Wireless networks often struggle to run in full duplex because the access points (AP) have a hard time listening when they are transmitting.

An AP would send and then have to say “over” before getting a response that it could hear — like a hand-held radio. Researchers now say that the AP can avoid this problem by adapting to its own transmission noise, canceling it out, so it hears only signal(s) even though it is still transmitting.

It is like wearing headphones that cancel noise and are specifically tuned to eliminate your own voice:

This paper presents Antenna Cancellation, a novel technique for self-interference cancellation. In conjunction with existing RF interference cancellation and digital baseband interference cancellation, antenna cancellation achieves the amount of self-interference cancellation required for full-duplex operation.

This could double the performance of an AP. The authors also explain why doubling the number of physical devices, which also may achieve the same objective, is less compelling:

…a wireless full-duplex system that can nearly double the throughput of a single hop link is practically implementable. On the other hand, the implementation uses additional resources that could otherwise be used to implement a 2×2 MIMO system, that may provide similar physical layer gains. It is unclear if only the physical layer gains of full-duplex would justify the engineering and cost needed to implement these systems. However, we believe that the true benefit of the full-duplex system lies beyond this gain in the physical layer. Practical full-duplexing can mitigate many of the problems with wireless networks today. Full-duplexing helps address three distinct challenges in current wireless systems: hidden terminals, congestion due to MAC scheduling, and high end-to-end delays in multihop wireless networks. Further, full duplex can have applications to future wireless networks that use cognitive radios.

The EFF have released an update to their handy HTTPS Everywhere extension for Firefox. It turns on SSL for most popular sites and can be configured to handle many more.

I found a couple interesting notes in the change log.

0.9.4:
* Disable Cisco by default
* Disable Google Custom Search Engines (they don’t work)

Why disable Cisco? This is not the sort of behavior I would have expected from the EFF, especially as I was just railing on Facebook for the same thing the other day. Google at least gets an explanation.

BMC Patrol is marketed as system management software that will “Proactively detect and automatically resolve IT performance issues and sub-optimal configurations before users and services are negatively impacted.”

Speaking of sub-optimal configurations, the vulnerability database at NIST just popped up an urgent alert that says BMC Patrol actually might be your next source of negative impact:

Stack-based buffer overflow in BMC PATROL Agent Service Daemon for in Performance Analysis for Servers, Performance Assurance for Servers, and Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers 7.4.00 through 7.5.10; Performance Analyzer and Performance Predictor for Servers 7.4.00 through 7.5.10; and Capacity Management Essentials 1.2.00 (7.4.15) allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted length value in a BGS_MULTIPLE_READS command to TCP port 6768.

They give it a CVSS v2 Base Score of 10.0 (the highest rating).

Sometimes this means the vendor is not supplying sufficient information, but in this case it looks like port 6768 is just a short step away from complete control of a system.

Access Vector: Network exploitable
Access Complexity: Low
Authentication: Not required to exploit
Impact Type:Allows unauthorized disclosure of information; Allows unauthorized modification; Allows disruption of service

Fourteen months passed between discovery and this patch/announcement. At least their announcement has been more well-reasoned than the last time I mentioned a BMC remote exploit.

They should have called it Operation Sloppy Joe.

McAfee is stirring cyberwar book authors into high alert again. Expect to see the authors issue new warnings, recommend the purchase new products (probably made in China), and tell you to buy their book(s) and give lots of attention to a report titled: “Global Energy Cyberattacks: Night Dragon”

I will cover this in my presentation next week at BSidesSF (Dr. Stuxlove or how I learned to stop worrying and love the worm) but here’s a sneak preview.

McAfee has determined that all of the identified data exfiltration activity occurred from Beijing-based IP addresses and operated inside the victim companies weekdays from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Beijing time, which also suggests that the involved individuals were “company men” working on a regular job, rather than freelance or unprofessional hackers.

That is not the conclusion I would draw from the same data. They are making some funny and highly improbable assumptions:

1. The attackers are male (Ok, cheap shot, I know, but srsly “company men?” Is this 1950?)
2. The attacks correspond to 9-5 daytime in Beijing, so they must be related to a regular Joe. Get it? Sloppy Joe. Why not assume the opposite — night-time attacks from freelance or unprofessional hackers? Heck, why not assume professional night-time hackers using Beijing proxies? And they might not be sloppy so much as cost-effective. They still went undiscovered for a good long time, and saved money over more secretive methods.
3. The attackers used Chinese language attack tools, therefore they must be Chinese. This is a reverse language bias that brings back memories of L0phtCrack. It only ran in English. I mean if you ran L0phtCrack, it made you an American, right? Neat how that works. It used to be so hard to get Chinese citizenship. Now you just run Hookmsgina and blammo! You start waking up as a company man for 9am Beijing time — metamorphosis.

Seriously, though. The evidence continues to show that innovation is still alive and well as a form of imitation, as I have written before. Competitors will try to get inside information to copy and improve upon their own processes and products without the cost of invention. This has been a risk since the beginning of competition. Are we at cyberwar yet?

There is a reason the iPhone adopted the Garmin-like touch screen and form-factor and added a Google-like scrolling interface…it could be the very same reason someone is trying to study critical infrastructure in America. Or they might want to get insider information so their next round of surveillance/control is more sophisticated. Or they might want to get more power and money for anti-Chinese cyber programs. The problem is that the report gives a lot of room for interpretation and pot stirring instead of a clear case.