Google Online Security Blog: 2019

Announcing updates to our Patch Rewards program in 2020

December 18, 2019

Posted by Jan Keller, Technical Program Manager, Security
Patch Rewards programIntroducing upfront financial helpafter the work is completed

We will start off with two support levels :

Small ($5,000): Meant to motivate and reward a project for fixing a small number of security issues. Examples: improvements to privilege separation or sandboxing, cleanup of integer artimetrics, or more generally fixing vulnerabilities identified in open source software by bug bounty programs such as EU-FOSSA 2 (see ‘Qualifying submissions’ here for more examples).
Large ($30,000): Meant to incentivize a larger project to invest heavily in security, e.g. providing support to find additional developers, or implement a significant new security feature (e.g. new compiler mitigations).

Nomination process

Anyone can nominate an open source project for support by filling out http://goo.gle/patchz-nomination. Our Patch Reward Panel will review submissions on a monthly basis and select a number of projects that meet the program criteria. The panel will let submitors know if a project has been chosen and will start working with the project maintainers directly.

Projects in scope

Any open source project can be nominated for support. When selecting projects, the panel will put an emphasis on projects that either are vital to the health of the Internet or are end-user projects with a large user base.

What do we expect in return?

We expect to see security improvements to open source software. Ideally, the project can provide us
with a short blurb or pointers to some of the completed work that was possible because of our support. We don’t want to add bureaucracy, but would like to measure the success of the program.
What about the existing Patch Rewards program?
This is an addition to the existing program, the current Patch Rewards program will continue as it stands today.

Protecting programmatic access to user data with Binary Authorization for Borg

December 17, 2019

Posted by Daniel Rebolledo Samper and Mark Lodato, Software Engineers, Security & Privacy
Borg
Binary Authorization for Borg is a deploy-time enforcement check
Binary Authorization for Borg, or BAB, is an internal deploy-time enforcement check that reduces insider risk by ensuring that production software and configuration deployed at Google is properly reviewed and authorized, especially when that code has the ability to access user data. BAB ensures that code and configuration deployments meet certain standards prior to being deployed. BAB includes both a deploy-time enforcement service to prevent unauthorized jobs from starting, and an audit trail of the code and configuration used in BAB-enabled jobs.

BAB ensures that Google's official software supply chain process is followed. First, a code change is reviewed and approved before being checked into Google's central source code repository. Next, the code is verifiably built and packaged using Google's central build system. This is done by creating the build in a secure sandbox and recording the package's origin in metadata for verification purposes. Finally, the job is deployed to Borg, with a job-specific identity. BAB rejects any package that lacks proper metadata, that did not follow the proper supply chain process, or that otherwise does not match the identity’s predefined policy.

Binary Authorization for Borg allows for several kinds of security checks

BAB can be used for many kinds of deploy-time security checks. Some examples include:

Is the binary built from checked in code?
Is the binary built verifiably?
Is the binary built from tested code?
Is the binary built from code intended to be used in the deployment?

After deployment, a job is continuously verified for its lifetime, to check that jobs that were started (and any that may still be running) conform to updates to their policies.

Binary Authorization for Borg provides other security benefits
Though the primary purpose of BAB is to limit the ability of a potentially malicious insider to run an unauthorized job that could access user data, BAB has other security benefits. BAB provides robust code identity for jobs in Google’s infrastructure, tying a job’s identity to specific code, and ensuring that only the specified code can be used to exercise the job identity’s privileges. This allows for a transition from a job identity—trusting an identity and any of its privileged human users transitively—to a code identity—trusting a specific piece of reviewed code to have specific semantics and which cannot be modified without an approval process.

BAB also dictates a common language for data protection, so that multiple teams can understand and meet the same requirements. Certain processes, such as those for financial reporting, need to meet certain change management requirements for compliance purposes. Using BAB, these checks can be automated, saving time and increasing the scope of coverage.

Binary Authorization for Borg is part of the BeyondProd model
BAB is one of several technologies used at Google to mitigate insider risk, and one piece of how we secure containers and microservices in production. By using containerized systems and verifying their BAB requirements prior to deployment, our systems are easier to debug, more reliable, and have a clearer change management process. More details on how Google has adopted a cloud-native security model are available in another whitepaper we are releasing today, “BeyondProd: A new approach to cloud-native security.”

