October 9, 2024

Archives for May 2008

Counterfeits, Trojan Horses, and shady distributors

Last Friday, the New York Times published an article about counterfeit Cisco products that have been sold as if they were genuine and are widely used throughout the U.S. government.  The article also raised the concern that these counterfeits could well be engineered with malicious intent, but that this appears not to have been the case. There was an immediate Slashdot thread as well, but a number of issues are still worth commenting on.

First things first: the facts, as best we understand them.  The New York Times reports that approximately 3500 counterfeit Cisco components (worth $3.5M) have been discovered as a result of a two-year FBI investigation.  A Cisco spokesman is quoted saying that they found “no evidence of re-engineering.”  In other words, we’re talking about faithful knock-offs of legitimate products.

If you go to the FBI’s unclassified PowerPoint presentation (dated January 11, 2008), you’ll see all the actual information.  This is a fascinating read.  For starters, let’s talk about the cost.  The slides claim you can get a counterfeit router for approximately 1/6 the cost of a genuine router.  (You can do similarly well buying used gear on eBay.)  The counterfeit gear looks an awful lot like the genuine article.  Detecting differences here is as difficult as detecting counterfeit money, counterfeit Rolex watches, or counterfeit signatures from sports stars.  Given the apparent discrepancy between component cost and street value, we should be no more surprised to find knock-off Cisco gear than we are to find knock-off everything else.

Counterfeit vs. Original Cisco line card

It’s claimed that these counterfeits are built to lower manufacturing standards than the original equipment, causing higher failure rates. One even caught fire due to a faulty power supply.  Likewise, the fakers are making stupid errors, like building multiple components with the same MAC address.  (MAC addresses, by design, are meant to be unique – no two ever the same.)

The really interesting story is all about the supply chain. Consider how you might buy yourself a new Mac.  You could go to your local Apple store.  Or you could get it from any of a variety of other stores, who in turn may have gotten it from Apple directly or may have gone through a distributor.  Apparently, for Cisco gear, it’s much more complicated than that.  The U.S. government buys from “approved” vendors, who might then buy from multiple tiers of sub-contractors.  In one case, one person bought shady gear from eBay and resold it to the government, moving a total of $1M in gear before he was caught.  In a more complicated case, Lockheed Martin won a bid for a U.S. Navy project.  They contracted with an unauthorized Cisco reseller who in turn contracted with somebody else, who used a sub-contractor, who then directly shipped the counterfeit gear to the Navy. (The slides say that $250K worth of counterfeit gear was sold; duplicate serial numbers were discovered.)

Why is this happening?  The Government wants to save money, so they look for contractors who can give them the best price, and their contracts allow for subcontracts, direct third-party shipping, and so forth.  There is no serious vetting of this supply chain by either Cisco or the government. Apparently, Cisco doesn’t do direct sales except for high-end, specialized gear.  You’d think Cisco would follow the lead of the airline industry, among others, and cut out the distributors to keep the profit for themselves.

Okay, on to the speculation.  Both the New York Times and the FBI presentation concern themselves with Trojan Horses.  Even though there’s no evidence that any of this counterfeit gear was actually malicious, the weak controls in the supply chain make it awfully easy for such compromised gear to be sold into sensitive parts of the government, raising all the obvious concerns.

Consider a recent paper by U. Illinois’s Sam King et al. where they built a “malicious processor”.  The idea is pretty clever.  You send along a “secret knock” (e.g., a network packet with a particular header) which triggers a sensor that enables “shadow code” to start running alongside the real operating system.  The Illinois team built shadow code that compromised the Linux login program, adding a backdoor password.  After the backdoor was tripped, it would disable the shadow code, thus going back to “normal” operation.

The military is awfully worried about this sort of threat, as well they should be.  For that matter, so are voting machine critics. It’s awfully easy for “stealth” malicious behavior to exist in legitimate systems, regardless of how carefully you might analyze or test it. Ken Thompson’s classic paper, Reflections on Trusting Trust, shows how he designed a clever Trojan Horse for Unix.  [Edit: it’s unclear that it ever got released into the wild.]

Okay everybody, let’s put on our evil hats.  If your goal was to get a Trojan Horse router into a sensitive military environment, how would you do it and how would it behave?  Clearly, the weak supply chain is an excellent vector for getting the gear into place.  Given the resources of a nation-state intelligence agency, you could afford to buy genuine Cisco parts and modify them, rather than using low-cost, counterfeit gear.  Nobody would detect you; you wouldn’t screw up and ship multiple boxes with the same serial number.

How will you implement your Trojan Horse logic?  Pretty much any gear you’ll ever find of any modest complexity will have software running inside it.  Even line cards have embedded processors of some sort.  For all that hardware, there’s software, and that’s what you’d go to install your logic bomb.  The increasing use of FPGAs in industrial designs means you could also “rewire” those parts to behave arbitrarily, much like the Illinois hack; you’d really want to get a hold of the original VHDL “source code”, leveraging your aforementioned spying prowess, to simplify the design and implementation of your malicious behavior.  Hacking the raw netlists (the FPGA-equivalent of machine code) would be possible, but would be far more painful. [See Sidebar.]

What sort of behavior would you build in?  The New York Times raises the idea of a kill switch.  I send your router a magic packet and it dies.  That’s too easy.  How about I send your router a magic packet, it then forwards it on to all of its peers, repeatedly, and then they all die a few seconds later?  That’s a pretty good denial of service attack (nevermind a plot device that was the basis of a popular science fiction television series). Alternatively, following the Illinois idea, we could imagine that the magic packet turns on a monitoring feature, allowing our intelligence agency to gather all kinds of information, reconfigure the router, and so forth.  If they don’t want to generate extra traffic, which might be detected, they could instead weaken the encryption of a VPN tunnel, perhaps publishing the session key through a subliminal channel of some sort, acquiring the ciphertext through “other” means.

