Tag Archives: trust

Google Signs Agreement to Tackle YouTube Piracy

2017-09-21 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/google-signs-unprecedented-agreement-to-tackle-youtube-piracy-170921/

Once upon a time, people complaining about piracy would point to the hundreds of piracy sites around the Internet. These days, criticism is just as likely to be leveled at Google-owned services.

YouTube, in particular, has come in for intense criticism, with the music industry complaining of exploitation of the DMCA in order to obtain unfair streaming rates from record labels. Along with streaming-ripping, this so-called Value Gap is one of the industry’s hottest topics.

With rightsholders seemingly at war with Google to varying degrees, news from France suggests that progress can be made if people sit down and negotiate.

According to local reports, Google and local anti-piracy outfit ALPA (l’Association de Lutte Contre la Piraterie Audiovisuelle) under the auspices of the CNC have signed an agreement to grant rightsholders direct access to content takedown mechanisms on YouTube.

YouTube has granted access to its Content ID systems to companies elsewhere for years but the new deal will see the system utilized by French content owners for the first time. It’s hoped that the access will result in infringing content being taken down or monetized more quickly than before.

“We do not want fraudsters to use our platforms to the detriment of creators,” said Carlo D’Asaro Biondo, Google’s President of Strategic Relationships in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The agreement, overseen by the Ministry of Culture, will see Google provide ALPA with financial support and rightsholders with essential training.

ALPA president Nicolas Seydoux welcomed the deal, noting that it symbolizes the “collapse of the wall of incomprehension” that previously existed between France’s rightsholders and the Internet search giant.

The deal forms part of the French government’s “Plan of Action Against Piracy”, in which it hopes to crack down on infringement in various ways, including tackling the threat of pirate sites, better promotion of services offering legitimate content, and educating children “from an early age” on the need to respect copyright.

“The fight against piracy is the great challenge of the new century in the cultural sphere,” said France’s Minister of Culture, Françoise Nyssen.

“I hope this is just the beginning of a process. It will require other agreements with rights holders and other platforms, as well as at the European level.”

According to NextInpact, the Google agreement will eventually encompass the downgrading of infringing content in search results as part of the Trusted Copyright Removal Program. A similar system is already in place in the UK.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

ISO Rejects NSA Encryption Algorithms

2017-09-21 Bruce Schneier

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/iso_rejects_nsa.html

The ISO has decided not to approve two NSA-designed block encryption algorithms: Speck and Simon. It’s because the NSA is not trusted to put security ahead of surveillance:

A number of them voiced their distrust in emails to one another, seen by Reuters, and in written comments that are part of the process. The suspicions stem largely from internal NSA documents disclosed by Snowden that showed the agency had previously plotted to manipulate standards and promote technology it could penetrate. Budget documents, for example, sought funding to “insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems.”

More than a dozen of the experts involved in the approval process for Simon and Speck feared that if the NSA was able to crack the encryption techniques, it would gain a “back door” into coded transmissions, according to the interviews and emails and other documents seen by Reuters.

“I don’t trust the designers,” Israeli delegate Orr Dunkelman, a computer science professor at the University of Haifa, told Reuters, citing Snowden’s papers. “There are quite a lot of people in NSA who think their job is to subvert standards. My job is to secure standards.”

I don’t trust the NSA, either.

Greater Transparency into Actions AWS Services Perform on Your Behalf by Using AWS CloudTrail

2017-09-21 Ujjwal Pugalia

Post Syndicated from Ujjwal Pugalia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/get-greater-transparency-into-actions-aws-services-perform-on-your-behalf-by-using-aws-cloudtrail/

To make managing your AWS account easier, some AWS services perform actions on your behalf, including the creation and management of AWS resources. For example, AWS Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. To make these AWS actions more transparent, AWS adds an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service-linked roles to your account for each linked service you use. Service-linked roles let you view all actions an AWS service performs on your behalf by using AWS CloudTrail logs. This helps you monitor and audit the actions AWS services perform on your behalf. No additional actions are required from you and you can continue using AWS services the way you do today.

To learn more about which AWS services use service-linked roles and log actions on your behalf to CloudTrail, see AWS Services That Work with IAM. Over time, more AWS services will support service-linked roles. For more information about service-linked roles, see Role Terms and Concepts.

In this blog post, I demonstrate how to view CloudTrail logs so that you can more easily monitor and audit AWS services performing actions on your behalf. First, I show how AWS creates a service-linked role in your account automatically when you configure an AWS service that supports service-linked roles. Next, I show how you can view the policies of a service-linked role that grants an AWS service permission to perform actions on your behalf. Finally, I use the configured AWS service to perform an action and show you how the action appears in your CloudTrail logs.

How AWS creates a service-linked role in your account automatically

I will use Amazon Lex as the AWS service that performs actions on your behalf for this post. You can use Amazon Lex to create chatbots that allow for highly engaging conversational experiences through voice and text. You also can use chatbots on mobile devices, web browsers, and popular chat platform channels such as Slack. Amazon Lex uses Amazon Polly on your behalf to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice.

Amazon Lex uses two IAM service-linked roles:

AWSServiceRoleForLexBots — Amazon Lex uses this service-linked role to invoke Amazon Polly to synthesize speech responses for your chatbot.
AWSServiceRoleForLexChannels — Amazon Lex uses this service-linked role to post text to your chatbot when managing channels such as Slack.

You don’t need to create either of these roles manually. When you create your first chatbot using the Amazon Lex console, Amazon Lex creates the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots role for you. When you first associate a chatbot with a messaging channel, Amazon Lex creates the AWSServiceRoleForLexChannels role in your account.

1. Start configuring the AWS service that supports service-linked roles

Navigate to the Amazon Lex console, and choose Get Started to navigate to the Create your Lex bot page. For this example, I choose a sample chatbot called OrderFlowers. To learn how to create a custom chatbot, see Create a Custom Amazon Lex Bot.

2. Complete the configuration for the AWS service

When you scroll down, you will see the settings for the OrderFlowers chatbot. Notice the field for the IAM role with the value, AWSServiceRoleForLexBots. This service-linked role is “Automatically created on your behalf.” After you have entered all details, choose Create to build your sample chatbot.

AWS has created the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role in your account. I will return to using the chatbot later in this post when I discuss how Amazon Lex performs actions on your behalf and how CloudTrail logs these actions. First, I will show how you can view the permissions for the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role by using the IAM console.

How to view actions in the IAM console that AWS services perform on your behalf

When you configure an AWS service that supports service-linked roles, AWS creates a service-linked role in your account automatically. You can view the service-linked role by using the IAM console.

1. View the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role on the IAM console

Go to the IAM console, and choose AWSServiceRoleForLexBots on the Roles page. You can confirm that this role is a service-linked role by viewing the Trusted entities column.

2.View the trusted entities that can assume the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role

Choose the Trust relationships tab on the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots role page. You can view the trusted entities that can assume the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role to perform actions on your behalf. In this example, the trusted entity is lex.amazonaws.com.

3. View the policy attached to the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role

Choose AmazonLexBotPolicy on the Permissions tab to view the policy attached to the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role. You can view the policy summary to see that AmazonLexBotPolicy grants permission to Amazon Lex to use Amazon Polly.

4. View the actions that the service-linked role grants permissions to use

Choose Polly to view the action, SynthesizeSpeech, that the AmazonLexBotPolicy grants permission to Amazon Lex to perform on your behalf. Amazon Lex uses this permission to synthesize speech responses for your chatbot. I show later in this post how you can monitor this SynthesizeSpeech action in your CloudTrail logs.

Now that I know the trusted entity and the policy attached to the service-linked role, let’s go back to the chatbot I created earlier and see how CloudTrail logs the actions that Amazon Lex performs on my behalf.

How to use CloudTrail to view actions that AWS services perform on your behalf

As discussed already, I created an OrderFlowers chatbot on the Amazon Lex console. I will use the chatbot and display how the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role helps me track actions in CloudTrail. First, though, I must have an active CloudTrail trail created that stores the logs in an Amazon S3 bucket. I will use a trail called TestTrail and an S3 bucket called account-ids-slr.

1. Use the Amazon Lex chatbot via the Amazon Lex console

In Step 2 in the first section of this post, when I chose Create, Amazon Lex built the OrderFlowers chatbot. After the chatbot was built, the right pane showed that a Test Bot was created. Now, I choose the microphone symbol in the right pane and provide voice input to test the OrderFlowers chatbot. In this example, I tell the chatbot, “I would like to order some flowers.” The bot replies to me by asking, “What type of flowers would you like to order?”

When the chatbot replies using voice, Amazon Lex uses Amazon Polly to synthesize speech from text to voice. Amazon Lex assumes the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role to perform the SynthesizeSpeech action.

2. Check CloudTrail to view actions performed on your behalf

Now that I have created the chatbot, let’s see which actions were logged in CloudTrail. Choose CloudTrail from the Services drop-down menu to reach the CloudTrail console. Choose Trails and choose the S3 bucket in which you are storing your CloudTrail logs.

In the S3 bucket, you will find log entries for the SynthesizeSpeech event. This means that CloudTrail logged the action when Amazon Lex assumed the AWSServiceRoleForLexBots service-linked role to invoke Amazon Polly to synthesize speech responses for your chatbot. You can monitor and audit this invocation, and it provides you with transparency into Amazon Polly’s SynthesizeSpeech action that Amazon Lex invoked on your behalf. The applicable CloudTrail log section follows and I have emphasized the key lines.

{  
         "eventVersion":"1.05",
         "userIdentity":{  
           "type":"AssumedRole",
            "principalId":"{principal-id}:OrderFlowers",
            "arn":"arn:aws:sts::{account-id}:assumed-role/AWSServiceRoleForLexBots/OrderFlowers",
            "accountId":"{account-id}",
            "accessKeyId":"{access-key-id}",
            "sessionContext":{  
               "attributes":{  
                  "mfaAuthenticated":"false",
                  "creationDate":"2017-09-17T17:30:05Z"
               },
               "sessionIssuer":{  
                  "type":"Role",
                  "principalId":"{principal-id}",
                  "arn":"arn:aws:iam:: {account-id}:role/aws-service-role/lex.amazonaws.com/AWSServiceRoleForLexBots",
                  "accountId":"{account-id",
                  "userName":"AWSServiceRoleForLexBots"
               }
            },
            "invokedBy":"lex.amazonaws.com"
         },
         "eventTime":"2017-09-17T17:30:05Z",
         "eventSource":"polly.amazonaws.com",
         "eventName":"SynthesizeSpeech",
         "awsRegion":"us-east-1",
         "sourceIPAddress":"lex.amazonaws.com",
         "userAgent":"lex.amazonaws.com",
         "requestParameters":{  
            "outputFormat":"mp3",
            "textType":"text",
            "voiceId":"Salli",
            "text":"**********"
         },
         "responseElements":{  
            "requestCharacters":45,
            "contentType":"audio/mpeg"
         },
         "requestID":"{request-id}",
         "eventID":"{event-id}",
         "eventType":"AwsApiCall",
         "recipientAccountId":"{account-id}"
      }

Conclusion

Service-linked roles make it easier for you to track and view actions that linked AWS services perform on your behalf by using CloudTrail. When an AWS service supports service-linked roles to enable this additional logging, you will see a service-linked role added to your account.

If you have comments about this post, submit a comment in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about working with service-linked roles, start a new thread on the IAM forum or contact AWS Support.

– Ujjwal

Security updates for Tuesday

2017-09-19 ris

Post Syndicated from ris original https://lwn.net/Articles/734142/rss

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (apache and ettercap), Debian (gdk-pixbuf and newsbeuter), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (httpd, libgcrypt, and ruby), SUSE (kernel), and Ubuntu (bind9, kernel, libidn2-0, libxml2, linux, linux-aws, linux-gke, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-raspi2, linux-hwe, linux-lts-trusty, and linux-lts-xenial).

Automating Amazon EBS Snapshot Management with AWS Step Functions and Amazon CloudWatch Events

2017-09-18 Andy Katz

Post Syndicated from Andy Katz original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/automating-amazon-ebs-snapshot-management-with-aws-step-functions-and-amazon-cloudwatch-events/

Brittany Doncaster, Solutions Architect

Business continuity is important for building mission-critical workloads on AWS. As an AWS customer, you might define recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) for different tier applications in your business. After the RPO and RTO requirements are defined, it is up to your architects to determine how to meet those requirements.

You probably store persistent data in Amazon EBS volumes, which live within a single Availability Zone. And, following best practices, you take snapshots of your EBS volumes to back up the data on Amazon S3, which provides 11 9’s of durability. If you are following these best practices, then you’ve probably recognized the need to manage the number of snapshots you keep for a particular EBS volume and delete older, unneeded snapshots. Doing this cleanup helps save on storage costs.

Some customers also have policies stating that backups need to be stored a certain number of miles away as part of a disaster recovery (DR) plan. To meet these requirements, customers copy their EBS snapshots to the DR region. Then, the same snapshot management and cleanup has to also be done in the DR region.

