ownCloud

Throughout the recent months (and particulary: weeks), people have asked me how to properly secure their SSL/TLS communication, particulary on web servers. At the same time I’ve started to look for good literature on SSL/TLS. I noticed that many of ... [More] the “guides” on how to do a good SSL/TLS setup are actually cargo cult. Cargo cult is a really dangerous thing for two reasons: First of all, security is never a one-size-fits-all solution. Your setup needs to work in your environment, taking into account possible limitation imposed by hardware or software in your infrastructure. And secondly, some of those guides are outdated, e.g. they do neglect the clear need for Perfect Forward Secrecy, or use now-insecure ciphers. At the worst case, they are simply wrong. So I won’t be providing yet another soon-outdated tutorial that leaves you non-the-wiser. Instead, I’ll share my collection of free and for-pay documents, books and resources on the topic which I found particularly useful in the hope that they may help you in gaining some insight. Introduction to SSL/TLS If you’re unfamiliar with SSL/TLS, you definitely should take half an hour to read the Crypto primer, and bookmark SSL/TLS Strong Encryption: An Introduction for reference. Cypto Primer: How does SSL work? sums up the functionality of SSL/TLS SSL/TLS Strong Encryption: An Introduction is less of an introduction than a very elaborate glossary of SSL/TLS and crypto terminology Deploying SSL/TLS So you want to get your hands dirty? Check your server setup with Qualys SSL Labs’ server test. Make sure you fix the most important issues. You should at least be able to get an A- grading. If you find yourself in trouble (and are the administrator of an Apache or nginx setup), you should read the OpenSSL cookbook. Professional system administrators should have Bulletproof SSL/TLS and PKI on the shelf/eBook reader.1) Qualys SSL Labs is a web site that can analyze the quality of a given SSL/TLS setup (HTTP only) using a nice rating scheme 2) and providing hints on how to easily improve your setup. Bulletproof SSL/TLS and PKI – Subtitled The Complete Guide to Securely Using SSL/TLS and PKI in Infrastructure Deployment and Web Application Development, this book is still work in progress (and is constantly updated, also according to readers feedback). Its author, Ivan Ristić, is also the guy behind ssllabs.com. While not finished, a preview eBook is available for £19 (roughly €23 or $32). Purchasers will receive the full eBook once finished. You can also pre-order a hard copy OpenSSL Cookbook  – Extended excerpt from Bulletproof SSL/TLS and PKI. Suitable to secure your web server. Free download (requires registration). Up-to-date cipher suite recommendation from Mozilla with detailed explanation on why it was chosen. (Thanks to Tom Brossman). Efficiently picking PFS-compatible cipher suites for IIS (using PowerShell). The SSL, the TLS and the Ugly If you are a dedicated IT professional, you should not miss the next section. Although it’s not crucial for those wishing to “simply secure their server”, it provides those who are responsible for data security with a clear understanding of the numerous theoretical and practical limitations of SSL/TLS. SSL: Paved with Good Intentions: Presentation on history and weaknesses of SSL/TLS by Richard Moore, CTO at Westpoint Ltd and the maintainer of the Qt SSL/TLS stack. Adam Langley (Google Chrome) on the risks of Revocation Checks 20 years of SSL/TLS Research Dissertation providing an excellent background on the pitfalls, attacks and risks of SSL/TLS. Suitable for non-scholars (and highly recommended). You may skip the math. The case for OCSP-Must-Staple: Great commentary on what is needed for SSL/TLS beyong OCSP Stapling to have good support for certificate revocation. Tools and Utilities for Debugging SSL/TLS Sometimes you need to debug errors during the SSL handshake. While a bit primitive, openssl’s s_client tool is the weapon of choice. When it comes to monitoring SSL/TLS encrypted communications, use mitmproxy or Charles. They need to be added as proxies, but can also intercept PFS connections, due to their active MITM position. sslyze – a command line server check script (Python) openssl s_client is a command line tool that provides details on the handshake phase and establishes a secure connection. Use it to debug problems with certificate chaining, OCSP stapling, etc. Wireshark packet analyzer (and why it will not help you if use PFS) mitmproxy suite — command line tools to analyze encrypted traffic (Python-based, Free) Charles Web Debugging Proxy (Java, Commercial) This list is not exhaustive and if you have more suggestions, please go ahead and post them in the comments. I’ll be happy to add them. Finally, just like with system administration in general, you’re never “done” with security. SSL/TLS is a swiftly moving target, and you need to be aware of what is going on. If you are an IT professional, subscribe to security mailing lists and the announcement lists of your vendor. Finally, while I’m aiming to update this page, there’s never a guarantee of up-to-dateness for this list either. (last updated: 21/04/2014) 1) I do realize that I am courting Ivan a lot in this section and that relying on only an a single external web service that can go away any day is not a good thing. At the same time I think that the handshake simulation and the simple rating process are priceless, as such assessment cannot be trivially done by people whom’s life does not revolve around crypto and security 24/7. At the same time, I’m happy for any pointers towards other, user friendly tools. 2) While blindly following the rating can easily lead to the establishment of cargo cult, ssllabs.com is continuously updated to only give those a good grading that follow the best pactices. Again: Avoid Cargo Cult, make sure you have a good idea of what you are doing. [Less]

