July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

Re: [IP] more on search experience on "border"
by Tom Fairlie 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

>And to what end? We know that the Bush administration has long tried to earn points with religious fundamentalists. We also know that this same administration operates incompetently the majority of the time (both objective facts). Thus, creating a speed bump at our borders to keep out evil porn would be a good example of a policy that fits both MOs--it's appealing to prudes and ineffective/costly at the same time. We also know that the Bush administration has accelerated our descent into fascism. This isn't hyperbole; anyone who studies such things would at least admit that this is a debatable assertion. The stopping of good travelers at our borders for a little personal interrogation, while not effective at stopping anything, is a marvelous form of thought control (e.g., "Let's remember to not bring anything with us that might be considered offensive to our government." begets "Let's not say anything offensive to our government." begets "My government knows best.") I think the real answer is somewhere in the middle. As we've all discussed, the TSA has been largely ineffective and they aren't free. However, they have also now done a long list of things that, for better or worse, have forced millions of Americans to think twice before performing many different innocuous actions before traveling. Given that this list is growing and not shrinking based upon public outcry, I gather that my second option above is either part of the plan or just a happy coincidence. Tom Fairlie ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Farber" <dave(a)farber.net> To: <ip(a)v2.listbox.com> Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 11:25 AM Subject: [IP] more on search experience on "border" Begin forwarded message:

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[IP] more on search experience on "border"
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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Re: [p2p-hackers] darknet ~= (blacknet, f2f net)
by zooko＠zooko.com 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Ian, p2p-hackers: It's not my goal to quibble about etymology (except inasmuch as it is useful to preserve the historical record). My goals are: 1. Avoid ambiguity -- where some people think that word X denotes concept 1, and others think that word X denotes concept 2. Especially if concepts 1 and 2 are related but not identical. Especially if one of them is politically incendiary. 2. Make sure we have names for our useful concepts. However, before I get to that I am going to go through the history one last time in order to cast light on the current problem. I turned up some interesting details. Let's start with a Venn diagram: _______ _______ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \/ \ / /\ \ / / \ \ | | | | | 1 |1^2 | 2 | | | | | | | | | \ \ / / \ \/ / \ /\ / \ / \ / \_______/ \_______/ Let 1 be the set of networks which are used for illegal transmission of information, and 2 be the set of networks which are built on f2f connections, and 1^2 be the intersection -- the set of networks which are used for illegal transmission of information and which are built on f2f connections. [bepw2002] introduces "darknet" to mean concept 1. In their words darknet is "a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content", and they use it consistently within that meaning. They refer to concept 2, starting in section 2.1, using the term "small-world nets", and they clearly distinguish between what they call "small-world darknets" and "non-small-world darknets". However nowadays some people in the mass media seem to think that a "darknet" means primarily a network which is "invitation-only", i.e. a "small-world" or "f2f" net [globe]. When did the meaning shift? Ooh -- how interesting to examine the evolution of this word on [wikipedia]! The original definition on wikipedia was written on 2004-09-30. It read in full: "Darknet is a broad term to denote the networks and technologies that enable users to copy and share digital material. The term was coined in a paper from four Microsoft Research authors.". The next change was that two months later someone redirected the "Darknet" page to just be a link to the "Filesharing page", with the comment "Just another word for filesharing". The next change was that on 2005-04-14 someone from IP 81.178.83.245 wrote a definition beginning with this sentence: "A Darknet is a private file sharing network where users only connect to people they trust.". By the way, I should point out that I have a personal interest in this history because between 2001 and 2003 I tried to promulgate concept 2, using Lucas Gonze's coinage: "friendnet" [zooko2001, zooko2002, zooko2003, gonze2002]. I would like to know for my own satisfaction if my ideas were a direct inspiration for some of this modern stuff, such as the Freenet v0.7 design. So much for etymology. Now the problem is that in the current parlance of the media, the word "darknet" is used to mean vaguely 1 or 2 or 1^2. The reason that this is a problem isn't that it breaks with some etymological tradition, but that it is ambiguous and that it deprives us of useful words to refer to 1 or 2 specifically. The ambiguity has nasty political consequences -- see for example these f2f network operators struggling to persuade newspaper readers that they are not primarily for illegal purposes: [globe]. My proposal to rectify the lack-of-words problem is to use "blacknet" to refer to 1 specifically and "f2f net" to refer to 2 specifically. I don't know if there is any way to rectify the ambiguity problem. Ian wrote: > > ... > defining the term "darknet" as a f2f network that is designed > to conceal the activities of its participants (this being, so far as I > have seen, one of the main motivations for building an f2f network), So you think of "darknet" as meaning 1^2. That's an interesting remark -- that you regard concealment as one of the main motivations. I personally regard concealment as one of the lesser motivations -- I'm more interested in attack resistance (resisting attacks such as subversion or denial-of-service, rather than attacks such as surveillance), scalability, and other properties. Although I'm interested in the concealment properties as well. Regards, Zooko P.S. Here's some obligatory link juice for Gonze's latest sly neologism: lightnet! [bepw2002] "The darknet and the future of content distribution" Biddle, England, Peinado, Willman (Microsoft Corporation) http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc http://www.dklevine.com/archive/darknet.pdf (The .doc version crashes my OpenOffice.org app when I try to read it. Does this mean something? The .pdf version has screwed up images when I view it in evince.) [wikipedia] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet [zooko2001] "Attack Resistant Sharing of Metadata" Zooko and Raph Levien presentation, First O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference, 2001 http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/p2p2001/view/e_sess/1200 [zooko2002] http://zooko.com/log-2002-12.html#d2002-12-14-the_human_context_and_the_fut… e_of_Mnet [zooko2003] http://www.zooko.com/log-2003-01.html#d2003-01-23-trust_is_just_another_top… ogy [gonze2002] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2428 [globe] "Darknets: The invitation-only Internet" globeandmail.com 2005-11-24 http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20051007.gtdar knetoct7/BNStory/Technology/ [lightnet] http://gonze.com/weblog/story/lightnet _______________________________________________ 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> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 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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Re: [IP] search experience on "border"
by Lauren Weinstein 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

