[SR-Users] Russian meddling in Kamailio project

[Daniel-Constantin Mierla]

Shall we rise a CVE report now, or?!?


On 01.04.18 06:42, Alex Balashov wrote:
> (Filed by the Geostrategic Open Source Alliance.)
>
> ATLANTA, GA (1 April 2018)--In a twist of events that has shocked the global
> technical community, the well-known open-source VoIP professional Alex Balashov
> has revealed himself to be a deep cover intelligence operative of the GRU
> (Main Intelligence Directorate of the military of the Russian Federation) and
> the FSB (the Federal Security Bureau, the successor agency to the Soviet-era
> KGB). 
>
> Balashov was reported to be seeking US political asylum and immunity from
> prosecution in return for an exposé of the ways in which the Russian foreign
> intelligence apparatus has sought to influence the direction of the open-source
> communications project "Kamailio", widely used in telecommunications carrier,
> service provider and enterprise environments to deliver high-scalability
> routing services and other SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) platform building
> blocks.
>
> In connection with these sensitive ongoing negotiations, Balashov was debriefed
> on behalf of the US Government by Fred Posner of The Palner Group, a
> counterintelligence think tank and security consulting firm based in
> Gainesville, Florida. This debriefing was coordinated with the German BND
> (Bundesnachrichtendienst) agency and other agencies representing security
> cooperation partners of the European Union and NATO.
>
> GOSA have been able to obtain exclusive excerpts from the portions of this
> interview not deemed top secret:
>
>
> POSNER: Please state your full name, age, place of birth, physical
> characteristics, serial number and any other relevant professional asset
> identification markers. 
>
> BALASHOV: [redacted]
>
> POSNER: You have made the claim that Kamailio has been infiltrated by Russian
> spy agencies. Given that it's an open-source project, that's a bold and
> provocative claim. Where's the evidence?
>
> BALASHOV: Infiltration is perhaps strong word from spy novels. Reality is less
> thrilling. As you are knowing from controversy about election of our Donald,
> covert global influence today is mainly question of soft power.
>
> POSNER: Is there an obvious way in which this applies to the Kamailio project
> you can show us? I remind you that you have staked your personal freedom on
> this issue.
>
> BALASHOV: Influence is delicate matter. Da, of course there are some
> superficial indications...
>
> POSNER: Such as?
>
> BALASHOV: For example module to support language Squirrel. What is Squirrel?
> Who uses it? If you take a look at code is a bit complicated, da? What does it
> do?
>
> POSNER: It is a bit complicated, But I'm not convinced. Sell me.
>
> BALASHOV: It was in fact committed to GitHub by former Eastern Bloc
> personality, yes? Very complicated code for unknown mystery language support
> from Eastern Europe...
>
> POSNER: Yes, from the main developer and leader of the project.
>
> BALASHOV: Hmm.
>
> POSNER: What else?
>
> BALASHOV: There is a Ukranian [redacted] who is in charge of many SIP captures
> with system which diverts them to central database, yes? Something with name
> from ancient Greek troubadour or myths maybe?
>
> POSNER: We'll have to look into that.
>
> BALASHOV: Kamailio World is held every year in East Berlin. Every year back to
> Berlin.
>
> POSNER: So what?
>
> BALASHOV: Where do most guests of it spend their night?
>
> POSNER: [audible crack of pistol whip] This is not a quiz show! I ask the
> questions here. 
>
> BALASHOV: Yes, yes, okay, they are at the Park Inn at Alexanderplatz.
>
> POSNER: And?
>
> BALASHOV: The history of this hotel in East German times and Stasi presence
> there...
>
> POSNER: That aspect of history is well-known.
>
> BALASHOV: Da... then is clear.
>
> POSNER: What are the strategic goals of Russia with regard to open source
> communication infrastructure?
>
> BALASHOV: From news lately can be seen that is soft power leveraging and
> economic sabotage.
>
> POSNER: Economic sabotage? How will they achieve that with open source?
>
> BALASHOV: Again is question of delicate influence in small ways. This is not
> time of Arab dignitaries visiting KGB hotels in Moscow in 1970s or this kind of
> naked and obvious trick.
>
> POSNER: [raises pistol] You are here to provide specifics.
>
> BALASHOV: Yes yes, okay. Well, I am not policy architect at Khoroshovskoe
> Shosse, but general point of view with colleagues is that best approach to
> Western countries is to encourage kind of "boondoggles" [air quotes] which
> consume large economic resources with very little benefit.
>
> POSNER: Does Russia create boondoggles in America?