In summary, implementing BAB, a deploy-time enforcement check, as part of Google’s containerized infrastructure and continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) process has enabled us to verify that the code and configuration we deploy meet certain standards for security. Adopting BAB has allowed Google to reduce insider risk, prevent possible attacks, and also support the uniformity of our production systems. For more information about BAB, read our whitepaper, “Binary Authorization for Borg: how Google verifies code provenance and implements code identity.”

Additional contributors to this whitepaper include Kevin Chen, Software Engineer; Tim Dierks, Engineering Director; Maya Kaczorowski, Product Manager; Gary O’Connor, Technical Writing; Umesh Shankar, Principal Engineer; Adam Stubblefield, Distinguished Engineer; and Wilfried Teiken, Software Engineer; with special recognition to the entire Binary Authorization for Borg team for their ideation, engineering, and leadership

Better password protections in Chrome - How it works

December 10, 2019

Posted by Patrick Nepper, Kiran C. Nair, Vasilii Sukhanov and Varun Khaneja, Chrome TeamannouncedWarnings about compromised passwordsintroducedPassword Checkup extensionhere into the Google Accountpasswords.google.com

Whenever Google discovers a username and password exposed by another company’s data breach, we store a hashed and encrypted copy of the data on our servers with a secret key known only to Google.

When you sign in to a website, Chrome will send a hashed copy of your username and password to Google encrypted with a secret key only known to Chrome. No one, including Google, is able to derive your username or password from this encrypted copy.

In order to determine if your username and password appears in any breach, we use a technique called private set intersection with blinding that involves multiple layers of encryption. This allows us to compare your encrypted username and password with all of the encrypted breached usernames and passwords, without revealing your username and password, or revealing any information about any other users’ usernames and passwords. In order to make this computation more efficient, Chrome sends a 3-byte SHA256 hash prefix of your username to reduce the scale of the data joined from 4 billion records down to 250 records, while still ensuring your username remains anonymous.

Only you discover if your username and password have been compromised. If they have been compromised, Chrome will tell you, and we strongly encourage you to change your password.

Sync and Google Servicesthe PasswordLeakDetectionEnabled policy settingReal-time phishing protection: Checking with Safe Browsing’s blocklist in real time. Safe Browsing.Make searches and browsing betterUrlKeyedAnonymizedDataCollectionEnabled policy settingsExpanding predictive phishing protection launched

Detecting unsafe path access patterns with PathAuditor

December 9, 2019

Posted by Marta Rożek, Google Summer Intern 2019, and Stephen Röttger, Software Engineer #!/bin/sh
cat /home/user/footmpreaperif ((dst = malloc(strlen(ent->d_name) + 3)) == NULL) message (LOG_FATAL, "malloc failed.\n");
strcpy(dst, ent->d_name);
strcat(dst, "/X");
rename(ent->d_name, dst);
if (errno == EXDEV) {
[...]

Make “/tmp/user/controlled” a file with controlled content.

The kernel resolves that path for the first argument to rename() and sees the file.

Replace “/tmp/user/controlled” with a symlink to /etc/cron.

The kernel resolves the path again for the second argument and ends up in /etc/cron.

If both the tmp and cron directories are on the filesystem, the kernel will move the attacker controlled file to /etc/cron, leading to code execution as root.

We can’t tell if a call to open(/user/controlled, O_RDONLY) is a vulnerability without looking at the context. It depends on whether the contents are returned to the user or are used in some security sensitive way. A call to chmod(/user/controlled, mode) depending on the mode can be either a DoS or a privilege escalation. Accessing files in sticky directories (like /tmp) can become vulnerabilities if the attacker found an additional bug to delete arbitrary files.

How Pathauditor works

To find issues like this at scale we wrote PathAuditor, a tool that monitors file accesses and logs potential vulnerabilities. PathAuditor is a shared library that can be loaded into processes using LD_PRELOAD. It then hooks all filesystem related libc functions and checks if the access is safe. For that, we traverse the path and check if any component could be replaced by an unprivileged user, for example if a directory is user-writable. If we detect such a pattern, we log it to syslog for manual analysis.

Here's how you can use it to find vulnerabilities in your code:

LD_PRELOAD the library to your binary and then analyse its findings in syslog. You can also add the library to /etc/ld.so.preload, which will preload it in all binaries running on the system.
It will then gather the PID and the command line of the calling process, arguments of the vulnerable function, and a stack trace -- this provides a starting point for further investigation. At this point, you can use the stack trace to find the code path that triggered the violation and manually analyse what would happen if you would point the path to an arbitrary file or directory.
For example, if the code is opening a file and returning the content to the user then you could use it to read arbitrary files. If you control the path of chmod or chown, you might be able to change the permissions of chosen files and so on.

