July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

[IP] more on Sounding the alarm on government mandated data
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

retention X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.749.3) Reply-To: dave(a)farber.net Begin forwarded message:

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Free and Unashamed IRC. An invitation.
by The Free and The Unashamed 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Free and Unashamed IRC. An invitation. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 AN INVITATION WHAT: IRC network for liberty builders. WHY: The time for waiting for others to do things is over. HOW: Using our energy and talents, rather than waiting until some unspecified date. WHERE: Server: agora.anarplex.net Port: 14716 (SSL Required) TOOL: If you don't have an irc client so far, use chatzilla with firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16) This link will connect you: ircs://agora.anarplex.net:14716 You may want to use an anonymizer to protect your connection. However, the IRC server does not know your IP address and cannot make it available. Mission: - Take risks for liberty. It is up to us to change our lives. Being obedient keeps us serfs. - Learn, create, cooperate, advance. - Create reputation and networks of trust. - Talk with people who are not fully brainwashed. - Prove that people can live with each other without coercion. Hints: - Use "/msg nickserv help" to find out how to create a persistent identity on the network. - Invite others that might want to contribute to liberty. - Respect others. This is a place where only minds meet. Be courteous and mature. - Read the posts at http://fau.anarplex.net/ This is all about creating parallel solutions to establish pockets of tangible liberty for you and the people you want to associate with. Politics does not work. Loopholes do not work forever. We must build liberty as a separate realm. Consider our server a country in itself - a place outside of any state. So, don't bring the state to it in your mind and do not draw the state's agents to this place. The Free and The Unashamed -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkoE/U8ACgkQfTNN/LMh9oPpiACbBj/GvcDUZnMGsHCVW36L4d9k rAAAniYpkvJ+dJDM9lx5HJ3WQpqSuGw0 =jjjr -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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CRYPTO-GRAM, April 15, 2011
by Bruce Schneier 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

CRYPTO-GRAM April 15, 2011 by Bruce Schneier Chief Security Technology Officer, BT schneier(a)schneier.com http://www.schneier.com A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. For back issues, or to subscribe, visit <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. You can read this issue on the web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1104.html>. These same essays and news items appear in the "Schneier on Security" blog at <http://www.schneier.com/blog>, along with a lively comment section. An RSS feed is available. ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* In this issue: Detecting Cheaters Ebook Fraud Unanticipated Security Risk of Keeping Your Money in a Home Safe News Changing Incentives Creates Security Risks Euro Coin Recycling Scam Security Fears of Wi-Fi in London Underground Schneier News Epsilon Hack Schneier's Law How did the CIA and FBI Know that Australian Government Computers Were Hacked? ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Detecting Cheaters Our brains are specially designed to deal with cheating in social exchanges. The evolutionary psychology explanation is that we evolved brain heuristics for the social problems that our prehistoric ancestors had to deal with. Once humans became good at cheating, they then had to become good at detecting cheating -- otherwise, the social group would fall apart. Perhaps the most vivid demonstration of this can be seen with variations on what's known as the Wason selection task, named after the psychologist who first studied it. Back in the 1960s, it was a test of logical reasoning; today, its used more as a demonstration of evolutionary psychology. But before we get to the experiment, let's get into the mathematical background. Propositional calculus is a system for deducing conclusions from true premises. It uses variables for statements because the logic works regardless of what the statements are. College courses on the subject are taught by either the mathematics or the philosophy department, and they're not generally considered to be easy classes. Two particular rules of inference are relevant here: *modus ponens* and *modus tollens*. Both allow you to reason from a statement of the form, "if P, then Q." (If Socrates was a man, then Socrates was mortal. If you are to eat dessert, then you must first eat your vegetables. If it is raining, then Gwendolyn had Crunchy Wunchies for breakfast. That sort of thing.) *Modus ponens* goes like this: If P, then Q. P. Therefore, Q. In other words, if you assume the conditional rule is true, and if you assume the antecedent of that rule is true, then the consequent is true. So, If Socrates was a man, then Socrates was mortal. Socrates was a man. Therefore, Socrates was mortal. *Modus tollens* is more complicated: If P, then Q. Not Q. Therefore, not P. If Socrates was a man, then Socrates was mortal. Socrates was not mortal. Therefore, Socrates was not a man. This makes sense: if Socrates was not mortal, then he'd be a demigod or a stone statue or something. Both are valid forms of logical reasoning. If you know "if P, then Q" and "P," then you know "Q." If you know "if P, then Q" and "not Q," then you know "not P." (The other two similar forms don't work. If you know "if P, then Q" and "Q," you don't know anything about "P." And if you know "if P, then Q" and "not P," then you don't know anything about "Q.") If I explained this in front of an audience full of normal people, not mathematicians or philosophers, most of them would be lost. Unsurprisingly, they would have trouble either explaining the rules or using them properly. Just ask any grad student who has had to teach a formal logic class; people have trouble with this. Consider the Wason selection task. Subjects are presented with four cards next to each other on a table. Each card represents a person, with each side listing some statement about that person. The subject is then given a general rule and asked which cards he would have to turn over to ensure that the four people satisfied that rule. For example, the general rule might be, "If a person travels to Boston, then he or she takes a plane." The four cards might correspond to travelers and have a destination on one side and a mode of transport on the other. On the side facing the subject, they read: "went to Boston," "went to New York," "took a plane," and "took a car." Formal logic states that the rule is violated if someone goes to Boston without taking a plane. Translating into propositional calculus, there's the general rule: "if P, then Q." The four cards are "P," "not P," "Q," and "not Q." To verify that "if P, then Q" is a valid rule, you have to verify *modus ponens* by turning over the "P" card and making sure that the reverse says "Q." To verify *modus tollens*, you turn over the "not Q" card and make sure that the reverse doesn't say "P." Shifting back to the example, you need to turn over the "went to Boston" card to make sure that person took a plane, and you need to turn over the "took a car" card to make sure that person didn't go to Boston. You don't -- as many people think -- need to turn over the "took a plane" card to see if it says "went to Boston"; because you don't care. The person might have been flying to Boston, New York, San Francisco, or London. The rule only says that people going to Boston fly; it doesn't break the rule if someone flies elsewhere. If you're confused, you aren't alone. When Wason first did this study, fewer than 10 percent of his subjects got it right. Others replicated the study and got similar results. The best result I've seen is "fewer than 25 percent." Training in formal logic doesn't seem to help very much. Neither does ensuring that the example is drawn from events and topics with which the subjects are familiar. People are just bad at the Wason selection task. They also tend to only take college logic classes upon requirement. This isn't just another "math is hard" story. There's a point to this. The one variation of this task that people are surprisingly good at getting right is when the rule has to do with cheating and privilege. For example, change the four cards to children in a family -- "gets dessert," "doesn't get dessert," "ate vegetables," and "didn't eat vegetables" -- and change the rule to "If a child gets dessert, he or she ate his or her vegetables." Many people -- 65 to 80 percent -- get it right immediately. They turn over the "ate dessert" card, making sure the child ate his vegetables, and they turn over the "didn't eat vegetables" card, making sure the child didn't get dessert. Another way of saying this is that they turn over the "benefit received" card to make sure the cost was paid. And they turn over the "cost not paid" card to make sure no benefit was received. They look for cheaters. The difference is startling. Subjects don't need formal logic training. They don't need math or philosophy. When asked to explain their reasoning, they say things like the answer "popped out at them." Researchers, particularly evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, have run this experiment with a variety of wordings and settings and on a variety of subjects: adults in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Hong Kong; Ecuadorian schoolchildren; and Shiriar tribesmen in Ecuador. The results are the same: people are bad at the Wason selection task, except when the wording involves cheating. In the world of propositional calculus, there's absolutely no difference between a rule about traveling to Boston by plane and a rule about eating vegetables to get dessert. But in our brains, there's an enormous difference: the first is a arbitrary rule about the world, and the second is a rule of social exchange. It's of the form "If you take Benefit B, you must first satisfy Requirement R." Our brains are optimized to detect cheaters in a social exchange. We're good at it. Even as children, we intuitively notice when someone gets a benefit he didn't pay the cost for. Those of us who grew up with a sibling have experienced how the one child not only knew that the other cheated, but felt compelled to announce it to the rest of the family. As adults, we might have learned that life isn't fair, but we still know who among our friends cheats in social exchanges. We know who doesn't pay his or her fair share of a group meal. At an airport, we might not notice the rule "If a plane is flying internationally, then it boards 15 minutes earlier than domestic flights." But we'll certainly notice who breaks the "If you board first, then you must be a first-class passenger" rule. This essay was originally published in IEEE Security & Privacy http://www.schneier.com/essay-337.html It is an excerpt from the draft of my new book. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/02/societal_securi.html Another explanation of the Wason Selection Task, with a possible correlation with psychopathy. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/12/test_of_psychopathy.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Ebook Fraud There is an interesting post -- and discussion -- on the blog Making Light about ebook fraud. Currently there are two types of fraud. The first is content farming, discussed in two interesting blog posts linked to below. People are creating automatically generated content, web-collected content, or fake content, turning it into a book, and selling it on an ebook site like Amazon.com. Then they use multiple identities to give it good reviews. (If it gets a bad review, the scammer just relists the same content under a new name.) That second blog post contains a screen shot of something called "Autopilot Kindle Cash," which promises to teach people how to post dozens of ebooks to Amazon.com per day. The second type of fraud is stealing a book and selling it as an ebook. So someone could scan a real book and sell it on an ebook site, even though he doesn't own the copyright. It could be a book that isn't already available as an ebook, or it could be a "low cost" version of a book that is already available. Amazon doesn't seem particularly motivated to deal with this sort of fraud. And it too is suitable for automation. Broadly speaking, there's nothing new here. All complex ecosystems have parasites, and every open communications system we've ever built gets overrun by scammers and spammers. Far from making editors superfluous, systems that democratize publishing have an even greater need for editors. The solutions are not new, either: reputation-based systems, trusted recommenders, white lists, takedown notices. Google has implemented a bunch of security countermeasures against content farming; ebook sellers should implement them as well. It'll be interesting to see what particular sort of mix works in this case. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012933.html http://www.impactmedia.co.uk/blog/search-marketing/are-ebooks-the-new-conte… or http://tinyurl.com/5rvs5kw http://www.publishingtrends.com/2011/03/the-kindle-swindle/ "All complex ecosystems have parasites": http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Unanticipated Security Risk of Keeping Your Money in a Home Safe In Japan, lots of people -- especially older people -- keep their life savings in cash in their homes. (The country's banks pay very low interest rates, so the incentive to deposit that money into bank accounts is lower than in other countries.) This is all well and good, until a tsunami destroys your home and washes your money out to sea. Then, when it washes up onto the beach, the police collect it. They have thousands, and -- in most cases -- no way of determining who owns them. After three months, the money goes to the government. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110411/ap_on_bi_ge/as_japan_earthquake_lost_mo… or http://tinyurl.com/3emdp5x ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* News Hacking cars with MP3 files: "By adding extra code to a digital music file, they were able to turn a song burned to CD into a Trojan horse. When played on the car's stereo, this song could alter the firmware of the car's stereo system, giving attackers an entry point to change other components on the car." http://www.itworld.com/security/139794/with-hacking-music-can-take-control-… or http://tinyurl.com/4klcuot http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/35094/ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/business/10hack.html Hacking ATM users by gluing down keys. http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/crime/2011/03/glue-gun-goons-target-unwary-… or http://tinyurl.com/4uhfgn3 Zombie fungus: as far as natural-world security stories go, this one is pretty impressive. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/zombie_fungus.html RSA Security, Inc. hacked. The company, not the algorithm. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/rsa_security_in.html I didn't post the video of a Times Square video screen being hacked with an iPhone when I first saw it because I suspected a hoax. Turns out, I was right. It wasn't even two guys faking hacking a Times Square video screen. It was a movie studio faking two guys faking hacking a Times Square video screen. http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/951-buzzy-viral-video-actually-a-promotio… or http://tinyurl.com/67wj3er This is a really interesting paper: "Folk Models of Home Computer Security," by Rick Wash. It was presented at SOUPS, the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, last year. http://www.rickwash.com/papers/rwash-homesec-soups10-final.pdf I found this article on the difference between threats and vulnerabilities to be very interesting. I like his taxonomy. http://jps.anl.gov/Volume4_iss2/Paper3-RGJohnston.pdf Technology for transmitting data through steel. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/transmitting_da.html What's interesting is that this technology can be used to transmit through TEMPEST shielding. Detecting words and phrases in encrypted VoIP calls. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1880022.1880029 http://www.cs.unc.edu/~fabian/papers/tissec2010.pdf I wrote about this in 2008. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/06/eavesdropping_o_2.html Interesting research: "One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Exploiting P2P Applications to Trace and Profile Tor Users" http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00574178/en/ A really interesting article on how to authenticate a launch order in a nuclear command and control system. http://www.slate.com/id/2286735 Interesting article on William Friedman and biliteral ciphers. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php Nice infographic on detecting liars. http://blogs.westword.com/showandtell/2011/03/how_to_spot_a_liar_gratuitous… or http://tinyurl.com/6fuxj7f New paper by Ross Anderson: "Can We Fix the Security Economics of Federated Authentication?" http://spw.stca.herts.ac.uk/2.pdf Also a blog post on the research. http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2011/03/24/can-we-fix-federated-authenti… or http://tinyurl.com/4tavapf In this amusing story of a terrorist plotter using pencil-and-paper cryptography instead of actually secure cryptography, there's this great paragraph: "Despite urging by the Yemen-based al Qaida leader Anwar Al Anlaki, Karim also rejected the use of a sophisticated code program called 'Mujhaddin Secrets', which implements all the AES candidate cyphers, 'because "kaffirs", or non-believers, know about it so it must be less secure.'" Actually, that's not how peer review works. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/22/ba_jihadist_trial_sentencing/ The FBI asks for cryptanalysis help from the community. http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/march/cryptanalysis_032911/cryptanalys… or http://tinyurl.com/4aqdqhs http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/fbi-wants-public-help-solving-en… or http://tinyurl.com/4d56zsz http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110329/ts_yblog_thelookout/fbi-a… or http://tinyurl.com/47rmo62 Comodo Group issues bogus SSL certificates. This isn't good. