It has been an interesting year of breaches, vulnerabilities, and scares. With the more recent ROCA vulnerability in Infineon’s TPM, a widely used module in the Smart Card industry, to the less-exploitable-but-still-serious KRACK vulnerability that makes hacking the WPA2 Wi-Fi security protocol possible, to the supply chain attack of CCleaner, a popular utility program for cleaning up a user’s computer.

What is clearly emerging from such events is that there is still much work to be done in the security space. The Ixia Security Report for 2017 describes an increase in the amount of malware and an increase in the size of company’s attack surface. Attack surface is the exposed, or public-facing, “surface area” of a company. Some have attributed the increase of attack surface to an increased usage and misconfiguration of cloud infrastructure. They argue that misconfiguration of servers looks to be replacing some of the more traditional OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities — such as SQL injection.

But the vulnerabilities listed above (ROCA, KRACK, and the CCleaner supply chain attack) aren’t necessarily cloud-related.

ROCA relates to an incorrectly-implemented software library — specifically the key pair generation. It allows an attacker to factor the private (secret) key just from using the public key. Modern encryption relies on a public key (that is sent to whoever wants it) and a secret (private) key that only the owner has and is used to decrypt messages. Only the private key can decrypt messages to the owner. This vulnerability allows anyone with the public key and some decent computational power (say an AWS cluster used to number-crunch) to get the original private key and decrypt the messages sent to the original owner. The computational power required is in the realm of “expensive but possible”. A targeted attack is a very real possibility, but widespread breaching would be infeasible.

KRACK involves a replay attack. “By repeatedly resetting the nonce transmitted in the third step of the WPA2 handshake, an attacker can gradually match encrypted packets seen before and learn the full keychain used to encrypt the traffic”. This vulnerability requires a physical component as the attacker will have to be on the Wi-Fi network. The cause is inherent to the standard — which means all correctly-implemented versions of the standard are vulnerable (i.e. Libraries that implemented it to spec). Many security practitioners have taken this particular moment in time to explain that the usage of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) would mitigate such attacks, and that Wi-Fi should be an un-trusted source to begin with.

The CCleaner supply chain attack included an injection of malware in a library that is used in the implementation of CCleaner. When the CCleaner program is packaged and deployed it will include this third-party library in its package. This type of attack takes advantage of consumer’s trust in CCleaner, and it is becoming a more popular attack for hackers. For the record, CCleaner has been sanitized and is no longer a threat from this malware. I imagine Avast, the company that offers CCleaner, also took a look at their supply chain trust and revamped some policies around it.

Each of these attacks are in addition to the general increase of attack surface and the misconfiguration of servers (that are becoming more common). There is an increase of supply chain attacks because they clearly work. There are plenty of incorrect implementations of standards or protocols that hackers can take advantage of. There are, far less often, errors in the actual standard or protocol themselves.

It may seem like the odds are piled against an organization’s security team. They are. That is why security is not only the responsibility of the security team, but the entire organization from the executive branch to the developers (who choose to implement specific libraries in their software) to the tech support teams that are often on the “front-line” with customers.

Education is always a good first step.