In summary, it’s probably a good thing, from the perspective of the U.S. military, to discover that their supply chain is allowing counterfeit gear into production.  This will help them clean up the supply chain, and will also provide an extra push to consider just how much they trust the sources of their equipment to ship clean software and hardware.

[Sidebar: Xilinx supports a notion of “encrypting” a netlist.  Broadly speaking, the idea behind the technology is to encrypt the description of your FPGA configuration with a crypto key, such that anybody who reads the file out of your board gets encrypted garbage.  However, the FPGA has the key material to decrypt the configuration and then initialize itself normally.  This sort of technology is meant to serve an anti-piracy / anti-reverse-engineering purpose.  It could ostensibly also serve an anti-Trojan Horse purpose, although at that point it’s really no more or less secure, semantically, than Microsoft’s Authenticode.  This technology, more broadly, is also an active research area (see, for example, Roy et al.’s EPIC: Ending Piracy of Integrated Circuits).  Again, if we’ve got a nation-state intelligence service tampering with the system, none of this is going to provide meaningful protection for the end-user against Trojan Horses.]

DRM Not Dead, Just Temporarily Indisposed, Says RIAA Tech Head

The RIAA’s head technology guy says that the move away from DRM (anti-copying) technology by record labels is just a phase, according to a Greg Sandoval story at News.com:

“(Recently) I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM,” said David Hughes, who heads up the RIAA’s technology unit, during a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood conference. “Any form of subscription service or limited play-per-view or advertising offer still requires DRM. So DRM is not dead.”

Last January, when Sony BMG became the last major recording company to sell DRM-free tracks at Amazon, plenty of observers considered the technology buried. Since then, a growing number of online stores have begun offering at least some open MP3s, including Walmart.com, Zune’s Marketplace, Amazon, as well as iTunes.

Not so fast, said Hughes, who predicted that DRM would reemerge in a big way. “I think there is going to be a shift,” he told the audience. “I think there will be a movement towards subscription services, and (that) will eventually mean the return of DRM.”

The imminent success of subscription services with DRM is more or less what the record industry was predicting several years ago. It didn’t happen, mostly because customers found the services clunky and inflexible – DRM at its worst. Nothing has changed to make DRMed subscription services more attractive. If anything, these services look even worse in light of the trend toward selling DRM-free tracks.

I can see the argument for selling large bundles of music rather than selling one track at a time. Bundling makes economic sense, given the huge storage capacity of today’s devices. The iPod of the future won’t be filled one track at a time.

But clunky DRM-based subscription services aren’t the only way to sell bundles of songs, and there are probably good ways to sell subscriptions without DRM. If you’re worried that a customer will subscribe for one month, download a zillion songs, cancel the subscription and keep the songs,then you can limit the number of downloads per month, or require a longer subscription period. If you can sell songs without DRM – and we know now that you can – there ought to be a way to sell a friendly subscription service too.

On this issue, the RIAA’s members may be ahead of the RIAA itself. There are encouraging signs that some of the major record companies are recognizing the need to rebuild their business strategy for the Internet era.

Stupidest Infotech Policy Contest

James Fallows at the Atlantic recently ran a reader contest to nominate the worst public policy decision of the past fifty years. (<a href="http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/stupidest_policy_ever_contest_1.php"The winner? Ethanol subsidies.) I’d like to do the same for technology policy.

Readers, please submit your suggestions for the stupidest infotech policy ever. An ideal submission is an infotech policy that (1) was established by a government, (2) did serious damage, (3) had wide support across the political spectrum, (4) failed for reasons that should have been obvious at the time, (5) failed even by the standards of its own supporters. It’s not enough that you would have chosen differently, or that you would have weighed competing public goods differently – we’re looking for a policy that no reasonable person, with the benefit of hindsight, would support.

Submit your suggestions in the comments. Once the discussion has died down, I’ll choose a winner. If this contest is successful, we’ll follow it up with a best policy contest.

30th Anniversary of First Spam Email; No End in Sight

Today marks the 30th anniversary of (what is reputed to be) the first spam email. Here’s the body of the email:

DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 (PDP-10) COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM. THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040 AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.

WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:

TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 – 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA

THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 – 2 PM
DUNFEY’S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA
(4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)

A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.

This is relatively mild by the standards of today’s spam. The message announced legitimate events relating to legitimate products in which the recipients might plausibly be interested. The sender was apparently unaware that this kind of message was against the rules.

Yet this message has much in common with today’s spam. The message used ALL CAPS, which was more common in those days but not the universal practice for email. The list of recipients was long. The message was incorrectly formatted – the original had more recipients than the email software of the day could handle, so what was supposed to be the recipient list actually spilled over into the body of the email, apparently unnoticed by the sender.

At the time, the Net’s rules forbade commercial activity, so the message was against the rules. Beyond the rule violation,the message’s propriety was widely questioned, and people debated what to do about it. (Brad Templeton has posted parts of the debate.)

Thirty years later, there is more spam than ever and no end is in sight. This shouldn’t be surprising, because the spam problem is fundamentally driven by economics. If anyone can send to anyone, and the cost of sending is nearly zero, many messages will be sent. Distinguishing unwanted email from wanted email is notoriously difficult – often you have to read a message to decide whether reading it was a waste of time. In this environment, spam will be a fact of life. The surprise, if anything, is that we have done as well as we have in coping with it.