>
> BALASHOV: No no. We don't have this level of direct influence to create per se.
> You can see from recent activities of Internet Research Agency for example that
> the successful approach is the one which will amplify or grow existing
> boondoggles which lead to kind of systemic dysfunction, through for example
> injection of kind of "memes" [air quote gesture] and "trolls" [air quote
> gesture].
>
> POSNER: Where has Russia been successful at this specifically as it relates to
> the Kamailio, the VoIP industry, and real-time communications?
>
> BALASHOV: The GRU are very successful at disinformation campaign to convince
> business executives about cloud things. They are always listening to our
> "thought leadership" [air quote gesture] to move to cloud, mostly Amazon Web
> Services, which is great for us since is worst possible approach. At industry
> events our people are always pushing very much cloud cloud cloud, you know,
> like a stampede of rhinoceroses to cloud, don't miss out on cloud! Don't be
> left on the ground, fly away to cloud! We have great podcas--
>
> POSNER: --stop. But there is a legitimate value proposition for service
> providers in moving to the cloud, isn't there?
>
> BALASHOV: Yes, for some maybe, but for example AWS is platform not designed at
> all for telecom, is kind of Node.js and Ruby on Rails hosting service. 
>
> POSNER: Where is the economic sabotage?
>
> BALASHOV: Well they are spending one month $30,000 to Amazon, next month
> $35,000, next month $40,000, always bigger instances, bigger, bigger, to handle
> even very basic work. Official sexy seduction mythology is you can fire all the
> system admins and no longer replace hard drives at 3 AM and forget all this
> messing with hardware. 
>
> Is very hard to resist for big business leaders who follow classical Western
> management consulting sermon from 90s about "divest yourself of non-core
> competencies" [air quote gesture]. You know, it is same advice they come to
> give to us in Gaidar and Yeltsin days. From my memory was not working out well
> until First Marshal Putin took different approach...
>
> POSNER: Let's stay focused. Surely companies can run the numbers for themselves
> and see if it makes sense for them?
>
> BALASHOV: Maybe, but where we have the success is in the exploit of the fear of
> missing out, I think is called "FOMO" [air quote gesture] nowadays. Everyone is
> moving to cloud, don't get left behind, even if unit economics of it are
> disaster for your product and your company. Have you heard about the cloud?
> It's future!
>
> POSNER: And this has been successful?
>
> BALASHOV: Hard to measure but for example there is major increase in mailing
> list posts about putting Kamailio in Amazon EC2, EC2, endless EC2 from people
> for whom it is obviously wrong thing. Lots of wheels spinnink, spinnik, making
> fire and sparks, light and heat going into cold, empty outer space, to keep warm 
> our GLONASS satellites. But where is result?  All cost increase. And still the
> $3000/mo instance does not process small amount of packets that is nothing for
> bare metal server. 
>
> Meanwhile spendink, spendink, solvink big amounts of kind of fake problems... I
> heard this expression once in Atlanta, "keep up with Jones" [air quote
> gesture]. I don't know who is Jones but everyone agrees is very important to
> keep up with h--
>
> POSNER: --back up. Fake problems?
>
> BALASHOV: Maybe is better word: unnecessary problems that come from way AWS
> inside workings. Stupid network constraints, stupid puzzles for puzzle-solvers.
> What is American term, "eager beaver" [air quote gesture]?
>
> POSNER: Apart from tying up resources, how does this enthusiasm for AWS help
> Russia?
>
> BALASHOV: Well it should be obvious that having whole industry pay huge premium
> price to centralise their infrastructure at one entity is both economically
> wasteful and precarious. Fragile and expensive setup is like our Soviet economy
> at end of eighties. Also havink resemblance to old-times mainframe computing is
> top secret irony nobody sees.
>
> POSNER: Where else is Russia seeding economically harmful memes?
>
> BALASHOV: Other big initiative is encourage huge overinvestment in WebRTC
> because is supposedly future of real-time communications.
>
> POSNER: But WebRTC is real.
>
> BALASHOV: Da, of course, sometimes workink fine, but eats up big engineering
> capital and talent fighting always browser bugs and incompatible
> implementations and always changink changink changink. Meanwhile who is caring
> for fundamental SIP services? 
>
> POSNER: And this is a form of economic sabotage?
>
> BALASHOV: Of course is sabotage. If you can make much of a sector of economy to
> obsess always about some toy and create kind of echo chamber of "visionary"
> [air quote gesture] commentary about it it is negative for GDP and innovation.
