Kebe Says - Dan McDonald's Blog

A Gentle Reminder About illumos

A very bad security vulnerability in Solaris was patched-and-announced by Oracle earlier this week. Turns out, we in open-source-descendant illumos had something in the same neighborhood. We can’t confirm it’s the same bug because reverse-engineering Oracle Solaris is off the table.

In general if a vulnerability is an old one in Solaris, there’s a good chance it’s also in illumos. Alex Wilson said it best in this recent tweet:

@anthomsec Hi! re: 2020-14871 (Solaris PAM bug), do you know if this was in the OpenSolaris PAM that went into illumos (https://t.co/Rxs5ct09xs) by any chance? We don't get any info via Oracle, but we do inherit their bugs if they're old enough :(

— Alex Wilson (@arekinath) October 22, 2020

If you want to see the full history, the first 11 minutes of my talk from 2016’s FOSDEM contains WHY a sufficiently old vulnerability in Solaris 10 and even Solaris 11 may also be in illumos.

Remember folks, Solaris is closed-source under Oracle, even though it used to be open-source during the last years of Sun’s existence. illumos is open-source, related, but NOT the same as Solaris anymore. Another suggested talk covers this rather well, especially if you start at the right part.

The Actual Request

Because of this history and shared heritage, if you’re a security researcher, PLEASE make sure you find one of many illumos distributions, install it, and try your proof-of-concept on that as well. If you find the same vulnerability in illumos, please report it to us via the security@illumos.org mailing alias. We have a PGP key too!

Thank you, and please test your Solaris exploits on illumos too (and vice-versa).

A recent twitter storm occurred in light of last week's #encryptnews event.

I was rather flattered when well-known whistleblower Thomas Drake retweeted this response of mine:

@KevinBankston @Thomas_Drake1 @headhntr Because vendors can be compromised. You want goodness, fully fund an FOSS project.

— Dan McDonald (@kebesays) November 7, 2014

The mention of "buying usable software" probably makes sense to someone who's used to dealing with Commercial, Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software. We don't live in a world where COTS is necessarily safe anymore. There was a period (which I luckily lived and worked in), where Defense Department ARPA money was being directed specifically to make COTS software more secure and high-assurance. Given the Snowden revelations, however, COTS can possibly be a vulnerability as much as it could be a strength.

In the seminal Frederick Brooks book, The Mythical Man-Month, he describes one approach to software engineering: The Surgical Team. See here and scroll down for a proper description. Note the different roles for such a team.

Given that most media is equivalent to software (easily copied, distributed, etc.), I wonder if media organizations shouldn't adopt certain types of those organizational roles that have been until now the domain of traditional software. In particular, the role of the Toolsmith should be one that modern media organizations adopt. Ignoring traditional functions of "IT", a toolsmith for, say, an investigative organization should be well-versed in what military types like to call Defensive Information Warfare. Beyond just the mere use of encryption (NOTE: ANYONE who equates encryption with security should be shot, or at least distrusted), such Toolsmiths should enable their journalists (who would correspond to the surgeon or the assistant in the surgical team model) to do their job in the face of strong adversaries. An entity that needs a toolsmith will also need a software base, and unless the entity has resources enough to create an entire software stack, that entity will need Free Open-Source Software (for various definitions of Free and Open I won't get into for fear of derailing my point).

I haven't been working in security much since the Solaris Diaspora, so I'm a little out of touch with modern threat environments. I suspect it's everything I'd previous imagined, just more real, and where the word "foreign" can be dropped from "major foreign governments". Anyone who cares about keeping their information and themselves safe should, in my opinion, have at least a toolsmith on their staff. Several organizations do, or at least have technology experts, like the ACLU's Christopher Soghoian, for example. The analogy could probably extend beyond security, but I wanted to at least point out the use of an effective toolsmith.

I'm sure all twelve of you readers out there know what's been going on with respect to recent revelations about NSA activity. Among other things is the unnerving discovery that NSA has been attempting to actively dumb-down security for the Internet.

In the second linked article, Bruce Schneier calls upon people to blow the whistle on, "how the NSA and other agencies are subverting routers, switches, the internet backbone, encryption technologies and cloud systems." Here's the deal:

I have never been asked to introduce back-doors or weaken security in the Solaris, OpenSolaris, Oracle Solaris 11 (for the four months I worked on it post-barn-door-closing), or Illumos. If there are weaknesses there, it was not because of any deliberate effort on my part.

You can view the kernel IPsec protocol sources (AH & ESP) here, by looking at ipsec*.c, sadb.c, spd.c, spdsock.c, keysock.c and header files in the directory above it. You can see the IPsec management utilities here. According to at least one well-known security researcher, the Illumos (nee OpenSolaris) IPsec code isn't bollocks.

