Roaming Authentication
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Transcript of Episode #113 Roaming Authentication Description: In this first of a two-part series, Steve and Leo discuss Steve's recent design of a secure roaming authentication solution for GRC's employees. Steve begins to describe the lightweight super-secure system he designed where even an attacker with "perfect knowledge" of an employee's logon will be unable to gain access to protected resources. High quality (64 kbps) mp3 audio file URL: http://media.GRC.com/sn/SN-113.mp3 Quarter size (16 kbps) mp3 audio file URL: http://media.GRC.com/sn/sn-113-lq.mp3 INTRO: Netcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT. Leo Laporte: Bandwidth for Security Now! is provided by AOL Radio at AOL.com/podcasting. This is Security Now! with Steve Gibson, Episode 113 for October 11, 2007: Roaming Authentication. It's time for Security Now!, still the best science and technology podcast in the world - until this time next year, I guess. Steve Gibson, hello. Steve Gibson: Thanks to our listeners, who helped us become the People's Choice Best Science & Technology Podcast. It was really fun, in fact, was it two weeks ago I guess that I was out at Ontario. Oh, no, it was a week ago. And it was really great. It's fun, Leo, to just sort of hang out with all of the podcast people... Leo: It is. Steve: ...and hobnob. Leo: That's the best part of PME, yeah. Just hang out. And so tell me what happened. So there was the awards party. Steve: Well, yeah. There was the awards party at the end of the first day. And I have to say I was flattered by the fact that my award - our award, I should say - was at the end of sort of a long list. Probably there were about 20 of them for - and sort of I think it was probably in the same order as they showed up on the web page. So, you know, we were the... Leo: You were the last. Steve: Yeah, we were down at the bottom of the page. And we were similarly, on the program, we were down toward the end. Well, I had never heard of most of the podcasts that won. And I have a feeling that most people had not heard of most of the other podcasts. Leo: Yeah, there's a lot of podcasts. Steve: There's a lot of podcasts. And, you know, they sort of tend to be obscure. And I think, you know, the TWiT family is a strong movement in pod land. And so here were all the people, after the exhibits and the various tracks and sessions and conferences and educational things shut down, all the people sort of hanging around the steam trays, you know, gathering for this event. And when the Science & Technology category was announced, and Security Now! was mentioned, there was a roomful of applause. Leo: Oh, yeah. People know you, sure. Steve: Well, and I mean, people know us, and they know this podcast, frankly, to I think a much greater degree because of the penetration and the fact that we were in our third year and, you know, blah blah blah. But anyway, it was really neat. So I was glad to do it. I don't know, though, next year it's going to be in Las Vegas. And that's... Leo: Yeah, I heard they were moving it. Steve: Yeah. And I'll be interested to see or to hear whether there's a strong attendance there. Leo: I think there'd probably be a bigger attendance. It's not as easy for you, but it's a lot easier for most people. Getting to Ontario is not an easy thing to do. Steve: Well, and of course Las Vegas subsidizes their airfare, so that the flights you get to Las Vegas are very inexpensive. Leo: Yeah. No, I understand why he's doing it. And there's another event that I'm going to next month called Blog World that is in Las Vegas. And I think that that's - it's just a more natural place. I mean, one of the problems I had was getting to Ontario after a day in Vancouver, then having to get back up here; and it just was very difficult to schedule it, so. Steve: Right. Leo: Well, anyway, congratulations. I'm glad you won. And it sounds like it was a great event. Steve: It was absolutely worth doing. And again, I thank our listeners. Actually, when I went up to the front to accept the award, that's what I said. I said, you know, I owe this to our listeners who made this happen for us when we found out this was happening, so. Leo: They came through fast. Steve: They did. Leo: Yeah. Thank you, listeners. Well, congratulations. Now, this week we're going to do something called, what is it, roaming... Steve: Roaming authentication. Leo: Roman authentication. Is this authentication you would get in Rome? Steve: Well, it's interesting. It's something we've never done before. But there will be some opportunities in the next year or so for me to include our listeners in my own development of some new technologies. And we know that we spoke a couple weeks ago about GRC's eCommerce system. I sort of gave people, our listeners, a look under the covers of the way I solved problems for GRC. I'm still in this mode of sort of nailing down a bunch of loose ends. And one of the things that I needed to provide Sue and Greg, my two employees, was the ability to connect to our eCommerce system in a secure fashion when they were away from home. Leo: So a VPN, right? Steve: Well, no, as a matter of fact. And for a number of reasons. But this will probably be a two-part series because it's - I think it'll be interesting, and it also allows us to leverage a lot of the things that we've been talking about. You know, we tend to talk about snippets of technology here and there, how these fundamental things work. We've never had an opportunity to look at using them to solve, like, a real-world problem, which is what I have done. And in the process, I came up with some interesting solutions that'll be fun to share with our listeners. So this will be roaming authentication, which will be part one of I think it's going to be a two-part podcast, which we'll finish up week after next, after next week's Q&A. Leo: Excellent, excellent. Before we get to that, do you have any errata? Steve: Oh, yeah. We've got some errata. One really funky weird thing, I had to mention it because we're a show about security. Our friend Mark Thompson of AnalogX has about 60 routers. That's six zero. He's been literally collecting them from all over the place because for a project he was working on for another company... Leo: [Indiscernible]. Steve: He was, yes, exactly, for testing various types - he was developing some, sorry to say, some Universal Plug and Play technology. It turns out that lots of routers don't do UPnP correctly. And also doing some NAT penetration work for some peer-to-peer stuff. Leo: Oh, excellent. Steve: So consequently he has all these routers. Well, he was wrapping up some work, and he discovered a bizarre router, which is bizarre unfortunately in a worrisome fashion. Leo: Uh-oh. Steve: This is a router from a company called Hawking, which I've actually heard of. In fact, I use their KVM at Level 3. It's a very nice KVM. Leo: I've used their antennas, actually, Hawking antennas. Steve: Yes. So anyway, this router model is the H2WR54G. Now, the hardware version is rev. A. The boot code is rev. 1.0. And the runtime is version 1.08. This will be important for anyone who has one of these routers for the following reason. Mark was working with the router and doing some characterization. He's got this cool Wi-Fi signal spectrum analyzer to show the power levels and spectrums and so forth. And he was going through, turning off the Wi-Fi on routers. And he switched off the Wi-Fi on the Hawking router using the regular administrative interface. And it didn't turn off. And he thought, okay, wait a minute, what's going on here. So he disconnected the other routers' power and made sure that this was the router he was talking to. And he turned the Wi-Fi back on. He had it set up with WPA security, and it was working normally. He disabled the Wi-Fi on the router. Well, the SSID changed to Venus... Leo: What? By itself? Steve: And it shut down security, but not the Wi-Fi. The router opened wide open... Leo: Oh, that's a hack. Steve: ...with no security. I mean, this is, you know, from the manufacturer. Leo: Somebody got into the firmware. I mean, that's what you would do. You would make it a known SSID, and you'd turn off all security. Steve: Well, and the other thing is that apparently two other routers, one from StarTech and one from Edimax, they look similar. Mark didn't test them specifically, but he's gotten very familiar with his 60 routers.