PathAuditor has proved successful at Google and we're excited to share it with the community. The project is still in the early stages and we are actively working on it. We look forward to hearing about any vulnerabilities you discover with the tool, and hope to see pull requests with further improvements.

Try out the PathAuditor tool here.

Marta Rożek was a Google Summer intern in 2019 and contributed to this blog and the PathAuditor tool

An Update on Android TLS Adoption

December 3, 2019

Posted by Bram Bonné, Senior Software Engineer, Android Platform Security & Chad Brubaker, Staff Software Engineer, Android Platform Security

banner illustration with several devices and gaming controller

Android is committed to keeping users, their devices, and their data safe. One of the ways that we keep data safe is by protecting network traffic that enters or leaves an Android device with Transport Layer Security (TLS). Android 7 (API level 24) introduced the Network Security Configuration in 2016, allowing app developers to configure the network security policy for their app through a declarative configuration file. To ensure apps are safe, apps targeting Android 9 (API level 28) or higher automatically have a policy set by default that prevents unencrypted traffic for every domain. Today, we’re happy to announce that 80% of Android apps are encrypting traffic by default. The percentage is even greater for apps targeting Android 9 and higher, with 90% of them encrypting traffic by default.

Percentage of apps that block cleartext by default. Since November 1 2019, all app (updates as well as all new apps on Google Play) must target at least Android 9. As a result, we expect these numbers to continue improving. Network traffic from these apps is secure by default and any use of unencrypted connections is the result of an explicit choice by the developer. The latest releases of Android Studio and Google Play’s pre-launch report warn developers when their app includes a potentially insecure Network Security Configuration (for example, when they allow unencrypted traffic for all domains or when they accept user provided certificates outside of debug mode). This encourages the adoption of HTTPS across the Android ecosystem and ensures that developers are aware of their security configuration.

Example of a warning shown to developers in Android Studio.

Example of a warning shown to developers as part of the pre-launch report. What can I do to secure my app? For apps targeting Android 9 and higher, the out-of-the-box default is to encrypt all network traffic in transit and trust only certificates issued by an authority in the standard Android CA set without requiring any extra configuration. Apps can provide an exception to this only by including a separate Network Security Config file with carefully selected exceptions. If your app needs to allow traffic to certain domains, it can do so by including a Network Security Config file that only includes these exceptions to the default secure policy. Keep in mind that you should be cautious about the data received over insecure connections as it could have been tampered with in transit. <network-security-config> <base-config cleartextTrafficPermitted="false" /> <domain-config cleartextTrafficPermitted="true"> <domain includeSubdomains="true">insecure.example.com</domain> <domain includeSubdomains="true">insecure.cdn.example.com</domain> </domain-config> </network-security-config> If your app needs to be able to accept user specified certificates for testing purposes (for example, connecting to a local server during testing), make sure to wrap your element inside a element. This ensures the connections in the production version of your app are secure. <network-security-config> <debug-overrides> <trust-anchors> <certificates src="user"/> </trust-anchors> </debug-overrides> </network-security-config>What can I do to secure my library? If your library directly creates secure/insecure connections, make sure that it honors the app's cleartext settings by checking isCleartextTrafficPermitted before opening any cleartext connection. Android’s built-in networking libraries and other popular HTTP libraries such as OkHttp or Volley have built-in Network Security Config support. Giles Hogben, Nwokedi Idika, Android Platform Security, Android Studio and Pre-Launch Report teams

Expanding the Android Security Rewards Program

November 21, 2019

Posted by Jessica Lin, Android Security Team

The Android Security Rewards (ASR) program was created in 2015 to reward researchers who find and report security issues to help keep the Android ecosystem safe. Over the past 4 years, we have awarded over 1,800 reports, and paid out over four million dollars. Today, we’re expanding the program and increasing reward amounts. We are introducing a top prize of $1 million for a full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence which compromises the Titan M secure element on Pixel devices. Additionally, we will be launching a specific program offering a 50% bonus for exploits found on specific developer preview versions of Android, meaning our top prize is now $1.5 million. As mentioned in a previous blog post, in 2019 Gartner rated the Pixel 3 with Titan M as having the most “strong” ratings in the built-in security section out of all devices evaluated. This is why we’ve created a dedicated prize to reward researchers for exploits found to circumvent the secure elements protections. In addition to exploits involving Pixel Titan M, we have added other categories of exploits to the rewards program, such as those involving data exfiltration and lockscreen bypass. These rewards go up to $500,000 depending on the exploit category. For full details, please refer to the Android Security Rewards Program Rules page. Now that we’ve covered some of what’s new, let’s take a look back at some milestones from this year. Here are some highlights from 2019:

Total payouts in the last 12 months have been over $1.5 million.

