For a security conference that everyone claims not to trust the wifi, there sure was a lot of wifi

I attended BlackHat USA 2017, Elastic had a booth on the floor I spent a fair bit of time at as well as meetings scattered about the conference center. It was a great time as always, but this year I had a secret with me. I put together a Raspberry Pi that was passively collecting wifi statistics. Just certain metadata, no actual wifi data packets were captured or harmed in the making of this. I then log everything into Elasticsearch so I can build pretty visualizations in Kibana. I only captured 2.4 Ghz data with one radio, so I had it jumping around. Obviously I missed plenty of data, but this was really just about looking for interesting patterns.

I put everything I used to make this project go into GitHub, it's really rough though, you've been warned.

I have a ton of data to mine, I'll no doubt spend a great deal of time in the future doing that, but here's the basic TL;DR picture.

I captured 12.6 million wifi packets, the blue bars show when I captured what, the table shows the SSIDs I saw (not all packets have SSID data), and the colored graph shows which wifi channels were seen (not all packets have channel data either). I also have packet frequencies logged, so all that can be put together later. The two humps in the wifi data was when I was around the conference, I admit I was surprised by the volume of wifi I saw basically everywhere, even in the middle of the night from my hotel room.

Below is a graph showing the various frequencies I saw, every packet has to come in on some wireless frequency even if it doesn't have a wifi channel.

The devices seen data was also really interesting.

This chart represents every packet seen, so it's clearly going to be a long tail. It's no surprise an access point sends out a lot of packets, I didn't expect Apple to be #1 here, I expected the top few to be access point manufacturers. It would seem Apple gear is more popular and noisy than I expected.

A more interesting graph is unique devices seen by manufacturer (as a side note, I saw 77,904 devices in total over my 3 days).

This table is far more useful as it's totally expected a single access point will be very noisy. I didn't expect Cisco to make the top 3 I admit. But this means that Apple was basically 10% of wifi devices then we drop pretty quickly.

There's a lot more interesting data in this set, I just have to spend some time finding it all. I'll also make a point to single out the data specific to business hours. Stay tuned for a far more detailed writeup.

Security and privacy are the same thing

Earlier today I ran across this post on Reddit
Security but not Privacy (Am I doing this right?)

The poster basically said "I care about security but not privacy".

It got me thinking about security and privacy. There's not really a difference between the two. They are two faces of the same coin but why isn't always obvious in today's information universe. If a site like Facebook or Google knows everything about you it doesn't mean you don't care about privacy, it means you're putting your trust in those sites. The same sort of trust that makes passwords private.

The first thing we need to grasp is what I'm going to call a trust boundary. I trust you understand trust already (har har har). But a trust boundary is less obvious sometimes. A security (or privacy) incident happens when there is a breach of the trust boundary. Let's just dive into some examples to better understand this.

A web site is defaced
In this example the expectation is the website owner is the only person or group that can update the website content. The attacker crossed a trust boundary that allowed them to make unwanted changes to the website.

Your credit card is used fraudulently
It's expected that only you will be using your credit card. If someone gets your number somehow and starts to make purchases with your card, how they got the card crosses a trust boundary. You could easily put this example in the "privacy" bucket if you wanted to keep them separate, it's likely your card was stolen due to lax security at one of the businesses you visited.

Your wallet is stolen
This one is tricky. The trust boundary is probably your pocket or purse. Maybe you dropped it or forgot it on a counter. Whatever happened the trust boundary is broken when you lose control of your wallet. An event like this can trickle down though. It could result in identity theft, your credit card could be used. Maybe it's just about the cash. The scary thing is you don't really know because you lost a lot of information. Some things we'd call privacy problems, some we'd call security problems.

I use a confusing last example on purpose to help prove my point. The issue is all about who do you trust with what. You can trust Facebook and give them tons of information, many of us do. You can trust Google for the same basic reasons. That doesn't mean you don't care about privacy, it just means you have put them inside a certain trust boundary. There are limits to that trust though.

