Reports of data losses and system breaches are almost becoming passe but from time to time events happen that take on a life of their own and have effects far beyond what the initial breach would normally represent.

Late last week there was an announcement that key servers belonging to both the Fedora and Red Hat Linux distributions were compromised. With this breach they join the ranks of Ubuntu, Debian and Gentoo] as Linux distributions that have suffered severe server breaches. What is causing the most concern about Fedora's case is that one of the servers that had been breached was being used to provide authoritative signing of packages distributed under the Fedora banner. Had the attacker been able to capture the private key, or even the source phrase used to generate the key, then it would have been possible to generate their own packages that authenticated as official Fedora software. The Red Hat compromise resulted in custom OpenSSH packages being uploaded to the compromised server.

While Fedora have stated that they don't believe the key or phrase were compromised, many feel that it isn't good enough and are calling for Red Hat to be far more open in reporting exactly what happened. The different signing systems in use has helped mitigate the extent of the damage (otherwise Red Hat's compromise would have the same sort of risk as Fedora's) but there is concern about how readily the Red Hat system signed the modified OpenSSH packages.

It would be interesting to uncover the motivation for the attack. If handled carefully, the attacker could have subtly poisoned user-space applications that could have allowed the easy extraction of sensitive personal information for Identity theft/fraud purposes. Targeting key system components is more likely to have the attackers found out quicker, but it also means that the attackers would potentially have full system access to a large number of global systems without any extra effort. One day we will see a cross over point, where the value of quietly stealing the personal information outweighs the value of the system as part of a botnet and attackers will begin to focus on subtle user-level attacks to achieve this.

Beyond the direct problems associated with resolving the breaches and uncovering the extent of any damage, the costs associated with re-verifying all source code and rebuilding packages make this particular set of system breaches more costly than most others. Questions should be asked about why the package signing machine was networked (and ultimately reachable from the Internet), is it a case where security has unintentionally been compromised for the sake of simpler administration and package distribution by remote authors?

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