Aadhaar on Blockchain : Consider or not? - Post 1/2

[This post builds upon introducing Aadhaar,its size,current way of handling the data sets,discuss its problems and subsequently followed by proposing Blockchain as a solution]

1.   When Aadhaar was originally introduced around 2009-10 by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI),it would not have envisaged the kind of Data juggling,analytics and security threats it would be subjected to in times to come.And here we are around the third quarter of 2018,wherein Aadhaar is central to so many authentications in the country ,being exploited in so many public utility services and also at the same time being subjected to all kind of threats and claims of data theft and leaks.For a record,it is estimated that around 1.2 billion citizens record are held in the CENTRAL servers and thus forms the worlds largest bio-metric identity repository in the world.UIDAI claims that the same is protected by layers of state of art cryptography in central servers located in the country. 

2.  Now in the world of IT,wherein claiming to be 100% secure is likely to remain a myth for ages ahead,can something like un-hackable really exist on this earth? We may harden something,we may actually add layers of security, we may do every possible hard encryption on this earth,but can we imagine a fool-proof IT domain anywhere. The question here attains severe importance when a Bio-metric repository data of 1.2 billion plus population of a country is at stake.

3.  Now what do we have on the platter here,if we consider the size of data,we can have the following assumptions :

(a) Per person biometric data size : 4-6 MB (Maximum I take)

(b) Approx data populated for : Around 1.25 billion plus ie 1,250,000,000 count

Total data ie to say 6 MB x 1,250,000,000 = 7500000000 MB Data ie around 7.5 Petabyte.....that's it...extrapolate the same with on-site backup and mirrors around...disaster recovery sites...we may just be discussing around 20 PB of data.

Even if we consider,augmenting data with the remaining population and generations ahead,we will be at max around 40-45PB of data to suffice around next few decades.That's all from point of view of the scalability of data and size.

4.  Now for this amount data, what are our security options in the present scenario.

Firstly we keep doing permutations and combinations and applying layers of hard coded security to the central servers that we have at various locations mirrored to each other.This presently includes the following : [SOURCE : http://www.cse.iitd.ernet.in/~suban/reports/aadhaar.pdf]

- 2048 bit PKI  encryption of biometric data in transit. End-to-end encryption from enrollment/POS to CIDR.

-   Trusted network carriers.

-  Effective precaution against denial of service (DOS) attacks.

- HMAC(keyed-hash message authentication code) based tamper detection of PID (Personal Identity Data) blocks,  which encapsulate bio-metric and other data at the field devices.

-  Registration and authentication of AUAs.

-  Within CIDR only a SHA-n Hash of Aadhaar number is stored.

-  Audit trails are stored SHA-n encrypted, possibly also with HMAC based tamper detection.

-  Only hashes of passwords and PINs are stored. 

-  Biometric data are stored in original form though.

-  Authentication requests have unique session keys and HMAC.

- Protection against replay attacks.

-  Resident data stored using 100 way sharding (vertical partitioning).First two digits of Aadhaar number are used as shared keys.

-  All system accesses, including administration, through a hardware security module (HSM) which maintains an audit trail.

-  All analytics carried out only on anonymized data.

From the IT guys perspectives,don't we actually know that above are all individual knitted layers and tools of security wherein we are creating a very complex network of solution for ourselves which might get even more complex to handle and manage in times to come with more severe security threats in pipelines. 

At the same time, above all solutions and knits combinations are looking and bracing for external threats while we take the insider threats as negligible or taken for granted any day.

So do we have any other ecosystem of architecture that turns the tables upside down from the security and immutability point of view while OFFERING A MORE ROBUST SECURE IMMUTABLE AND TRANSPARENT ARCHITECTURE...whether BLOCKCHAIN can be a solution?

So,we have the above scenario which discusses what do we have on the platter and what are we actually doing to negate the threats....the next post will discuss how BLOCKCHAIN can assist to negate the security threats Aadhaar faces as on date.

Testing UBUNTU for SHELLSHOCK vulnerability

Shellshock,the now famous vulnerability in GNU's bash shell that gives attackers access to run remote commands on a vulnerable system. If your system has not updated bash in since Tue Sep 30 2014: 1:32PM EST , you're most definitely vulnerable and have been since first boot. This security vulnerability affects versions 1.14 (released in 1994) to the most recent version 4.3.Its always good to at least close known bugs and holes since zero vulnerabilities always exist....here i bring out few ready made cut/paste terminal commands to test your UBUNTU...This simply involves running of a script shellshock_test.sh.Source code at https://github.com/wreiske/shellshocker/blob/master/shellshock_test.sh

Screen shot shown below as run from my system :  

Terminal cmd : curl https://shellshocker.net/shellshock_test.sh | bash

(Click to ENLARGE)

THREATS TERMINOLOGY & GLOSSARY : PART 1

1. The term VIRUS is still used in talks amongst the victims of so many threats which are relatively unknown to the normal user.Here I am putting down the commonly known present day threat terminology.I am missing out on the regular ones that include Malware,adware,spyware,spam etc....