Over 100 participating researchers have received an average reward amount of over $3,800 per finding (46% increase from last year). On average, this means we paid out over $15,000 (20% increase from last year) per researcher!

The top reward paid out in 2019 was $161,337.

Top Payout The highest reward paid out to a member of the research community was for a report from Guang Gong (@oldfresher) of Alpha Lab, Qihoo 360 Technology Co. Ltd. This report detailed the first reported 1-click remote code execution exploit chain on the Pixel 3 device. Guang Gong was awarded $161,337 from the Android Security Rewards program and $40,000 by Chrome Rewards program for a total of $201,337. The $201,337 combined reward is also the highest reward for a single exploit chain across all Google VRP programs. The Chrome vulnerabilities leveraged in this report were fixed in Chrome 77.0.3865.75 and released in September, protecting users against this exploit chain. We’d like to thank all of our researchers for contributing to the security of the Android ecosystem. If you’re interested in becoming a researcher, check out our Bughunter University for information on how to get started. Starting today November 21, 2019 the new rewards take effect. Any reports that were submitted before November 21, 2019 will be rewarded based on the previously existing rewards table. Happy bug hunting!

Using a built-in FIDO authenticator on latest-generation Chromebooks

November 19, 2019

Posted by Christiaan Brand, Product Manager, Google Cloud

announcedDeviceSecondFactorAuthentication

Main use cases
FIDO technology aims to solve three separate use cases for relying parties (or otherwise referred to as Internet services) by helping to:

Prevent phishing during initial login to a service on a new device;
Reverify a user’s identity to a service on a device on which they’ve already logged in to;
Confirm that the device a user is connecting from is still the original device where they logged in from previously. This is typically needed in the enterprise.

Security-savvy professionals may interpret the third use case as a special instance of use case #2. However, there are some differences, which we break down a bit further below:

In case #2, the problem that FIDO technology tries to solve is re-verifying a user’s identity by unlocking a private key stored on the device.
In case #3, FIDO technology helps to determine whether a previously created key is still available on the original device without any proof of who the user is.

How use case #1 works: Roaming security keys

Because the whole premise of this use case is one in which the user logs in on a brand new device they’ve never authenticated before, this requires the user to have a FIDO security key (removeable, cross-platform, or a roaming authenticator). By this definition, a built-in FIDO authenticator on Chrome OS devices would not be able to satisfy this requirement, because it would not be able to help verify the user’s identity without being set up previously. Upon initial log-in, the user’s identity is verified together with the presence of a security key (such as Google’s Titan Security Key) previously tied to their account.

Titan Security Keys

Once the user is successfully logged in, trust is conferred from the security key to the device on which the user is logging on, usually by placing a cookie or other token on the device in order for the relying party to “remember” that the user already performed a second factor authenticator on this device. Once this step is completed, it is no longer necessary to require a physical second factor on this device because the presence of the cookie signals to the relying party that this device is to be trusted.

Optionally, some services might require the user to still periodically verify that it’s the correct user in front of the already recognized device (for example, particularly sensitive and regulated services such as financial services companies). In almost all cases, it shouldn’t be necessary for the user to also-in addition to providing their knowledge factor (such as a password) - re-present their second factor when re-authenticating as they’ve already done that during initial bootstrapping.

Note that on Chrome OS devices, your data is encrypted when you’re not logged on, which further protects your data against malicious access.
How use case #2 works: Re-authentication recently enabled
Additionally, there are security benefits to this particular solution, as the relying party doesn’t only have to trust a previously issued cookie, but can now both verify that the right user is present (by means of a biometric) and that a particular private key is available on this particular device. Sometimes this promise is made based on key material stored in hardware (e.g. Titan security in Pixel Slate), which can be a strong indicator that the relying party is interacting with the right user on the right device.
How use case #3 works: Built-in device authenticator

Pixel Slate devices are built with hardware-based Titan security

We still highly recommend users to have a primary FIDO security key, such as Titan Security Key or an Android phone. This should be used in conjunction with a “FIDO re-authentication” policy, which is supported by G Suite.

