Half a year before the patch, Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing at IOActive, had an idea for faster content delivery: get around the domain name system's time to live, so that a server fetched a fresh answer for every lookup. Only later, talking it over casually with a friend, did he see that the trick could break the security of the whole system, and he wrote a little code to make sure. "Once I saw it work, my stomach dropped," he told Technology Review. He rang Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium, which maintains the BIND name server. Explaining took twenty seconds, Vixie recalled, and answering his objections twenty more; then Vixie asked him never again to say it over an unsecured mobile phone.
The fault lay in the protocol, not in any one product. A resolver accepted a forged answer if it carried the right sixteen-bit transaction ID, one of 65,536 values, and caching normally allowed an attacker one race per name until the stored answer expired. Kaminsky's method asked about random names that did not exist, so the races never stopped, and each forgery carried records making the attacker's servers the authority for the whole domain; his test attacks succeeded in as little as ten seconds. On 31 March sixteen experts meeting at Microsoft in Redmond agreed that every vendor would release its fix on the same day. On Tuesday 8 July Microsoft, ISC, Cisco, Sun and dozens of others shipped fixes that randomised each query's source port, about sixteen more bits to guess, and CERT/CC published VU#800113.
Kaminsky wanted defenders to have thirty days, and asked researchers not to speculate before his Black Hat talk. Thomas Ptacek of Matasano Security at first doubted there was "any meat" to the announcement; after Kaminsky briefed him by telephone on 9 July he wrote: "Dan's got the goods." On Monday 21 July Thomas Dullien, the German researcher known as Halvar Flake, posted a guess, admitting his DNS knowledge was limited. Shortly afterwards a post on Matasano's blog confirmed it in detail. The firm had kept it ready for the August talk; it was quickly taken down, but "it takes only seconds," Ptacek wrote in apology, "for Internet publications to spread." Kaminsky answered "13>0" — thirteen days of patching beat none — and "Patch. Today. Now. Yes, stay late."
Code followed. On Wednesday 23 July HD Moore and I)ruid of the Computer Academic Underground released a Metasploit module with an advisory; it planted one forged host name, and by the next day a second, for seizing whole domains, had followed. On Tuesday 29 July staff at BreakingPoint Systems in Austin, where Moore directed security research, noticed trouble after friends and family using the same AT&T resolver found that Google did not look quite right. Its cache entry for www.google.com had been replaced with four frames, one a fake Google, three loading ad-clickers from other compromised servers. GCN reported it as apparently the first instance of the exploit in the wild; once BreakingPoint contacted the provider, Moore wrote, the server was taken offline. "It's funny," Moore said. "I got owned."
Passwords for the Mayor
On Wednesday 9 July 2008 Terry Childs, principal network engineer at San Francisco's Department of Telecommunications and Information Services, was asked for the administrative passwords to FiberWAN, the fibre network he had configured and run since 2005 to give most city departments email, databases and the internet. By March he had set its core routers so that a power cut would wipe their configurations until he reloaded them himself. A speakerphone carried the meeting to the data centre, where his manager, colleagues and Cisco engineers listened. Childs said he no longer had administrative access, which was untrue, then gave passwords that did not work, and a police inspector warned him that refusing could break the state's computer-crime law. He was put on leave, arrested on the night of Saturday 12 July as he returned to his home in Pittsburg, and held on $5 million bail. On Monday 21 July Mayor Gavin Newsom visited him in jail. Through his lawyer Childs gave the mayor the passwords and backup configurations and, when the first attempt to use them failed, the details that let the city back in.
Free to Publish
In March 2008 the Digital Security group at Radboud University Nijmegen found that Crypto-1, the proprietary cipher in NXP Semiconductors' MIFARE Classic chip, let its 48-bit keys be recovered relatively easily. The chip sat inside the Dutch OV-chipkaart, London's Oyster card and many building passes. The university told the Dutch government and NXP in confidence. In June The Register reported that two of the group's researchers had cloned an Oyster card, ridden the Underground free and put credit back on it with an ordinary laptop; Transport for London answered that "the most anyone could gain from a rogue card is one day's travel." NXP, whose spokesperson called publication "irresponsible", asked the court in Arnhem to stop the group's paper, "Dismantling MIFARE Classic", and the case was heard on 10 July. On 18 July the judge ruled that the group, led by Professor Bart Jacobs, could publish, because "the publication of scientific studies carries a lot of weight in a democratic society"; NXP said it was disappointed. The paper was presented in Málaga that October, at ESORICS.
A Server in India
On Wednesday 2 July 2008 the telecom secretary, Siddhartha Behura, said: "There is no threat from BlackBerry services." Operators needed no permission to offer them, he added: "We have not given permission to anybody, we have not disallowed anybody." The Financial Express called it a volte-face. Since April the telecom department had barred Tata Teleservices from launching BlackBerry until a monitoring system was in place "to the satisfaction of the security agencies" and "the master key and algorithm are deposited with the licensor", and the government had written to Research In Motion asking it to put servers in India. RIM said in a customer update in May that it held no copy of its customers' encryption keys and would "simply be unable to accommodate" any such request.