“I write about the emergent Big Three – Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things – all of which are part of our unified view of IT today,” states Sys-Con’s Roger Strukhoff.   At a recent event in San Diego, he interviewed Frank Karlitscheck ... [More] , ownCloud CTO and states, “the company seems to have some strong legs and a nice focus on developing cloud-storage solutions from within enterprise IT’s datacenters. As some have put it, in an age of the NSA and Edward Snowden’s revelations, enterprises need to feel much more secure about their storage than ever before.”  Read the full interview on Sys-Con Media. [Less]

That’s scaling like a public cloud folks – that’s real good stuff!

25,000-User Benchmark Results Confirm Linear Scalability of Red Hat Storage and ownCloud running on x86 servers Lexington, MA – April 16, 2014 – ownCloud, Inc., the company behind the world’s most popular open source file sync and share software ... [More] , today released its performance testing for ownCloud Enterprise Edition with Red Hat Storage, Red Hat’s open, software-defined storage offering, running on x86 servers that demonstrate the cost and performance efficiency gained by running ownCloud with Red Hat Storage on industry-standard servers. The performance testing benchmarked 25,000 concurrent users of ownCloud Enterprise Edition and Red Hat Storage running on industry-standard x86 servers. The configuration used illustrates a 2x total cost of ownership (TCO) improvement by converging the application server and storage server tiers onto the same servers, compared to traditional solutions with separate storage server appliances. This enables businesses to scale quickly and cost-effectively with user demand like a public cloud with far greater control of sensitive data and without subsidizing free cloud vendor users. Red Hat and ownCloud used two twin-node x86 storage servers and four standard 2-socket servers for the performance benchmark. ownCloud Enterprise Edition and Red Hat Storage were installed and benchmarked on first one, and then two twin read more … [Less]

Give employees what they’ll use, give IT back control, use what you already have.

ownCloud, Inc. has released its performance testing for ownCloud Enterprise Edition with Red Hat Storage, Red Hat’s open, software-defined storage offering, running on x86 servers that demonstrate the cost and performance efficiency gained by running ownCloud with Red Hat Storage on industry-standard servers.

