Large Scale Attack on mTAN

The mobile variant of the Zeus malware has stolen big amounts of money. This has been expected. The banks must understand that in a world where non-experts use computers they have to offer good solutions, not the cheapest.

Severe Security Flaw in ATMs

Ross Anderson has published a severe security flaw in some ATM machines. The nonce sent from the ATM to the card in the process of authenticating the card is predictable. Therefor, an attacker can do the following: First, identify a vulnerable ATM and predict such a nonce. Second, send the nonce to the card of the victim using a fake POS terminal. Record the authentication answer from the card. Program a chip card with that answer. Third, replay that answer to the vulnerable ATM.
All kinds of details are given in the linked publication. It seems that this vulnerability has already been used in real frauds.
Such severe implementation issues cast big doubts on the whole EMV scheme. This could only happen because the certification process for the ATMs did not ensure the unpredictability of the nonces, where the security of the protocol depends on this unpredictability.

Online Payment Processors Don't Count Retries

A german TV station wanted to find out what happens if they enter random CVV numbers into the checkout page of e-commerce sites. Five out of six banks allowed them to try out CVV numbers until they found the right one. As this is a very very old security issue I am really surprised that this is possible. This becomes really unfortunate if this attack is combined with the new NFC credit cards where everyone can read the card holder data but not the CVV over NFC. Not using a retry counter for a NFC credit card is a really bad idea.

Attack against EMV Terminals

The German security company SRLabs claims that that they found several vulnerabilities in popular EMV terminals, including a buffer overrun and an open JTAG. If someone manipulates the user interface of the terminal it is quite easy to steal the PIN. Such a manipulation might happen by attacking a legitimate terminal or, even more easier, by presenting a user a fake terminal. The real issue is that the PIN is used as an authentication token wherever it is input. It would be much more safer to have a personal authentication device, like a cellphone. The users need to authenticate to their device with their preferred method, and the device would authenticate to the rest of the world with a cryptographic algorithm. This assumes that the users' device is secure, bur in contrast to the present situation the user can ensure the security of a personal device.

German Federal Trojan Suspected

The german hacker club CCC claims that they found a trojan malware used by german federal police (german source).
It seems that the software has many security issues and, even worse, has abilities which are illegal under german law.

The interesting question is now: Does it really originate from german authorities? Of course they deny that. And if so, how would one prove that? It seems that the trojan uses command servers outside of germany. At the moment it is unclear who operates these machines.

I do not expect that this will ever be resolved completely. It's way too embarrassing.

Update: The Bavarian Government accepted responsibility for the trojan. Antivirus vendors claim that it would be caught be heuristic malware detectors. Looks like there is an egg on someone's face.

Progress at Quantum Computing

NIST scientists have prepared a single qubit with an error rate, under 10^-4, that is low enough to enable error correction.

Because decoherence destroys the quantum information that is needed for the quantum algorithm that is supposed to run on the computer, scientists need to implement error correction to be able to implement a quantum algorithm. Therefore, this is an important step towards a working quantum computer.

The experiment which is published in the linked article achieved the low error rate by manipulating one trapped atom with microwaves instead of laser beams.

Experimental attack on mTAN

F-Secure reports (link in german) that the trojan SpyEye has a new attack on the mTAN online banking security system. Users of infected PCs are tricked into installing malware on their Symbian mobile phones.

In order to do so, the attacker needs the phone's IMEI number, which is not a security credential in itself, but a user should become suspicious nowadays if their bank wants to know their IMEI number. Therefore I suggest to categorize this attack as experimental.

The urgent question behind this is: why did the Symbian developers base the security of their operating system on IMEI numbers?

Botnets Transfer 11 Million Dollar to China

The FBI reportsthat the usual suspects, namely ZeuS and SpyNet were used to steal 11 Million dollars and transfer that money to China.
Probably the victims were attacked using targeted "spearphishing" emails.
This issue is known since long, how long will it take until this will be eventually fixed?

RSA Incident Neboulous

Intruders may have stolen data pertaining to RSA one time password (OTP) tokens. However, RSA won't tell the general public what has happened. There is a support note which is accessible only to customers.
OTP uses keys that need to remain secret, but I don't think these keys have been stolen.

TrustZone and Trusted Execution Environment

This post describes a recent security addition to mobile phones. It has a superficial similarity to the trusted platform module (TPM). Because the TPM seems to cast doubt on anything "trusted" I will compare TrustZone and TPM.
TrustZone is a virtualization technology. The basic idea is that the processor can be switched between normal mode and secure mode. Because of the virtualization the normal mode is unaffected by the secure mode. The secure mode is based on the TrustZone. More technically, some peripherals and keys are only accessible from the secure mode.
The TPM did not use virtualization. There was no unaffected more. It became unclear whether the owner of the computer or the owner of the TPM keys was the real master of the computer.
TrustZone can and will be used to implement a DRM system. However, it won't enforce anything in the normal world. Thus people who do not like to use DRM, can simply ignore it.
Still, there is a feature that will be useful to everyone: The secure mode can be used to protect PIN entry or display of sensitive information from malware. There is hope that such a technology might disrupt the creation of a criminal ecosystem on mobile phones before it gets out of control like it happened on PCs.
The secure mode is typically started from the normal mode, for example because the user wants to enter a PIN. The smart card standardization organization Global Platform intends to standardize this API under the name Trusted Execution Environment. That's the other T-word from the title.