All of this snapshot management logic consists of different components. You would first tag your snapshots so you could manage them. Then, determine how many snapshots you currently have for a particular EBS volume and assess that value against a retention rule. If the number of snapshots was greater than your retention value, then you would clean up old snapshots. And finally, you might copy the latest snapshot to your DR region. All these steps are just an example of a simple snapshot management workflow. But how do you automate something like this in AWS? How do you do it without servers?

One of the most powerful AWS services released in 2016 was Amazon CloudWatch Events. It enables you to build event-driven IT automation, based on events happening within your AWS infrastructure. CloudWatch Events integrates with AWS Lambda to let you execute your custom code when one of those events occurs. However, the actions to take based on those events aren’t always composed of a single Lambda function. Instead, your business logic may consist of multiple steps (like in the case of the example snapshot management flow described earlier). And you may want to run those steps in sequence or in parallel. You may also want to have retry logic or exception handling for each step.

AWS Step Functions serves just this purpose―to help you coordinate your functions and microservices. Step Functions enables you to simplify your effort and pull the error handling, retry logic, and workflow logic out of your Lambda code. Step Functions integrates with Lambda to provide a mechanism for building complex serverless applications. Now, you can kick off a Step Functions state machine based on a CloudWatch event.

In this post, I discuss how you can target Step Functions in a CloudWatch Events rule. This allows you to have event-driven snapshot management based on snapshot completion events firing in CloudWatch Event rules.

As an example of what you could do with Step Functions and CloudWatch Events, we’ve developed a reference architecture that performs management of your EBS snapshots.

Automating EBS Snapshot Management with Step Functions

This architecture assumes that you have already set up CloudWatch Events to create the snapshots on a schedule or that you are using some other means of creating snapshots according to your needs.

This architecture covers the pieces of the workflow that need to happen after a snapshot has been created.

It creates a CloudWatch Events rule to invoke a Step Functions state machine execution when an EBS snapshot is created.
The state machine then tags the snapshot, cleans up the oldest snapshots if the number of snapshots is greater than the defined number to retain, and copies the snapshot to a DR region.
When the DR region snapshot copy is completed, another state machine kicks off in the DR region. The new state machine has a similar flow and uses some of the same Lambda code to clean up the oldest snapshots that are greater than the defined number to retain.
Also, both state machines demonstrate how you can use Step Functions to handle errors within your workflow. Any errors that are caught during execution result in the execution of a Lambda function that writes a message to an SNS topic. Therefore, if any errors occur, you can subscribe to the SNS topic and get notified.

The following is an architecture diagram of the reference architecture:

Creating the Lambda functions and Step Functions state machines

First, pull the code from GitHub and use the AWS CLI to create S3 buckets for the Lambda code in the primary and DR regions. For this example, assume that the primary region is us-west-2 and the DR region is us-east-2. Run the following commands, replacing the italicized text in <> with your own unique bucket names.

git clone https://github.com/awslabs/aws-step-functions-ebs-snapshot-mgmt.git

cd aws-step-functions-ebs-snapshot-mgmt/

aws s3 mb s3://<primary region bucket name> --region us-west-2

aws s3 mb s3://<DR region bucket name> --region us-east-2

Next, use the Serverless Application Model (SAM), which uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy the Lambda functions and Step Functions state machines in the primary and DR regions. Replace the italicized text in <> with the S3 bucket names that you created earlier.

aws cloudformation package --template-file PrimaryRegionTemplate.yaml --s3-bucket <primary region bucket name>  --output-template-file tempPrimary.yaml --region us-west-2

aws cloudformation deploy --template-file tempPrimary.yaml --stack-name ebsSnapshotMgmtPrimary --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM --region us-west-2

aws cloudformation package --template-file DR_RegionTemplate.yaml --s3-bucket <DR region bucket name> --output-template-file tempDR.yaml  --region us-east-2

aws cloudformation deploy --template-file tempDR.yaml --stack-name ebsSnapshotMgmtDR --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM --region us-east-2

CloudWatch event rule verification

The CloudFormation templates deploy the following resources:

The Lambda functions that are coordinated by Step Functions
The Step Functions state machine
The SNS topic
The CloudWatch Events rules that trigger the state machine execution

So, all of the CloudWatch event rules have been created for you by performing the preceding commands. The next section demonstrates how you could create the CloudWatch event rule manually. To jump straight to testing the workflow, see the “Testing in your Account” section. Otherwise, you begin by setting up the CloudWatch event rule in the primary region for the createSnapshot event and also the CloudWatch event rule in the DR region for the copySnapshot command.

First, open the CloudWatch console in the primary region.

Choose Create Rule and create a rule for the createSnapshot command, with your newly created Step Function state machine as the target.

For Event Source, choose Event Pattern and specify the following values:

Service Name: EC2
Event Type: EBS Snapshot Notification
Specific Event: createSnapshot

For Target, choose Step Functions state machine, then choose the state machine created by the CloudFormation commands. Choose Create a new role for this specific resource. Your completed rule should look like the following:

Choose Configure Details and give the rule a name and description.

Choose Create Rule. You now have a CloudWatch Events rule that triggers a Step Functions state machine execution when the EBS snapshot creation is complete.

Now, set up the CloudWatch Events rule in the DR region as well. This looks almost same, but is based off the copySnapshot event instead of createSnapshot.

In the upper right corner in the console, switch to your DR region. Choose CloudWatch, Create Rule.

For Event Source, choose Event Pattern and specify the following values:

Service Name: EC2
Event Type: EBS Snapshot Notification
Specific Event: copySnapshot

For Target, choose Step Functions state machine, then select the state machine created by the CloudFormation commands. Choose Create a new role for this specific resource. Your completed rule should look like in the following:

As in the primary region, choose Configure Details and then give this rule a name and description. Complete the creation of the rule.

Testing in your account

To test this setup, open the EC2 console and choose Volumes. Select a volume to snapshot. Choose Actions, Create Snapshot, and then create a snapshot.

This results in a new execution of your state machine in the primary and DR regions. You can view these executions by going to the Step Functions console and selecting your state machine.

From there, you can see the execution of the state machine.

Primary region state machine:

DR region state machine:

I’ve also provided CloudFormation templates that perform all the earlier setup without using git clone and running the CloudFormation commands. Choose the Launch Stack buttons below to launch the primary and DR region stacks in Dublin and Ohio, respectively. From there, you can pick up at the Testing in Your Account section above to finish the example. All of the code for this example architecture is located in the aws-step-functions-ebs-snapshot-mgmt AWSLabs repo.

Primary Region eu-west-1 (Ireland)

DR Region us-east-2 (Ohio)

Summary

This reference architecture is just an example of how you can use Step Functions and CloudWatch Events to build event-driven IT automation. The possibilities are endless:

Use this pattern to perform other common cleanup type jobs such as managing Amazon RDS snapshots, old versions of Lambda functions, or old Amazon ECR images—all triggered by scheduled events.
Use Trusted Advisor events to identify unused EC2 instances or EBS volumes, then coordinate actions on them, such as alerting owners, stopping, or snapshotting.

Happy coding and please let me know what useful state machines you build!

Inside the MPAA, Netflix & Amazon Global Anti-Piracy Alliance

2017-09-18 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/inside-the-mpaa-netflix-amazon-global-anti-piracy-alliance-170918/

The idea of collaboration in the anti-piracy arena isn’t new but an announcement this summer heralded what is destined to become the largest project the entertainment industry has ever seen.

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) is a coalition of 30 companies that reads like a who’s who of the global entertainment market. In alphabetical order its members are:

Amazon, AMC Networks, BBC Worldwide, Bell Canada and Bell Media, Canal+ Group, CBS Corporation, Constantin Film, Foxtel, Grupo Globo, HBO, Hulu, Lionsgate, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Millennium Media, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount Pictures, SF Studios, Sky, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Star India, Studio Babelsberg, STX Entertainment, Telemundo, Televisa, Twentieth Century Fox, Univision Communications Inc., Village Roadshow, The Walt Disney Company, and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

The aim of the project is clear. Instead of each company considering its anti-piracy operations as a distinct island, ACE will bring them all together while presenting a united front to decision and lawmakers. At the core of the Alliance will be the MPAA.

“ACE, with its broad coalition of creators from around the world, is designed, specifically, to leverage the best possible resources to reduce piracy,”
outgoing MPAA chief Chris Dodd said in June.

“For decades, the MPAA has been the gold standard for antipiracy enforcement. We are proud to provide the MPAA’s worldwide antipiracy resources and the deep expertise of our antipiracy unit to support ACE and all its initiatives.”

Since then, ACE and its members have been silent on the project. Today, however, TorrentFreak can pull back the curtain, revealing how the agreement between the companies will play out, who will be in control, and how much the scheme will cost.

Power structure: Founding Members & Executive Committee Members

Netflix, Inc., Amazon Studios LLC, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc., Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios LLC, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, are the ‘Founding Members’ (Governing Board) of ACE.

These companies are granted full voting rights on ACE business, including the approval of initiatives and public policy, anti-piracy strategy, budget-related matters, plus approval of legal action. Not least, they’ll have the power to admit or expel ACE members.

All actions taken by the Governing Board (never to exceed nine members) need to be approved by consensus, with each Founding Member able to vote for or against decisions. Members are also allowed to abstain but one persistent objection will be enough to stop any matter being approved.

The second tier – ‘Executive Committee Members’ – is comprised of all the other companies in the ACE project (as listed above, minus the Governing Board). These companies will not be allowed to vote on ACE initiatives but can present ideas and strategies. They’ll also be allowed to suggest targets for law enforcement action while utilizing the MPAA’s anti-piracy resources.

Rights of all members

While all members of ACE can utilize the alliance’s resources, none are barred from simultaneously ‘going it alone’ on separate anti-piracy initiatives. None of these strategies and actions need approval from the Founding Members, provided they’re carried out in a company’s own name and at its own expense.

Information obtained by TorrentFreak indicates that the MPAA also reserves the right to carry out anti-piracy actions in its own name or on behalf of its member studios. The pattern here is different, since the MPAA’s global anti-piracy resources are the same resources being made available to the ACE alliance and for which members have paid to share.

Expansion of ACE

While ACE membership is already broad, the alliance is prepared to take on additional members, providing certain criteria are met. Crucially, any prospective additions must be owners or producers of movies and/or TV shows. The Governing Board will then vet applicants to ensure that they meet the criteria for acceptance as a new Executive Committee Members.

ACE Operations

The nine Governing Board members will meet at least four times a year, with each nominating a senior executive to serve as its representative. The MPAA’s General Counsel will take up the position of non-voting member of the Governing Board and will chair its meetings.

Matters to be discussed include formulating and developing the alliance’s ‘Global Anti-Piracy Action Plan’ and approving and developing the budget. ACE will also form an Anti-Piracy Working Group, which is scheduled to meet at least once a month.

On a daily basis, the MPAA and its staff will attend to the business of the ACE alliance. The MPAA will carry out its own work too but when presenting to outside third parties, it will clearly state which “hat” it is currently wearing.

Much deliberation has taken place over who should be the official spokesperson for ACE. Documents obtained by TF suggest that the MPAA planned to hire a consulting firm to find a person for the role, seeking a professional with international experience who had never been previously been connected with the MPAA.

They appear to have settled on Zoe Thorogood, who previously worked for British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Money, money, money

Of course, the ACE program isn’t going to fund itself, so all members are required to contribute to the operation. The MPAA has opened a dedicated bank account under its control specifically for the purpose, with members contributing depending on status.

Founding/Governing Board Members will be required to commit $5m each annually. However, none of the studios that are MPAA members will have to hand over any cash, since they already fund the MPAA, whose anti-piracy resources ACE is built.

“Each Governing Board Member will contribute annual dues in an amount equal to $5 million USD. Payment of dues shall be made bi-annually in equal shares, payable at
the beginning of each six (6) month period,” the ACE agreement reads.

“The contribution of MPAA personnel, assets and resources…will constitute and be considered as full payment of each MPAA Member Studio’s Governing Board dues.”

That leaves just Netflix and Amazon paying the full amount of $5m in cash each.

From each company’s contribution, $1m will be paid into legal trust accounts allocated to each Governing Board member. If ACE-agreed litigation and legal expenses exceed that amount for the year, members will be required to top up their accounts to cover their share of the costs.

For the remaining 21 companies on the Executive Committee, annual dues are $200,000 each, to be paid in one installment at the start of the financial year – $4.2m all in. Of all dues paid by all members from both tiers, half will be used to boost anti-piracy resources, over and above what the MPAA will spend on the same during 2017.

“Fifty percent (50%) of all dues received from Global Alliance Members other than
the MPAA Member Studios…shall, as agreed by the Governing Board, be used (a) to increase the resources spent on online antipiracy over and above….the amount of MPAA’s 2017 Content Protection Department budget for online antipiracy initiatives/operations,” an internal ACE document reads.