Enabling the built-in FIDO authenticator in the Google Admin console

Supported Chromebooks
Starting with Chrome 76, most latest-generation Chromebooks gained the option to enable a built-in FIDO authenticator backed by hardware-based Titan security. To see if your Chromebook can be enabled with this capability, you can navigate to chrome://system and check the “tpm-version” entry. If “vendor” equals “43524f53”, then your Chromebook is backed by Titan security.

Navigating to chrome://system on your Chromebook

Summary
In summary, we believe that this new enhancement can provide value to enterprise organizations that want to confirm that the device a user is connecting from is still the original device from which a user logged in from in the past. Most users, however, should be using roaming FIDO security keys, such as Titan Security Key, their Android phone, or security keys from other vendors, in order to avoid account lockouts.

GWP-ASan: Sampling heap memory error detection in-the-wild

November 7, 2019

Posted by Vlad Tsyrklevich, Dynamic Tools Team Memory safety errors, like use-after-frees and out-of-bounds reads/writes, are a leading source of vulnerabilities in C/C++ applications. Despite investments in preventing and detecting these errors in Chrome, over 60% of high severity vulnerabilities in Chrome are memory safety errors. Some memory safety errors don’t lead to security vulnerabilities but simply cause crashes and instability. Chrome uses state-of-the-art techniques to prevent these errors, including:

Coverage-guided fuzzing with AddressSanitizer (ASan)

Unit and integration testing with ASan

Defensive programming, like custom libraries to perform safe math or provide bounds checked containers

Mandatory code review

Chrome also makes use of sandboxing and exploit mitigations to complicate exploitation of memory errors that go undetected by the methods above. AddressSanitizer is a compiler instrumentation that finds memory errors occurring on the heap, stack, or in globals. ASan is highly effective and one of the lowest overhead instrumentations available that detects the errors that it does; however, it still incurs an average 2-3x performance and memory overhead. This makes it suitable for use with unit tests or fuzzing, but not deployment to end users. Chrome used to deploy SyzyASAN instrumented binaries to detect memory errors. SyzyASAN had a similar overhead so it was only deployed to a small subset of users on the canary channel. It was discontinued after the Windows toolchain switched to LLVM. GWP-ASan, also known by its recursive backronym, GWP-ASan Will Provide Allocation Sanity, is a sampling allocation tool designed to detect heap memory errors occurring in production with negligible overhead. Because of its negligible overhead we can deploy GWP-ASan to the entire Chrome user base to find memory errors happening in the real world that are not caught by fuzzing or testing with ASan. Unlike ASan, GWP-ASan can not find memory errors on the stack or in globals. GWP-ASan is currently enabled for all Windows and macOS users for allocations made using malloc() and PartitionAlloc. It is only enabled for a small fraction of allocations and processes to reduce performance and memory overhead to a negligible amount. At the time of writing it has found over sixty bugs (many are still restricted view). About 90% of the issues GWP-ASan has found are use-after-frees. The remaining are out-of-bounds reads and writes. To learn more, check out our full write up on GWP-ASan here.

The App Defense Alliance: Bringing the security industry together to fight bad apps

November 6, 2019

Posted by Dave Kleidermacher, VP, Android Security & Privacy ESETLookoutZimperiumWhat will the App Defense Alliance do?Who are the partners?Industry collaboration is keyhere

OpenTitan - open sourcing transparent, trustworthy, and secure silicon

November 5, 2019

Posted by Royal Hansen, Vice President, Google and Dominic Rizzo, OpenTitan Lead, Google Cloud

Today, along with our partners, we are excited to announce OpenTitan - the first open source silicon root of trust (RoT) project. OpenTitan will deliver a high-quality RoT design and integration guidelines for use in data center servers, storage, peripherals, and more. Open sourcing the silicon design makes it more transparent, trustworthy, and ultimately, secure.

The OpenTitan logo

Anchoring trust in siliconSilicon RoT can help ensure that the hardware infrastructure and the software that runs on it remain in their intended, trustworthy state by verifying that the critical system components boot securely using authorized and verifiable code. Silicon RoT can provide many security benefits by helping to:

Ensure that a server or a device boots with the correct firmware and hasn't been infected by a low-level malware.

Provide a cryptographically unique machine identity, so an operator can verify that a server or a device is legitimate.