BACKDOOR 

2. A remote administration utility which bypasses normal security mechanisms to secretly control a program, computer or network. These utilities may be legitimate, and may be used for legitimate reasons by authorized administrators, but they may also be misused by attackers. A backdoor is usually able to gain control of a system because it exploits vulnerabilities, bugs or undocumented processes in the system's code. 

A Variation: The IRC Backdoor 

3. There also exist IRC backdoors, which are controlled via bots hidden in specific invite-only IRC channels accessible only to the attacker; these bots serve as the client component of the traditional client-server backdoor arrangement. 

BLUE TOOTH WORM 

4.  A platform-specific type of worm that propagates primarily over a Bluetooth network. This type of worm is almost always designed to function on mobile devices, which make more use of Bluetooth connectivity than computers. 

BOT 

5. A malicious program that, on being installed onto a computer system, allows the attacker to enslave the system into a network of similarly affected systems known as a botnet. The individual computers in a botnet may also be referred to as a bot or a zombie. 

BOTNET 

6.  A portmanteau formed from the words robot and network, a 'botnet' is a network of infected computers that can be remotely controlled by an attacker, usually via a command-and-control (C&C) server. Each infected computer may be known as a bot , a zombie computer , or a zombie . 

BROWSER HELPER OBJECT (BHO) 

7.   A type of web browser plug-in specifically designed for use with the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. A Browser Helper Object (BHO) executes automatically every time the browser is launched and provides functionality that is not built-in to the browser. 

CROSS SITE SCRIPTING 

8.   A type of attack in which malicious scripts are injected into a legitimate website in oder to be served to subsequent site visitors. Cross site scripting (XSS) attacks can result in a variety of effects, including hijacked web browsing sessions, stolen session cookies, information theft and more. As more people become increasingly dependent on web-based services, XSS attacks are becoming increasingly common. 

DENIAL OF SERVICE

9.   A type of Internet-based attack that aims to deny legitimate users access to a service (for example, a website or a network) by overloading a relevant computer resource or network device. The most common type of Denial of Service (DoS) attack takes the form of a massive amount of requests being sent from a host machine to the target, for example, a government website server. 

ICMP Flood

10.   The attackers sends out a flood of ICMP_ECHO packets to the target, swamping CPU usage and effectively rendering the target unusable until the flood is ended or the target is reset or restarted. 

Peer to Peer attack

11.   Attacker exploit bugs in peer-to-peer servers and redirect clients from the peer-to-peer server to the target server instead, flooding the target with thousands of connections and overwhelming its resources. 

Application level floods: A DoS attack carried out via particular applications, most commonly Internet chat systems. The most common kind of flood is an IRC flood, which is carried out on the popular IRC chat system. 

DISTRIBUTED DENIAL OF SERVICE (DDOS)

12.   A type of attack conducted over the Internet, using the combined resources of many computers to bombard, and frequently crash, a targeted computer system or resource (e.g., a program, website or network). 

GENERIC DETECTION

13.   A new type of sophisticated detection that is being increasingly used by antivirus programs to identify programs with malicious characteristics. Unlike more traditional detections (also known as signature-based or single-file detections) a Generic Detection does not identify a unique or individual malicious program. Instead, a Generic Detection looks for broadly applicable code or behavior characteristics that indicate a file as potentially malicious, so that a single Generic Detection can efficiently identify dozens, or even hundreds of malware. 

POLYMORPHIC VIRUS

14.   A virus that mutates, or modifies, its own code at various intervals. The changes in code typically occur each time the virus replicates, or infects a new machine. Detection and disinfection of a polymorphic virus can be very challenging, as mutating code makes traditional signature-based detection methods ineffective. Nowadays, many antivirus programs instead use heuristic analysis to identify polymorphic viruses.

POLYMORPHISM

15.   The act of a virus 'mutating' parts of its code at various intervals in order to evade detections. By constantly changing its code, a virus ensures that each iteration of its code looks different from the preceding one, making it impossible for traditional signature-based antivirus programs to identify the two iterations as one and the same virus. These so-called 'mutating viruses' can be divided into polymorphic and metamorphic viruses. 

Polymorphic Versus Metamorphic 

16.   A metamorphic virus works performs its mutation routine differently. Rather than using encryption to obfuscate its virus body, a metamorphic virus 'rearranges' entire chunks of actual code between iterations in order to create a seemingly different virus. The changes in code are directed by a metamorphic engine and despite the alterations, do not affect function - that is, the virus is still able to perform the same malicious actions through each iteration. Fortunately, the major code changes performed by a metamorphic virus require a high degree of technical skill from the virus author, and there are very few such viruses in the wild so far.

ZERO DAY

17.   A type of attack that exploits a recently publicized vulnerability or security loophole, before program vendors or the security community are able to develop a patch for the vulnerability. The period between the public announcement of a vulnerability and the first release of a patch fixing the vulnerability is also sometimes referred to as "zero hour" – even if the actual timespan is longer than an hour. Dealing With Zero-Day attacks A zero-day attack can be very destructive, as vulnerable systems generally have few defenses against it.