Intellectual property

As the project moves forward, the Alliance expects to gain certain knowledge and experience. On the back of that, the MPAA hopes to grow its intellectual property portfolio.

“Absent written agreement providing otherwise, any and all data, intellectual property, copyrights, trademarks, or know-how owned and/or contributed to the Global Alliance by MPAA, or developed or created by the MPAA or the Global Alliance during the Term of this Charter, shall remain and/or become the exclusive property of the MPAA,” the ACE agreement reads.

That being said, all Governing Board Members will also be granted “perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive licenses” to use the same under certain rules, even in the event they leave the ACE initiative.

Terms and extensions

Any member may withdraw from the Alliance at any point, but there will be no refunds. Additionally, any financial commitment previously made to litigation will have to be honored by the member.

The ACE agreement has an initial term of two years but Governing Board Members will meet not less than three months before it is due to expire to vote on any extension.

To be continued……

With the internal structure of ACE now revealed, all that remains is to discover the contents of the initiative’s ‘Global Anti-Piracy Action Plan’. To date, that document has proven elusive but with an operation of such magnitude, future leaks are a distinct possibility.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Can an Army of Bitcoin “Bounty Hunters” Deter Pirates?

2017-09-17 Ernesto

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/can-an-army-of-bitcoin-bounty-hunters-deter-pirates-170917/

When we first heard of the idea to use Bitcoin bounties to track down pirated content online, we scratched our heads.

Snitching on copyright infringers is not a new concept, but the idea of instant cash rewards though cryptocurrency was quite novel.

In theory, it’s pretty straightforward. Content producers can add a unique identifying watermark into movies, eBooks, or other digital files before they’re circulated. When these somehow leak to the public, the bounty hunters use the watermark to claim their Bitcoin, alerting the owner in the process.

This helps to spot leaks early on, even on networks where automated tools don’t have access, and identify the source at the same time.

Two years have passed and it looks like the idea was no fluke. Custos, the South African company that owns the technology, has various copyright holders on board and recently announced a new partnership with book publisher Erudition Digital.

With help from anti-piracy outfit Digimarc, the companies will add identifying watermarks to eBook releases, counting on the bounty hunters to keep an eye out for leaks. These bounty hunters don’t have to be anti-piracy experts. On the contrary, pirates are more than welcome to help out.

“The Custos approach is revolutionary in that it attacks the economy of piracy by targeting uploaders rather than downloaders, turning downloaders into an early detection network,” the companies announced a few days ago.

“The result is pirates turn on one another, sowing seeds of distrust amongst their communities. As a result, the Custos system is capable of penetrating hard-to-reach places such as the dark web, peer-to-peer networks, and even email.”

Devon Weston, Director of Market Development for Digimarc Guardian, believes that this approach is the next level in anti-piracy efforts. It complements the automated detection tools that have been available in the past by providing access to hard-to-reach places.

“Together, this suite of products represents the next generation in technical measures against eBook piracy,” Weston commented on the partnership.

TorrentFreak reached out to Custos COO Fred Lutz to find out what progress the company has made in recent years. We were informed that they have been protecting thousands of copies every month, ranging from pre-release movie content to eBooks.

At the moment the company works with a selected group of “bounty hunters,” but they plan to open the extraction tool to the public in the near future, so everyone can join in.

“So far we have carefully seeded the free bounty extractor tool in relevant communities with great success. However, in the next phase, we will open the bounty hunting to the general public. We are just careful not to grow the bounty hunting community faster than the number of bounties in the wild require,” Lutz tells us.

The Bitcoin bounties themselves vary in size based on the specific use case. For a movie screener, they are typically anything between $10 and $50. However, for the most sensitive content, they can be $100 or more.

“We can also adjust the bounty over time based on the customer’s needs. A low-quality screener that was very sensitive prior to cinematic release does not require as large a bounty after cam-rips becomes available,” Lutz notes.

Thus far, roughly 50 Bitcoin bounties have been claimed. Some of these were planted by Custos themselves, as an incentive for the bounty hunters. Not a very high number, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not working.

“While this number might seem a bit small compared to the number of copies we protect, our aim is first and foremost not to detect leaks, but to pose a credible threat of quick detection and being caught.”

People who receive content protected by Custos are made aware of the watermarks, which may make them think twice about sharing it. If that’s the case, then it’s having effect without any bounties being claimed.

The question remains how many people will actively help to spot bounties. The success of the system largely depends on volunteers, and not all pirates are eager to rat on the people that provide free content.

On the other hand, there’s also room to abuse the system. In theory, people could claim the bounties on their own eBooks and claim that they’ve lost their e-reader. That would be fraud, of course, but since the bounties are in Bitcoin this isn’t easy to prove.

That brings us to the final question. What happens of a claimed bounty identifies a leaker? Custos admits that this alone isn’t enough evidence to pursue a legal case, but the measures that are taken in response are up to the copyright holders.

“A claim of a bounty is never a sufficient legal proof of piracy, instead, it is an invaluable first piece of evidence on which a legal case could be built if the client so requires. Legal prosecution is definitely not always the best approach to dealing with leaks,” Lutz says.

Time will tell if the Bitcoin bounty approach works…

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

EU Prepares Guidelines to Force Google & Facebook to Police Piracy

2017-09-15 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/eu-prepares-guidelines-to-force-google-facebook-to-police-piracy-170915/

In the current climate, creators and distributors are forced to play a giant game of whac-a-mole to limit the unlicensed spread of their content on the Internet.

The way the law stands today in the United States, EU, and most other developed countries, copyright holders must wait for content to appear online before sending targeted takedown notices to hosts, service providers, and online platforms.

After sending several billion of these notices, patience is wearing thin, so a new plan is beginning to emerge. Rather than taking down content after it appears, major entertainment industry groups would prefer companies to take proactive action. The upload filters currently under discussion in Europe are a prime example but are already causing controversy.

Continuing the momentum in this direction, Reuters reports that the European Union will publish draft guidelines at the end of this month, urging platforms such as Google and Facebook to take a more proactive approach to illegal content of all kinds.

“Online platforms need to significantly step up their actions to address this problem,” the draft EU guidelines say.

“They need to be proactive in weeding out illegal content, put effective notice-and-action procedures in place, and establish well-functioning interfaces with third parties (such as trusted flaggers) and give a particular priority to notifications from national law enforcement authorities.”

On the copyright front, Google already operates interfaces designed to take down infringing content. And, as the recent agreement in the UK with copyright holders shows, is also prepared to make infringing content harder to find. Nevertheless, it will remain to be seen if Google is prepared to give even ‘trusted’ third-parties a veto on what content can appear online, without having oversight itself.

The guidelines are reportedly non-binding but further legislation in this area isn’t being ruled out for Spring 2018, if companies fail to make significant progress.

Interestingly, however, a Commission source told Reuters that any new legislation would not “change the liability exemption for online platforms.” Maintaining these so-called ‘safe harbors’ is a priority for online giants such as Google and Facebook – anything less would almost certainly be a deal-breaker.

The guidelines, due to be published at the end of September, will also encourage online platforms to publish transparency reports. These should detail the volume of notices received and actions subsequently taken. Again, Google is way ahead of the game here, having published this kind of data for the past several years.

“The guidelines also contain safeguards against excessive removal of content, such as giving its owners a right to contest such a decision,” Reuters adds.

More will be known about the proposals in a couple of weeks but it’s quite likely they’ll spark another round of debate on whether legislation is the best route to tackle illegal content or whether voluntary agreements – which have a tendency to be rather less open – should be the way to go.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Self-Driving Cars Should Be Open Source

2017-09-15 Bozho

Post Syndicated from Bozho original https://techblog.bozho.net/self-driving-cars-open-source/

Self-driving cars are (will be) the pinnacle of consumer products automation – robot vacuum cleaners, smart fridges and TVs are just toys compared to self-driving cars. Both in terms of technology and in terms of impact. We aren’t yet on level 5 self driving cars , but they are behind the corner.

But as software engineers we know how fragile software is. And self-driving cars are basically software, so we can see all the risks involved with putting our lives in the hands anonymous (from our point of view) developers and unknown (to us) processes and quality standards. One may argue that this has been the case for every consumer product ever, but with software is different – software is way more complex than anything else.

So I have an outrageous proposal – self-driving cars should be open source. We have to be able to verify and trust the code that’s navigating our helpless bodies around the highways. Not only that, but we have to be able to verify if it is indeed that code that is currently running in our car, and not something else.

In fact, let me extend that – all cars should be open source. Before you say “but that will ruin the competitive advantage of manufacturers and will be deadly for business”, I don’t actually care how they trained their neural networks, or what their datasets are. That’s actually the secret sauce of the self-driving car and in my view it can remain proprietary and closed. What I’d like to see open-sourced is everything else. (Under what license – I’d be fine to even have it copyrighted and so not “real” open source, but that’s a separate discussion).

Why? This story about remote carjacking using the entertainment system of a Jeep is a scary example. Attackers that reverse engineer the car software can remotely control everything in the car. Why did that happen? Well, I guess it’s complicated and we have to watch the DEFCON talk.

And also read the paper, but a paragraph in wikipedia about the CAN bus used in most cars gives us a hint:

CAN is a low-level protocol and does not support any security features intrinsically. There is also no encryption in standard CAN implementations, which leaves these networks open to man-in-the-middle packet interception. In most implementations, applications are expected to deploy their own security mechanisms; e.g., to authenticate incoming commands or the presence of certain devices on the network. Failure to implement adequate security measures may result in various sorts of attacks if the opponent manages to insert messages on the bus. While passwords exist for some safety-critical functions, such as modifying firmware, programming keys, or controlling antilock brake actuators, these systems are not implemented universally and have a limited number of seed/key pair

I don’t know in what world it makes sense to even have a link between the entertainment system and the low-level network that operates the physical controls. As apparent from the talk, the two systems are supposed to be air-gapped, but in reality they aren’t.

Rookie mistakes were abound – unauthenticated “execute” method, running as root, firmware is not signed, hard-coded passwords, etc. How do we know that there aren’t tons of those in all cars out there right now, and in the self-driving cars of the future (which will likely use the same legacy technologies of the current cars)? Recently I heard a negative comment about the source code of one of the self-driving cars “players”, and I’m pretty sure there are many of those rookie mistakes.

Why this is this even more risky for self-driving cars? I’m not an expert in car programming, but it seems like the attack surface is bigger. I might be completely off target here, but on a typical car you’d have to “just” properly isolate the CAN bus. With self-driving cars the autonomous system that watches the surrounding and makes decisions on what to do next has to be connected to the CAN bus. With Tesla being able to send updates over the wire, the attack surface is even bigger (although that’s actually a good feature – to be able to patch all cars immediately once a vulnerability is discovered).

Of course, one approach would be to introduce legislation that regulates car software. It might work, but it would rely on governments to to proper testing, which won’t always be the case.

The alternative is to open-source it and let all the white-hats find your issues, so that you can close them before the car hits the road. Not only that, but consumers like me will feel safer, and geeks would be able to verify whether the car is really running the software it claims to run by verifying the fingerprints.

Richard Stallman might be seen as a fanatic when he advocates against closed source software, but in cases like … cars, his concerns seem less extreme.

“But the Jeep vulnerability was fixed”, you may say. And that might be seen as being the way things are – vulnerabilities appear, they get fixed, life goes on. No person was injured because of the bug, right? Well, not yet. And “gaining control” is the extreme scenario – there are still pretty bad scenarios, like being able to track a car through its GPS, or cause panic by controlling the entertainment system. It might be over wifi, or over GPRS, or even by physically messing with the car by inserting a flash drive. Is open source immune to those issues? No, but it has proven to be more resilient.

One industry where the problem of proprietary software on a product that the customer bought is … tractors. It turns out farmers are hacking their tractors, because of multiple issues and the inability of the vendor to resolve them in a timely manner. This is likely to happen to cars soon, when only authorized repair shops are allowed to touch anything on the car. And with unauthorized repair shops the attack surface becomes even bigger.

In fact, I’d prefer open source not just for cars, but for all consumer products. The source code of a smart fridge or a security camera is trivial, it would rarely mean sacrificing competitive advantage. But refrigerators get hacked, security cameras are active part of botnets, the “internet of shit” is getting ubiquitous. A huge amount of these issues are dumb, beginner mistakes. We have the right to know what shit we are running – in our frdges, DVRs and ultimatey – cars.

Your fridge may soon by spying on you, your vacuum cleaner may threaten your pet in demand of “ransom”. The terrorists of the future may crash planes without being armed, can crash vans into crowds without being in the van, and can “explode” home equipment without being in the particular home. And that’s not just a hypothetical.

Will open source magically solve the issue? No. But it will definitely make things better and safer, as it has done with operating systems and web servers.

The post Self-Driving Cars Should Be Open Source appeared first on Bozho's tech blog.

