Man--given how heated DeCSS has gotten, I cringe at the thought of how, uh, unhappy some huge organizations are going to be with this one.

Bah, on second though, we're only talking about ATM machines, no big deal.
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But, if the QNX people were really lazy, they could have just grabbed crypt function from one of the BSD source trees and used it. (remember, the BSD license doesn't not dissallow the use of their code in a closed-source system like the GPL does.)

• The Unaware ATM Beowulf Cluster...
• The Unaware iOpener SETI@home Team...
• The distributed.net Wristwatch Team...

The possibilities are truly endless.

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seineew era sreenigne XNQ

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guillaume

Okay, with that out of the way, even if you stole an ATM and decrypted everything in it, here's what you'd find: Nothing.

The network is specifically designed to avoid silly things like that - the ATM stores no persistent information beyond who used it, some accounting information, and when it was used. *that* information *may* be compromised, but a) it wouldn't do you any good and b) it's unlikely they're using anything less than 3DES. Give these people some credit, ok?

Now, if somebody was able to do realtime decoding of the ATM network itself... that would do several things a) panic people who normally don't panic, b) increase the local population drastically after the influx of federal agents, c) make international headlines and d) would not be submitted by an anonymous coward.

Guys.. I know people who work/have worked for financial institutions. I'd estimate the security to be B2 or above (if it was government certified). Unlike the DoD's "NIPR" net which was /supposed/ to be physically disconnected from any/every other network, the financial institutions just plain don't transfer important info over networks. The data is too valuable.

For example, credit bureaus will not accept an update to anybody's credit report electronically - it is done by hand with tape drives. Makes the movie "Hackers" seem more than alittle unrealistic. =) In short, DON'T PANIC. This crack means nothing to the financial industry. Now, if you want to be worried... you should note some of them run Windows 95..................

This isn't as serious as you might think. Sure the "encryption" of crypt on QNX was cracked. But good security assumes that the crypt function returns the plain text anyway. All crypt is used for is to encrypt the passwords in /etc/passwd This was all fine and dandy 20 years ago when it took lots of time to decrypt passwords. But these days you can break through the passwords with brute force in a week or less. Good systems use shadow passwords. So the real passwords go in /etc/shadow, which is unreadable by anyone but root and anyone but root can't even look at the encrypted passwords.

I'd like to thank the morons at QNX for writing their own crypt function, and thus making this program possible.

There are plenty of good crypt implementations available. I can imagine wanting to write your own, but I don't understand why they wanted/chose/allowed a reversable encryption method?

When the source is out there, reversable is doomed: anyone can find the algorithm and apply it backwards, which is the reason why fetchmail uses plain text password storage (encrypting them would not at all improve security).

But even without source reversable encryption is doomed: there are very neat decompilers that explain the complete bit and byte shifting stuff that's going on. And probably there are plenty more methods of cracking the code, hence this article.

The Crypt algorithm for the QNX operating system was just cracked. QNX runs on banks computers, ATM's, Medical Equipment, and the almighty i-opener. Source code is there if you're interested.

If that link wasn't posted, perhaps the Hospital I.T. department could have ensured that the dialysis machine wouldn't have been rooted.

Instead of hiring competent people who KNOW that there are free algorithms & free sourcecode at sites, they hire these schmucks and everyone "marvels" at their security expertise, which is shot down to the ground when Joe Hacker, 3 years old breaks it using the calculator on his wrist watch!

SECURITY IS AN ARTFORM.

HIRE COMPETENT PEOPLE, PEOPLE!

Cool.

It's even got a modest execution time... (largest loop -- while (rot--){...} -- rot is max 127 -- rot=(...)%128;) nothin too complex there...

The reason, I suspect, that they didn't use DES is that they were afraid of legal issues - I'm sure that QNX is sold all over the world, and they didn't want to make a diferent non-DES release for idiotic contries (France, US) with restrictive crypto laws. Even if an expensive legal effort would determine what's exportable where, laws change all the time. This way, there is no "export controlled" code that they need to worry about.

If I'd written a piss poor encryption scheme, I wouldn't post the source http://www.qnx.com/ cgi-bin/dir_find.cgi?/usr/free/qnx4/os/libs/

security through obscurity would do me nicely.

As far as the ATM/bank computer encryption goes... I figured they'd be running 2048 Bit RSA. You're right some people will just never learn.

