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Google’s ‘SHA-1 Countdown Clock’ Could Undermine Enterprise Security
In the wake of a recently documented 'collision' attack, Google researchers should consider delaying the release of the code behind the crack until companies can roll out adequate patches. Here's why
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The recent announcement from Google that researchers documented a collision with theSecure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) cryptographic hash function has enormous implications for the IT industry.
Whether it’s file reputation and whitelisting services or browser security, SHA-1 plays a critical role in today’s IT infrastructure. The algorithm allows, for, among other things, unique identification of datasets. Many content and file whitelisting vendors rely heavily on SHA-1 to distinguish between benign and malicious content.
The same is true for file reputation services. Within storage, vendors have used the algorithm to identify duplicate files. The algorithm is also used for digital signatures and file integrity verification, which secure credit card transactions, electronic documents, GIT open-source software repositories and software distribution.
From a security perspective, having datasets hash to the same SHA-1 digest (what’s called a “collision”), undermines the safety of the algorithm. Attackers could potentially create a malicious file with the same hash as a benign file, bypassing current security measures.
Equally alarming, though, is Google’s conduct in this manner. Google researchers say that they will publish the code - not merely a paper - enabling someone to create two PDF files with identical SHA-1 hashes within 90 days in accordance with the vulnerability policy practice by Project Zero, Google’s security and vulnerability research team. They have also released a tool that checks whether a file is vulnerable for collisions.
Time is of the Essence
The scale and severity of the problem may well require more than the 90 days for most vendors to publish patches, and for customers to apply them. SHA-1 is so widely deployed that it will take far too long to make the necessary infrastructural changes across every relevant product in the network.
Obviously, we don’t know the details of the exact code Google will release in 90 days, but we are concerned that any code could accelerate the creation of a successful SHA-1 attack. Currently, most hackers are unlikely to reproduce the attack, if only because of the significant cost of the computational power needed to crack SHA-1.
A vendor’s ability to eliminate SHA-1 support will depend on several factors, including:
The product architecture
How the vendor managed the file hash database
How much the vendor depends on a specific hashing algorithm
Whether it’s easy to make the code change
This definitely will not be a quick fix for some vendors. While service providers will not face as many challenges as appliance vendors, thanks to the speed of service updates, it is unfair to force enterprises into a race to beat a Google-created SHA-1 countdown clock.
Rather, Google should provide a paper describing the attack in 90 days, and then release the code at a later date. This deviates from Google’s normal practice, but the mere documentation of a SHA-1 collision will be sufficient to accelerate the change to a better hashing algorithm.
“Told You So” is Not the Answer
Google’s blog seems to anticipate some of these issues by pointing out that they’ve long called for the elimination of SHA-1: “For the tech community, our findings emphasize the necessity of sun setting SHA-1 usage. Google has advocated the deprecation of SHA-1 for many years, particularly when it comes to signing TLS certificates,” according to the blog.
In fact, Google is hardly unique in its wish to eliminate SHA-1. In 2005, cryptanalysts first suggested that SHA-1 may not be secure enough for ongoing use, and since 2010 many organizations have recommended its replacement by SHA-2 or SHA-3. Further, Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla and Google have all announced that their respective browsers will stop accepting SHA-1 SSL certificates by 2017.
But the business of IT has always been about prioritizing the here-and-now over tomorrow. Companies try to maximize their resources by bringing products to market - not with every possible feature, but just the right features at the right time. Until now, SHA-1’s theoretical limitations have made replacing the algorithm a “to be” feature rather than an immediate concern. There had not yet been a practical SHA-1 collision, leaving vendors to continue using the algorithm as a hashing function.
What You Can Do
CISOs and their teams should immediately ask security vendors about their plans for replacing SHA-1. They should also implement plans to patch or update their systems to the latest revision.
All network and endpoint security vendors using whitelisting mechanisms for files should rely on a more secure hashing algorithm, such as SHA-256 or SHA-3, not SHA-1. Vendors should align their databases with the new hashes respectively.
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Finally, enterprises will want to be sure that their vendors do not work with third-party resources, such as reputation services, that rely on SHA-1 or MD5, an even older, more insecure hashing algorithm.
Google has an aggressive approach to teaching vendors about security. We've seen this in several of the latest Project Zero publications and we see it in this issue. Google has long advocated for the depreciation of SHA-1; releasing the code now will assuredly achieve that aim.
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