Behura allowed that the agencies had "raised certain issues and talks are on regarding them". Two days later the telecom minister, A. Raja, said the department was separately looking at a third-party solution: "We cannot throw out BlackBerry services but the question is how to keep this service, while taking care of security measures at the same time." The emails claiming the bombings in Ahmedabad on 26 July, and the unsecured Wi-Fi networks they were sent through, belong to September. Tata launched its service on 18 September, after Behura's word that no permission was needed, The Financial Express reported, while the National Security Adviser was still looking into the security issues. The demand returned as a deadline in August 2010, and reports in February 2012 said RIM would allow interception of Messenger and consumer email.
Polaris beats the poker professionals
From 3 to 6 July 2008, at a Las Vegas expo, the University of Alberta's program Polaris played heads-up limit Texas hold'em against a team of professionals. Each deal was played twice, with the cards reversed, to cancel out luck. After a draw and a defeat Polaris came from behind to win by three matches to two. Unlike the program of a year earlier, Michael Bowling explained, it recognised an opponent's style and switched to a strategy that countered it. On 1 July Microsoft had agreed to buy Powerset, a San Francisco start-up whose engine, built on language technology licensed from PARC, searched Wikipedia by meaning rather than keywords, for a reported $100 million. At the International Conference on Machine Learning in Helsinki, Ronan Collobert and Jason Weston of NEC Labs presented a single deep network trained on several language tasks at once, learning word vectors as it went; it won ICML's Test of Time award in 2018. Alberta's Cepheus essentially solved heads-up limit hold'em in January 2015, and professionals were beaten at no-limit in January 2017.
Sophos and McAfee buy into data protection
On 28 July 2008 Sophos announced a cash offer of €14.75 a share for Utimaco Safeware, valuing the German data-security company at €217 million, 92 per cent above its last closing price; Investcorp Technology Partners had already agreed to sell its 24.99 per cent stake. Steve Munford, Sophos's chief executive, said information security should be "as commonplace as anti-virus protection". On 31 July McAfee agreed to pay $46 million in cash for Reconnex, a privately owned data-loss-prevention company whose technology, McAfee said, could protect a network's information without being told in advance what needed protecting. By 9 July AVG had changed LinkScanner, the link checker in AVG 8, after webmasters complained that it visited every link in its users' search results, disguised as Internet Explorer 6, swelling their traffic figures; it now checked a local blacklist and scanned only links that were clicked. Sophos held more than three-quarters of Utimaco by the end of September; it kept the SafeGuard encryption line and in 2013 sold the rest of the company to management and financial investors.
⏳ Time capsule — July 2008
- On 6 July Rafael Nadal beat Roger Federer 6–4, 6–4, 6–7, 6–7, 9–7 in the Wimbledon final. Interrupted by rain, it ran to 4 hours and 48 minutes of play, then the longest singles final in the tournament's history, and finished in near darkness at 9.15 in the evening, ending Federer's run of 40 consecutive match wins at Wimbledon.
- On 10 July Apple opened the App Store with 500 third-party applications, and on 11 July the iPhone 3G went on sale in 22 countries. Apple counted ten million application downloads, and a million phones sold, over the first weekend.
- On 18 July Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight opened in North America and took $158.4 million in its first weekend, beating the record set by Spider-Man 3; it went on to gross more than $1 billion worldwide.
- On 22 July the Lok Sabha passed a motion of confidence in Manmohan Singh's government by 275 votes to 256. It had been sought after the Left parties withdrew their support over the civil nuclear agreement with the United States, and the result let the government take the agreement forward.
Sixteen more bits
When Kaminsky gave his talk at Black Hat on 6 August, more than 120 million broadband customers had, by his count, been protected. The new ports bought time, not safety. ISC's advisory called DNSSEC, which lets a resolver check an answer against a signature, "the only full solution"; the root zone was signed on 15 July 2010, with Kaminsky among its seven recovery key shareholders. He co-wrote the paper against court-ordered DNS filtering told in January 2012, and died in April 2021. By then a team led from the University of California, Riverside had shown with SAD DNS, in November 2020, that a side channel could give away a resolver's source port and revive the attack of 2008. In 2026 DNSSEC is widely deployed, though not universally.
The month's other stories took years to close. A judge threw out all but one count against Childs; on 27 April 2010 a jury convicted him of denying computer services to the city, and on 6 August 2010, with 755 days already served, he was sentenced to four years. In May 2011 he was ordered to pay the city $1,485,791, and on 25 October 2013 the Court of Appeal upheld both. Boston's transit authority went to court over a talk on the same MIFARE chip in August. India's agencies had lawful interception of BlackBerry's consumer services ready by July 2013, but not of its corporate mail. Behind this edition the archive runs back through June 2008 to January 2008.