Protect secrets like encryption keys in a tamper-resistant way even for people with physical access (e.g., while a server or a device is being shipped).

Provide authoritative, tamper-evident audit records and other runtime security services.

Titan

Raising the transparency and security bar

Similar to open source software, open source silicon can:

Enhance trust and security through design and implementation transparency. Issues can be discovered early, and the need for blind trust is reduced.
Enable and encourage innovation through contributions to the open source design.
Provide implementation choice and preserve a set of common interfaces and software compatibility guarantees through a common, open reference design.

The OpenTitan project is managed by the lowRISC CIC, an independent not-for-profit company with a full-stack engineering team based in Cambridge, UK, and is supported by a coalition of like-minded partners, including ETH Zurich, G+D Mobile Security, Google, Nuvoton Technology, and Western Digital.

The founding partners of the OpenTitan project

OpenTitan is an active engineering project staffed by a team of engineers representing a coalition of partners who bring ideas and expertise from many perspectives. We are transparently building the logical design of a silicon RoT, including an open source microprocessor (the lowRISC Ibex, a RISC-V-based design), cryptographic coprocessors, a hardware random number generator, a sophisticated key hierarchy, memory hierarchies for volatile and non-volatile storage, defensive mechanisms, IO peripherals, secure boot, and more. With OpenTitan, a coalition of partners have come together to deliver a more open, transparent, and high-quality RoT.

A comparison of the major design components of a traditional RoT and an OpenTitan RoT

The OpenTitan project is rooted in three key principles:

Transparency - anyone can inspect, evaluate, and contribute to OpenTitan’s design and documentation to help build more transparent, trustworthy silicon RoT for all.
High quality - we are building a high-quality logically-secure silicon design, including reference firmware, verification collateral, and technical documentation.
Flexibility - adopters can reduce costs and reach more customers by using a vendor- and platform-agnostic silicon RoT design that can be integrated into data center servers, storage, peripheral and other devices.

Participating in the OpenTitan project

OpenTitan will be helpful for chip manufacturers, platform providers, and security-conscious enterprise organizations that want to enhance their infrastructure with silicon-based security. Visit our GitHub repository today.

If you are interested in actively collaborating on OpenTitan to help make secure open source silicon a reality, we encourage you to contact the OpenTitan team. If you would like your product to be considered for a pilot OpenTitan RoT integration, the team would be excited to hear from you.

How Google adopted BeyondCorp: Part 4 (services)

October 31, 2019

Posted by Guilherme Gonçalves, Site Reliability Engineer and Kyle O'Malley, Security Engineer
IntroBeyondCorpfirst postsecond postthird post

High level architecture for BeyondCorpIdentifying and gating services
How do you identify and categorize all the services that should be gated?
Google began as a web-based company, and as it matured in the modern era, most internal business applications were developed with a web-first approach. These applications were hosted on similar internal architecture as our external services, with the exception that they could only be accessed on corporate office networks. Thus, identifying services to be gated by BeyondCorp was made easier for us due to the fact that most internal services were already properly inventoried and hosted via standard, central solutions. Migration, in many cases, was as simple as a DNS change. Solid IT asset inventory systems and maintenance are critical to migrating to a zero trust security model.

Enforcement of zero trust access policies began with services which we determined would not be meaningfully impacted by the change in access requirements. For most services, requirements could be gathered via typical access log analysis or consulting with service owners. Services which could not be readily gated by default ACL requirements required service owners to develop strict access groups and/or eliminate risky workflows before they could be migrated.
How do you know which trust tier is needed for every service?previous blog postprinciple of least privilege
What do you do with services that are incompatible with BeyondCorp ideals?

It may not always be possible to gate an application by the preferred zero trust solution. Services that cannot be easily gated typically fall into these categories:

Type 1: "Non-proxyable protocols", e.g. non-HTTP/HTTPS traffic.
Type 2: Low latency requirements or localized high throughput traffic.
Type 3: Administrative and emergency access networks.

The typical first step in finding a solution for these cases is finding a way to remove the need for that service altogether. In many cases, this was made possible by deprecating or replacing systems which could not be made compatible with the BeyondCorp implementation.

