After years of studied silence on the government’s secret and controversial use of security vulnerabilities, the White House has finally acknowledged that the NSA and other agencies exploit some of the software holes they uncover, rather than disclose them to vendors to be fixed.
The acknowledgement comes in a news report indicating that President Obama decided in January that from now on
any time the NSA discovers a major flaw in software, it must disclose the vulnerability to vendors and others so that it can be patched, according to the
New York Times.
But Obama included a major loophole in his decision, which falls far short of recommendations made by a presidential review board last December: According to Obama, any flaws that have “a clear national security or law enforcement” use can be kept secret and exploited.
This, of course, gives the government wide latitude to remain silent on critical flaws like the recent Heartbleed vulnerability if the NSA, FBI, or other government agencies can justify their exploitation.
A so-called zero-day vulnerability is one that’s unknown to the software vendor and for which no patch therefore exists. The U.S. has long wielded zero-day exploits for espionage and sabotage purposes, but has never publicly stated its policy on their use. Stuxnet, a digital weapon used by the U.S. and Israel to attack Iran’s uranium enrichment program, used five zero-day exploits to spread.
Last December, the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies declared that only in rare instances should the U.S. government authorize the use of zero-day exploits for “high priority intelligence collection.” The review board, which was convened in response to reports of widespread NSA surveillance revealed in the Edward Snowden documents, also said that decisions about the use of zero-day attacks should only be made “following senior, interagency review involving all appropriate departments.”
“In almost all instances, for widely used code, it is in the national interest to eliminate software vulnerabilities rather than to use them for US intelligence collection,” the review board
wrote in its lengthy report (.pdf). “Eliminating the vulnerabilities — ‘patching’ them — strengthens the security of US Government, critical infrastructure, and other computer systems.”
When the government does decide to use a zero-day hole for national security purposes, they noted, that decision should have an expiration date.
“We recommend that, when an urgent and significant national security priority can be addressed by the use of a Zero Day, an agency of the US Government may be authorized to use temporarily a Zero Day instead of immediately fixing the underlying vulnerability,” they wrote. “Before approving use of the Zero Day rather than patching a vulnerability, there should be a senior-level, interagency approval process that employs a risk management approach.”
But Obama appeared to ignore these recommendations when the report was released. A month later, when he announced a list of reforms based on the review board’s report, the issue of zero days went unaddressed.
Last week, however, after the Heartbleed vulnerability was exposed, and
questions arose about whether the NSA had known about the vulnerability and kept silent about it, the White House and NSA emphatically denied that the spy agency had known about the flaw or exploited it before this year.
Following a now-disputed report from Bloomberg that the NSA had been exploiting the Heartbleed flaw for two years, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
issued a statement denying that the NSA had known about the vulnerability before it was publicly disclosed.
“If the Federal government, including the intelligence community, had discovered this vulnerability prior to last week, it would have been disclosed to the community responsible for OpenSSL,” the statement said.
Intelligence authorities also revealed that in response to the presidential review board’s recommendations in December, the White House had recently reviewed and “reinvigorated an interagency process for deciding when to share” information about zero day vulnerabilities with vendors and others so that the security holes could be patched.
“When Federal agencies discover a new vulnerability in commercial and open source software … it is in the national interest to responsibly disclose the vulnerability rather than to hold it for an investigative or intelligence purpose,” the statement said.
The government process for deciding on whether or not to use a zero-day exploit is called the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, and the statement said that unless there is “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the equities process is now “biased toward responsibly disclosing such vulnerabilities.”
This implies, of course, that the bias was aimed in favor of something else until now.
“If this is a change in policy, it kind of explicitly confirms that beforehand that was not the policy,” says Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council and a former officer in the Air Force’s cyber division.
The government’s use of zero-day exploits has exploded over the last decade, feeding a lucrative market for defense contractors and others who uncover critical flaws in the software used in cell phones, computers, routers, and industrial control systems and sell information about these vulnerabilities to the government.
But the government’s use of zero days for exploitation purposes has long contradicted Obama’s stated policy claims that the security of the internet is a high priority for his administration.