>From: Travis Kalanick <travis(a)redswoosh.net> ... >While operating my laptop he said that we was tasked with preventing >illegal pornographic material from entering the United States ... >He returned my laptop after this warrantless search saying I was free Dave, And to what end -- other than going through the motions -- is such a search? Given a quick check, the border agent would be unlikely to find a cache of porn photos that was compressed and archived in a single encrypted file named C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB911567 or some other obscure name -- not a single JPG porn file to be found in a file scan. Perhaps what's really going on in such border cases is some sort of "amateur test" -- since any pro who wanted to bring porn (or any other data) into the U.S. on a laptop would never leave the data in an easily discovered form. But then again, why bother using the laptop? How about putting an innocuous looking file on that cute keychain memory dongle? Or on an iPod? Porn could be easily rigged to look like an mp3 file, that could even play properly. Or why not use some spare cell phone memory area? Or how about that 2 Gig memory stick in the camera, or a miniSD memory card inserted into an electric razor or the binding of a book? To quote the wonderful episode "OBIT" from the original '60s television series "The Outer Limits": "The machines are everywhere!" Anyone with half a brain who wants to bring data into the U.S. can do so without meaningful detection, short of a full body cavity strip search and prolonged forensic analysis -- and even then the true nature of any data might well be undiscovered. All of the rest is for show, and perhaps to cull the low hanging fruit. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein lauren(a)vortex.com or lauren(a)pfir.org Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 http://www.pfir.org/lauren Co-Founder, PFIR - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org Co-Founder, IOIC - International Open Internet Coalition - http://www.ioic.net Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com DayThink: http://daythink.vortex.com ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as tfairlie(a)frontiernet.net To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting- people/ ------------------------------------- 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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Re: [IP] more on search experience on "border"
by Tom Fairlie 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