Malware on Android

As everyone reports: there has been malware on Google's Android market. I have to add that such a thing removes the remaining security from SMS-TANs or similar two factor authentication schemes. One way out of that problem would be to use an additional trusted execution environment on smart phones.

German Police Infects PC at Customs Control

The German newspaper Der Spiegel writes in its issue 9/2011 that the PC of a suspect was infectected with spyware at the customs control. It seems they had permission by a judge, but that this permission did not include the main functionality of the program: to send in a screenshot every thirty seconds. Pretty scary, I would think.

CISCO report on malware

Cisco published an interesting report on the 2010 developments on the malware scene. They discuss the economics of malware, the recruiting of mules (people who funnel stolen money on criminal's accounts) and future developments. The prediction I find most interesting is that Apple computers will be targeted next year. Another prediction is of course that smartphones will targeted.

ZeuS uses unpatched IE exploit

The Eleonore toolkit, which is the tack vector for the ZeuS malware, got support for the
recent CSS vulnerability of IE 8 which is still not fixed. This means that there will be more broken webservers distributing the exploit and bigger damage to affected users.

Position:Zeppelinstraße,München,Deutschland

ZeuS Botnet under Reorganisation

Reuters reports that the author of the ZeuS botnet announced that he will stop developing and maintaining ZeuS. Probably he has sold the sources and the customer base to a competing botnet , Spy Eye. Spy Eye has been fighting hard against ZeuS, but could not overtake ZeuS.

One may safely assume that the ZeuS author will use this sabbatical to come back with something even more dangerous, as it was the case in 2007 and 2008 when he also took a break.

Will Apple kill the SIM card?

GigaOM reports rumors that Apple and Gemalto work on integrating a SIM into iPhone circuit board. Everyone believes that this is totally unaccaptable for the network operators, but probably they want the iPhone badly enough so that they would accept this.

Here is what would come out of that:

• precious space on the PCB is saved
• the new security element might also contain payment applets
• the general security of the iPhone might be improved.
• changing the mobile network operator could become extremely simple, even automatic.

There were rumors before that apple wants to enter the NFC universe. It will be important to see if Apple makes SIM switching really easy. They could if they wanted to. Also, it will be very interesting to see if such a device could also get EMV certifications.

ZeuS attacks m-TAN

ZeuS e-crime toolkit now supports man in the mobile also. It seems that the malware on the PC tricks the user into installing malware on their phone with a classic social engineering manipulation.

The fraud is then straightforward: The trojan on the PC starts a transaction, the telephone malware grabs the m-TAN confirmation message and forwards it to the malware on the PC where the fraudulent transaction is completed.

This will become increasingly dangerous with the success of smartphones, which allow more attack vectors, in particular if the telephone is regularly connected to the PC, e.g. for synchronizing or charging.

I have written about this problem already one month ago.

Smartphones Not Ready for Mobile TANs

In the last weeks we had an outbreak of security issues with smart phones. The most famous was the pdf font bug that hit the iPhone and other iOS devices which was fixed by Apple with iOS 4.0.2. This one was really dangerous because it could infect iPhones just by opening an infective web site.

Then we had a rootkit for Android phones. A first criminal exploitation was a Trojan, also for Android, that sent text messages to premium numbers.

Of course there is much more. The reason for this is, of course, that there is no magical security for telephones. Old-style telephone-and-SMS-only phones were simply too dumb to be hacked (if we disregard the occasional bluetooth hack). Modern smartphones are normal computers that happen to contain a radio baseband chip.

However, we have that security feature M-TAN or Mobile TAN for online banking. When a M-TAN user has entered their transaction into the online banking website, they get a SMS with some details on the transaction and the M-TAN number. If the details of the transaction look good, they enter the M-TAN into the web site to complete the transaction.

So, here is the criminal master plan:

1. own as many PCs as you get
2. own as many smartphones as possible
3. match smartphones and PCs
4. start phony transactions on the PC
5. capture the resulting SMS
6. send the M-TAN to the Trojan on the PC
7. Profit

Sounds complicated, but if everyone has a backup of their smart phone on the PCs step 3 should be quite easy and the only remaining issue for the criminal is whether they find enough matches so that the plan is worth the effort.

A promising version of this plan would be to attack the smart phone via the infected PC. In iPhone speak this would be called the "trojan jailbreak". If this can be done without the user noticing it, the M-TAN is completely broken.

I don't recommend using M-TANs on a smartphone.

FBI can't break TrueCrypt

The FBI failed to decrypt a hard disk encrypted under TrueCrypt and another unnamed program. Of course, this is the expected result if AES is secure and the password the suspect had chosen is also secure. Still, this is a nice argument that the whole things worked.

On a side note: this is exactly why authorities want to put trojans into computers of suspected people: The Trojans would be used to "confiscate" the data or the password while the suspect uses them.

Graham Cluley from Sophos claims that Apple have secretly patched their OS against a Tojan. Of course the claim that Apple computers were immune against malware have always been absurd. It is reasonable to expect that more malware will target Macs, and we will see how Apple will deal with that. It will be hard work just like in the case of Windows, not some magical pixie dust.