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/comodo-compromise/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/08/revealed-the-in/ http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/phony-web-certificates-issued-google-yaho… or http://tinyurl.com/4rdgqrb http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12847072 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/microsoft-warns-fraudulent-digital-certi… or http://tinyurl.com/4e6tzsp https://www.comodo.com/Comodo-Fraud-Incident-2011-03-23.html Fake certs for Google, Yahoo, and Skype? Wow. This isn't the first time Comodo has screwed up with certificates. The safest thing for us users to do would be to remove the Comodo root certificate from our browsers so that none of their certificates work, but we don't have the capability to do that. The browser companies -- Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, etc. -- could do that, but my guess is they won't. The economic incentives don't work properly. Comodo is likely to sue any browser company that takes this sort of action, and Comodo's customers might as well. So it's smarter for the browser companies to just ignore the issue and pass the problem to us users. 34 SCADA vulnerabilities published. It's hard to tell how serious this is. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/scada-vulnerabilities/ Here's some very clever thinking from India's chief economic adviser. In order to reduce bribery, he proposes legalizing the giving of bribes. The idea is that after a bribe is given, both the briber and the bribee are partners in the crime, and neither wants the bribe to become public. However, if it is legal it give the bribe but illegal to take it, then after the bribe the bribe giver is much more likely to cooperate with the police. He notes that this only works for a certain class of bribes: when you have to bribe officials for something you are already entitled to receive. It won't work for any long-term bribery relationship, or in any situation where the briber would otherwise not want the bribe to become public. http://finmin.nic.in/WorkingPaper/Act_Giving_Bribe_Legal.pdf http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/03/30/kaushik-basu-says-make-bribe-… or http://tinyurl.com/3e6zytr "Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security," by John Mueller and Mark Stewart. Of course, it's not cost effective. http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/MID11TSM.PDF An optical stun ray has been patented; no idea if it actually works. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=patent-watch-apr-11 New research allows a computer to be pinpointed to within 690 meters, from over the Internet. Impressive, and scary. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20336-internet-probe-can-track-you-do… or http://tinyurl.com/6hfz8gz Terrorist alerts of Facebook and Twitter. What could possibly go wrong? http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/get_your_terror.html The former CIA general counsel, John A. Rizzo, talks about his agency's assassination program, which has increased dramatically under the Obama administration. http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/inside-the-killing-machine.html And the ACLU Deputy Legal Director comments on the interview. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-jaffer-nationalsecurit… or http://tinyurl.com/6hbnzx7 New French law mandates sites save personal information even when it is no longer required. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/new_french_law.html Israel is thinking about creating a counter-cyberterrorism unit. You'd think the country would already have one of those. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/06/isreal_mulls_elite_counter_hacker_u… or http://tinyurl.com/67a368q ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Changing Incentives Creates Security Risks One of the things I am writing about in my new book is how security equilibriums change. They often change because of technology, but they sometimes change because of incentives. An interesting example of this is the recent scandal in the Washington, DC, public school system over teachers changing their students' test answers. In the U.S., under the No Child Left Behind Act, students have to pass certain tests; otherwise, schools are penalized. In the District of Columbia, things went further. Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the public school system from 2007 to 2010, offered teachers $8,000 bonuses -- and threatened them with termination -- for improving test scores. Scores did increase significantly during the period, and the schools were held up as examples of how incentives affect teaching behavior. It turns out that a lot of those score increases were faked. In addition to teaching students, teachers cheated on their students' tests by changing wrong answers to correct ones. That's how the cheating was discovered; researchers looked at the actual test papers and found more erasures than usual, and many more erasures from wrong answers to correct ones than could be explained by anything other than deliberate manipulation. Teachers were always able to manipulate their students' test answers, but before, there wasn't much incentive to do so. With Rhee's changes, there was a much greater incentive to cheat. The point is that whatever security measures were in place to prevent teacher cheating before the financial incentives and threats of firing wasn't sufficient to prevent teacher cheating afterwards. Because Rhee significantly increased the costs of cooperation (by threatening to fire teachers of poorly performing students) and increased the benefits of defection ($8,000), she created a security risk. And she should have increased security measures to restore balance to those incentives. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-28-1Aschooltesting28_CV_N.htm or http://tinyurl.com/6epluee This is not isolated to DC. It has happened elsewhere as well. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/06/cheating_on_tes_1.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Euro Coin Recycling Scam This story is just plain weird. Regularly, damaged coins are taken out of circulation. They're destroyed and then sold to scrap metal dealers. That makes sense, but it seems that one- and two-euro coins aren't destroyed very well. They're both bi-metal designs, and they're just separated into an inner core and an outer ring and then sold to Chinese scrap metal dealers. The dealers, being no dummies, put the two parts back together and sold them back to a German bank at face value. The bank was chosen because they accept damaged coins and don't inspect them very carefully. Is this not entirely predictable? If you're going to take coins out of circulation, you had better use a metal shredder. (Except for U.S. pennies, which are worth more in component metals.) http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,754238,00.html Pennies. http://www.snopes.com/business/money/pennycost.asp ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Security Fears of Wi-Fi in London Underground The London Underground is getting Wi-Fi. Of course there are security fears. The article below worries that this will enable people to use their laptop as a cell phone, and that in Afghanistan and Iraq bomb attacks have been detonated using cell phones. Also, eavesdropping software exists. This is just silly. We could have a similar conversation regarding any piece of our infrastructure. Yes, the bad guys could use it, just as they use telephones and automobiles and all-night restaurants. If we didn't deploy technologies because of this fear, we'd still be living in the Middle Ages. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12856289 ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Schneier News I'm speaking at InfoSec Europe in London on April 20. http://www.infosec.co.uk/page.cfm/Link=687 I'm also speaking at the Activate conference in New York on April 28. http://www.guardian.co.uk/activate/new-york-programme ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Epsilon Hack I have no idea why the Epsilon hack is getting so much press. Yes, millions of names and e-mail addresses might have been stolen. Yes, other customer information might have been stolen, too. Yes, this personal information could be used to create more personalized and better targeted phishing attacks. So what? These sorts of breaches happen all the time, and even more personal information is stolen. I get that over 50 companies were affected, and some of them are big names. But the hack of the century? Hardly. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-04/marriott-hilton-hit-by-data-breach… or http://tinyurl.com/3ar42xk http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/17088/epsilon-hack-50-companies-h… or http://tinyurl.com/42l987f http://articles.cnn.com/2011-04-04/tech/epsilon.stolen.emails_1_fake-e-mail… or http://tinyurl.com/3ouylro http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-04-04-epsilon-hacking-poses-phishing… or http://tinyurl.com/3o3696f http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/03/epsilon-hack_n_844212.html "The hack of the century": http://blogs.computerworld.com/18079/epsilon_breach_hack_of_the_century or http://tinyurl.com/3f56qkn ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Schneier's Law Back in 1998, I wrote: "Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break." In 2004, Cory Doctorow called this Schneier's law: "...what I think of as Schneier's Law: 'any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it.'" The general idea is older than my writing. Wikipedia points out that in The Codebreakers, David Kahn writes: "Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break." The idea is even older. Back in 1864, Charles Babbage wrote: "One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher." My phrasing is different, though. Here's my original quote in context: "Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. It's not even hard. What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after years of analysis. And the only way to prove that is to subject the algorithm to years of analysis by the best cryptographers around." And here's me in 2006: "Anyone can invent a security system that he himself cannot break. I've said this so often that Cory Doctorow has named it 'Schneier's Law': When someone hands you a security system and says, 'I believe this is secure,' the first thing you have to ask is, 'Who the hell are you?' Show me what you've broken to demonstrate that your assertion of the system's security means something." And that's the point I want to make. It's not that people believe they can create an unbreakable cipher; it's that people create a cipher that they themselves can't break, and then use that as evidence they've created an unbreakable cipher. Me in 1998: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9810.html#cipherdesign Me in 2006: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0608.html#7 Cory Doctorow: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt Charles Babbage: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Babbage_deciphering.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* How did the CIA and FBI Know that Australian Government Computers Were Hacked? Newspapers are reporting that, for about a month, hackers had access to computers "of at least 10 federal ministers including the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Defence Minister." That's not much of a surprise. What is odd is the statement that "Australian intelligence agencies were tipped off to the cyber-spy raid by US intelligence officials within the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation." How did the CIA and the FBI know? Did they see some intelligence traffic and assume that those computers were where the stolen e-mails were coming from? Or something else? http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/hackers-log-in-to-federal-mp… or http://tinyurl.com/6hm3fk9 ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Since 1998, CRYPTO-GRAM has been a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your address on the Web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. Back issues are also available at that URL. Please feel free to forward CRYPTO-GRAM, in whole or in part, to colleagues and friends who will find it valuable. Permission is also granted to reprint CRYPTO-GRAM, as long as it is reprinted in its entirety. CRYPTO-GRAM is written by Bruce Schneier. Schneier is the author of the best sellers "Schneier on Security," "Beyond Fear," "Secrets and Lies," and "Applied Cryptography," and an inventor of the Blowfish, Twofish, Threefish, Helix, Phelix, and Skein algorithms. He is the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT BCSG, and is on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). He is a frequent writer and lecturer on security topics. See <http://www.schneier.com>. Crypto-Gram is a personal newsletter. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of BT. Copyright (c) 2011 by Bruce Schneier. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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CRYPTO-GRAM, April 15, 2011
by Bruce Schneier 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

CRYPTO-GRAM April 15, 2011 by Bruce Schneier Chief Security Technology Officer, BT schneier(a)schneier.com http://www.schneier.com A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. For back issues, or to subscribe, visit <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. You can read this issue on the web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1104.html>. These same essays and news items appear in the "Schneier on Security" blog at <http://www.schneier.com/blog>, along with a lively comment section. An RSS feed is available. ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* In this issue: Detecting Cheaters Ebook Fraud Unanticipated Security Risk of Keeping Your Money in a Home Safe News Changing Incentives Creates Security Risks Euro Coin Recycling Scam Security Fears of Wi-Fi in London Underground Schneier News Epsilon Hack Schneier's Law How did the CIA and FBI Know that Australian Government Computers Were Hacked? ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Detecting Cheaters Our brains are specially designed to deal with cheating in social exchanges. The evolutionary psychology explanation is that we evolved brain heuristics for the social problems that our prehistoric ancestors had to deal with. Once humans became good at cheating, they then had to become good at detecting cheating -- otherwise, the social group would fall apart. Perhaps the most vivid demonstration of this can be seen with variations on what's known as the Wason selection task, named after the psychologist who first studied it. Back in the 1960s, it was a test of logical reasoning; today, its used more as a demonstration of evolutionary psychology. But before we get to the experiment, let's get into the mathematical background. Propositional calculus is a system for deducing conclusions from true premises. It uses variables for statements because the logic works regardless of what the statements are. College courses on the subject are taught by either the mathematics or the philosophy department, and they're not generally considered to be easy classes. Two particular rules of inference are relevant here: *modus ponens* and *modus tollens*. Both allow you to reason from a statement of the form, "if P, then Q." (If Socrates was a man, then Socrates was mortal. If you are to eat dessert, then you must first eat your vegetables. If it is raining, then Gwendolyn had Crunchy Wunchies for breakfast. That sort of thing.) *Modus ponens* goes like this: If P, then Q. P. Therefore, Q. In other words, if you assume the conditional rule is true, and if you assume the antecedent of that rule is true, then the consequent is true. So, If Socrates was a man, then Socrates was mortal. Socrates was a man. Therefore, Socrates was mortal. *Modus tollens* is more complicated: If P, then Q. Not Q. Therefore, not P. If Socrates was a man, then Socrates was mortal. Socrates was not mortal. Therefore, Socrates was not a man. This makes sense: if Socrates was not mortal, then he'd be a demigod or a stone statue or something. Both are valid forms of logical reasoning. If you know "if P, then Q" and "P," then you know "Q." If you know "if P, then Q" and "not Q," then you know "not P." (The other two similar forms don't work. If you know "if P, then Q" and "Q," you don't know anything about "P." And if you know "if P, then Q" and "not P," then you don't know anything about "Q.") If I explained this in front of an audience full of normal people, not mathematicians or philosophers, most of them would be lost. Unsurprisingly, they would have trouble either explaining the rules or using them properly. Just ask any grad student who has had to teach a formal logic class; people have trouble with this. Consider the Wason selection task. Subjects are presented with four cards next to each other on a table. Each card represents a person, with each side listing some statement about that person. The subject is then given a general rule and asked which cards he would have to turn over to ensure that the four people satisfied that rule. For example, the general rule might be, "If a person travels to Boston, then he or she takes a plane." The four cards might correspond to travelers and have a destination on one side and a mode of transport on the other. On the side facing the subject, they read: "went to Boston," "went to New York," "took a plane," and "took a car." Formal logic states that the rule is violated if someone goes to Boston without taking a plane. Translating into propositional calculus, there's the general rule: "if P, then Q." The four cards are "P," "not P," "Q," and "not Q." To verify that "if P, then Q" is a valid rule, you have to verify *modus ponens* by turning over the "P" card and making sure that the reverse says "Q." To verify *modus tollens*, you turn over the "not Q" card and make sure that the reverse doesn't say "P." Shifting back to the example, you need to turn over the "went to Boston" card to make sure that person took a plane, and you need to turn over the "took a car" card to make sure that person didn't go to Boston. You don't -- as many people think -- need to turn over the "took a plane" card to see if it says "went to Boston"; because you don't care. The person might have been flying to Boston, New York, San Francisco, or London. The rule only says that people going to Boston fly; it doesn't break the rule if someone flies elsewhere. If you're confused, you aren't alone. When Wason first did this study, fewer than 10 percent of his subjects got it right. Others replicated the study and got similar results. The best result I've seen is "fewer than 25 percent." Training in formal logic doesn't seem to help very much. Neither does ensuring that the example is drawn from events and topics with which the subjects are familiar. People are just bad at the Wason selection task. They also tend to only take college logic classes upon requirement. This isn't just another "math is hard" story. There's a point to this. The one variation of this task that people are surprisingly