>
> "Vision" has shown the big success for us; is perfect concept in hand of
> intelligence agency because nobody is knowing what it is but everyone so
> desperate to show they have it.
>
> POSNER: So a large-scale movement of VoIP service providers to the cloud and
> big development around WebRTC represent Russian attempts at sabotage of the
> Western real-time communications industry?
>
> BALASHOV: Well again, these tendencies are existing before. It is more question
> of amplifying and boosting and promoting them so many actors are distracted
> from important things. American business guys are very vulnerable to it; every
> time they are asking, "this does not seem to be worth it for us?", always they
> hear from friends at country club, "you need more bold vision and company
> culture of innovation, my friend". 
>
> We have learned after some years and applying KGB psychology training to
> exploit their big personal insecurities about many things. For example they see
> competitor have Cloud Business Analytics, they too must have now Cloud Business
> Analytics, not for any reason, just fear, insecurity, the angst about not
> having enough "Big Data" [air quote gesture].
>
> POSNER: What else?
>
> BALASHOV: In recent years can be found thought leadership to remove direct
> sales because is inefficient, too high customer acquisition cost and so forth.
> Always now resellers, channel partners this and master agents that. Common
> sense shows industry cannot support chain with big depth of reseller of
> reseller of reseller with everyone wanting to be reseller and nobody selling
> actual products to the real people.
>
> POSNER: That's not new to telecom.
>
> BALASHOV: No, no, but now new twist! They are now having everything "as a
> service" [air quote gesture], platform-aaS, infrastructure-aaS...
>
> POSNER: Okay?
>
> BALASHOV: But also now infrastructure management-as-a-service and kind of meta
> approach, management-of-management-of-platform-aaS. Resellers of resale
> platforms of platforms of platforms. 
>
> Maybe not quite clear, but this is special recursive sense of humour tradition
> in Russia. Put endless things inside things inside things like matryoshka
> doll. Again--
>
> POSNER: --matryoshka? Like the Russian nesting doll?
>
> BALASHOV: Yes yes, nesting doll. 
>
> As I was saying key point is lots of "activity and buzz" [air quote gesture]
> which is parasitism by another name. Lots of energy and enthusiasm, big
> banners, hype from UC press, LinkedIn Pulse CTO insights, cheerleadink, but
> where is result? 
>
> POSNER: How is this all tied to Kamailio?
>
> BALASHOV: Some of it is not directly tied. It is more idea that Kamailio is
> tool for executing "big ideas" [air quote gesture] and "platform plays" [air
> quote gesture]. 
>
> When you are reading mailing list post like, "how to scale up with Kamailio to
> deliver cloud WebRTC solutions for the enterprise?" and wonder with yourself
> "from where this small guy got such 'big ideas'?" is often result of
> Russian-sponsored so-called thought leadership. Who is he? He does not have
> enterprise!
>
> POSNER: What's wrong with that question?
>
> BALASHOV: Well from our point of view nothing; great question, bold and
> inspiring! We are encouraging them always to go build grandiose megalomania
> ideas, telling to them, yes, "boil the ocean", "be disruptor 2.0", etc.  Have
> you seen ITEXPO? Ideally also raising some venture capital to erase value from
> fund limited partners portfolio, like pension funds, university endowments.
>
> Although sometimes we feel sorry, knowink they will not meet the success, and
> almost have heart to tell them is just trollink, but our government is clear
> about goal: work hard every day to suck money out of American economy.
>
> POSNER: So it is in Russia's interest to see big ideas funded in America?
>
> BALASHOV: Oh yes yes! Bigger is better! First mover advantage and network
> effect, go big or go home trailblazink! On every time someone gets the Series A
> for "completely transforming the way you do the business with UCaaS" [air quote
> gesture] or like "a new kind of next-gen VoIP peering" [air quote gesture] we
> are having another champagne bottle at the headquarters.
>
> POSNER: This does not really sound like traditional intelligence work.
>
> BALASHOV: Is not. We are livink in Internet cultural moment, is about memes,
> engineering perceptions and mass behaviour, new kind of value creation.
> Likewise destruction.
>
> POSNER: We will consider your asylum application in detail. In the meantime,
> you will be detained at [redacted] as before.
>
> BALASHOV: This is famous American tradition of "customer service"?
>
> POSNER: We call it "customer success" nowadays.
>
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-- 
Daniel-Constantin Mierla
www.twitter.com/miconda -- www.linkedin.com/in/miconda
Kamailio Advanced Training - April 16-18, 2018, Berlin - www.asipto.com
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