fidzu : gentoo

Gentoo elections are conducted using a custom software called votify. During the voting period, the developers place their votes in their respective home directories on one of the Gentoo servers. Afterwards, the election officials collect the votes, count them, compare their results and finally announce them.

The simplified description stated above suggests two weak points. Firstly, we rely on honesty of election officials. If they chose to conspire, they could fake the result. Secondly, we rely on honesty of all Infrastructure members, as they could use root access to manipulate the votes (or the collection process).

To protect against possible fraud, we make the elections transparent (but pseudonymous). This means that all votes cast are public, so everyone can count them and verify the result. Furthermore, developers can verify whether their personal vote has been included. Ideally, all developers would do that and therefore confirm that no votes were manipulated.

Currently, we are pretty much implicitly relying on developers doing that, and assuming that no protest implies successful verification. However, this is not really reliable, and given the unfriendly nature of our scripts I have reasons to doubt that the majority of developers actually verify the election results. In this post, I would like to shortly explain how Gentoo elections work, how they could be manipulated and introduce Votrify - a tool to explicitly verify election results.

Gentoo voting process in detail

Once the nomination period is over, an election official sets the voting process up by creating control files for the voting scripts. Those control files include election name, voting period, ballot (containing all vote choices) and list of eligible voters.

There are no explicit events corresponding to the beginning or the end of voting period. The votify script used by developers reads election data on each execution, and uses it to determine whether the voting period is open. During the voting period, it permits the developer to edit the vote, and finally to 'submit' it. Both draft and submitted vote are stored as appropriate files in the developer's home directory, 'submitted' votes are not collected automatically. This means that the developer can still manually manipulate the vote once voting period concludes, and before the votes are manually collected.

Votes are collected explicitly by an election official. When run, the countify script collects all vote files from developers' home directories. An unique 'confirmation ID' is generated for each voting developer. All votes along with their confirmation IDs are placed in so-called 'master ballot', while mapping from developer names to confirmation IDs is stored separately. The latter is used to send developers their respective confirmation IDs, and can be discarded afterwards.

Each of the election officials uses the master ballot to count the votes. Afterwards, they compare their results and if they match, they announce the election results. The master ballot is attached to the announcement mail, so that everyone can verify the results.

Possible manipulations

The three methods of manipulating the vote that I can think of are:

1. Announcing fake results. An election result may be presented that does not match the votes cast. This is actively prevented by having multiple election officials, and by making the votes transparent so that everyone can count them.
2. Manipulating votes cast by developers. The result could be manipulated by modifying the votes cast by individual developers. This is prevented by including pseudonymous vote attribution in the master ballot. Every developer can therefore check whether his/her vote has been reproduced correctly. However, this presumes that the developer is active.
3. Adding fake votes to the master ballot. The result could be manipulated by adding votes that were not cast by any of the existing developers. This is a major problem, and such manipulation is entirely plausible if the turnout is low enough, and developers who did not vote fail to check whether they have not been added to the casting voter list.

Furthermore, the efficiency of the last method can be improved if the attacker is able to restrict communication between voters and/or reliably deliver different versions of the master ballot to different voters, i.e. convince the voters that their own vote was included correctly while manipulating the remaining votes to achieve the desired result. The former is rather unlikely but the latter is generally feasible.

Finally, the results could be manipulated via manipulating the voting software. This can be counteracted through verifying the implementation against the algorithm specification or, to some degree, via comparing the results a third party tool. Robin H. Johnson and myself were historically working on this (or more specifically, on verifying whether the Gentoo implementation of Schulze method is correct) but neither of us was able to finish the work. If you're interested in the topic, you can look at my election-compare repository. For the purpose of this post, I'm going to consider this possibility out of scope.

Verifying election results using Votrify

Votrify uses a two-stage verification model. It consists of individual verification which is performed by each voter separately and produces signed confirmations, and community verification that uses the aforementioned files to provide final verified election result.

The individual verification part involves:

1. Verifying that the developer's vote has been recorded correctly. This takes part in detecting whether any votes have been manipulated. The positive result of this verification is implied by the fact that a confirmation is produced. Additionally, developers who did not cast a vote also need to produce confirmations, in order to detect any extraneous votes.
2. Counting the votes and producing the election result. This produces the election results as seen from the developer's perspective, and therefore prevents manipulation via announcing fake results. Furthermore, comparing the results between different developers helps finding implementation bugs.
3. Hashing the master ballot. The hash of master ballot file is included, and comparing it between different results confirms that all voters received the same master ballot.

If the verification is positive, a confirmation is produced and signed using developer's OpenPGP key. I would like to note that no private data is leaked in the process. It does not even indicate whether the dev in question has actually voted - only that he/she participates in the verification process.