There is no open-source for IKE, because the libike.so.1 library was mostly OEM code, from a vendor whose technical lead let me co-write an RFC with him. You can use the various observability and debugging tools in Illumos to see how things work, however, if you wish.

If you want to write your own, better, key management application for Illumos (or even Oracle Solaris), you can use PF_KEY to control the IPsec SADB. I detail the subsequent additions to RFC 2367 on my day-one-of-OpenSolaris blog post. If you want to work on IPsec in totally-open-source Illumos, you have my blessing, and I'll definitely be reviewing (and maybe integrating if you pass code reviews) your code.

(Pardon the latency on this post. I had it in the Drafts section for a while.)

When a website requires a password for registration, said site SHOULD NOT EVER mail you back the password in the clear in an e-mail. Let me repeat that... SHOULD... NOT... EVER.

One of my daughters plays soccer, and has for two towns. My whole family enjoy seeing the Boston Breakers play soccer too. Both my daughter's town website (outsourced to Blue Sombrero) and the Boston Breaker's ticketing website (run by PMI ticketing using TicketSocket's technology) made the aforementioned mistake. Both of them, quickly addressed the issue with direct and up-front e-mails. I believe Blue Sombrero addressed the problem a bit quicker, but that's because of a combination of smaller organizations and the Breakers' mistake happening on a weekend.

The Blue Sombrero handling of my daughter's old town website mistake was quick, and without incident. Hats off (no pun intended) to the Blue Sombrero folks, who I hope have implemented the no-mailing-passwords policy throughout their entire customer base.

One bad thing someone in the Breakers organization did was remove my original complaining posts on Facebook. I suspect this was merely the case of panic and not active malice. The General Manager of the Breakers, Andy Crossley, sent me a mail on Saturday to see what was going on. Once he understood the problem, he got the relevant technical folks involved, and they solved things.

While I'm glad to see quick turnaround on these flaws, the one piece of advice I will reiterate is NEVER SEND OUT CLEARTEXT PASSWORDS. Thank you.

Make sure you don't pick a good password for ekiga.net -- they mail it back to you IN THE CLEAR in an e-mail message.

I'm so furious, I can't even begin to describe it. Did I miss fine-print on their page saying they'd do something this stupid?

UPDATE: They also store your password in the clear on-disk. Check out ~/.gconf/apps/ekiga/protocols/%gconf.xml if you wanna see it in all of its cleartext glory!

I don't have a tag for general Security because dammit, I'm still a networking person who works on security! (UPDATE: I'm wiser now in 2020 and have added one.)

Anyway, you've seen elsewhere about how Alan H. turned around the S10 fix as quickly as he could. I'm going to tell you how Alan already found this:

D 1.67  07/02/11 19:46:41 danmcd        90 89   00009/00010/04896
6523815 LARGE vulnerability in telnetd

when he went to file a bug that'd already been putback into Nevada/OpenSolaris.

The best place to see what happened is to visit the OpenSolaris discussions, especially this thread.

I was reading e-mail on a Sunday because of an operations problem I was having with one of our punchin IPsec remote access servers. (I'll discuss the problem, a routing one, in a followup entry later today.) I found the initial note and read the PDF file to which "skunsul" so graciously provided a link. MAN I was embarassed. After trying it on some lab machines and my laptop, I brought up the in.telnetd source (at the line number provided by Kingcope). My first approach was to verify the content of the $USER environment variable fed to in.telnetd. I compiled-and-ran the fix, which seemed to work. Great! Time to find some code reviewers.

My only regret about this was not putting the review on security-discuss@opensolaris.org or networking-discuss@opensolaris.org. I'll try better next time, especially for something that was announced on an opensolaris list initially. Anyway, two reviewers (OpenSolaris board member and well-known Sun Good Guy Casper Dik, and crypto framework expert Krishna Yenduri) suggested that login(1) is already getopt-compliant, and that I should just pass "--" between the rest of the arguments and the contents of $USER, no matter how *&^$-ed up it is. Because it was a Sunday, I didn't get rapid turnaround on e-mail replies. This is why the putback didn't happen until six hours after I'd read the note from skunsul. Krishna also recommended (in the spirit of open development) that I place the diffs on the very thread, and I did just that.

Anyone I know here who happened to have seen the initial note would've jumped on this in the same way - please don't think I did something others wouldn't do. My point is - this is the first security exploit reported to us via OpenSolaris, and I think the "Open" part of OpenSolaris helped out the code, as well as Sun's customers.

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