When that was not an option, we found that no single solution would work for all critical requirements:

Solutions for the "Type 1" traffic have generally involved maintaining a specialized client tunneling which strongly enforces authentication and authorization decisions on the client and the server end of the connection. This is usually client/server type traffic which is similar to HTTP traffic in that connectivity is typically multi-point to point.
Solutions to the "Type 2" problems generally rely on moving BeyondCorp-compatible compute resources locally or developing a solution tightly integrated with network access equipment to selectively forward "local" traffic without permanently opening network holes.
As for “Type 3,” it would be ideal to completely eliminate all privileged internal networks. However, the reality is that some privileged networking will likely always be required to maintain the network itself and also to provide emergency access during outages.

It should be noted that server-to-server traffic in secure production data center environments does not necessarily rely on BeyondCorp, although many systems are integrated regardless, due to the Service-Oriented Design benefits that BeyondCorp inherently provides.
How do you prioritize gating?

Prioritization starts by identifying all the services that are currently accessible via internal IP-access alone and migrating the most critical services to BeyondCorp, while working to slowly ratchet down permissions via exception management processes. Criticality of the service may also depend on the number and type of users, sensitivity of data handled, security and privacy risks enabled by the service.
Migration logistics

Most services required integration testing with the BeyondCorp proxy. Service teams were encouraged to stand up "test" services which were used to test functionality behind the BeyondCorp proxy. Most services that performed their own access control enforcement were reconfigured to instead rely on BeyondCorp for all user/group authentication and authorization. Service teams have been encouraged to develop their own "fine-grained" discretionary access controls in the services by leveraging session data provided by the BeyondCorp proxy.
Lessons learnt
Allow coarse gating and exceptions

Inventory: It's easy to overlook the importance of keeping a good inventory of services, devices, owners and security exceptions. The journey to a BeyondCorp world should start by solving organizational challenges when managing and maintaining data quality in inventory systems. In short, knowing how a service works, who should access it, and what makes that acceptable are the central tenets of managing BeyondCorp. Fine-grained access control is severely complicated when this insight is missing.

Legacy protocols: Most large enterprises will inevitably need to support workflows and protocols which cannot be migrated to a BeyondCorp world (in any reasonable amount of time). Exception management and service inventory become crucial at this stage while stakeholders develop solutions. Run highly reliable systems
The BeyondCorp initiative would not be sustainable at Google’s scale without the involvement of various Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams across the inventory systems, BeyondCorp infrastructure and client side solutions. The ability to successfully achieve wide-spread adoption of changes this large can be hampered by perceived (or in some cases, actual) reliability issues. Understanding the user workflows that might be impacted, working with key stakeholders and ensuring the transition is smooth and trouble-free for all users helps protect against backlash and avoids users finding undesirable workarounds. By applying our reliability engineering practices, those teams helped to ensure that the components of our implementation all have availability and latency targets, operational robustness, etc. These are compatible with our business needs and intended user experiences.
Put employees in control as much as possible

Employees cover a broad range of job functions with varying requirements of technology and tools. In addition to communicating changes to our employees early, we provide them with self-service solutions for handling exceptions or addressing issues affecting their devices. By putting our employees in control, we help to ensure that security mechanisms do not get in their way, helping with the acceptance and scaling processes.
Summarysetting contextdevicestiered accessBeyondCorp research papersGoogle Cloud (context-aware access)Cloud OnAirThank you to the editors of the BeyondCorp blog post series, Puneet Goel (Product Manager), Lior Tishbi (Program Manager), and Justin McWilliams (Engineering Manager).

Protecting against code reuse in the Linux kernel with Shadow Call Stack

October 30, 2019

Posted by Sami Tolvanen, Staff Software Engineer, Android Security & Privacy Team

Control-Flow Integrity (CFI)Shadow Call Stack (SCS) Return-oriented programmingReturn-oriented programming (ROP)automatically generating this type of kernel exploit Shadow Call Stack

4.144.19upstream LinuxCONFIG_SHADOW_CALL_STACK=y # CONFIG_SHADOW_CALL_STACK_VMAP is not set # CONFIG_DEBUG_STACK_USAGE is not set By default, shadow stacks are not virtually allocated to minimize memory overhead, but CONFIG_SHADOW_CALL_STACK_VMAP can be enabled for better stack exhaustion protection. With CONFIG_DEBUG_STACK_USAGE, the kernel will also print out shadow stack usage in addition to normal stack usage which can be helpful when debugging issues.
AlternativesARMv8.3 Pointer Authentication (PAC)Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) Conclusion