Afterwards, confirmations from different voters are collected. They are used to perform community verification which involves:

1. Verifying the OpenPGP signature. This is necessary to confirm the authenticity of the signed confirmation. The check also involves verifying that the key owner was an eligible voter and that each voter produced only one confirmation. Therefore, it prevents attempts to~fake the verification results.
2. Comparing the results and master ballot hashes. This confirms that everyone participating received the same master ballot, and produced the same results.

If the verification for all confirmations is positive, the election results are repeated, along with explicit quantification of how trustworthy they are. The number indicates how many confirmations were used, and therefore how many of the votes (or non-votes) in master ballot were confirmed. The difference between the number of eligible voters and the number of confirmations indicates how many votes may have been altered, planted or deleted. Ideally, if all eligible voters produced signed confirmations, the election would be 100% confirmed.

09 Jul 2019 2:15pm GMT

So I wanted an autoclicker for linux - for one of my browser based games that require a lot of clicking.

Looked around and tried to find something useful, but all i could find was old pages outdated download links,..

In the end I stumbled upon something simple yet immensely more powerful:xdotool (github) or check out the xdootool website

As an extra bonus it is in the Gentoo repository so a simple

emerge xdotool

Got it installed. it also has minimal dependencies which is nice.

The good part, but also a bit of a downside is that there is no UI (maybe I'll write one when I get a chance .. just as a wrapper).

anyway to do what I wanted was simply this:

xdotool click --repeat 1000 --delay 100 1

Pretty self explainatory, but here's a short explaination anyway:

• click .. simulate a mouse click
• --repeat 1000 ... repeat 1000 times
• --delay 100 ... wait 100ms between clicks
• 1 .. mouse button 1

The only problem is I need to know how many clicks I need beforehand - which can also be a nice feature of course.

There is one way to stop it if you have the terminal you ran this command from visible (which i always have - and set it to always on top): click with your left mouse button - this stops the click events being registered since it is mouse-down and waits for mouse-up i guess .. but not sure if that is the reason. then move to the terminal and either close it or ctrl+c abort the command -- or just wait for the program to exit after finishing the requested number of clicks. -- On a side note if you don't like that way of stopping it you could always just ctrl+alt+f1 (or whatever terminal you want to use) and log in there and kill the xdotool process (either find thepid and kill it or just killall xdotool - which will of course kill all, but i doubt you'll run more than one at once)

09 Jul 2019 2:02pm GMT

The recent key poisoning attack on SKS keyservers shook the world of OpenPGP. While this isn't a new problem, it has not been exploited on this scale before. The attackers have proved how easy it is to poison commonly used keys on the keyservers and effectively render GnuPG unusably slow. A renewed discussion on improving keyservers has started as a result. It also forced Gentoo to employ countermeasures. You can read more on them in the 'Impact of SKS keyserver poisoning on Gentoo' news item.

Coincidentally, the attack happened shortly after the launch of keys.openpgp.org, that advertises itself as both poisoning-resistant and GDPR-friendly keyserver. Naturally, many users see it as the ultimate solution to the issues with SKS. I'm afraid I have to disagree - in my opinion, this keyserver does not solve any problems, it merely cripples OpenPGP in order to avoid being affected by them, and harms its security in the process.

In this article, I'd like to shortly explain what the problem is, and which of the different solutions proposed so far to it (e.g. on gnupg-users mailing list) make sense, and which make things even worse. Naturally, I will also cover the new Hagrid keyserver as one of the glorified non-solutions.

The attack - key poisoning

OpenPGP uses a distributed design - once the primary key is created, additional packets can be freely appended to it and recombined on different systems. Those packets include subkeys, user identifiers and signatures. Signatures are used to confirm the authenticity of appended packets. The packets are only meaningful if the client can verify the authenticity of their respective signatures.

The attack is carried through third-party signatures that normally are used by different people to confirm the authenticity of the key - that is, to state that the signer has verified the identity of the key owner. It relies on three distinct properties of OpenPGP:

1. The key can contain unlimited number of signatures. After all, it is natural that very old keys will have a large number of signatures made by different people on them.
2. Anyone can append signatures to any OpenPGP key. This is partially keyserver policy, and partially the fact that SKS keyserver nodes are propagating keys one to another.
3. There is no way to distinguish legitimate signatures from garbage. To put it other way, it is trivial to make garbage signatures look like the real deal.

The attacker abuses those properties by creating a large number of garbage signatures and sending them to keyservers. When users fetch key updates from the keyserver, GnuPG normally appends all those signatures to the local copy. As a result, the key becomes unusually large and causes severe performance issues with GnuPG, preventing its normal usage. The user ends up having to manually remove the key in order to fix the installation.

The obvious non-solutions and potential solutions

Let's start by analyzing the properties I've listed above. After all, removing at least one of the requirements should prevent the attack from being possible. But can we really do that?

