[ISN] Experimental Break-Ins Reveal Vulnerabilities

From: mea culpa (jerichoat_private)
Date: Fri Jan 15 1999 - 12:14:24 PST

  • Next message: mea culpa: "[ISN] CRYPTO-GRAM, January 15, 1999"

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    Source: Duke University
    (http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/research/ENCRYPT.HTM)
    
    Experimental Break-Ins Reveal Vulnerability In Internet, UNIX Computer
    Security
    
    DURHAM, N.C. - Duke University computer science researchers found that
    using an experimental computer, they could "crack"within an average 3.75
    hours the encryption that protects such privately held information as
    credit card account numbers on the Internet.
    
    With the same equipment and "brute force" technique, Gershon Kedem, a Duke
    associate computer science professor, and graduate student Yuriko Ishihara
    of Nagano, Japan, were also able to compromise many of the more
    commonplace passwords that guard access to UNIX-based computer networks. 
    
    Ishihara conducted the research for her masters thesis. For more
    information on their technique, access their Duke website at
    http://kedem.cs.duke.edu/CipherFlow/index.html.
    
    According to Kedem, computer-savvy criminals, governments, or companies
    embarked on industrial espionage could design, build and test even better
    computers to target such codes for $6 million to $10 million. Copies of
    such machines could subsequently be manufactured for little as $60,000, he
    estimated.
    
    The pair's experimental break-ins were done with a powerful graphics
    computer called PixelFlow, designed by computer scientists at the
    University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
    
    The fact that such a machine - while itself experimental but not designed
    to decipher secret codes -- could so easily penetrate popular security
    systems underscores the vulnerability of current computer encryption
    standards, Kedem said in an interview.
    
    "This is a particularly serious security threat," added Kedem, whose
    interests include computer security and cryptography. "Statements that
    computer products are encrypted, and therefore are secure, should
    certainly be viewed with a very large grain of salt."
    
    Kedem said Internet browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft
    Internet Explorer use 40-bit series of digits as the secret solutions for
    unraveling encrypted information. "Bit" is an abbreviation for "binary
    digit," the standard unit of computer information.
    
    The identity of a solution - called the "key" - is supposed to be known
    only to the sender and receiver of a scrambled communication. Software
    manufacturers have been using the 40-bit key standard to comply with
    United States export restrictions, even though they know the U.S. 
    government has powerful-enough technology to decipher it, he said.
    
    Kedem and Ishihara proved the 40-bit key is vulnerable to more than
    government sleuthing by subjecting the 40-bit key to an attack with the
    "massively parallel" PixelFlow computer. The 18-board PixelFlow
    configuration they used satisfies the requirement for this type of "brute
    force" cryptoanalysis because it harnessed 147,456 separate processing
    units, all executing the same set of instructions at the same time, Kedem
    said.
    
    "If you have a very fast computer like this one, you can either try and
    search all the possible keys and see if you can find one that matches, or
    at least you can search a large enough numbers of possible keys that your
    probability of finding the right one is reasonably high," he explained.
    
    In the case of a 40-bit key, the total number of possibilities is 2 to the
    power of 40 - 2 multiplied by itself 40 times - which is 1,099,511,627,776
    different combinations of 0 or 1 binary digits, he said. 
    
    The UNIX password, a more-formidable challenge, allows users to specify up
    to 5,132,188,731,375,620 combinations of letters, numbers or symbols. 
    "The machine we had access to doesn't quite have enough computing power," 
    Kedem acknowledged. "I think it would take us almost a year to break a
    UNIX password outright.
    
    "But it turns out that we didn't really have to try all possible
    passwords, as long as we tried all likely passwords."
    
    The most secure passwords are made up of truly random combinations, but
    "people are not very good at remembering a lot of random symbols from the
    keyboard," he added. "So most passwords are letters, usually lower case,
    or maybe one or two digits or punctuation marks.
    
    "An important fact to remember is that PixelFlow was built with
    early-1990s technology," he said. "If that machine were reimplemented in
    today's technology, we could probably crack a 56-bit key in less than 10
    hours." 
    
    Kedem said the United States government just announced a new policy
    allowing the export of encryption technology with 56-bit keys. But most
    banks and Internet browsers, he added, currently use shorter 40-bit
    private keys like those he and Ishihara cracked. 
    
    The private keys they targeted were specified by the RC4 encryption
    algorithm that comes with popular browser software, he said.
    
    Kedem emphasized that PixelFlow's processors "were not designed with
    encryption in mind," Kedem noted. "They were designed to do graphics. So
    they are missing some instructions that would have made them much more
    effective for doing cryptography.
    
    "It should be very easy to build a massively parallel machine specifically
    for brute force cryptoanalysis that would make any encryption algorithm
    now commonly used totally insecure," he predicted. 
    
    "I would say that anything less than 80-bit keys probably could be
    broken," he added, noting that governments and some other security minded
    organizations already use still longer keys that will be immune from brute
    force attacks for the foreseeable future.
    
    "It would take $6 million to $10 million dollars to develop such a
    machine, but the cost of each unit might end up being just $60,000 to
    $100,000," Kedem said. For that outlay, some unscrupulous entity with
    access to cash "could crack a lot of codes in practice today in the
    commercial world," he speculated. 
    
    Kedem said he decided to use PixelFlow to test the security of on-line
    encryption at the suggestion of John Poulton, a UNC-Chapel Hill computer
    science professor who is a major architect of the graphics computer, built
    in collaboration with the Hewlett-Packard Corp.
    
    
    Posted 1/14/99
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
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