Improving Site Isolation for Stronger Browser Security

October 17, 2019

Posted by Charlie Reis, Site Isolator The Chrome Security team values having multiple lines of defense. Web browsers are complex, and malicious web pages may try to find and exploit browser bugs to steal data. Additional lines of defense, like sandboxes, make it harder for attackers to access your computer, even if bugs in the browser are exploited. With Site Isolation, Chrome has gained a new line of defense that helps protect your accounts on the Web as well. Site Isolation ensures that pages from different sites end up in different sandboxed processes in the browser. Chrome can thus limit the entire process to accessing data from only one site, making it harder for an attacker to steal cross-site data. We started isolating all sites for desktop users back in Chrome 67, and now we’re excited to enable it on Android for sites that users log into in Chrome 77. We've also strengthened Site Isolation on desktop to help defend against even fully compromised processes. Site Isolation helps defend against two types of threats. First, attackers may try to use advanced "side channel" attacks to leak sensitive data from a process through unexpected means. For example, Spectre attacks take advantage of CPU performance features to access data that should be off limits. With Site Isolation, it is harder for the attacker to get cross-site data into their process in the first place. Second, even more powerful attackers may discover security bugs in the browser, allowing them to completely hijack the sandboxed process. On desktop platforms, Site Isolation can now catch these misbehaving processes and limit their access to cross-site data. We're working to bring this level of hijacked process protection to Android in the future as well. Thanks to this extra line of defense, Chrome can now help keep your web accounts even more secure. We are still making improvements to get the full benefits of Site Isolation, but this change gives Chrome a solid foundation for protecting your data. If you’d like to learn more, check out our technical write up on the Chromium blog.

USB-C Titan Security Keys - available tomorrow in the US

October 14, 2019

Posted by Christiaan Brand, Product Manager, Google Cloud Google’s automatic protectionsstrongestbuiltexpandedextended

USB-C Titan Security Key
YubicoFIDOFeitian TechnologiesGoogle StoreBulk orders

We highly recommend all users at a higher risk of targeted attacks to get Titan Security Keys and enroll into the Advanced Protection Program (APP), which provides Google’s industry-leading security protections to defend against evolving methods that attackers use to gain access to your accounts and data. You can also use Titan Security Keys for any site where FIDO security keys are supported for 2FA, including your personal or work Google Account, 1Password, Coinbase, Dropbox, Facebook, GitHub, Salesforce, Stripe, Twitter, and more.

No More Mixed Messages About HTTPS

October 3, 2019

Posted by Emily Stark and Carlos Joan Rafael Ibarra Lopez, Chrome security team Update (04/06/2020): Mixed image autoupgrading was originally scheduled for Chrome 81, but will be delayed until at least Chrome 84. Check the Chrome Platform Status entry for the latest information about when mixed images will be autoupgraded and blocked if they fail to load over https://. Sites with mixed images will continue to trigger the “Not Secure” warning. mixed contentprogressChrome will gradually move to blocking all mixed content by default Timeline

In Chrome 79, releasing to stable channel in December 2019, we’ll introduce a new setting to unblock mixed content on specific sites. This setting will apply to mixed scripts, iframes, and other types of content that Chrome currently blocks by default. Users can toggle this setting by clicking the lock icon on any https:// page and clicking Site Settings. This will replace the shield icon that shows up at the right side of the omnibox for unblocking mixed content in previous versions of desktop Chrome.

Accessing Site settings, from which users will be able to unblock mixed content loads in Chrome 79.

In Chrome 80, mixed audio and video resources will be autoupgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 80 will be released to early release channels in January 2020. Users can unblock affected audio and video resources with the setting described above.

Also in Chrome 80, mixed images will still be allowed to load, but they will cause Chrome to show a “Not Secure” chip in the omnibox. We anticipate that this is a clearer security UI for users and that it will motivate websites to migrate their images to HTTPS. Developers can use the upgrade-insecure-requests or block-all-mixed-content Content Security Policy directives to avoid this warning.

Omnibox treatment for websites that load mixed images in Chrome 80.

In Chrome 81, mixed images will be autoupgraded to https://, and Chrome will block them by default if they fail to load over https://. Chrome 81 will be released to early release channels in February 2020.

Resources for developers

Use Content Security Policy and Lighthouse’s mixed content audit to discover and fix mixed content on your site.

See this guide for general advice on migrating servers to HTTPS.

Check with your CDN, web host, or content management system to see if they have special tools for debugging mixed content. For example, Cloudflare offers a tool to rewrite mixed content to https://, and WordPress plugins are available as well.

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