>And to what end? We know that the Bush administration has long tried to earn points with religious fundamentalists. We also know that this same administration operates incompetently the majority of the time (both objective facts). Thus, creating a speed bump at our borders to keep out evil porn would be a good example of a policy that fits both MOs--it's appealing to prudes and ineffective/costly at the same time. We also know that the Bush administration has accelerated our descent into fascism. This isn't hyperbole; anyone who studies such things would at least admit that this is a debatable assertion. The stopping of good travelers at our borders for a little personal interrogation, while not effective at stopping anything, is a marvelous form of thought control (e.g., "Let's remember to not bring anything with us that might be considered offensive to our government." begets "Let's not say anything offensive to our government." begets "My government knows best.") I think the real answer is somewhere in the middle. As we've all discussed, the TSA has been largely ineffective and they aren't free. However, they have also now done a long list of things that, for better or worse, have forced millions of Americans to think twice before performing many different innocuous actions before traveling. Given that this list is growing and not shrinking based upon public outcry, I gather that my second option above is either part of the plan or just a happy coincidence. Tom Fairlie ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Farber" <dave(a)farber.net> To: <ip(a)v2.listbox.com> Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 11:25 AM Subject: [IP] more on search experience on "border" Begin forwarded message:

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[IP] more on search experience on "border"
by David Farber 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Begin forwarded message:

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FC: Anti-terrorism bill's "expiration date" may not mean much
by Declan McCullagh 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Text of USA Act, which President Bush will sign today: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:h.r.03162: Background: http://www.wartimeliberty.com/search.pl?topic=legislation --- http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47901,00.html Terror Bill Has Lasting Effects By Declan McCullagh (declan(a)wired.com) 2:00 a.m. Oct. 26, 2001 PDT WASHINGTON -- Legislators who sent a sweeping anti-terrorism bill to President Bush this week proudly say that the most controversial surveillance sections will expire in 2005. Senate Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) said that a four-year expiration date "will be crucial in making sure that these new law enforcement powers are not abused." In the House, Bob Barr (R-Georgia) stressed that "we take very seriously the sunset provisions in this bill." But the Dec. 2005 expiration date embedded in the USA Act -- which the Senate approved 98 to 1 on Thursday -- applies only to a tiny part of the mammoth bill. After the president signs the measure on Friday, police will have the permanent ability to conduct Internet surveillance without a court order in some circumstances, secretly search homes and offices without notifying the owner, and share confidential grand jury information with the CIA. Also exempt from the expiration date are investigations underway by Dec. 2005, and any future investigations of crimes that took place before that date. [...] Other sections of the USA Act, which the House approved by a 357 to 66 vote on Wednesday, that do not expire include the following: * Police can sneak into someone's house or office, search the contents, and leave without ever telling the owner. This would be supervised by a court, and the notification of the surreptitious search "may be delayed" indefinitely. (Section 213) * Any U.S. attorney or state attorney general can order the installation of the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system and record addresses of Web pages visited and e-mail correspondents -- without going to a judge. Previously, there were stiffer legal restrictions on Carnivore and other Internet surveillance techniques. (Section 216) * Any American "with intent to defraud" who scans in an image of a foreign currency note or e-mails or transmits such an image will go to jail for up to 20 years. (Section 375) * An accused terrorist who is a foreign citizen and who cannot be deported can be held for an unspecified series of "periods of up to six months" with the attorney general's approval. (Section 412) * Biometric technology, such as fingerprint readers or iris scanners, will become part of an "integrated entry and exit data system" with the identities of visa holders who hope to enter the U.S. (Section 414) * Any Internet provider or telephone company must turn over customer information, including phone numbers called -- no court order required -- if the FBI claims the "records sought are relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism." The company contacted may not "disclose to any person" that the FBI is doing an investigation. (Section 505) * Credit reporting firms like Equifax must disclose to the FBI any information that agents request in connection with a terrorist investigation -- without police needing to seek a court order first. Current law permits this only in espionage cases. (Section 505) * The current definition of terrorism is radically expanded to include biochemical attacks and computer hacking. Some current computer crimes -- such as hacking a U.S. government system or breaking into and damaging any Internet-connected computer -- are covered. (Section 808) * A new crime of "cyberterrorism" is added, which covers hacking attempts causing damage "aggregating at least $5,000 in value" in one year, any damage to medical equipment or "physical injury to any person." Prison terms range between five and 20 years. (Section 814) * New computer forensics labs will be created to inspect "seized or intercepted computer evidence relating to criminal activity (including cyberterrorism)" and to train federal agents. (Section 816) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- End forwarded message -----