good at getting right is when the rule has to do with cheating and privilege. For example, change the four cards to children in a family -- "gets dessert," "doesn't get dessert," "ate vegetables," and "didn't eat vegetables" -- and change the rule to "If a child gets dessert, he or she ate his or her vegetables." Many people -- 65 to 80 percent -- get it right immediately. They turn over the "ate dessert" card, making sure the child ate his vegetables, and they turn over the "didn't eat vegetables" card, making sure the child didn't get dessert. Another way of saying this is that they turn over the "benefit received" card to make sure the cost was paid. And they turn over the "cost not paid" card to make sure no benefit was received. They look for cheaters. The difference is startling. Subjects don't need formal logic training. They don't need math or philosophy. When asked to explain their reasoning, they say things like the answer "popped out at them." Researchers, particularly evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, have run this experiment with a variety of wordings and settings and on a variety of subjects: adults in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Hong Kong; Ecuadorian schoolchildren; and Shiriar tribesmen in Ecuador. The results are the same: people are bad at the Wason selection task, except when the wording involves cheating. In the world of propositional calculus, there's absolutely no difference between a rule about traveling to Boston by plane and a rule about eating vegetables to get dessert. But in our brains, there's an enormous difference: the first is a arbitrary rule about the world, and the second is a rule of social exchange. It's of the form "If you take Benefit B, you must first satisfy Requirement R." Our brains are optimized to detect cheaters in a social exchange. We're good at it. Even as children, we intuitively notice when someone gets a benefit he didn't pay the cost for. Those of us who grew up with a sibling have experienced how the one child not only knew that the other cheated, but felt compelled to announce it to the rest of the family. As adults, we might have learned that life isn't fair, but we still know who among our friends cheats in social exchanges. We know who doesn't pay his or her fair share of a group meal. At an airport, we might not notice the rule "If a plane is flying internationally, then it boards 15 minutes earlier than domestic flights." But we'll certainly notice who breaks the "If you board first, then you must be a first-class passenger" rule. This essay was originally published in IEEE Security & Privacy http://www.schneier.com/essay-337.html It is an excerpt from the draft of my new book. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/02/societal_securi.html Another explanation of the Wason Selection Task, with a possible correlation with psychopathy. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/12/test_of_psychopathy.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Ebook Fraud There is an interesting post -- and discussion -- on the blog Making Light about ebook fraud. Currently there are two types of fraud. The first is content farming, discussed in two interesting blog posts linked to below. People are creating automatically generated content, web-collected content, or fake content, turning it into a book, and selling it on an ebook site like Amazon.com. Then they use multiple identities to give it good reviews. (If it gets a bad review, the scammer just relists the same content under a new name.) That second blog post contains a screen shot of something called "Autopilot Kindle Cash," which promises to teach people how to post dozens of ebooks to Amazon.com per day. The second type of fraud is stealing a book and selling it as an ebook. So someone could scan a real book and sell it on an ebook site, even though he doesn't own the copyright. It could be a book that isn't already available as an ebook, or it could be a "low cost" version of a book that is already available. Amazon doesn't seem particularly motivated to deal with this sort of fraud. And it too is suitable for automation. Broadly speaking, there's nothing new here. All complex ecosystems have parasites, and every open communications system we've ever built gets overrun by scammers and spammers. Far from making editors superfluous, systems that democratize publishing have an even greater need for editors. The solutions are not new, either: reputation-based systems, trusted recommenders, white lists, takedown notices. Google has implemented a bunch of security countermeasures against content farming; ebook sellers should implement them as well. It'll be interesting to see what particular sort of mix works in this case. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012933.html http://www.impactmedia.co.uk/blog/search-marketing/are-ebooks-the-new-conte… or http://tinyurl.com/5rvs5kw http://www.publishingtrends.com/2011/03/the-kindle-swindle/ "All complex ecosystems have parasites": http://craphound.com/complexecosystems.txt ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Unanticipated Security Risk of Keeping Your Money in a Home Safe In Japan, lots of people -- especially older people -- keep their life savings in cash in their homes. (The country's banks pay very low interest rates, so the incentive to deposit that money into bank accounts is lower than in other countries.) This is all well and good, until a tsunami destroys your home and washes your money out to sea. Then, when it washes up onto the beach, the police collect it. They have thousands, and -- in most cases -- no way of determining who owns them. After three months, the money goes to the government. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110411/ap_on_bi_ge/as_japan_earthquake_lost_mo… or http://tinyurl.com/3emdp5x ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* News Hacking cars with MP3 files: "By adding extra code to a digital music file, they were able to turn a song burned to CD into a Trojan horse. When played on the car's stereo, this song could alter the firmware of the car's stereo system, giving attackers an entry point to change other components on the car." http://www.itworld.com/security/139794/with-hacking-music-can-take-control-… or http://tinyurl.com/4klcuot http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/35094/ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/business/10hack.html Hacking ATM users by gluing down keys. http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/crime/2011/03/glue-gun-goons-target-unwary-… or http://tinyurl.com/4uhfgn3 Zombie fungus: as far as natural-world security stories go, this one is pretty impressive. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/zombie_fungus.html RSA Security, Inc. hacked. The company, not the algorithm. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/rsa_security_in.html I didn't post the video of a Times Square video screen being hacked with an iPhone when I first saw it because I suspected a hoax. Turns out, I was right. It wasn't even two guys faking hacking a Times Square video screen. It was a movie studio faking two guys faking hacking a Times Square video screen. http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/951-buzzy-viral-video-actually-a-promotio… or http://tinyurl.com/67wj3er This is a really interesting paper: "Folk Models of Home Computer Security," by Rick Wash. It was presented at SOUPS, the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, last year. http://www.rickwash.com/papers/rwash-homesec-soups10-final.pdf I found this article on the difference between threats and vulnerabilities to be very interesting. I like his taxonomy. http://jps.anl.gov/Volume4_iss2/Paper3-RGJohnston.pdf Technology for transmitting data through steel. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/03/transmitting_da.html What's interesting is that this technology can be used to transmit through TEMPEST shielding. Detecting words and phrases in encrypted VoIP calls. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1880022.1880029 http://www.cs.unc.edu/~fabian/papers/tissec2010.pdf I wrote about this in 2008. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/06/eavesdropping_o_2.html Interesting research: "One Bad Apple Spoils the Bunch: Exploiting P2P Applications to Trace and Profile Tor Users" http://hal.inria.fr/inria-00574178/en/ A really interesting article on how to authenticate a launch order in a nuclear command and control system. http://www.slate.com/id/2286735 Interesting article on William Friedman and biliteral ciphers. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/sherman.php Nice infographic on detecting liars. http://blogs.westword.com/showandtell/2011/03/how_to_spot_a_liar_gratuitous… or http://tinyurl.com/6fuxj7f New paper by Ross Anderson: "Can We Fix the Security Economics of Federated Authentication?" http://spw.stca.herts.ac.uk/2.pdf Also a blog post on the research. http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2011/03/24/can-we-fix-federated-authenti… or http://tinyurl.com/4tavapf In this amusing story of a terrorist plotter using pencil-and-paper cryptography instead of actually secure cryptography, there's this great paragraph: "Despite urging by the Yemen-based al Qaida leader Anwar Al Anlaki, Karim also rejected the use of a sophisticated code program called 'Mujhaddin Secrets', which implements all the AES candidate cyphers, 'because "kaffirs", or non-believers, know about it so it must be less secure.'" Actually, that's not how peer review works. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/22/ba_jihadist_trial_sentencing/ The FBI asks for cryptanalysis help from the community. http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/march/cryptanalysis_032911/cryptanalys… or http://tinyurl.com/4aqdqhs http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/fbi-wants-public-help-solving-en… or http://tinyurl.com/4d56zsz http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110329/ts_yblog_thelookout/fbi-a… or http://tinyurl.com/47rmo62 Comodo Group issues bogus SSL certificates. This isn't good. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/comodo-compromise/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/08/revealed-the-in/ http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/phony-web-certificates-issued-google-yaho… or http://tinyurl.com/4rdgqrb http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12847072 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/microsoft-warns-fraudulent-digital-certi… or http://tinyurl.com/4e6tzsp https://www.comodo.com/Comodo-Fraud-Incident-2011-03-23.html Fake certs for Google, Yahoo, and Skype? Wow. This isn't the first time Comodo has screwed up with certificates. The safest thing for us users to do would be to remove the Comodo root certificate from our browsers so that none of their certificates work, but we don't have the capability to do that. The browser companies -- Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, etc. -- could do that, but my guess is they won't. The economic incentives don't work properly. Comodo is likely to sue any browser company that takes this sort of action, and Comodo's customers might as well. So it's smarter for the browser companies to just ignore the issue and pass the problem to us users. 34 SCADA vulnerabilities published. It's hard to tell how serious this is. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/scada-vulnerabilities/ Here's some very clever thinking from India's chief economic adviser. In order to reduce bribery, he proposes legalizing the giving of bribes. The idea is that after a bribe is given, both the briber and the bribee are partners in the crime, and neither wants the bribe to become public. However, if it is legal it give the bribe but illegal to take it, then after the bribe the bribe giver is much more likely to cooperate with the police. He notes that this only works for a certain class of bribes: when you have to bribe officials for something you are already entitled to receive. It won't work for any long-term bribery relationship, or in any situation where the briber would otherwise not want the bribe to become public. http://finmin.nic.in/WorkingPaper/Act_Giving_Bribe_Legal.pdf http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/03/30/kaushik-basu-says-make-bribe-… or http://tinyurl.com/3e6zytr "Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security," by John Mueller and Mark Stewart. Of course, it's not cost effective. http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/MID11TSM.PDF An optical stun ray has been patented; no idea if it actually works. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=patent-watch-apr-11 New research allows a computer to be pinpointed to within 690 meters, from over the Internet. Impressive, and scary. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20336-internet-probe-can-track-you-do… or http://tinyurl.com/6hfz8gz Terrorist alerts of Facebook and Twitter. What could possibly go wrong? http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/get_your_terror.html The former CIA general counsel, John A. Rizzo, talks about his agency's assassination program, which has increased dramatically under the Obama administration. http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/inside-the-killing-machine.html And the ACLU Deputy Legal Director comments on the interview. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-jaffer-nationalsecurit… or http://tinyurl.com/6hbnzx7 New French law mandates sites save personal information even when it is no longer required. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/new_french_law.html Israel is thinking about creating a counter-cyberterrorism unit. You'd think the country would already have one of those. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/06/isreal_mulls_elite_counter_hacker_u… or http://tinyurl.com/67a368q ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Changing Incentives Creates Security Risks One of the things I am writing about in my new book is how security equilibriums change. They often change because of technology, but they sometimes change because of incentives. An interesting example of this is the recent scandal in the Washington, DC, public school system over teachers changing their students' test answers. In the U.S., under the No Child Left Behind Act, students have to pass certain tests; otherwise, schools are penalized. In the District of Columbia, things went further. Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the public school system from 2007 to 2010, offered teachers $8,000 bonuses -- and threatened them with termination -- for improving test scores. Scores did increase significantly during the period, and the schools were held up as examples of how incentives affect teaching behavior. It turns out that a lot of those score increases were faked. In addition to teaching students, teachers cheated on their students' tests by changing wrong answers to correct ones. That's how the cheating was discovered; researchers looked at the actual test papers and found more erasures than usual, and many more erasures from wrong answers to correct ones than could be explained by anything other than deliberate manipulation. Teachers were always able to manipulate their students' test answers, but before, there wasn't much incentive to do so. With Rhee's changes, there was a much greater incentive to cheat. The point is that whatever security measures were in place to prevent teacher cheating before the financial incentives and threats of firing wasn't sufficient to prevent teacher cheating afterwards. Because Rhee significantly increased the costs of cooperation (by threatening to fire teachers of poorly performing students) and increased the benefits of defection ($8,000), she created a security risk. And she should have increased security measures to restore balance to those incentives. http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-28-1Aschooltesting28_CV_N.htm or http://tinyurl.com/6epluee This is not isolated to DC. It has happened elsewhere as well. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/06/cheating_on_tes_1.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Euro Coin Recycling Scam This story is just plain weird. Regularly, damaged coins are taken out of circulation. They're destroyed and then sold to scrap metal dealers. That makes sense, but it seems that one- and two-euro coins aren't destroyed very well. They're both bi-metal designs, and they're just separated into an inner core and an outer ring and then sold to Chinese scrap metal dealers. The dealers, being no dummies, put the two parts back together and sold them back to a German bank at face value. The bank was chosen because they accept damaged coins and don't inspect them very carefully. Is this not entirely predictable? If you're going to take coins out of circulation, you had better use a metal shredder. (Except for U.S. pennies, which are worth more in component metals.) http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,754238,00.html Pennies. http://www.snopes.com/business/money/pennycost.asp ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Security Fears of Wi-Fi in London Underground The London Underground is getting Wi-Fi. Of course there are security fears. The article below worries that this will enable people to use their laptop as a cell phone, and that in Afghanistan and Iraq bomb attacks have been detonated using cell phones. Also, eavesdropping software exists. This is just silly. We could have a similar conversation regarding any piece of our infrastructure. Yes, the bad guys could use it, just as they use telephones and automobiles and all-night restaurants. If we didn't deploy technologies because of this fear, we'd still be living in the Middle Ages. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-12856289 ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Schneier News I'm speaking at InfoSec Europe in London on April 20. http://www.infosec.co.uk/page.cfm/Link=687 I'm also speaking at the Activate conference in New York on April 28. http://www.guardian.co.uk/activate/new-york-programme ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Epsilon Hack I have no idea why the Epsilon hack is getting so much press. Yes, millions of names and e-mail addresses might have been stolen. Yes, other customer information might have been stolen, too. Yes, this personal information could be used to create more personalized and better targeted phishing attacks. So what? These sorts of breaches happen all the time, and even more personal information is stolen. I get that over 50 companies were affected, and some of them are big names. But the hack of the century? Hardly. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-04/marriott-hilton-hit-by-data-breach… or http://tinyurl.com/3ar42xk http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/17088/epsilon-hack-50-companies-h… or http://tinyurl.com/42l987f http://articles.cnn.com/2011-04-04/tech/epsilon.stolen.emails_1_fake-e-mail… or http://tinyurl.com/3ouylro http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-04-04-epsilon-hacking-poses-phishing… or http://tinyurl.com/3o3696f http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/03/epsilon-hack_n_844212.html "The hack of the century": http://blogs.computerworld.com/18079/epsilon_breach_hack_of_the_century or http://tinyurl.com/3f56qkn ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Schneier's Law Back in 1998, I wrote: "Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break." In 2004, Cory Doctorow called this Schneier's law: "...what I think of as Schneier's Law: 'any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it.'" The general idea is older than my writing. Wikipedia points out that in The Codebreakers, David Kahn writes: "Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break." The idea is even older. Back in 1864, Charles Babbage wrote: "One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher." My phrasing is different, though. Here's my original quote in context: "Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. It's not even hard. What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after years of analysis. And the only way to prove that is to subject the algorithm to years of analysis by the best cryptographers around." And here's me in 2006: "Anyone can invent a security system that he himself cannot break. I've said this so often that Cory Doctorow has named it 'Schneier's Law': When someone hands you a security system and says, 'I believe this is secure,' the first thing you have to ask is, 'Who the hell are you?' Show me what you've broken to demonstrate that your assertion of the system's security means something." And that's the point I want to make. It's not that people believe they can create an unbreakable cipher; it's that people create a cipher that they themselves can't break, and then use that as evidence they've created an unbreakable cipher. Me in 1998: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9810.html#cipherdesign Me in 2006: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0608.html#7 Cory Doctorow: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt Charles Babbage: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Babbage_deciphering.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* How did the CIA and FBI Know that Australian Government Computers Were Hacked? Newspapers are reporting that, for about a month, hackers had access to computers "of at least 10 federal ministers including the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Defence Minister." That's not much of a surprise. What is odd is the statement that "Australian intelligence agencies were tipped off to the cyber-spy raid by US intelligence officials within the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation." How did the CIA and the FBI know? Did they see some intelligence traffic and assume that those computers were where the stolen e-mails were coming from? Or something else? http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/hackers-log-in-to-federal-mp… or http://tinyurl.com/6hm3fk9 ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Since 1998, CRYPTO-GRAM has been a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your address on the Web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. Back issues are also available at that URL. Please feel free to forward CRYPTO-GRAM, in whole or in part, to colleagues and friends who will find it valuable. Permission is also granted to reprint CRYPTO-GRAM, as long as it is reprinted in its entirety. CRYPTO-GRAM is written by Bruce Schneier. Schneier is the author of the best sellers "Schneier on Security," "Beyond Fear," "Secrets and Lies," and "Applied Cryptography," and an inventor of the Blowfish, Twofish, Threefish, Helix, Phelix, and Skein algorithms. He is the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT BCSG, and is on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). He is a frequent writer and lecturer on security topics. See <http://www.schneier.com>. Crypto-Gram is a personal newsletter. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of BT. Copyright (c) 2011 by Bruce Schneier. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [IP] Sounding the alarm on government mandated data
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

retention Lauren, Thanks for your kind remarks about my article for CNET News.com. It's interesting that you say if we "don't take a stand now, we are likely to see the wonders of the Net repurposed into shackles that have the potential to undermine the very basis of our fundamental freedoms." It does seem bizarre that we had such a public outcry about the Justice Department trying to obtain some information from Google. But now that we have the Justice Department proposing something far broader -- and *actual legislation* afoot in the U.S. Congress, with a floor vote perhaps next Wednesday -- nobody seems to be paying attention. I first wrote about the Justice Department shopping around this proposal nearly a year ago: http://news.com.com/Your+ISP+as+Net+watchdog/2100-1028_3-5748649.html And then wrote an update a few weeks ago: http://news.com.com/ISP+snooping+gaining+support/ 2100-1028_3-6061187.html And we've published two articles since then: http://news.com.com/U.S.+attorney+general+calls+for+reasonable+data +retention/2100-1030_3-6063185.html http://news.com.com/Congress+may+consider+mandatory+ISP+snooping/ 2100-1028_3-6066608.html But doing a search for "data retention" coupled with "Gonzales" on Google News turns up only four hits, three of them our News.com articles and the fourth a blog entry that links to News.com. Where's the other coverage and broader concern? My June 2005 article about the DoJ's statements in a private meeting took digging, true, but the more recent articles are based on _public statements_ by top Bush administration officials including Gonzales, Chertoff, and Mueller, and _actual legislation_ that's published on a House of Representatives web site. Perhaps people are waiting until data retention requirements becomes law before they'll take it seriously? -Declan David Farber forwarded Lauren's message: >Recently here in IP, I commented on Attorny General Gonazales' >comments >on data retention, and the alarming slippery slope that I feel this >represented: >http://lists.elistx.com/archives/interesting-people/200604/ >msg00134.html >Now, Declan has noted in an article: >http://news.com.com/Congress+may+consider+mandatory+ISP+snooping/ >2100-1028_3-6066608.html?tag=st_lh that a Democratic Congresswoman >is proposing to fast-track a bill or >ammendment to *require* essentially permanent retention of users' >Internet activity data (until at *least* one year after the user >*closes their account*). For long-term users, this means effectively >permanent retention. [...remainder snipped...] ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen(a)leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[IP] more on Sounding the alarm on government mandated data
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

retention X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.749.3) Reply-To: dave(a)farber.net Begin forwarded message:

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[tahoe-dev] Weekly Dev Chat notes from 2013-03-07
by Zooko Wilcox-OHearn 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Sheesh, it takes a lot longer to write these notes up for the list than it does to actually attend the dev chat. in attendance: Oleksandr, Zooko (scribe), David-Sarah, Randall "ClashTheBunny" Mason, Brian (latebone lash), Tony (latebone lash) not in attendance: Andrew (ABSENTbtwo lashes) sort-of-in-attendance (on the IRC channel): a lot of folks Agenda: Tahoe-LAFS v1.10 (Nuts and Bolts) SUMMARY: This was awesome. We got lots of tickets closed, or at least pushed forward a step or two. This was the most productive hour of ticket-closing work ever. We're going to do it again next week! If you like doing code-review and writing unit tests, you should join us. DETAILS: You can see also use the Trac Timeline: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/timeline ClashTheBunny has some patches for IPv6 for Tahoe-LAFS and Foolscap (#867), and has some tests of them but needs more thorough tests. However, we didn't look at that this time, because we focused on tickets for Tahoe-LAFS v1.10. Nejucomo said on IRC that he wasn't going to get around to manually verifying that the bug we fixed in ticket #1679 was the same as the bug he reported. I decided to just close the ticket for the following reasons: there *is* a bug that we understand, there is a fix which is clear, there is a unit test that exercises the bug that is red without the fix and green with the fix, and The Dod manually verified that it fixed the problem in practice for him. The only reason we've left the ticket open waiting for Nejucomo to test is in case Nathan actually has a *different* bug than this one. But we don't need to keep the ticket open for that eventuality. ClashTheBunny did design review on #1732. He approved the design and made good comments that showed that he actually had thought about it. Subsequently Zooko added another design question and assigned it to Brian for design re-re-re-review. We looked at #1926. It is a blocker because it makes the SFTP frontend incompatible with the current stable release of