Another iPhone Change to Frustrate the Police

2017-09-15 Bruce Schneier

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/another_iphone_.html

I recently wrote about the new ability to disable the Touch ID login on iPhones. This is important because of a weirdness in current US law that protects people’s passcodes from forced disclosure in ways it does not protect actions: being forced to place a thumb on a fingerprint reader.

There’s another, more significant, change: iOS now requires a passcode before the phone will establish trust with another device.

In the current system, when you connect your phone to a computer, you’re prompted with the question “Trust this computer?” and you can click yes or no. Now you have to enter in your passcode again. That means if the police have an unlocked phone, they can scroll through the phone looking for things but they can’t download all of the contents onto a another computer without also knowing the passcode.

More details:

This might be particularly consequential during border searches. The “border search” exception, which allows Customs and Border Protection to search anything going into the country, is a contentious issue when applied electronics. It is somewhat (but not completely) settled law, but that the U.S. government can, without any cause at all (not even “reasonable articulable suspicion”, let alone “probable cause”), copy all the contents of my devices when I reenter the country sows deep discomfort in myself and many others. The only legal limitation appears to be a promise not to use this information to connect to remote services. The new iOS feature means that a Customs office can browse through a device — a time limited exercise — but not download the full contents.

How to Enable Your Users to Access Office 365 with AWS Microsoft Active Directory Credentials

2017-09-14 Darryn Hendricks

Post Syndicated from Darryn Hendricks original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-enable-your-users-to-access-office-365-with-aws-microsoft-active-directory-credentials/

You can now enable your users to access Microsoft Office 365 with credentials that you manage in AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Microsoft AD. You can accomplish this by deploying Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) Connect and Active Directory Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 (AD FS 2016) with AWS Microsoft AD. AWS Microsoft AD makes it possible and easy for you to build a Windows environment in the AWS Cloud, synchronize your AWS Microsoft AD users into Microsoft Azure AD, and use Office 365, all without needing to create and manage AD domain controllers. Now you can also benefit from the broad set of AWS Cloud services for compute, storage, database, and Internet of Things (IoT) while continuing to use Office 365 business productivity apps—all with a single AD domain.

Office 365 provides different options to support user authentication with identities that come from AD. One common way to do this is to use Azure AD Connect and AD FS together with your AD directory. In this model, you use Azure AD Connect to synchronize user names from AD into Azure AD so that Office 365 can use those identities. To complete this solution, you use AD FS to enable Office 365 to authenticate the identities against your AD directory. Good news: AWS Microsoft AD now supports this model!

In this blog post, we show how to use Azure AD Connect and AD FS with AWS Microsoft AD so that your employees can access Office 365 by using their AD credentials.

Prerequisites

The instructions in this post assume that you understand how to create Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instances, know how to use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to log in to the instances, and already have completed the following tasks:

Create an AWS Microsoft AD directory.
Join an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance to your AWS Microsoft AD domain to use as a management instance (Management).
Install Active Directory Administration Tools on your Management instance.
Join an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server 2016 instance to the AWS Microsoft AD domain to use as your ADFS server. We show you how to install AD FS later.
Join an Amazon EC2 for Windows Server instance to the AWS Microsoft AD domain you use as your ADSync server. We will show you how to install Azure AD Connect on this instance later.
Using Active Directory Users and Computers on your Management instance, create a standard user named ADFSSVC in your AWS Microsoft AD directory. AD FS uses this user account later.
Create an active Office 365 subscription.
Add and verify your domain in Office 365

Note: You must use RDP and sign in with the AWS Microsoft AD admin account using the password you specified when you created your AWS Microsoft AD directory when performing Steps 3 and 6 in this “Prerequisites” section.

The following diagram illustrates the environment you must have in place to implement the solution in this blog post (the numbers in the diagram correspond to Steps 1–8 earlier in this section). We build on this configuration to install and configure Azure AD Connect and AD FS with Azure AD and Office 365.

Note: In this blog post, we use separate Microsoft Windows Server instances on which to run AD FS and Azure AD Connect. You can choose to combine these on a single server, as long as you use Windows Server 2016. Though it is technically possible to use an on-premises server as the AD FS and Azure AD host, such a configuration is counter to the idea of a Windows environment completely in the cloud. Also, this requires configuration of firewall ports and AWS security groups, which is beyond the scope of this blog.

Configuration background

When you create an AWS Microsoft AD directory, AWS exclusively retains the enterprise administrator account of the forest and domain administrator account for the root domain to deliver the directory as a managed service. When you set up your directory, AWS creates an organizational unit (OU) in the directory and delegates administrative privileges for the OU to your admin account. Within this OU, you administer users, groups, computers, Group Policy objects, other devices, and additional OUs as needed. You perform these actions using standard AD administration tools from a computer that is joined to an AWS Microsoft AD domain. Typically, the administration computer is an EC2 instance that you access using RDP, by logging in with your admin account credentials. From your admin account, you can also delegate permissions to other users or groups you create within your OU.

To use Office 365 with AD identities, you use Azure AD Connect to synchronize the AD identities into Azure AD. There are two commonly supported ways to use Azure AD Connect to support Office 365 use. In one model, you synchronize user names only, and you use AD FS to federate authentication from Office 365 to your AD. In the second model, you synchronize user names and passwords from your AD directory to Azure AD, and you do not have to use AD FS. The model supported by AWS Microsoft AD is the first model: synchronize user names only and use AD FS to authenticate from Office 365 to your AWS Microsoft AD. The AD FS model also enables authentication with SaaS applications that support federated authentication (this topic is beyond the scope of this blog post).

Note: Azure AD Connect now has a pass-through model of authentication. Because this was in a preview status at the time of writing this blog post, this authentication model is beyond the scope of this blog post.

In a default AD FS installation, AD FS uses two containers that require special AD permissions that your AWS Microsoft AD administrative account does not have. To address this, you will create two nested containers in your OU for AD FS to use. When you install AD FS, you tell AD FS where to find the containers through a Windows PowerShell parameter.

As described previously, we will now show you how to use Azure AD Connect and AD FS with AWS Microsoft AD with Azure AD and Office 365 in five steps, as illustrated in the following diagram.

Add two containers to AWS Microsoft AD for use by AD FS.
Install AD FS.
Integrate AD FS with Azure AD.
Synchronize users from AWS Microsoft AD to Azure AD with Azure AD Connect.
Sign in to Office 365 by using your Microsoft AD identities.

Step 1: Add two containers to AWS Microsoft AD for use by AD FS

The following steps show how to create the AD containers required by AD FS in your AWS Microsoft AD directory.

From the Management instance:

Generate a random global unique identifier (GUID) using the following Windows PowerShell command.
```
(New-Guid).Guid
```

Make a note of the GUID output because it will be required later on. In this case, the GUID is 67734c62-0805-4274-b72b-f7171110cd56.

Create a container named ADFS in your OU. The OU is located in the domain root and it has the same name as the NetBIOS name you specified when you created your AWS Microsoft AD directory. In this example, our OU name is AWS, and our domain is DC=awsexample,DC=com. You create the container by running the following Windows PowerShell command. You must replace the names that are in bold text with the names from your AWS Microsoft AD directory.
```
New-ADObject -Name "ADFS" -Type Container -Path “OU=YourNetBIOSName,DC=YourDomainSuffix,DC=YourDomainRoot”
```
Create another AD container in your new ADFS container, and use the previously generated GUID as the name. Do this by running the following Windows PowerShell command. Be sure to replace the names in bold text with the names from your AWS Microsoft AD directory and your GUID. In this example, we replace GUID with 67734c62-0805-4274-b72b-f7171110cd56. The other bold items shown match the names in our example AWS Microsoft AD directory.
```
New-ADObject -Name "GUID" -Type Container -Path “CN=ADFS,OU=YourNetBIOSName,DC=YourDomainSuffix,DC=YourDomainRoot”
```

To verify that you successfully created the ADFS and GUID containers, open Active Directory Users and Computers and navigate to the containers you created. Your root domain, OU name, and GUID name should match your AWS Microsoft AD configuration.

Note: If you do not see the ADFS and GUID containers, turn on Advanced Features by choosing View in the Active Directory Users and Computers tool, and then choosing Advanced Features.

Step 2: Install AD FS

In this section, we show how to install AD FS by using Windows PowerShell commands. First, though, select a federation service name for your AD FS server. You can create your federation service name by adding a short name (for example, sts) followed by your domain name (for example, awsexample.com). In this example, we use sts.awsexample.com as the federation service name.

Using your AWS Microsoft AD admin account, open an RDP session to your ADFS instance, run Windows PowerShell as a local administrator, and complete the following steps:

Install the Windows feature, AD FS, by running the following Windows PowerShell command. This command only adds the components needed to install your ADFS server later.
```
Install-WindowsFeature ADFS-Federation
```
Now that you have installed AD FS, you must obtain a certificate for use when you configure your ADFS server. The AD FS certificate plays an important role to secure communication between the ADFS server and clients, and to ensure tokens issued by the ADFS server are secured. AWS recommends that you use a certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority (CA).

In our example, we use the SSL certificate, sts.awsexample.com. It is important to note that the common name and subject alternative name (SAN) must include the federation service name we plan to use for the AD FS server. In our example, the name is sts.awsexample.com.

Install the certificate on the AD FS server using the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in for certificates by following these steps:

Open a command prompt window.
Type mmc and press Enter.
Choose File, choose Add/Remove snap-in, and choose Add.
For Add Standalone Snap-in, choose Certificates and then choose Add.
For the Certificates snap-in, choose Computer account and then choose Next.
Choose Finish, and then choose OK to load the Certificates snap In.
Expand Certificates (Local Computer).
Right-click Personal, choose All Tasks, and then choose Import.
On the Certificate Import Wizard, choose Next.
Choose Browse to locate and select your certificate that has been given by your CA. Choose Next.
Ensure Certificate store is set to Personal, and choose Next.
Choose Finish and OK to complete the installation of the certificate on the AD FS server.

Next you need to retrieve the Thumbprint value of the newly installed certificate and save it for use when you configure your ADFS server. Follow the remaining steps:

In the Certificates console window, expand Personal, and choose Certificates.
Right-click the certificate, and then choose Open.
Choose the Details tab to locate the Thumbprint

Note: In this case, we will copy our certificate Thumbprint, d096652327cfa18487723ff61040c85c7f57f701, and save it in Windows Notepad.

Open an RDP session to your ADFS server by using the admin account for your AWS Microsoft AD directory. Install AD FS by running the following Windows PowerShell command. You must replace the bold strings in the command with the GUID you created in Step 1 and the names from your AWS Microsoft AD directory.
```
$adminConfig = @{"DKMContainerDn"="CN=GUID,CN=ADFS,OU=YourNetBIOSName,DC=YourDomainSuffix,DC=YourDomainRoot"}
```

Enter the AD FS standard user account credentials for the ADFSSVC user and save it in the script variable, $svcCred, by running the following Windows PowerShell command.
```
$svcCred = (get-credential)
```

Type the Microsoft AD administrator credentials of the Admin user and save it in the script variable, $localAdminCred, by running the following Windows PowerShell command.
```
$localAdminCred = (get-credential)
```

Install the AD FS server by running the following Windows PowerShell command. You must replace the bold items with the Thumbprint ID from your certificate, and replace the federation service name with the federation service name you chose earlier. For our example, the federation service name is awsexample.com and we copy our certificate Thumbprint, d096652327cfa18487723ff61040c85c7f57f701, from where we saved it in Windows Notepad.

Note: Be sure to remove any empty spaces in the certificate Thumbprint value.

Install-ADFSFarm -CertificateThumbprint <Thumbprint ID> -FederationServiceName "YourFederationServiceName" -ServiceAccountCredential $svcCred -Credential $localAdminCred -OverwriteConfiguration -AdminConfiguration $adminConfig -SigningCertificateThumbprint <Thumbprint ID> -DecryptionCertificateThumbprint <Thumbprint ID>

Create a DNS A record for use with AD FS. This record resolves the federation service name to the public IP address you assign to your ADFS instance. You must create the DNS A record at the DNS hosting provider that hosts your domain. In the following example, sts.awsexample.com is the federation service name and 54.x.x.x is the public IP address of our AD FS instance.
- Hostname: awsexample.com
- Record Type: A
- IP Address: x.x.x

Enable the AD FS sign-in page by running the following Windows PowerShell command.
```
Set-ADFSProperties -EnableIdpInitiatedSignonPage $true
```

To verify that the AD FS sign-in page works, open a browser on the AD FS instance, and sign in on the AD FS sign-in page (https://<my federation service name>/AD FS/ls/IdpInitiatedSignOn.aspx) by using your AWS Microsoft AD admin account. In our example, the federation service name (<my federation service name> in the sign-in page URL) is sts.awsexample.com.

