The question is of course where to next?
As people are aware I've been working on addressing security issues and
how to make River better and more secure. I've been working on this
outside the project because my attempts to discuss it caused heated
arguments. I figured that if I could demonstrate a working example that
people could try out, it could allevieate any misunderstandings that may
have developed due to language or culture differences.
River's approach to security (a result of the Jini Davis project) is
quite complex and contains a flaw borne out of two limitations around
the time it was developed:
1. The assumption that the Java sandbox and java serialization was
secure (we know today this isn't the case).
2. Interfaces cannot be changed (no longer true with java 8), in this
case ServiceRegistrar was designed prior to the later added on
security features.
What's wrong with River's approach?
Answer: It validates and authenticates after downloading code and
deserializing untrusted data, using the proxy trust framework, by asking
an already downloaded and deserialized service proxy for a bootstrap
proxy, the client code then uses the boostrap proxy to determine if the
service proxy can be trusted. Too little too late. Why not instead
recieve a bootstrap proxy, deserialized using input validation, without
code download, authenticate the remote endpoint, then ask the bootstrap
proxy for the service proxy?
The trouble with the existing approach today is an attacker has
opportunity to take control of a computer using deserialization alone.
For those who think a network firewall is sufficient protection and the
flawed security design isn't an issue on local networks, even in air
gapped networks, an attacker can leave a USB key in a car park
containing malware that looks for network transmissions that contain
java serialized data, hoping that someone will pick it up and plug it
into their pc, the malware will send serial data containing a gadget
attack to a listening network port that accepts java serial data and
take over the infected computer.
All network communications using standard java serialization must be
both authenticated and encrypted, prior to reading in any data to ensure
that the data is trusted.
I think we can all accept that these vulnerabilities exist and googling
java serialization gadget attacks should convince even the most doubtful
sceptic.
Relevant links:
https://www.apache.org/dev/committers.html#apache-way
http://www.apache.org/security/committers.html
I would like the opportunity to explain more, and go through working
examples of solutions before we start arguing about whether we should
solve these problems. Anyone reading the Apache Way will realise that
security is a mandatory feature of Apache Software and therefore we
should consider how we should fix existing security issues in River and
while doing so, take the opportunity to make security simpler to
implement. Arguments should not be about the relevance of security
issues, but rather the suitablility of solutions.
Regards,
Peter.
On 6/10/2016 2:04 PM, Bryan Thompson wrote:
Excellent. A great step.
Bryan
On Wednesday, October 5, 2016, Peter Firmstone<peter.firmst...@zeus.net.au>
wrote:
Results:
3 binding votes
1 non binding
None against.
The artifacts have been published, we need to wait 24 hours before
announcing.
Regards,
Peter.
Sent from my Samsung device.