Twisted. However it is closed as a duplicate of #1525 because the improvement in #1525 would remove the incompatibility. We briefly considered kludging it by requiring people to install an older Twisted, but instead decided to fix it the good way. David-Sarah had already implemented the fix to #1525 but there was something wrong with the unit test. NEWFLASH! This just in! As we were going to press, David-Sarah posted on #1525 a comment that they are currently working on it. We discussed #1767. David-Sarah had an idea for how to make the implementation simple, by incrementing the server-wide counter once for each service. Brian will work on it. It and #1732 are the two blockers that require new code to be written before we release Tahoe-LAFS v1.10. We closed #1484 as fixed. Yay! #1746 is finished, reviewed, and ought to go into Tahoe-LAFS v1.10, but I can't figure out how to merge it into master using git. I don't understand how to use git very well, since I've only been using it on a daily basis for a little more than two years now... #1812 was already applied, but there was something wrong with it according to Brian. Do we need to fix that as a blocker for 1.10 release? We agreed to drop support for Python 2.5 and therefore for CentOS 5. In the last few minutes of the hangout, we agreed that next week's hangout will be another Nuts And Bolts like this one, hopefully bringing Tahoe-LAFS v1.10 close to completion. Brian will work on #1767. Someone (maybe Zooko??) will work on #1732. Then we briefly mentioned the possibility of switching from a "semantic versioning" style version number, to a YEAR.RELEASE_COUNT version number like Twisted does. So instead of Tahoe-LAFS v1.10, this might be Tahoe-LAFS v13.0. Then if there is another release in 2013, that would be Tahoe-LAFS v13.1. We also considered leaving it alone for the "v1.10" release, and switching styles for the next release. Currently we use the "1." in "Tahoe-LAFS v1.10" to mean that it has backward-compatibility with all of the stable Tahoe-LAFS releases since v1.0 (released March 25, 2008: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Doc#TheParadeofReleaseNotes ). I'm not sure that's accurate. While we have never deliberately violated that goal, and we are not aware of any change that we've made which would break that compatibility, on the other hand we don't have automated or manual testing of backwards compatibility. Anyway, I suspect that there aren't any users of Tahoe-LAFS versions older than 1.9.2: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/OSPackages tickets mentioned in this letter: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/867# use ipv6 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1484# CLI: overzealous quoting of error messages https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1525# SFTP: handle download failures correctly; remove use of IFinishableConsumer https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1679# Nondeterministic NoSharesError for direct CHK download in 1.8.3 and 1.9.1 https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1732# consider changes to webapi "Move" API before release https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1746# write test for anti-Ubuntu-crash-reporter exception-catching code https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1767# update Announcement "timestamp": sequence number? https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1812# parse_abbreviated_size doesn't accept T for terabytes (and other quibbles with the regex it uses) https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1926# Failed to load application: cannot import name IFinishableConsumer -- Regards, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep https://LeastAuthority.com _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev(a)tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[p2p-hackers] Amicima's amiciPhone now on Macintosh
by Matthew Kaufman 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

amiciPhone, our Skype-like P2P communicator that does encrypted peer-to-peer VoIP calling, text messaging, user presence, and file transfer (including photo preview when sending images) is now available for the Macintosh (OS X 10.3.9 or later, and PPC-only at this point). Also, the Windows XP version is still available and has been upgraded several times (latest release is Beta 4). This is a great way to try out what MFP and MFPNet can do (both of which have documentation and open-source implementations available on our website, unlike Skype's proprietary protocol model) and we'd also love to hear feedback about the application itself before we add any more features, so give it a try! (and get your friends to give it a try too!) Matthew Kaufman matthew(a)matthew.at amiciPhone: matthew(a)test.amicima.com http://www.amicima.com Ps. For a good time, try calling "7" _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)zgp.org http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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[drone-list] When swimming with SHARKs...
by Yosem Companys 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gregory Foster <gfoster(a)entersection.org> To: drone-list(a)lists.stanford.edu Cc: gia-unmanned_systems(a)grassintel.com Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:42:51 -0600 Subject: When swimming with SHARKs... This is the first domestic incident I've seen of a privately launched surveillance UAV being shot down by disgruntled folks under observation. It won't be the last! The Times and Democrat (Feb 14) - "Animal rights group says drone shot down" http://thetandd.com/animal-rights-group-says-drone-shot-down/article_017a72… The comments over on Gizmodo's coverage are revealing of public sentiment, as a majority say they would have shot the drone down too, if it was hovering over their home ("then I'd run my mower over it"). http://gizmodo.com/5886013/hunters-shoot-animal-rights-drone-out-of-the-sky However, it sounds like the drone was actually not over private property at the time of the incident. A little digging starting (but not ending) at the "Air rights" article on Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights>indicates that National Airspace (NAS) starts at about 500 feet above the land or structures, and is effectively the property of the US Government. The FAA's Advisory Circular 91-57<http://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/advisory_circulars/index.cfm/go/doc…>governs non-commercial hobbyist usage of UAVs, roughly interpreted as restricting flight below 400 feet while maintaining line-of-sight. So it seems that landowners have property rights to the airspace directly above their property and below the NAS. Hobbyist UAVs should watch those property lines! Reminds me a little of the Cold War "ravens" and "ferrets"<http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1360/1>tasked with probing Russian airspace to gather signals intelligence: *The aircraft themselves were called ferrets, a name that stemmed from their mission of burrowing for prey, like their furry namesake. Rarely did the aircraft actually penetrate Soviet airspace, and those that did occasionally got shot down. But their reason for being in the air was to record signals and they could not do this if the Soviets never turned their radars on, so it was common for them to fly provocatively. Sometimes they headed directly toward the Soviet border and turned away at the last minute; sometimes they operated with other aircraft, to scare their prey by implying that they were about to do something warlike. Nobody said that being a raven was a safe job. * The Straight Dope has a pretty funny article surveying the history of relevant case law<http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1117/can-i-declare-a-no-flight-zon…> . gf -- Gregory Foster || gfoster(a)entersection.org @gregoryfoster <> http://entersection.com/ _______________________________________________ drone-list mailing list drone-list(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/drone-list If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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[p2p-hackers] Amicima's amiciPhone now on Macintosh
by Matthew Kaufman 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

amiciPhone, our Skype-like P2P communicator that does encrypted peer-to-peer VoIP calling, text messaging, user presence, and file transfer (including photo preview when sending images) is now available for the Macintosh (OS X 10.3.9 or later, and PPC-only at this point). Also, the Windows XP version is still available and has been upgraded several times (latest release is Beta 4). This is a great way to try out what MFP and MFPNet can do (both of which have documentation and open-source implementations available on our website, unlike Skype's proprietary protocol model) and we'd also love to hear feedback about the application itself before we add any more features, so give it a try! (and get your friends to give it a try too!) Matthew Kaufman matthew(a)matthew.at amiciPhone: matthew(a)test.amicima.com http://www.amicima.com Ps. For a good time, try calling "7" _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)zgp.org http://zgp.org/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ Here is a web page listing P2P Conferences: http://www.neurogrid.net/twiki/bin/view/Main/PeerToPeerConferences ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]

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