Implications of Microsoft’s Legal Approach towards the TrickBot Takedown

Just this week, Microsoft announced its takedown operation against the TrickBot botnet, in collaboration with other cybersecurity partners, such as FS-ISAC, ESET, and Symantec. This takedown followed Microsoft’s successful application for a court order this month, enabling them to enact technical disruption against the botnet. Such legal processes are typical and necessary precursors to such counter-operations.

However, what was of particular interest, in this case, was the legal precedent Microsoft (successfully) sought, which was based on breaches of copyright law. Specifically, they founded their claim on the alleged reuse (and misuse) of Microsoft’s copyrighted software – the Windows 8 SDK – by the TrickBot malware authors.

Now, it is clear that this takedown operation is not likely to cripple the entirety of the TrickBot operation. As numerous researchers have found (e.g., Stone-Gross et al., 2011; Edwards et al., 2015), a takedown operation often works well in the short-term, but the long-term effects are highly variable. More often than not, unless they are arrested, and their infrastructure is seized, botnet operators tend to respond to such counter-operations by redeploying their infrastructure to new servers and ISPs, moving their operations to other geographic regions or new targets, and/or adapting their malware to become more resistant to detection and analysis. In fact, these are just some of the behaviours we observed in a case-by-case longitudinal study on botnets targeted by law enforcement (one of which involved Dyre, a predecessor of the TrickBot malware). A pre-print of this study is soon to be released.

So, no, I’m not proposing to discuss the long-term efficacy of takedown operations such as this. That is for another blog post.

Rather, what I want to discuss (or, perhaps, more accurately, put forward as some initial thoughts) are the potential implications of Microsoft’s legal approach to obtaining the court order (which is incumbent for such operations) on future botnet takedowns, particularly in the area of malicious code reuse.

Consider unintended harms of cybersecurity controls, as they might harm the people you are trying to protect

Well-meaning cybersecurity risk owners will deploy countermeasures in an effort to manage the risks they see affecting their services or systems. What is not often considered is that those countermeasures may produce unintended, negative consequences themselves. These unintended consequences can potentially be harmful, adversely affecting user behaviour, user inclusion, or the infrastructure itself (including services of others).

Here, I describe a framework co-developed with several international researchers at a Dagstuhl seminar in mid-2019, resulting in an eCrime 2019 paper later in the year. We were drawn together by an interest in understanding unintended harms of cybersecurity countermeasures, and encouraging efforts to preemptively identify and avoid these harms. Our collaboration on this theme drew on our varied and multidisciplinary backgrounds and interests, including not only risk management and cybercrime, but also security usability, systems engineering, and security economics.

We saw it as necessary to focus on situations where there is often an urgency to counter threats, but where efforts to manage threats have the potential to introduce harms. As documented in the recently published seminar report, we explored specific situations in which potential harms may make resolving the overarching problems more difficult, and as such cannot be ignored – especially where potentially harmful countermeasures ought to be avoided. Example case studies of particular importance include tech-abuse by an intimate partner, online disinformation campaigns, combating CEO fraud and phishing emails in organisations, and online dating fraud.

Consider disinformation campaigns, for example. Efforts to counter disinformation on social media platforms can include fact-checking and automated detection algorithms behind the scenes. These can reduce the burden on users to address the problem. However, automation can also reduce users’ scepticism towards the information they see; fact-checking can be appropriated as a tool by any one group to challenge viewpoints of dissimilar groups.

We then see how unintended harms can shift the burden of managing cybersecurity to others in the ecosystem without them necessarily expecting it or being prepared for it. There can be vulnerable populations which are disadvantaged by the effects of a control more than others. An example may be legitimate users of social media who are removed – or have their content removed – from a platform, due to traits shared with malicious actors or behaviour, e.g., referring to some of the same topics, irrespective of sentiment – an example of ‘Misclassification’, in the list below. If a user, user group, or their online activity are removed from the system, the risk owner for that system may not notice that problems have been created for users in this way – they simply will not see them, as their actions have excluded them. Anticipating and avoiding unintended harms is then crucial before any such outcomes can occur.

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A Reflection on the Waves Of Malice: Malicious File Distribution on the Web (part 2)

The first part of this article introduced the malicious file download dataset and the delivery network structure. This final part explores the types of files delivered, discusses how the network varies over time, and concludes with challenges for the research community.