Don't encrypt passwords, hash them! Make sure there's enough information to identify a correct password, but not enough to reproduce it!

Why are hashes inherently more secure?

A hash is a non-injective function, so it is by definition not invertible, but a weak hash function can still be cracked. The reverse algorithm may not return the original password, but isn't one that yields the same hash just as powerful as the original?

Is it simply that when you lift the requirement of injectivity (and thus invertibility) it becomes easier to write a more crack resistant algorithm?

Say my landlord put bars on my window, and I relied on them to keep me safe. One day, some passer-by notices that they are bolted into a rotting window casing, ripped the bars from the window using 2 fingers of his non-dominant hand, and said "Look, you're window casing is rotted", I would thank him.

But I would not appreciate neighbors breaking into my house by picking the locks to demonstrate to me that it could be done.

This isn't like that. Nobody broke into your QNX system and decrypted your passwords to demonstrate the insecurity to you. This is more like a staged demonstration at a home security conference where they show how easy it is to pick a lock.

At some point, someone told you that your door locks can be picked. Well, that's useful information, just like the information that bicycle locks can be frozen or crowbarred. Knowing that helps you make better decisions about how to use the products you have and how much to trust them.

Information like that isn't for the company, it's for the customer, and I'm grateful that people bother working on this. Without this kind of information, people would still erroneously believe that IIS and NT are "very secure" on the strength of Microsoft's reputation and marketing.

He was naive. I've found a couple bugs too in turn-key systems. They have all been reported anonymously.. and fixed. Who do you blame if you don't have a name?

That is, if you have the string that has been used as a XOR mask, else if you don't have access to that string at all and don't know what the original password is, you are screwed. XOR'ing CAN BE used for a really strong symetric encryption, that is if the string used to make the mask is as long as the original string, and if you use it only once.

The problem is then to transmit that masking string...

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guillaume

But with a hashed password file, you don't need to reproduce the same password, only one that gives the same hash. Unless the password is used somewhere else (bad practice), I fail to see how hashing is better than encryption (securitywise) for password files (assuming equivalent time to break).

tangent - art and creation are a higher purpose

That's idiotic. There's a difference between doing something stupid and doing something unethical. For instance: your above comment was stupid. That doesn't mean you can be sued for libel, because it wasn't malicious, which would have made it unethical.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *

This will of course further strain the relationship between Netpliance and the i-opener hackers. I can see them possibly going after all the people involved and sue them for trade secret violation.

This also raises problems between geek culture and the rest of society ... geeks will be seen as being more dangerous and laws will be passed (or the DCMA used) to procecute more people furthering the increasing alienation of the geek culture that has created the internet & computer industry in general.

My wonder is when this will get to the poing an we will ban to gether and start an undergound to fight back against the company controled society & government.

SubSolar

Since day one, but that is another topic. Get your facts straight anyway, importing any kind of encryption into the US is legal.

Yeah, but exporting is not always, and that creates the stupid implications.

It's... It's...

From http://www.i-opener-linux.net/:

Thats it..its over. sean_k from #i-opener-linux has devolped a program to decrypt ANY qnx password. Because of this we were able to extract these passwords:

Root: osiw$6.4
Regular user: one2go
Thanks to everone who helped him. Source to the program is here

For most systems using the standard Unix crypt, however, it is easier to grab a selection of encrypted passwords from the system, and brute force it with a decent word list than it is to try to find a better way. MD5 is way safer. But even that can be brute forced in many cases (because users pr. definition are stupid and have too bad memory and choose passwords that are inherently unsafe - such as wifes name, dogs name, kids names, bithdates, wedding days, their phone number, any words visible from their office chair such as signs on buildings outside their window, etc. - which is why social engineering still is the number one crackers tool).

And you're part right, having a plaintext that will generate the same hash as the password is just as good. But it's highly unlikely that you'll find one if you're using any moderately good hashing algorithm. Especially if you use something like MD5.

I think they recommented the code making it easier to understand

Heard of OpenBSD? They hash their passwords with four blowfish rounds (eight for root). I do not think you can crack that in a week or less. I do not think even MD5 password encryption (now available on Linux), admittedly much weaker than blowfish, can be cracked in that time. (Not with reasonable means, of course.)

supposedly yes... DES isn't tho... but MD5 passwords (in all latest linux distros) are much easier to do a brute force search thru than try to reverse the MD5 hash... which should be the point right?