Some Windows laptops made by Lenovo come pre-loaded with an adware program that exposes users to security risks.
The software, Superfish Visual Discovery, is designed to insert product ads into search results on other websites, including Google.
However, since Google and some other search engines use HTTPS (HTTP Secure), the connections between them and users’ browsers are encrypted and cannot be manipulated to inject content.
To overcome this, Superfish installs a self-generated root certificate into the Windows certificate store and then acts as a proxy, re-signing all certificates presented by HTTPS sites with its own certificate. Because the Superfish root certificate is placed in the OS certificate store, browsers will trust all fake certificates generated by Superfish for those websites.
This is a classic man-in-the-middle technique of intercepting HTTPS communications that’s also used on some corporate networks to enforce data leak prevention policies when employees visit HTTPS-enabled websites.
However, the problem with Superfish’s approach is it uses the same root certificate
with the same RSA key on all installations, according to Chris Palmer, a Google Chrome security engineer who investigated the issue. In addition, the RSA key is only 1024 bits long, which is considered cryptographically unsafe today because of advances in computing power.
The phasing out of SSL certificates with 1024-bit keys started several years ago, and
the process has been accelerated recently. In January 2011, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology said that digital signatures based on 1024-bit RSA keys
should be disallowed after 2013.
Regardless of whether the private RSA key that corresponds to the Superfish root certificate can be cracked or not, there is the possibility that it could be recovered from the software itself, although this has not yet been confirmed.
If attackers obtain the RSA private key for the root certificate, they could launch man-in-the-middle traffic interception attacks against any user that has the application installed. This would allow them to impersonate any website by presenting a certificate signed with the Superfish root certificate that’s now trusted by systems where the software is installed.
Man-in-the-middle attacks can be launched over insecure wireless networks or by compromising routers, which is not an uncommon occurrence.
“The saddest part about #superfish is it’s only like 100 more lines of code to generate a unique fake CA signing cert for each system,” said Marsh Ray, a security expert who works for Microsoft,
on Twitter.
Another problem pointed out by users on Twitter is that even if Superfish is uninstalled,
the root certificate it creates is left behind. This means affected users will have to manually remove it in order to be completely protected.
It’s also not clear why Superfish is using the certificate to perform a man-in-the-middle attack on all HTTPS websites, not just search engines. A screen shot posted by security expert Kenn White on Twitter shows
a certificate generated by Superfish for www.bankofamerica.com.
Superfish did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mozilla
is considering ways to block the Superfish certificate in Firefox, even though Firefox does not trust certificates installed in Windows and uses it’s own certificate store, unlike Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
“Lenovo removed Superfish from the preloads of new consumer systems in January 2015,” a Lenovo representative said in an emailed statement. “At the same time Superfish disabled existing Lenovo machines in market from activating Superfish.”
The software was only preloaded on a select number of consumer PCs, the representative said, without naming those models. The company is “thoroughly investigating all and any new concerns raised regarding Superfish,” she said.
It seems that this has been happening for a while. There are
reports about Superfish on the Lenovo community forum going back to September 2014.
“Preinstalled software is always a concern because there’s often no easy way for a buyer to know what that software is doing—or if removing it will cause system problems further down the line,” said Chris Boyd, a malware intelligence analyst at Malwarebytes, via email.
Boyd advises users to uninstall Superfish, then to type certmgr.msc into the Windows search bar, open the program and remove the Superfish root certificate from there.
“With increasingly security and privacy conscious buyers, laptop and mobile phone manufacturers may well be doing themselves a disservice by seeking outdated advertising based monetization strategies,” said Ken Westin, a senior security analyst at Tripwire. “If the findings are true and Lenovo is installing their own self-signed certificates, they have not only betrayed their customers’ trust, but also put them at increased risk.”
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.)