A few weeks ago, Google did some changes to YouTube. Now, when you attempt to watch a video on YouTube, the video will be streamed using the RC4 cipher. If you disable RC4 in your browser, no video will be loaded. You cannot watch it. It is also ... [More] documented in a Google groups thread. The first time I heard about it was when Faldrian shared his experience with googlevideo.com (German), while YouTube still worked without RC4. A bit later Google extented it on YouTube. What's bad about RC4 RC4 is a widely used stream cipher. For instance it is used to safely transport Video or Audio by symmetric encryption. The advantages of RC4 are that is simple and fast. But it also has its drawbacks. It is said the the RC4 cipher is cryptographically broken (=insecure) for years. Jacob Appelbaum states the NSA can break it in real time. If this is true, it is as good as no encryption. Although no proof exists in public, it seems to be very likely. If you want to be on the safe side, you disable RC4 in your browser. But you cannot disable it for certain web sites only (or only whitelist sites) – it affects all sites. Even Microsoft recommends to stay away from RC4. There may be good reasons for Google doing so, after all they usually reason things out before taking actions. It might have been that Google did not send their videos over an encrypted HTTP connection before (pure speculation), but now they do. Well meant is not necessarily well done. If it drives people to keep using RC4, worse security is the result. My guess is they switched all traffic to TLS encrypted connections, after certain Snowden leaks, and RC4 was the fastest and easiest to implement for video streaming. An interesting side note is that Google filed a draft for an alternative stream cipher for TLS. The candidate is ChaCha20 by Bernstein. So maybe RC4 is just a temporary move? So what? I keep RC4 disabled, YouTube is not that important to me. Except for YouTube, I believe I came across only one other site that relied solely on RC4, and it was far less important, even I do not remember which one it was. Only I wish that more people or blogs would move away from YouTube. The other major reason for this is also to go away from (centralized) services provided by companies that are too big to be good. Bookmarklet: Search for video on other sites Since people will not stop to link to YouTube in the near future, I need to find the video on other sites if I want to watch them. I wrote a little bookmarklet (What is a bookmarklet?) that I can click when I end up on a YouTube video. It will take the video title and start a Google video search excluding youtube.com. Now, not every video will be available somewhere else. Bad luck. On the other hand, many videos on YouTube that are blocked in Germany can be freely seen on other sites. Interested in the bookmarklet? Drag the following "link" into your bookmarks list. Below is a quick video howto if you are new to bookmarklets and also the source code. javascript:(function(){ var title=document.getElementById('eow-title').getAttribute('title'); var noyt='%20-site:youtube.com'; var se='http://www.google.com/search?&tbm=vid&q='; window.location=se+encodeURIComponent(title+noyt); })();Why actually a Google search? – Mainly for ironic reasons. Most likely you can use any search engine that offers a video search if you adjust the URL and parameters. My search engine of choice is startpage.com, by the way, and I do block Google cookies. Tags: YouTubeGoogleVideoEncryptionPlanetUbuntuFiles: bookmarklet.mp4bookmarklet.ogv [Less]

Stop by, we look forward to seeing you there!

Based on the popular ownCloud open source file sync and share community project, ownCloud was founded in 2011 to give corporate IT greater control of their data — combining greater flexibility, openness and extensibility with on premise servers and ... [More] storage. In this podcast their CTO and co-founder discusses how this project and product helps companies and individuals choose where their data is hosted. MP3 version [12:24] OGG version [12:24] [Less]

Now that ownCloud 1.6.0 beta1 is out, it’s time to explain the story behind it: This release was developed under the promise that it would improve performance 1), and we have made tremendous improvements: Using a new Qt-based propagator ... [More] implementation, we can now perform multiple simultaneous up- and downloads. We still provide the old propagator for certain situation where it’s more suitable, such as for situations where bandwidth limitation is needed. Furthermore, the sync journal access code has been significantly optimized. It paid tribute to most of the high CPU load during the mandatory interval checks. CPU usage should be much lower now, and the client should be usable with more files at the same time. Windows users should also find update times improved as the time spent in file stat operations has been reduced. Mac OS X users will enjoy the benefits of a much improved file watcher. To be able to use the more efficient API, 1.6 drops support for Mac OS Snow Leopard (10.6) and now requires Mac OS 10.7 or better. At the same time, production releases are now using Qt 5 rather than Qt 4 on Windows and Mac OS X2). This fixes a lot of visual bugs in Mac OS X, especially for Mavericks users, and allows us to profit from improvements in the SSL handling, especially on the Mac. We also implemented an item that was on many peoples wish list: a concise sync log. Next to the database, the sync folder now holds a hidden file called .owncloudsync.log. It will store all sync processes in a minimal CSV file. Contrary to previous logging facilities, it always logs and only collects information relevant to the actual sync algorithm decisions. Because this tour was not as colorful as the previous one, let’s close this blog post with a feature contributed by Denis Dzyubenko: The settings dialog on Mac OS X now has a native look & feel: Watch on Youtube Get ownCloud Client 1.6.0 beta1 now and provide feedback! 1) Now that while the client is multi-threaded, you may find that the transfer time still doesn’t improve as much as you would expect. This is due locking issues on the server which prevent efficient parallel transfers. This has been improved in 1.7, and could potentilly improved even further by implementing support for X-Sendfile/X-Accel-Redirect in SabreDAV, the DAV framework used by ownCloud server. 2) We can’t do the switch even on modern Linux distributions mostly due of the poor support for modern and divergent Systray/Notification area support in Qt5: Even in Qt 4 we could only use it because Canonical had patched their Qt to make QSystemTrayIcon work with Unity, which they have not ported to Qt 5 yet. Gnome 3 also hides away traditional Systray icons way to well, not to speak of Plasma. Any leads would be helpful. PS: Martin’s blog on the subject indicates that Qt 5.3 might solve the problem. [Less]