Step 3: Integrate AD FS with Azure AD

The following steps show you how to connect AD FS with Office 365 by connecting to Azure AD with Windows PowerShell and federating the custom domain.From the ADFS instance, make sure you run Windows PowerShell as a local administrator and complete the following steps:

Connect to Azure AD using Windows PowerShell.
Federate the custom domain you added and verified in Azure AD by running the following two Windows PowerShell commands. You must update the items in bold text with the names from your AWS Microsoft AD directory. For our example, our AD FS instance’s Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) is adfsserver.awsexample.com, and our domain name is awsexample.com.
```
Set-MsolADFSContext –computer <ADFS instance FQDN>

Convert-MsolDomainToFederated –domain <Domain name>
```

Step 4: Synchronize users from AWS Microsoft AD to Azure AD with Azure AD Connect

The following steps show you how to install and customize Azure AD Connect to synchronize your AWS Microsoft AD identities to Azure AD for use with Office 365.Open an RDP session to your ADSync instance by using your AWS Microsoft AD admin user account:

Download Azure AD Connect.
On the Welcome page of the Azure AD Connect Wizard, accept the license terms and privacy notice, and then choose Continue.
On the Express Settings page, choose Customize.
On the Install required components page, choose Install.
On the User sign-in page, choose Do not configure and then choose Next.
On the Connect to Azure AD page, enter your Office 365 global administrator account credentials and then choose Next.
On the Connect your directories page, choose Active Directory as the Directory Type, and then choose your Microsoft AD Forest as your Forest. Choose Add Directory.
At the prompt, enter your AWS Microsoft AD admin account credentials, and then choose OK.
Now that you have added the AWS Microsoft AD directory, choose Next.
On the Azure AD sign-in configuration page, choose Next.

Note: AWS recommends the userPrincipalName (UPN) attribute for use by AWS Microsoft AD users when they sign in to Azure AD and Office 365. The UPN attribute format combines the user’s login name and the UPN-suffix of an AWS Microsoft AD user. The UPN suffix is the domain name of your AWS Microsoft AD domain and the same domain name you added and verified with Azure AD.

In the following example from the Active Directory Users and Computers tool, the user’s UPN is [email protected], which is a combination of the user’s login name, awsuser, with the UPN-suffix, @awsexample.com.

On the Domain and OU filtering page, choose Sync selected domains and OUs, choose the Users OU under your NetBIOS OU, and then choose Next.
On the Uniquely identifying your users page, choose Next.
On the Filter users and devices page, choose Next.
On the Optional features page, choose Next.
On the Ready to configure page, choose Start the synchronization process when configuration completes, and then choose Install.
The Azure AD Connect installation has now completed. Choose Exit.

Note: By default, the Azure AD Connect sync scheduler runs every 30 minutes to synchronize your AWS Microsoft AD identities to Azure AD. You can tune the scheduler by opening a Windows PowerShell session as an administrator and running the appropriate Windows PowerShell commands. For more information, go to Azure AD Connect Sync Scheduler.

Tip: Do you need to synchronize a change immediately? You can manually start a sync cycle outside the scheduled sync cycle from the Azure AD Connect sync instance. Open a Windows PowerShell session as an administrator and run the following Windows PowerShell commands.

Import-Module ADSync
Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta

Step 5: Sign in to Office 365 by using your AWS Microsoft AD identities

The following steps show you how to sign in to Office 365 using AD FS as the authentication method with your AWS Microsoft AD user account. In this example, we assign a license to the AWS Microsoft AD user account, [email protected], in the Office 365 admin center. We then sign in to Office 365 by using the AWS Microsoft AD user account UPN, [email protected].

Using a computer on the internet, open a browser and complete the following steps:

Access the Office 365 admin center using your global administrator account, and assign a license to a user you created in your AWS Microsoft AD directory.
Sign in with the AWS Microsoft AD user account at https://portal.office.com.

When entering the UPN of the AWS Microsoft AD user account, you will be redirected to your ADFS server sign-in page to complete user authentication.
On the AD FS sign-in page, enter your UPN and the password of the AWS Microsoft AD user account.
You have successfully signed in to Office 365 using your AWS Microsoft AD user account!

Summary

In this blog post, we showed how to use Azure AD Connect and AD FS with AWS Microsoft AD so that your employees can access Office 365 using their AD credentials. Now that you have Azure AD Connect and AD FS in place, you also might want to explore how to build upon this infrastructure to add sign-in for other Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that are compatible with AD FS. For example, this blog post explains how you can provide your users single sign-on access to Amazon AppStream by using AD FS.

If you have comments or questions, post them on the Directory Service forum or contact AWS Support.

– Darryn and Ron

A Hardware Privacy Monitor for iPhones

2017-09-11 Bruce Schneier

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/09/a_hardware_priv.html

Andrew “bunnie” Huang and Edward Snowden have designed a hardware device that attaches to an iPhone and monitors it for malicious surveillance activities, even in instances where the phone’s operating system has been compromised. They call it an Introspection Engine, and their use model is a journalist who is concerned about government surveillance:

Our introspection engine is designed with the following goals in mind:

Completely open source and user-inspectable (“You don’t have to trust us”)
Introspection operations are performed by an execution domain completely separated from the phone”s CPU (“don’t rely on those with impaired judgment to fairly judge their state”)

Proper operation of introspection system can be field-verified (guard against “evil maid” attacks and hardware failures)

Difficult to trigger a false positive (users ignore or disable security alerts when there are too many positives)

Difficult to induce a false negative, even with signed firmware updates (“don’t trust the system vendor” — state-level adversaries with full cooperation of system vendors should not be able to craft signed firmware updates that spoof or bypass the introspection engine)

As much as possible, the introspection system should be passive and difficult to detect by the phone’s operating system (prevent black-listing/targeting of users based on introspection engine signatures)

Simple, intuitive user interface requiring no specialized knowledge to interpret or operate (avoid user error leading to false negatives; “journalists shouldn’t have to be cryptographers to be safe”)

Final solution should be usable on a daily basis, with minimal impact on workflow (avoid forcing field reporters into the choice between their personal security and being an effective journalist)

This looks like fantastic work, and they have a working prototype.

Of course, this does nothing to stop all the legitimate surveillance that happens over a cell phone: location tracking, records of who you talk to, and so on.

BoingBoing post.

Now Create and Manage AWS IAM Roles More Easily with the Updated IAM Console

2017-09-09 Rob Moncur

Post Syndicated from Rob Moncur original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/now-create-and-manage-aws-iam-roles-more-easily-with-the-updated-iam-console/

Today, we updated the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console to make it easier for you to create, manage, and understand IAM roles. We made improvements that include an updated role-creation workflow that better guides you through the process of creating trust relationships (which define who can assume a role) and attaching permissions to roles. Additionally, you can now view and understand the permissions attached to roles more easily by using policy summaries for each role in your account.

In this post, I provide background information about roles, show how to create roles correctly by using the updated IAM console, and review other changes to the role list and details pages that help you better manage your roles.

Background information about IAM roles

What are IAM roles?

IAM roles are a secure way to grant permissions to entities you trust. You can use a role in the following scenarios:

Delegating permissions to an AWS service to carry out actions on your behalf (such as Enhanced Monitoring for Amazon Relational Database Service [RDS]).
Enabling application code running on an Amazon EC2 instance to access or modify AWS resources (such as data stored in an Amazon S3 bucket).
Granting access to users from another AWS account.
Enabling federated sign-in to the AWS Management Console for employees in your corporate directory.

What are the different parts of an IAM role?

As illustrated in the following diagram, roles have two types of policies attached to them:

Trust policy – This policy defines the entities that can assume a role. When you create a role by using the IAM console, the trust policy is created for you. You can customize the trust policy after it has been created. A role can have only one trust policy.
Permissions policies – These policies define which AWS resources a role can access and the actions it can perform on those resources. These policies can be AWS managed policies, customer managed policies, or inline policies attached directly to the role. You can attach multiple permissions policies to an IAM role.

How do I use an IAM role?

Roles can be used to access AWS both programmatically and via the AWS Management Console.

Using a role to access AWS programmatically

You can assume a role programmatically by using the AWS CLI or SDK. When you assume a role, the role issues temporary security credentials that you can use to access resources and call AWS service actions. Using roles enables you to follow the security best practice to use temporary security credentials instead of long-term security credentials.

If you are using AWS services such as EC2 or AWS Lambda, you can assign a role to your EC2 instance or Lambda function. Your code running on either the instance or function will then be able to access AWS using the short-term credentials from that role. These services automatically assume the role and use the returned credentials to enable you to access resources or perform actions. Learn more about IAM roles for EC2 and IAM roles for Lambda.

Using a role to access the AWS Management Console

You can also assume a role to access an account in the AWS Management Console by using Switch Role functionality. You can access this functionality by using the drop-down menu in the upper right corner of the console or through a custom sign-in URL. To switch roles, you must sign in as either an IAM or federated user. Swith Role is not supported for root users.

Introducing the updated role-creation workflow

To make it easier to create IAM roles, we’ve updated the role-creation workflow in the IAM console. To introduce the new experience, let’s look at a specific example.

Let’s suppose I am developing a new application running on an EC2 instance that reads and writes image data to S3. To enable that application to access the S3 bucket where the image data is stored, I need to create a new role that the EC2 instance running my application code can assume. This role trusts EC2 (defined in the trust policy) and has permissions to read and write to S3 (defined in the permissions policy).

I first navigate to the Roles page of the IAM console, and choose Create role.

I then select the type of trusted entity this role will allow. I have four options in this step:

AWS service – To grant access to an AWS service to manage resources in my account.
Another AWS account – To grant access to my account from another account.
Web identities – To grant access to Amazon Cognito or other OpenID Connect providers.
SAML – To grant access to identities from a SAML-enabled identity provider.

For this example, I choose AWS service. I then see a list of AWS services the new role could trust. Because I need a role that can be assumed by an EC2 instance, I choose EC2. This opens a section below it with specific use cases for this service. I choose the EC2 (Allows EC2 instances to call AWS services on your behalf) use case. This defines the role’s trust policy to include EC2 as an entity that can assume that role.

Then, I set the permissions that the role needs to access S3. I already created a permissions policy that grants access to my S3 bucket and named it MyImageApp-S3Access. I choose that policy and choose Next to move to the final step.

In the final step, I name the role MyImageAppRole and describe it this way: “Allows application code running on EC2 instances to access data in S3.” I choose Create role and I am done! I can now attach this role to EC2 instances on which my application is running to give them permissions to access data in S3.

Other updates to help you manage your roles

With this update, you will see a new column called Trusted entities on the Roles list page. This column allows you to review at a glance which entities can assume a role. This makes it easier to identify roles that trust a specific account or AWS service. It also makes it easier to audit the trust relationships across all your roles. You also can add other columns to this table, including Creation time and Role ARN, by clicking the gear icon. Your column selection preference will be remembered when you return to the Roles page.

To help you understand the permissions attached to your role, we’ve also updated the Permissions tab to include IAM policy summaries. Policy summaries make it easier for you to understand the permissions for IAM permissions policies attached to roles without having to view a policy’s JSON.

Conclusion

Now it is easier for you to create and manage your IAM roles using the IAM console. As you manage your roles, be sure to review and follow IAM best practices, which can help to improve the security of your AWS resources and make your account easier to manage.

If you have comments about this post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions or suggestions, start a new thread on the IAM forum or contact AWS Support.

– Rob

New UK IP Crime Report Reveals Continued Focus on ‘Pirate’ Kodi Boxes

2017-09-08 Andy

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/new-uk-ip-crime-report-reveals-continued-focus-on-pirate-kodi-boxes-170908/

The UK’s Intellectual Property Office has published its annual IP Crime Report, spanning the period 2016 to 2017.

It covers key events in the copyright and trademark arenas and is presented with input from the police and trading standards, plus private entities such as the BPI, Premier League, and Federation Against Copyright Theft, to name a few.

The report begins with an interesting statistic. Despite claims that many millions of UK citizens regularly engage in some kind of infringement, figures from the Ministry of Justice indicate that just 47 people were found guilty of offenses under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act during 2016. That’s down on the 69 found guilty in the previous year.

Despite this low conviction rate, 15% of all internet users aged 12+ are reported to have consumed at least one item of illegal content between March and May 2017. Figures supplied by the Industry Trust for IP indicate that 19% of adults watch content via various IPTV devices – often referred to as set-top, streaming, Android, or Kodi boxes.

“At its cutting edge IP crime is innovative. It exploits technological loopholes before they become apparent. IP crime involves sophisticated hackers, criminal financial experts, international gangs and service delivery networks. Keeping pace with criminal innovation places a burden on IP crime prevention resources,” the report notes.

The report covers a broad range of IP crime, from counterfeit sportswear to foodstuffs, but our focus is obviously on Internet-based infringement. Various contributors cover various aspects of online activity as it affects them, including music industry group BPI.

“The main online piracy threats to the UK recorded music industry at present are from BitTorrent networks, linking/aggregator sites, stream-ripping sites, unauthorized streaming sites and cyberlockers,” the BPI notes.