Firstly, we could set a hard limit on number of signatures or key size. This should obviously prevent the attacker from breaking user systems via huge keys. However, it will make it entirely possible for the attacker to 'brick' the key by appending garbage up to the limit. Then it would no longer be possible to append any valid signatures to the key. Users would suffer less but the key owner will lose the ability to use the key meaningfully. It's a no-go.

Secondly, we could limit key updates to the owner. However, the keyserver update protocol currently does not provide any standard way of verifying who the uploader is, so it would effectively require incompatible changes at least to the upload protocol. Furthermore, in order to prevent malicious keyservers from propagating fake signatures we'd also need to carry the verification along when propagating key updates. This effectively means an extension of the key format, and it has been proposed e.g. in 'Abuse-Resistant OpenPGP Keystores' draft. This is probably a wortwhile option but it will take time before it's implemented.

Thirdly, we could try to validate signatures. However, any validation can be easily worked around. If we started requiring signing keys to be present on the keyserver, the attackers can simply mass-upload keys used to create garbage signatures. If we went even further and e.g. started requiring verified e-mail addresses for the signing keys, the attackers can simply mass-create e-mail addresses and verify them. It might work as a temporary solution but it will probably cause more harm than good.

There were other non-solutions suggested - most notably, blacklisting poisoned keys. However, this is even worse. It means that every victim of poisoning attack would be excluded from using the keyserver, and in my opinion it will only provoke the attackers to poison even more keys. It may sound like a good interim solution preventing users from being hit but it is rather short-sighted.

keys.openpgp.org / Hagrid - a big non-solution

A common suggestion for OpenPGP users - one that even Gentoo news item mentions for lack of alternative - is to switch to keys.openpgp.org keyserver, or switch keyservers to their Hagrid software. It is not vulnerable to key poisoning attack because it strips away all third-party signatures. However, this and other limitations make it a rather poor replacement, and in my opinion can be harmful to security of OpenPGP.

Firstly, stripping all third-party signatures is not a solution. It simply avoids the problem by killing a very important portion of OpenPGP protocol - the Web of Trust. Without it, the keys obtained from the server can not be authenticated otherwise than by direct interaction between the individuals. For example, Gentoo Authority Keys can't work there. Most of the time, you won't be able to tell whether the key on keyserver is legitimate or forged.

The e-mail verification makes it even worse, though not intentionally. While I agree that many users do not understand or use WoT, Hagrid is implicitly going to cause users to start relying on e-mail verification as proof of key authenticity. In other words, people are going to assume that if a key on keys.openpgp.org has verified e-mail address, it has to be legitimate. This makes it trivial for an attacker that manages to gain unauthorized access to the e-mail address or the keyserver to publish a forged key and convince others to use it.

Secondly, Hagrid does not support UID revocations. This is an entirely absurd case where GDPR fear won over security. If your e-mail address becomes compromised, you will not be able to revoke it. Sure, the keyserver admins may eventually stop propagating it along with your key, but all users who fetched the key before will continue seeing it as a valid UID. Of course, if users send encrypted mail the attacker won't be able to read it. However, the users can be trivially persuaded to switch to a new, forged key.

Thirdly, Hagrid rejects all UIDs except for verified e-mail-based UIDs. This is something we could live with if key owners actively pursue having their identities verified. However, this also means you can't publish a photo identity or use keybase.io. The 'explicit consent' argument used by upstream is rather silly - apparently every UID requires separate consent, while at the same time you can trivially share somebody else's PII as the real name of a valid e-mail address.

Apparently, upstream is willing to resolve the first two of those issues once satisfactory solutions are established. However, this doesn't mean that it's fine to ignore those problems. Until they are resolved, and necessary OpenPGP client updates are sufficiently widely deployed, I don't believe Hagrid or its instance at keys.openpgp.org are good replacements for SKS and other keyservers.

So what are the solutions?

Sadly, I am not aware of any good global solution at the moment. The best workaround for GnuPG users so far is the new self-sigs-only option that prevents it from importing third-party signatures. Of course, it shares the first limitation of Hagrid keyserver. The future versions of GnuPG will supposedly fallback to this option upon meeting excessively large keys.

For domain-limited use cases such as Gentoo's, running a local keyserver with restricted upload access is an option. However, it requires users to explicitly specify our keyserver, and effectively end up having to specify multiple different keyservers for each domain. Furthermore, WKD can be used to distribute keys. Sadly, at the moment GnuPG uses it only to locate new keys and does not support refreshing keys via WKD (gemato employs a cheap hack to make it happen). In both cases, the attack is prevented via isolating the infrastructure and preventing public upload access.

The long-term solution probably lies in the 'First-party-attested Third-party Certifications' section of the 'Abuse-Resistant OpenPGP Keystores' draft. In this proposal, every third-party signature must be explicitly attested by the key owner. Therefore, only the key owner can append additional signatures to the key, and keyservers can reject any signatures that were not attested. However, this is not currently supported by GnuPG, and once it is, deploying it will most likely take significant time.

04 Jul 2019 11:23am GMT