The Great Divide: A PUP Ecosystem and a Malware Ecosystem

We found a notable divide in the delivery of PUP and malware. First, there is much more PUP than malware in the wild: we found PUP-to-malware ratios of 5:1 by number of SHA-2s, and 17:2 by number of raw downloads. Second, we found that mixed delivery mechanisms of PUP and malware are not uncommon (e.g., see our Opencandy case study in the paper). Third, the highly connected Giant Component is predominantly a PUP Ecosystem (8:1 PUP-to-malware by number of SHA-2s), while the many “islands” of download activity outside of this component are predominantly a Malware Ecosystem (1.78:1 malware-to-PUP by number of SHA-2s).

Comparing the structures of the two ecosystems,we found that the PUP Ecosystem leverages a higher degree of IP address and autonomous system (AS) usage per domain and per dropper than the Malware Ecosystem, possibly indicating higher CDN usage or the use of evasive fast-flux techniques to change IP addresses (though, given earlier results, the former is the more likely). On the other hand, the Malware Ecosystem was attributed with fewer SHA-2s being delivered per domain than the PUP Ecosystem with the overall numbers in raw downloads remaining the same, which could again be indicative of a disparity in the use of CDNs between the two ecosystems (i.e., CDNs typically deliver a wide range of content). At the same time, fewer suspicious SHA-2s being delivered per domain could also be attributable to evasive techniques being employed (e.g., malicious sites delivering a few types of files before changing domain) or distributors in this ecosystem dealing with fewer clients and smaller operations.

We tried to estimate the number of PPIs in the wild by defining a PPI service as a network-only component (or group of components aggregated by e2LD) that delivered more than one type of malware or PUP family. Using this heuristic, we estimated a lower bound of 394 PPIs operating on the day, 215 of which were in the PUP Ecosystem. In terms of proportions, we found that the largest, individual PPIs in the PUP and Malware Ecosystems involved about 99% and 24% of all e2LDs and IPs in their ecosystems, respectively.

With there being a number of possible explanations for these structural differences between ecosystems, and such a high degree of potential PPI usage in the wild (especially within the PUP Ecosystem), this is clearly an area in which further research is required.

Keeping Track of the Waves

The final part of the study involved tracking these infrastructures and their activities over time. Firstly, we generated tracking signatures of the network-only (server-side) and file-only (client-side) delivery infrastructures. In essence, this involved tracking the root and trunk nodes in a component, which typically had the highest node degrees, and thus, were more likely to be stable, as opposed to the leaf nodes, which were more likely to be ephemeral.

Continue reading A Reflection on the Waves Of Malice: Malicious File Distribution on the Web (part 2)

A Reflection on the Waves Of Malice: Malicious File Distribution on the Web (part 1)

The French cybercrime unit, C3N, along with the FBI and Avast, recently took down the Retadup botnet that infected more than 850,000 computers, mostly in South America. Though this takedown operation was successful, the botnet was created as early as 2016, with the operators reportedly making millions of euros since. It is clear that large-scale analysis, monitoring, and detection of malicious downloads and botnet activity, even as far back as 2016, is still highly relevant today in the ongoing battle against increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals.

Malware delivery has undergone an impressive evolution since its inception in the 1980s, moving from being an amateur endeavor to a well-oiled criminal business. Delivery methods have evolved from the human-centric transfer of physical media (e.g., floppy disks), sending of malicious emails, and social engineering, to the automated delivery mechanisms of drive-by downloads (malicious code execution on websites and web advertisements), packaged exploit kits (software packages that fingerprint user browsers for specific exploits to maximise the coverage of potential victims), and pay-per-install (PPI) schemes (botnets that are rented out to other cybercriminals).

Furthermore, in recent times, researchers have uncovered the parallel economy of potentially unwanted programs (PUP), which share many traits with the malware ecosystem (such as their delivery through social engineering and PPI networks), while being primarily controlled by different actors. However with some types of PUP, including adware and spyware, PUP has generally been regarded as an annoyance rather than a direct threat to security.

Using the download metadata of millions of users worldwide from 2015/16, we (Colin C. Ife, Yun Shen, Steven J. Murdoch, Gianluca Stringhini) carried out a comprehensive measurement study in the short-term (a 24-hour period), the medium-term (daily, over the course of a month), and the long-term (weekly, over the course of a year) to characterise the structure of this complex malicious file delivery ecosystem on the Web, and how it evolves over time. This work provides us with answers to some key questions, while, at the same time, posing some more and exemplifying some significant issues that continue to hinder security research on unwanted software activity.

An Overview

There were three main research questions that influenced this study, which we will traverse in the following sections of this post:

1. What does the malicious file delivery ecosystem look like?
2. How do the networks that deliver only malware, only PUP, or both compare in structure?
3. How do these file delivery infrastructures and their activities change over time?