The BPI’s website blocking efforts have been closely reported, with 63 infringing sites blocked to date via various court orders. However, the BPI reports that more than 700 related URLs, IP addresses, and proxy sites/ proxy aggregators have also been rendered inaccessible as part of the same action.

“Site blocking has proven to be a successful strategy as the longer the blocks are in place, the more effective they are. We have seen traffic to these sites reduce by an average of 70% or more,” the BPI reports.

While prosecutions against music pirates are a fairly rare event in the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) Specialist Fraud Division highlights that their most significant prosecution of the past 12 months involved a prolific music uploader.

As first revealed here on TF, Wayne Evans was an uploader not only on KickassTorrents and The Pirate Bay, but also some of his own sites. Known online as OldSkoolScouse, Evans reportedly cost the UK’s Performing Rights Society more than £1m in a single year. He was sentenced in December 2016 to 12 months in prison.

While Evans has been free for some time already, the CPS places particular emphasis on the importance of the case, “since it provided sentencing guidance for the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, where before there was no definitive guideline.”

The CPS says the case was useful on a number of fronts. Despite illegal distribution of content being difficult to investigate and piracy losses proving tricky to quantify, the court found that deterrent sentences are appropriate for the kinds of offenses Evans was accused of.

The CPS notes that various factors affect the severity of such sentences, not least the length of time the unlawful activity has persisted and particularly if it has done so after the service of a cease and desist notice. Other factors include the profit made by defendants and/or the loss caused to copyright holders “so far as it can accurately be calculated.”

Importantly, however, the CPS says that beyond issues of personal mitigation and timely guilty pleas, a jail sentence is probably going to be the outcome for others engaging in this kind of activity in future. That’s something for torrent and streaming site operators and their content uploaders to consider.

“[U]nless the unlawful activity of this kind is very amateur, minor or short-lived, or in the absence of particularly compelling mitigation or other exceptional circumstances, an immediate custodial sentence is likely to be appropriate in cases of illegal distribution of copyright infringing articles,” the CPS concludes.

But while a music-related trial provided the highlight of the year for the CPS, the online infringement world is still dominated by the rise of streaming sites and the now omnipresent “fully-loaded Kodi Box” – set-top devices configured to receive copyright-infringing live TV and VOD.

In the IP Crime Report, the Intellectual Property Office references a former US Secretary of Defense to describe the emergence of the threat.

“The echoes of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous aphorism concerning ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’ reverberate across our landscape perhaps more than any other. The certainty we all share is that we must be ready to confront both ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’,” the IPO writes.

“Not long ago illegal streaming through Kodi Boxes was an ‘unknown’. Now, this technology updates copyright infringement by empowering TV viewers with the technology they need to subvert copyright law at the flick of a remote control.”

While the set-top box threat has grown in recent times, the report highlights the important legal clarifications that emerged from the BREIN v Filmspeler case, which found itself before the European Court of Justice.

As widely reported, the ECJ determined that the selling of piracy-configured devices amounts to a communication to the public, something which renders their sale illegal. However, in a submission by PIPCU, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, box sellers are said to cast a keen eye on the legal situation.

“Organised criminals, especially those in the UK who distribute set-top boxes, are aware of recent developments in the law and routinely exploit loopholes in it,” PIPCU reports.

“Given recent judgments on the sale of pre-programmed set-top boxes, it is now unlikely criminals would advertise the devices in a way which is clearly infringing by offering them pre-loaded or ‘fully loaded’ with apps and addons specifically designed to access subscription services for free.”

With sellers beginning to clean up their advertising, it seems likely that detection will become more difficult than when selling was considered a gray area. While that will present its own issues, PIPCU still sees problems on two fronts – a lack of clear legislation and a perception of support for ‘pirate’ devices among the public.

“There is no specific legislation currently in place for the prosecution of end users or sellers of set-top boxes. Indeed, the general public do not see the usage of these devices as potentially breaking the law,” the unit reports.

“PIPCU are currently having to try and ‘shoehorn’ existing legislation to fit the type of criminality being observed, such as conspiracy to defraud (common law) to tackle this problem. Cases are yet to be charged and results will be known by late 2017.”

Whether these prosecutions will be effective remains to be seen, but PIPCU’s comments suggest an air of caution set to a backdrop of box-sellers’ tendency to adapt to legal challenges.

“Due to the complexity of these cases it is difficult to substantiate charges under the Fraud Act (2006). PIPCU have convicted one person under the Serious Crime Act (2015) (encouraging or assisting s11 of the Fraud Act). However, this would not be applicable unless the suspect had made obvious attempts to encourage users to use the boxes to watch subscription only content,” PIPCU notes, adding;

“The selling community is close knit and adapts constantly to allow itself to operate in the gray area where current legislation is unclear and where they feel they can continue to sell ‘under the radar’.”

More generally, pirate sites as a whole are still seen as a threat. As reported last month, the current anti-piracy narrative is that pirate sites represent a danger to their users. As a result, efforts are underway to paint torrent and streaming sites as risky places to visit, with users allegedly exposed to malware and other malicious content. The scare strategy is supported by PIPCU.

“Unlike the purchase of counterfeit physical goods, consumers who buy unlicensed content online are not taking a risk. Faulty copyright doesn’t explode, burn or break. For this reason the message as to why the public should avoid copyright fraud needs to be re-focused.

“A more concerted attempt to push out a message relating to malware on pirate websites, the clear criminality and the links to organized crime of those behind the sites are crucial if public opinion is to be changed,” the unit advises.

But while the changing of attitudes is desirable for pro-copyright entities, PIPCU says that winning over the public may not prove to be an easy battle. It was given a small taste of backlash itself, after taking action against the operator of a pirate site.

“The scale of the problem regarding public opinion of online copyright crime is evidenced by our own experience. After PIPCU executed a warrant against the owner of a streaming website, a tweet about the event (read by 200,000 people) produced a reaction heavily weighted against PIPCU’s legitimate enforcement action,” PIPCU concludes.

In summary, it seems likely that more effort will be expended during the next 12 months to target the set-top box threat, but there doesn’t appear to be an abundance of confidence in existing legislation to tackle all but the most egregious offenders. That being said, a line has now been drawn in the sand – if the public is prepared to respect it.

The full IP Crime Report 2016-2017 is available here (pdf)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Играта на доверие

2017-09-07 Григор

Post Syndicated from Григор original http://www.gatchev.info/blog/?p=2081

Напоследък навсякъде – а в България май повече, отколкото на много други места – си струва човек да си зададе няколко прости въпроса.

Кога хората си вярват? Кога не си вярват? Защо си вярват, или не си вярват? И как да направим така, че да могат да си вярват повече?

Достатъчно лъганите почват да имат усещането, че тези въпроси не са по силите на обикновените смъртни, че единствено някое божество може да ги разреши.

Има ли такова божество? За щастие, да. И вярващите, и атеистите си приличат по едно – безусловната вяра в него. За всички неговата воля е непоклатима, и неговото слово е пример за истина от последна инстанция, нерушима при никакви обстоятелства. Името на това божество е математика, а словото му е „2 + 2 = 4“.

Можем ли да призовем математиката на помощ за тези отговори? Оказва се, че да. За пръв път го е направил още през 1984 г. Робърт Акселрод, в книгата си „Еволюцията на сътрудничеството“. По-късно темата също е чоплена от много други учени. Трудовете им обаче често са обемисти и трудносмилаеми за простосмъртните.

Затова се въодушевих толкова, когато един читател тук пусна в коментар един интересен линк. Намерих на него интересна, весела и увлекателна игра, която направо ми грабна вниманието. И пътем обясни на прост човешки език основите на това, което ни кара да се доверяваме или да не се доверяваме на другите.

Идеята ме запали. Скалъпих набързо български превод и го пратих на автора на играта – двайсетинагодишно момче на име Ники Кейс. След няколко дни получих линк към българоезична версия на играта онлайн – и доказателство колко любопитен и дълбок ум има този „младок“.

Препоръчвам играта на всички. Пробвайте я и се учете. И най-вече разпространявайте линковете. Мисля, че всички имаме нужда от нейните простички, ясни и разбираеми обяснения и изводи.

Англоезичната версия можете да откриете на http://ncase.me/trust/. Преведената от мен на български (моля, не ма бийте много) – на http://ncase.me/trust-bg/.

Приятна игра!

Cloud Storage Doesn’t have to be Convoluted, Complex, or Confusing

2017-09-06 Ahin Thomas

Post Syndicated from Ahin Thomas original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-storage-pricing-comparison/

So why do many vendors make it so hard to get information about how much you’re storing and how much you’re being charged?

Cloud storage is fast becoming the central repository for mission critical information, irreplaceable memories, and in some cases entire corporate and personal histories. Given this responsibility, we believe cloud storage vendors have an obligation to be transparent as possible in how they interact with their customers.

In that light we decided to challenge four cloud storage vendors and ask two simple questions:

Can a customer understand how much data is stored?
Can a customer understand the bill?

The detailed results are below, but if you wish to skip the details and the screen captures (TL;DR), we’ve summarized the results in the table below.

Summary of Cloud Storage Pricing Test

Our challenge was to upload 1 terabyte of data, store it for one month, and then download it.

	Visibility to Data Stored	Easy to Understand Bill	Cost
Backblaze B2	Accurate, intuitive display of storage information.	Available on demand, and the site clearly defines what has and will be charged for.	$25
Microsoft Azure	Storage is being measured in KiB, but is billed by the GB. With a calculator, it is unclear how much storage we are using.	Available, but difficult to find. The nearly 30 day lag in billing creates business and accounting challenges.	$72
Amazon S3	Incomplete. From the file browsing user interface, there is no reasonable way to understand how much data is being stored.	Available on demand. While there are some line items that seem unnecessary for our test, the bill is generally straight-forward to understand.	$71
Google Cloud Service	Incomplete. From the file browsing user interface, there is no reasonable way to understand how much data is being stored.	Available, but provides descriptions in units that are not on the pricing table nor commonly used.	$100

Cloud Storage Test Details

For our tests, we choose Backblaze B2, Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s S3, and Google Cloud Storage. Our idea was simple: Upload 1 TB of data to the comparable service for each vendor, store it for 1 month, download that 1 TB, then document and share the results.

Let’s start with most obvious observation, the cost charged by each vendor for the test:

	Cost
Backblaze B2	$25
Microsoft Azure	$72
Amazon S3	$71
Google Cloud Service	$100

Later in this post, we’ll see if we can determine the different cost components (storage, downloading, transactions, etc.) for each vendor, but our first step is to see if we can determine how much data we stored. In some cases, the answer is not as obvious as it would seem.

Test 1: Can a Customer Understand How Much Data Is Stored?

At the core, a provider of a service ought to be able to tell a customer how much of the service he or she is using. In this case, one might assume that providers of Cloud Storage would be able to tell customers how much data is being stored at any given moment. It turns out, it’s not that simple.

Backblaze B2
Logging into a Backblaze B2 account, one is presented with a summary screen that displays all “buckets.” Each bucket displays key summary information, including data currently stored.

Clicking into a given bucket, one can browse individual files. Each file displays its size, and multiple files can be selected to create a size summary.

Summary: Accurate, intuitive display of storage information.

Microsoft Azure

Moving on to Microsoft’s Azure, things get a little more “exciting.” There was no area that we could find where one can determine the total amount of data, in GB, stored with Azure.

There’s an area entitled “usage,” but that wasn’t helpful.

Microsoft Azure cloud storage screenshot

We then moved on to “Overview,” but had a couple challenges.The first issue was that we were presented with KiB (kibibyte) as a unit of measure. One GB (the unit of measure used in Azure’s pricing table) equates to roughly 976,563 KiB. It struck us as odd that things would be summarized by a unit of measure different from the billing unit of measure.

Microsoft Azure usage dashboard screenshot

Summary: Storage is being measured in KiB, but is billed by the GB. Even with a calculator, it is unclear how much storage we are using.

Amazon S3

Next we checked on the data we were storing in S3. We again ran into problems.

In the bucket overview, we were able to identify our buckets. However, we could not tell how much data was being stored.

Amazon S3 cloud storage buckets screenshot

Drilling into a bucket, the detail view does tell us file size. However, there was no method for summarizing the data stored within that bucket or for multiple files.

Amazon S3 cloud storage buckets usage screenshot

Summary: Incomplete. From the file browsing user interface, there is no reasonable way to understand how much data is being stored.

Google Cloud Storage (“GCS”)

GCS proved to have its own quirks, as well.

One can easily find the “bucket” summary, however, it does not provide information on data stored.

Clicking into the bucket, one can see files and the size of an individual file. However, no ability to see data total is provided.

Google Cloud Storage bucket files screenshot

Summary: Incomplete. From the file browsing user interface, there is no reasonable way to understand how much data is being stored.