What if Facebook decided to use your personal information to access your bank records? That would be a pretty substantial trust boundary abuse. What if your phone company decided to use the information they have to log into your Facebook account?

A good password isn't all that different from your credit card number. It's a bit of private information that you share with one or more other organizations. You are expecting them not to cross a trust boundary with the information you gave them.

The real challenge is to understand what trust boundaries you're comfortable with. What do you share with who? Nobody is an island, we must exist in an ecosystem of trust. We all have different boundaries of what we will share. That's quite all right. If you understand your trust boundary making good security/privacy decisions becomes a lot easier.

They say information is the new oil. If that's true then trust must be the currency.

Summer is coming

I'm getting ready to attend Black Hat. I will miss BSides and Defcon this year unfortunately due to some personal commitments. And as I'm packing up my gear, I started thinking about what these conferences have really changed. We've been doing this every summer for longer than many of us can remember now. We make our way to the desert, we attend talks by what we consider the brightest minds in our industry. We meet lots of people. Everyone has a great time. But what is the actionable events that come from these things.

The answer is nothing. They've changed nothing.

But I'm going to put an asterisk next to that.

I do think things are getting better, for some definition of better. Technology is marching forward, security is getting dragged along with a lot of it. Some things, like IoT, have some learning to do, but the real change won't come from the security universe.

Firstly we should understand that the world today has changed drastically. The skillset that mattered ten years ago doesn't have a lot of value anymore. Things like buffer overflows are far less important than they used to be. Coding in C isn't quite what it once was. There are many protections built into frameworks and languages. The cloud has taken over a great deal of infrastructure. The list can go on.

The point of such a list is to ask the question, how much of the important change that's made a real difference came from our security leaders? I'd argue not very much. The real change comes from people we've never heard of. There are people in the trenches making small changes every single day. Those small changes eventually pile up until we notice they're something big and real.

Rather than trying to fix the big problems, our time is better spent ignoring the thought leaders and just doing something small. Conferences are important, but not to listen to the leaders. Go find the vendors and attendees who are doing new and interesting things. They are the ones that will make a difference, they are literally the future. Even the smallest bug bounty, feature, or pull request can make a difference. The end goal isn't to be a noisy gasbag, instead it should be all about being useful.

Who's got your hack back?

The topic of hacking back keeps coming up these days. There's an attempt to pass a bill in the US that would legalize hacking back. There are many opinions on this topic, I'm generally not one to take a hard stand against what someone else thinks. In this case though, if you think hacking back is a good idea, you're wrong. Painfully wrong.

Everything I've seen up to this point tells me the people who think hacking back is a good idea are either mistaken about the issue or they're misleading others on purpose. Hacking back isn't self defense, it's not about being attacked, it's not about protection. It's a terrible idea that has no place in a modern society. Hacking back is some sort of stone age retribution tribal law. It has no place in our world.

Rather than break the various argument apart. Let's think about two examples that exist in the real world.

Firstly, why don't we give the people doing mall security guns? There is one really good reasons I can think of here. The insurance company that holds the policy on the mall would never allow the security to carry guns. If you let security carry guns, they will use them someday. They'll probably use them in an inappropriate manner, the mall will be sued, and they will almost certainly lose. That doesn't mean the mall has to pay a massive settlement, it means the insurance company has to pay a massive settlement. They don't want to do that. Even if some crazy law claims it's not illegal to hack back, no sane insurance company will allow it. I'm not talking about cyber insurance, I'm just talking about general policies here.

The second example revolves around shoplifting. If someone is caught stealing from a store, does someone go to their house and take some of their stuff in retribution? They don't of course. Why not? Because we're not cave people anymore. That's why. Retribution style justice has no place in a modern civilization. This is how a feud starts, nobody has ever won a feud, at best it's a draw when they all kill each other.

So this has me really thinking. Why would anyone want to hack back? There aren't many reasons that don't revolve around revenge. The way most attacks work you can't reliably know who is doing what with any sort of confidence. Hacking back isn't going to make anything better. It would make things a lot worse. Nobody wants to be stuck in the middle of a senseless feud. Well, nobody sane.