For full technical details, you can refer to our paper – Waves of Malice: A Longitudinal Measurement of the Malicious File Delivery Ecosystem on the Web – published by and presented at the ACM AsiaCCS 2019 conference.

The Data

The dataset was provided (and pre-sanitized) by Symantec and consisted of 129 million download events generated by 12 million users. Each download event contained information such as the timestamp, the SHA-2s of the downloaded file and its parent file, the filename, the size (in bytes), the referrer URL, Host URLs (landing pages after redirection) of the download and parent file, and the IP address hosting the download.

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New threat models in the face of British intelligence and the Five Eyes’ new end-to-end encryption interception strategy

Due to more and more services and messaging applications implementing end-to-end encryption, law enforcement organisations and intelligence agencies have become increasingly concerned about the prospect of “going dark”. This is when law enforcement has the legal right to access a communication (i.e. through a warrant) but doesn’t have the technical capability to do so, because the communication may be end-to-end encrypted.

Earlier proposals from politicians have taken the approach of outright banning end-to-end encryption, which was met with fierce criticism by experts and the tech industry. The intelligence community had been slightly more nuanced, promoting protocols that allow for key escrow, where messages would also be encrypted under an additional key (e.g. controlled by the government). Such protocols have been promoted by intelligence agencies as recently as 2016 and early as the 1990s but were also met with fierce criticism.

More recently, there has been a new set of legislation in the UK, statements from the Five Eyes and proposals from intelligence officials that propose a “different” way of defeating end-to-end encryption, that is akin to key escrow but is enabled on a “per-warrant” basis rather than by default. Let’s look at how this may effect threat models in applications that use end-to-end encryption in the future.

Legislation

On the 31st of August 2018, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (collectively known as the “Five Eyes”) released a “Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption”, where they outlined their position on encryption.

In the statement, it says:

Privacy laws must prevent arbitrary or unlawful interference, but privacy is not absolute. It is an established principle that appropriate government authorities should be able to seek access to otherwise private information when a court or independent authority has authorized such access based on established legal standards.

The statement goes on to set out that technology companies have a mutual responsibility with government authorities to enable this process. At the end of the statement, it describes how technology companies should provide government authorities access to private information:

The Governments of the Five Eyes encourage information and communications technology service providers to voluntarily establish lawful access solutions to their products and services that they create or operate in our countries. Governments should not favor a particular technology; instead, providers may create customized solutions, tailored to their individual system architectures that are capable of meeting lawful access requirements. Such solutions can be a constructive approach to current challenges.

Should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access to information necessary to aid the protection of the citizens of our countries, we may pursue technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions.

Their position effectively boils down to requiring technology companies to provide a technical means to fulfil court warrants that require them to hand over private data of certain individuals, but the implementation for doing so is open to the technology company.

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UCL runs a digital security training event aimed at domestic abuse support services

In late November, UCL’s “Gender and IoT” (G-IoT) research team ran a “CryptoParty” (digital security training event) followed by a panel discussion which brought together frontline workers, support organisations, as well as policy and tech representatives to discuss the risk of emerging technologies for domestic violence and abuse. The event coincided with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, taking place annually on the 25th of November.

Technologies such as smartphones or platforms such as social media websites and apps are increasingly used as tools for harassment and stalking. Adding to the existing challenges and complexities are evolving “smart”, Internet-connected devices that are progressively populating public and private spaces. These systems, due to their functionalities, create further opportunities to monitor, control, and coerce individuals. The G-IoT project is studying the implications of IoT-facilitated “tech abuse” for victims and survivors of domestic violence and abuse.

CryptoParty

The evening represented an opportunity for frontline workers and support organisations to upskill in digital security. Attendees had the chance to learn about various topics including phone, communication, Internet browser and data security. They were trained by a group of so-called “crypto angels”, meaning volunteers who provide technical guidance and support. Many of the trainers are affiliated with the global “CryptoParty” movement and the CryptoParty London specifically, as well as Privacy International, and the National Cyber Security Centre.

G-IoT’s lead researcher, Dr Leonie Tanczer, highlighted the importance of this event in light of the socio-technical research that the team pursued so far: “Since January 2018, we worked closely with the statutory and voluntary support sector. We identified various shortcomings in the delivery of tech abuse provisions, including practice-oriented, policy, and technical limitations. We set up the CryptoParty to bring together different communities to holistically tackle tech abuse and increase the technical security awareness of the support sector.”

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