Test 1 Conclusions

We knew how much storage we were uploading and, in many cases, the user will have some sense of the amount of data they are uploading. However, it strikes us as odd that many vendors won’t tell you how much data you have stored. Even stranger are the vendors that provide reporting in a unit of measure that is different from the units in their pricing table.

Test 2: Can a Customer Understand The Bill?

The cloud storage industry has done itself no favors with its tiered pricing that requires a calculator to figure out what’s going on. Setting that aside for a moment, one would presume that bills would be created in clear, auditable ways.

Backblaze

Inside of the Backblaze user interface, one finds a navigation link entitled “Billing.” Clicking on that, the user is presented with line items for previous bills, payments, and an estimate for the upcoming charges.

One can expand any given row to see the the line item transactions composing each bill.

Summary: Available on demand, and the site clearly defines what has and will be charged for.

Azure

Trying to understand the Azure billing proved to be a bit tricky.

On August 6th, we logged into the billing console and were presented with this screen.

As you can see, on Aug 6th, billing for the period of May-June was not available for download. For the period ending June 26th, we were charged nearly a month later, on July 24th. Clicking into that row item does display line item information.

Microsoft Azure cloud storage billing details screenshot

Summary: Available, but difficult to find. The nearly 30 day lag in billing creates business and accounting challenges.

Amazon S3

Amazon presents a clean billing summary and enables users to “drill down” into line items.

Going to the billing area of AWS, one can survey various monthly bills and is presented with a clean summary of billing charges.

Expanding into the billing detail, Amazon articulates each line item charge. Within each line item, charges are broken out into sub-line items for the different tiers of pricing.

Summary: Available on demand. While there are some line items that seem unnecessary for our test, the bill is generally straight-forward to understand.

Google Cloud Storage (“GCS”)

This was an area where the GCS User Interface, which was otherwise relatively intuitive, became confusing.

Going to the Billing Overview page did not offer much in the way of an overview on charges.

However, moving down to the “Transactions” section did provide line item detail on all the charges incurred. However, similar to Azure introducing the concept of KiB, Google introduces the concept of the equally confusing Gibibyte (GiB). While all of Google’s pricing tables are listed in terms of GB, the line items reference GiB. 1 GiB is 1.07374 GBs.

Google Cloud Storage billing details screenshot

Summary: Available, but provides descriptions in units that are not on the pricing table nor commonly used.

Test 2 Conclusions

Clearly, some vendors do a better job than others in making their pricing available and understandable. From a transparency standpoint, it’s difficult to justify why a vendor would have their pricing table in units of X, but then put units of Y in the user interface.

Transparency: The Backblaze Way

Transparency isn’t easy. At Backblaze, we believe in investing time and energy into presenting the most intuitive user interfaces that we can create. We take pride in our heritage in the consumer backup space — servicing consumers has taught us how to make things understandable and usable. We do our best to apply those lessons to everything we do.

This philosophy reflects our desire to make our products usable, but it’s also part of a larger ethos of being transparent with our customers. We are being trusted with precious data. We want to repay that trust with, among other things, transparency.

It’s that spirit that was behind the decision to publish our hard drive performance stats, to open source the infrastructure that is behind us having the lowest cost of storage in the industry, and also to open source our erasure coding (the math that drives a significant portion of our redundancy for your data).

Why? We believe it’s not just about good user interface, it’s about the relationship we want to build with our customers.

The post Cloud Storage Doesn’t have to be Convoluted, Complex, or Confusing appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Choosing a Backup Provider (An Intro to Backblaze)

2017-08-31 Roderick Bauer

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/an-intro-to-backblaze/

Hi! We’re Backblaze — a backup and cloud storage company in sunny San Mateo, California. We’ve been in business since 2007, have a great track record, and have been on a mission to make backing up simple, inexpensive, and unobtrusive.

This post hopes to serve as an introduction to Backblaze for folks that might not be familiar with us. If you’re an avid reader already, you’ll note that we’ve written about many of these stories before. We won’t be offended if you tune back in for the next post. For everyone else, we thought we’d give you a look at who we are, how we’ve remained committed to unlimited backup, and why we think you should give us a shot.

A Bit About our Background

“We never had deep VC pockets to burn cash. If we were unsustainable, we would have gone out of business 9 years ago.” — Gleb Budman, Backblaze CEO and cofounder

Backblaze just turned 10 years old (thanks for the birthday wishes), and we have a solid track record as a successful company. Backblaze was started by five founders who went without salaries for two years until they got the company profitable. That’s an accomplishment in and of itself. A decade later, we’ve “only” raised $5.3 Million in funding. Don’t get us wrong, $5M is a lot of money, but we do think it shows that we run a responsible company by providing industry leading backup solutions at fair prices.

Backblaze is Committed To Customers & Unlimited Data Backup

Since 2007, many companies have come into the backup space. Many of those, at some point or another, offered an unlimited data storage plan. In 2017, Backblaze stands alone as the remaining player offering truly unlimited data backup.

What is “truly unlimited?” To us, that means getting our customers backed up as quickly as possible — with no limits on file types or sizes. While there are other backup companies out there, few of them if any, offer unlimited services at a flat rate. Many force customers to choose between service tiers, leading to confusion and customer apprehension about how much data they have now, or will have later. By contrast, we are focused on making Backblaze easy to use, and easy to understand.

At Backblaze, backup means running efficiently in the background to get a copy of your data securely into the cloud. Because we’re truly unlimited, we operate on an “exclusion” model. That means, by default, we backup all of the user data on your computer. Of course, you can exclude anything you don’t want backed up. Other companies operate on an “inclusion” model — you need to proactively select folders and files to be backed up. Why did we choose “exclusion” over “inclusion?” Because in our model, if you do nothing, you are fully covered. The alternative may leave you forgetting that new folder you created or those important files on your desktop.

Operating under the “inclusion model” would mean we would store less data (which would reduce our costs), but we’re not interested in reducing our costs if it means leaving our customers unprotected. Because of decisions like that, we’re currently storing over 350PB of our customer data.

Recently, we released version 5.0 of our industry leading computer backup product. Among other things in that release, we introduced file sharing via URL and faster backups. Through something called auto-threading, we’ve increased the speed at which your data gets backed up. Our internal tests have us over 10x the speed of the competition. That’s how one Reddit user backed up almost one terabyte of data in fewer than 24 hours.

Not only are we committed to our Personal Backup users, but we’re also a leading destination for businesses as well. Our latest Backblaze for Business update gives businesses of any size all of the same great backup and security, while also adding an administrative console and tools through our Backblaze Groups feature.

Best of all our Backblaze Groups feature is available to every Backblaze user, so if you’re the “Head of I.T.” for your household and managing a few computers, you can manage your families backups with Groups as well.

How We Do It

The question often comes up, “How do you do it? How can you continue offering unlimited backup in an era where most everyone else has stopped?” The answer lies in our origins — because we didn’t have a lot of cash, we had to create a sustainable business. Among other things, we created our own Storage Pods, Storage Vaults, and software. Our purpose-built infrastructure is what gives us incredibly low cloud storage costs. That same storage architecture is the basis for B2 Cloud Storage, the most affordable object storage on the planet (B2 is ¼ of the price of the offerings from Amazon, Microsoft and Google). Backblaze B2’s APIs, CLIs, and integration partners also give users the flexibility of backing up Macs, PCs, Linux, and servers their own way, if they want to take control.

We think that kind of dedication, innovation, and frugality supports our claim to be a trustworthy caretaker of your data — videos, photos, business docs, and other precious memories.

Give Us a Try!

Give us a try with our free 15-day trial. We’d love to welcome you to your new backup home.

Have questions? Sound off in the comments below! We love hearing from current customers as well as those looking to come aboard.

The post Choosing a Backup Provider (An Intro to Backblaze) appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Security updates for Wednesday

2017-08-30 ris

Post Syndicated from ris original https://lwn.net/Articles/732396/rss

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libgcrypt20, poppler, and wordpress), Fedora (cvs, java-1.8.0-openjdk-aarch32, and postgresql), Mageia (gstreamer0.10-plugins-base, gstreamer1.0-plugins-base and libgit2), openSUSE (exim), Red Hat (instack-undercloud, openvswitch, and poppler), Scientific Linux (poppler), SUSE (kernel and quagga), and Ubuntu (linux-lts-trusty).

How to Configure an LDAPS Endpoint for Simple AD

2017-08-29 Cameron Worrell

Post Syndicated from Cameron Worrell original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-configure-an-ldaps-endpoint-for-simple-ad/

Simple AD, which is powered by Samba 4, supports basic Active Directory (AD) authentication features such as users, groups, and the ability to join domains. Simple AD also includes an integrated Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) server. LDAP is a standard application protocol for the access and management of directory information. You can use the BIND operation from Simple AD to authenticate LDAP client sessions. This makes LDAP a common choice for centralized authentication and authorization for services such as Secure Shell (SSH), client-based virtual private networks (VPNs), and many other applications. Authentication, the process of confirming the identity of a principal, typically involves the transmission of highly sensitive information such as user names and passwords. To protect this information in transit over untrusted networks, companies often require encryption as part of their information security strategy.

In this blog post, we show you how to configure an LDAPS (LDAP over SSL/TLS) encrypted endpoint for Simple AD so that you can extend Simple AD over untrusted networks. Our solution uses Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to send decrypted LDAP traffic to HAProxy running on Amazon EC2, which then sends the traffic to Simple AD. ELB offers integrated certificate management, SSL/TLS termination, and the ability to use a scalable EC2 backend to process decrypted traffic. ELB also tightly integrates with Amazon Route 53, enabling you to use a custom domain for the LDAPS endpoint. The solution needs the intermediate HAProxy layer because ELB can direct traffic only to EC2 instances. To simplify testing and deployment, we have provided an AWS CloudFormation template to provision the ELB and HAProxy layers.

This post assumes that you have an understanding of concepts such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and its components, including subnets, routing, Internet and network address translation (NAT) gateways, DNS, and security groups. You should also be familiar with launching EC2 instances and logging in to them with SSH. If needed, you should familiarize yourself with these concepts and review the solution overview and prerequisites in the next section before proceeding with the deployment.

Note: This solution is intended for use by clients requiring an LDAPS endpoint only. If your requirements extend beyond this, you should consider accessing the Simple AD servers directly or by using AWS Directory Service for Microsoft AD.

Solution overview

The following diagram and description illustrates and explains the Simple AD LDAPS environment. The CloudFormation template creates the items designated by the bracket (internal ELB load balancer and two HAProxy nodes configured in an Auto Scaling group).

Here is how the solution works, as shown in the preceding numbered diagram:

The LDAP client sends an LDAPS request to ELB on TCP port 636.
ELB terminates the SSL/TLS session and decrypts the traffic using a certificate. ELB sends the decrypted LDAP traffic to the EC2 instances running HAProxy on TCP port 389.
The HAProxy servers forward the LDAP request to the Simple AD servers listening on TCP port 389 in a fixed Auto Scaling group configuration.
The Simple AD servers send an LDAP response through the HAProxy layer to ELB. ELB encrypts the response and sends it to the client.

Note: Amazon VPC prevents a third party from intercepting traffic within the VPC. Because of this, the VPC protects the decrypted traffic between ELB and HAProxy and between HAProxy and Simple AD. The ELB encryption provides an additional layer of security for client connections and protects traffic coming from hosts outside the VPC.

Prerequisites

Our approach requires an Amazon VPC with two public and two private subnets. The previous diagram illustrates the environment’s VPC requirements. If you do not yet have these components in place, follow these guidelines for setting up a sample environment:
1. Identify a region that supports Simple AD, ELB, and NAT gateways. The NAT gateways are used with an Internet gateway to allow the HAProxy instances to access the internet to perform their required configuration. You also need to identify the two Availability Zones in that region for use by Simple AD. You will supply these Availability Zones as parameters to the CloudFormation template later in this process.
2. Create or choose an Amazon VPC in the region you chose. In order to use Route 53 to resolve the LDAPS endpoint, make sure you enable DNS support within your VPC. Create an Internet gateway and attach it to the VPC, which will be used by the NAT gateways to access the internet.
3. Create a route table with a default route to the Internet gateway. Create two NAT gateways, one per Availability Zone in your public subnets to provide additional resiliency across the Availability Zones. Together, the routing table, the NAT gateways, and the Internet gateway enable the HAProxy instances to access the internet.
4. Create two private routing tables, one per Availability Zone. Create two private subnets, one per Availability Zone. The dual routing tables and subnets allow for a higher level of redundancy. Add each subnet to the routing table in the same Availability Zone. Add a default route in each routing table to the NAT gateway in the same Availability Zone. The Simple AD servers use subnets that you create.
5. The LDAP service requires a DNS domain that resolves within your VPC and from your LDAP clients. If you do not have an existing DNS domain, follow the steps to create a private hosted zone and associate it with your VPC. To avoid encryption protocol errors, you must ensure that the DNS domain name is consistent across your Route 53 zone and in the SSL/TLS certificate (see Step 2 in the “Solution deployment” section).
Make sure you have completed the Simple AD Prerequisites.
We will use a self-signed certificate for ELB to perform SSL/TLS decryption. You can use a certificate issued by your preferred certificate authority or a certificate issued by AWS Certificate Manager (ACM).
Note: To prevent unauthorized connections directly to your Simple AD servers, you can modify the Simple AD security group on port 389 to block traffic from locations outside of the Simple AD VPC. You can find the security group in the EC2 console by creating a search filter for your Simple AD directory ID. It is also important to allow the Simple AD servers to communicate with each other as shown on Simple AD Prerequisites.

