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colmmacc's profile
Colm MacCárthaigh
Colm MacCárthaigh
Colm MacCárthaigh
@colmmacc

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Colm MacCárthaigh

@colmmacc

AWS, Apache, Crypto, Irish Music, Haiku, Photography

Seattle
notesfromthesound.com
Joined April 2008

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    1. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      Within Amazon, we have our own package system called Brazil. At the time a part of http://Amazon.com  (retail) owned our internal OpenSSL package, but over on ELB we took it over that day and came up with a minimal 2-line hot-patch. Didn't want new risks.

      3 replies 4 retweets 90 likes
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    2. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      Within about an hour, deployments with the hot patch were in progress, and it went out quicker than I've seen anything. Within a matter of hours, AWS was 100% patched. Even 5 years ago, this was millions of deployments. Amazingly, there were no reports of customer impact either.

      6 replies 30 retweets 279 likes
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    3. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      In parallel to that were discussions about customer messaging and notification. We were asked to analyze if we thought private keys could have been disclosed. This wasn't an easy call. It looked like keys weren't leaking, but intermediate data used as part of key operations was.

      1 reply 3 retweets 75 likes
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    4. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      My best guess on the day was that enough material was in there that keys could be at risk. I recommended thatl customers rotate and revoke keys if they can, and our CISO and CEO took that as good enough and began that painful process.

      1 reply 3 retweets 84 likes
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    5. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      About a week later, that hunch was proved right, we know for sure because CloudFlare ran a contest to see if folks could re-assemble keys and they could. Impressive stuff!

      1 reply 5 retweets 121 likes
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    6. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      To backtrack a little: once the HeartBleed website went live (which incidentally was hosted on AWS S3! and there was never event a hint of taking it down) we started getting a *lot* of customer contacts.

      2 replies 2 retweets 85 likes
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    7. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      HeartBleed was really well marketed, which is a good thing! Months later in a presentation I showed that it made more headlines and news articles in one day than any war had since Vietnam. Good because people patched. 98% of customers patched within a week.

      1 reply 18 retweets 134 likes
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    8. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      I know that because on the night of Heartbleed we did something we never did before: we started vulnerability scanning every EC2 IP address and sending customers notifications. We thought it was a big enough deal that the emails would be worth it.

      1 reply 6 retweets 129 likes
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    9. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      The day after Heartbleed, our core cryptography people met, I remember @pzb was there, and we did a few more things with the OpenSSL package. Amazon's OpenSSL has always been a bit different than the public one, but that day we created a new "hardened" branch.

      2 replies 3 retweets 85 likes
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    10. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      I won't go into what we did with it here, but quite a bit at the time, Emilia Kasper included some of the changes into base OpenSSL later I think. Our customers mostly upgraded to the latest public version from OpenSSL, which we had in Amazon Linux too.

      1 reply 2 retweets 63 likes
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      Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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      Unfortunately we had a few customers stuck though; their OpenSSL libraries were embedded in commercial software that they couldn't quickly upgrade. One of our VPs reached out "Is there anything we can do here?"

      11:06 AM - 7 Apr 2019
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      1 reply 2 retweets 61 likes
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        2. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          So at about 2AM, I wrote a Netfilter plugin that could block heart bleed using the Linux Kernel firewall. It's still on GitHub ... https://github.com/colmmacc/nf_conntrack_tls … , it tracks the TLS record layer state machine and would drop any heartbeat messages. Crude but effective.

          1 reply 17 retweets 210 likes
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        3. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          In our annual planning, we had raised the idea of writing our own TLS/SSL implementation because we thought we could better, but it was a nascent plan. Well that went from nascent to DO IT NOW. I started writing when became Amazon s2n.

          2 replies 7 retweets 96 likes
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        4. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          It took about 5 weekends, just me, and there's something very special about finally getting a bunch of code together and seeing it work in a browser. It took a little longer, and 3 intense security reviews, to get approval to Open Source it, but our CEO was very supportive.

          4 replies 4 retweets 113 likes
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        5. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          Now it's widely used across AWS. Blows my mind to think that S3 is using it!https://github.com/awslabs/s2n 

          1 reply 9 retweets 150 likes
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        6. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          s2n is coded specifically in a way to try to avoid the problem heartbleed hit. Rather than parse memory into integers using pointers directly, all across the code, s2n uses a "stuffer" data structure that includes a cursor. Similar to BoringSSL's crypto_bytes, or DJB's stralloc.

          1 reply 5 retweets 103 likes
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        7. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          Oh BoringSSL! In the months after HeartBleed, the industry rallied to get OpenSSL more funding and support through the core infrastructure initiative. We still take part! And the BoringSSL and LibreSSL forks of OpenSSL happened. Great work from each!

          1 reply 2 retweets 81 likes
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        8. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          The next year, the amazing @BenLaurie and @trevp__ started an annual High Assurance Cryptography workshop after @RealWorldCrypto, that has also born fruits and helped us produce tools that can analyze cryptography code and find even subtle problems.

          2 replies 2 retweets 63 likes
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        9. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          I'm almost done, but before I finish, I kind of depressing twist on this whole thing: The Heart Beat extension never really made any sense to begin with. A 0-byte record could have been used as a keep-alive, and ordinary path MTU discovery works for UDP!

          3 replies 7 retweets 108 likes
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        10. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          All of this trouble for a feature that to this day I can't even think of a good use case for. This is one reason why "Don't do less well. Do less, well." resonates with me as a motto.

          2 replies 50 retweets 338 likes
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        11. Colm MacCárthaigh‏ @colmmacc 7 Apr 2019
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          That's my story for now, until I remember something I forgot. Thanks to everyone who moved mountains 5 years ago. I'm in JFK waiting to fly to Bucharest, so AMA!

          16 replies 3 retweets 219 likes
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        12. End of conversation

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