Solution deployment

This solution includes five main parts:

Create a Simple AD directory.
Create a certificate.
Create the ELB and HAProxy layers by using the supplied CloudFormation template.
Create a Route 53 record.
Test LDAPS access using an Amazon Linux client.

1. Create a Simple AD directory

With the prerequisites completed, you will create a Simple AD directory in your private VPC subnets:

In the Directory Service console navigation pane, choose Directories and then choose Set up directory.
Choose Simple AD.
Provide the following information:
- Directory DNS – The fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the directory, such as corp.example.com. You will use the FQDN as part of the testing procedure.
- NetBIOS name – The short name for the directory, such as CORP.
- Administrator password – The password for the directory administrator. The directory creation process creates an administrator account with the user name Administrator and this password. Do not lose this password because it is nonrecoverable. You also need this password for testing LDAPS access in a later step.
- Description – An optional description for the directory.
- Directory Size – The size of the directory.
Provide the following information in the VPC Details section, and then choose Next Step:
- VPC – Specify the VPC in which to install the directory.
- Subnets – Choose two private subnets for the directory servers. The two subnets must be in different Availability Zones. Make a note of the VPC and subnet IDs for use as CloudFormation input parameters. In the following example, the Availability Zones are us-east-1a and us-east-1c.
Review the directory information and make any necessary changes. When the information is correct, choose Create Simple AD.

It takes several minutes to create the directory. From the AWS Directory Service console , refresh the screen periodically and wait until the directory Status value changes to Active before continuing. Choose your Simple AD directory and note the two IP addresses in the DNS address section. You will enter them when you run the CloudFormation template later.

Note: Full administration of your Simple AD implementation is out of scope for this blog post. See the documentation to add users, groups, or instances to your directory. Also see the previous blog post, How to Manage Identities in Simple AD Directories.

2. Create a certificate

In the previous step, you created the Simple AD directory. Next, you will generate a self-signed SSL/TLS certificate using OpenSSL. You will use the certificate with ELB to secure the LDAPS endpoint. OpenSSL is a standard, open source library that supports a wide range of cryptographic functions, including the creation and signing of x509 certificates. You then import the certificate into ACM that is integrated with ELB.

You must have a system with OpenSSL installed to complete this step. If you do not have OpenSSL, you can install it on Amazon Linux by running the command, sudo yum install openssl. If you do not have access to an Amazon Linux instance you can create one with SSH access enabled to proceed with this step. Run the command, openssl version, at the command line to see if you already have OpenSSL installed.
```
[[email protected] ~]$ openssl version
OpenSSL 1.0.1k-fips 8 Jan 2015
```

Create a private key using the command, openssl genrsa command.

[[email protected] tmp]$ openssl genrsa 2048 > privatekey.pem
Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus
......................................................................................................................................................................+++
..........................+++
e is 65537 (0x10001)

Generate a certificate signing request (CSR) using the openssl req command. Provide the requested information for each field. The Common Name is the FQDN for your LDAPS endpoint (for example, ldap.corp.example.com). The Common Name must use the domain name you will later register in Route 53. You will encounter certificate errors if the names do not match.
```
[[email protected] tmp]$ openssl req -new -key privatekey.pem -out server.csr
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request.
```
Use the openssl x509 command to sign the certificate. The following example uses the private key from the previous step (privatekey.pem) and the signing request (server.csr) to create a public certificate named server.crt that is valid for 365 days. This certificate must be updated within 365 days to avoid disruption of LDAPS functionality.
```
[[email protected] tmp]$ openssl x509 -req -sha256 -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey privatekey.pem -out server.crt
Signature ok
subject=/C=XX/L=Default City/O=Default Company Ltd/CN=ldap.corp.example.com
Getting Private key
```
You should see three files: privatekey.pem, server.crt, and server.csr.
```
[[email protected] tmp]$ ls
privatekey.pem server.crt server.csr
```
Restrict access to the private key.
```
[[email protected] tmp]$ chmod 600 privatekey.pem
```
Keep the private key and public certificate for later use. You can discard the signing request because you are using a self-signed certificate and not using a Certificate Authority. Always store the private key in a secure location and avoid adding it to your source code.
In the ACM console, choose Import a certificate.
Using your favorite Linux text editor, paste the contents of your server.crt file in the Certificate body box.
Using your favorite Linux text editor, paste the contents of your privatekey.pem file in the Certificate private key box. For a self-signed certificate, you can leave the Certificate chain box blank.
Choose Review and import. Confirm the information and choose Import.

3. Create the ELB and HAProxy layers by using the supplied CloudFormation template

Now that you have created your Simple AD directory and SSL/TLS certificate, you are ready to use the CloudFormation template to create the ELB and HAProxy layers.

Load the supplied CloudFormation template to deploy an internal ELB and two HAProxy EC2 instances into a fixed Auto Scaling group. After you load the template, provide the following input parameters. Note: You can find the parameters relating to your Simple AD from the directory details page by choosing your Simple AD in the Directory Service console.

Input parameter	Input parameter description
HAProxyInstanceSize	The EC2 instance size for HAProxy servers. The default size is t2.micro and can scale up for large Simple AD environments.
MyKeyPair	The SSH key pair for EC2 instances. If you do not have an existing key pair, you must create one.
VPCId	The target VPC for this solution. Must be in the VPC where you deployed Simple AD and is available in your Simple AD directory details page.
SubnetId1	The Simple AD primary subnet. This information is available in your Simple AD directory details page.
SubnetId2	The Simple AD secondary subnet. This information is available in your Simple AD directory details page.
MyTrustedNetwork	Trusted network Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) to allow connections to the LDAPS endpoint. For example, use the VPC CIDR to allow clients in the VPC to connect.
SimpleADPriIP	The primary Simple AD Server IP. This information is available in your Simple AD directory details page.
SimpleADSecIP	The secondary Simple AD Server IP. This information is available in your Simple AD directory details page.
LDAPSCertificateARN	The Amazon Resource Name (ARN) for the SSL certificate. This information is available in the ACM console.

Enter the input parameters and choose Next.
On the Options page, accept the defaults and choose Next.
On the Review page, confirm the details and choose Create. The stack will be created in approximately 5 minutes.

4. Create a Route 53 record

The next step is to create a Route 53 record in your private hosted zone so that clients can resolve your LDAPS endpoint.

If you do not have an existing DNS domain for use with LDAP, create a private hosted zone and associate it with your VPC. The hosted zone name should be consistent with your Simple AD (for example, corp.example.com).
When the CloudFormation stack is in CREATE_COMPLETE status, locate the value of the LDAPSURL on the Outputs tab of the stack. Copy this value for use in the next step.
On the Route 53 console, choose Hosted Zones and then choose the zone you used for the Common Name box for your self-signed certificate. Choose Create Record Set and enter the following information:
1. Name – The label of the record (such as ldap).
2. Type – Leave as A – IPv4 address.
3. Alias – Choose Yes.
4. Alias Target – Paste the value of the LDAPSURL on the Outputs tab of the stack.
Leave the defaults for Routing Policy and Evaluate Target Health, and choose Create.

5. Test LDAPS access using an Amazon Linux client

At this point, you have configured your LDAPS endpoint and now you can test it from an Amazon Linux client.

Create an Amazon Linux instance with SSH access enabled to test the solution. Launch the instance into one of the public subnets in your VPC. Make sure the IP assigned to the instance is in the trusted IP range you specified in the CloudFormation parameter MyTrustedNetwork in Step 3.b.
SSH into the instance and complete the following steps to verify access.
1. Install the openldap-clients package and any required dependencies:
  sudo yum install -y openldap-clients.
2. Add the server.crt file to the /etc/openldap/certs/ directory so that the LDAPS client will trust your SSL/TLS certificate. You can copy the file using Secure Copy (SCP) or create it using a text editor.
3. Edit the /etc/openldap/ldap.conf file and define the environment variables BASE, URI, and TLS_CACERT.
  - The value for BASE should match the configuration of the Simple AD directory name.
  - The value for URI should match your DNS alias.
  - The value for TLS_CACERT is the path to your public certificate.

Here is an example of the contents of the file.

BASE dc=corp,dc=example,dc=com
URI ldaps://ldap.corp.example.com
TLS_CACERT /etc/openldap/certs/server.crt

To test the solution, query the directory through the LDAPS endpoint, as shown in the following command. Replace corp.example.com with your domain name and use the Administrator password that you configured with the Simple AD directory

$ ldapsearch -D "[email protected]corp.example.com" -W sAMAccountName=Administrator

You should see a response similar to the following response, which provides the directory information in LDAP Data Interchange Format (LDIF) for the administrator distinguished name (DN) from your Simple AD LDAP server.

# extended LDIF
#
# LDAPv3
# base <dc=corp,dc=example,dc=com> (default) with scope subtree
# filter: sAMAccountName=Administrator
# requesting: ALL
#

# Administrator, Users, corp.example.com
dn: CN=Administrator,CN=Users,DC=corp,DC=example,DC=com
objectClass: top
objectClass: person
objectClass: organizationalPerson
objectClass: user
description: Built-in account for administering the computer/domain
instanceType: 4
whenCreated: 20170721123204.0Z
uSNCreated: 3223
name: Administrator
objectGUID:: l3h0HIiKO0a/ShL4yVK/vw==
userAccountControl: 512
…

You can now use the LDAPS endpoint for directory operations and authentication within your environment. If you would like to learn more about how to interact with your LDAPS endpoint within a Linux environment, here are a few resources to get started:

Using ldapsearch to locate and retrieve directory entries
Using ldapmodify to make changes to directory entries
Managing access with the System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) – SSSD can be used within a Linux environment to authenticate LDAP sessions.

Troubleshooting

If you receive an error such as the following error when issuing the ldapsearch command, there are a few things you can do to help identify issues.

ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1)

You might be able to obtain additional error details by adding the -d1 debug flag to the ldapsearch command in the previous section.
```
$ ldapsearch -D "[email protected]" -W sAMAccountName=Administrator –d1
```
Verify that the parameters in ldap.conf match your configured LDAPS URI endpoint and that all parameters can be resolved by DNS. You can use the following dig command, substituting your configured endpoint DNS name.
```
$ dig ldap.corp.example.com
```
Confirm that the client instance from which you are connecting is in the CIDR range of the CloudFormation parameter, MyTrustedNetwork.
Confirm that the path to your public SSL/TLS certificate configured in ldap.conf as TLS_CAERT is correct. You configured this in Step 5.b.3. You can check your SSL/TLS connection with the command, substituting your configured endpoint DNS name for the string after –connect.
```
$ echo -n | openssl s_client -connect ldap.corp.example.com:636
```
Verify that your HAProxy instances have the status InService in the EC2 console: Choose Load Balancers under Load Balancing in the navigation pane, highlight your LDAPS load balancer, and then choose the Instances

Conclusion

You can use ELB and HAProxy to provide an LDAPS endpoint for Simple AD and transport sensitive authentication information over untrusted networks. You can explore using LDAPS to authenticate SSH users or integrate with other software solutions that support LDAP authentication. This solution’s CloudFormation template is available on GitHub.

If you have comments about this post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about or issues implementing this solution, start a new thread on the Directory Service forum.

– Cameron and Jeff

Hacking a Phone Through a Replacement Touchscreen

2017-08-28 Bruce Schneier

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/hacking_a_phone.html

Researchers demonstrated a really clever hack: they hid malware in a replacement smart phone screen. The idea is that you would naively bring your smart phone in for repair, and the repair shop would install this malicious screen without your knowledge. The malware is hidden in touchscreen controller software, which is trusted by the phone.

The concern arises from research that shows how replacement screens — one put into a Huawei Nexus 6P and the other into an LG G Pad 7.0 — can be used to surreptitiously log keyboard input and patterns, install malicious apps, and take pictures and e-mail them to the attacker. The booby-trapped screens also exploited operating system vulnerabilities that bypassed key security protections built into the phones. The malicious parts cost less than $10 and could easily be mass-produced. Most chilling of all, to most people, the booby-trapped parts could be indistinguishable from legitimate ones, a trait that could leave many service technicians unaware of the maliciousness. There would be no sign of tampering unless someone with a background in hardware disassembled the repaired phone and inspected it.

Academic paper. BoingBoing post.

Noise

Tag Archives: trust

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Играта на доверие

Hacking a Phone Through a Replacement Touchscreen

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