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CRYPTO-GRAM, July 15, 2009
by Bruce Schneier 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

CRYPTO-GRAM July 15, 2009 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-0907.html>. These same essays appear in the "Schneier on Security" blog: <http://www.schneier.com/blog>. An RSS feed is available. ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* In this issue: Imagining Threats Security, Group Size, and the Human Brain North Korean Cyberattacks Why People Don't Understand Risks Fraud on eBay News Authenticating Paperwork The Pros and Cons of Password Masking The "Hidden Cost" of Privacy Fixing Airport Security Schneier News Homomorphic Encryption Breakthrough New Attack on AES MD6 Withdrawn from SHA-3 Competition Ever Better Cryptanalytic Results Against SHA-1 Comments from Readers ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Imagining Threats A couple of years ago, the Department of Homeland Security hired a bunch of science fiction writers to come in for a day and think of ways terrorists could attack America. If our inability to prevent 9/11 marked a failure of imagination, as some said at the time, then who better than science fiction writers to inject a little imagination into counterterrorism planning? I discounted the exercise at the time, calling it "embarrassing." I never thought that 9/11 was a failure of imagination. I thought, and still think, that 9/11 was primarily a confluence of three things: the dual failure of centralized coordination and local control within the FBI, and some lucky breaks on the part of the attackers. More imagination leads to more movie-plot threats -- which contributes to overall fear and overestimation of the risks. And that doesn't help keep us safe at all. Recently, I read a paper by Magne Jorgensen that provides some insight into why this is so. Titled More Risk Analysis Can Lead to Increased Over-Optimism and Over-Confidence, the paper isn't about terrorism at all. It's about software projects. Most software development project plans are overly optimistic, and most planners are overconfident about their overoptimistic plans. Jorgensen studied how risk analysis affected this. He conducted four separate experiments on software engineers, and concluded (though there are lots of caveats in the paper, and more research needs to be done) that performing more risk analysis can make engineers more overoptimistic instead of more realistic. Potential explanations all come from behavioral economics: cognitive biases that affect how we think and make decisions. (I've written about some of these biases and how they affect security decisions, and there's a great book on the topic as well.) First, there's a control bias. We tend to underestimate risks in situations where we are in control, and overestimate risks in situations when we are not in control. Driving versus flying is a common example. This bias becomes stronger with familiarity, involvement and a desire to experience control, all of which increase with increased risk analysis. So the more risk analysis, the greater the control bias, and the greater the underestimation of risk. The second explanation is the availability heuristic. Basically, we judge the importance or likelihood of something happening by the ease of bringing instances of that thing to mind. So we tend to overestimate the probability of a rare risk that is seen in a news headline, because it is so easy to imagine. Likewise, we underestimate the probability of things occurring that don't happen to be in the news. A corollary of this phenomenon is that, if we're asked to think about a series of things, we overestimate the probability of the last thing thought about because it's more easily remembered. According to Jorgensen's reasoning, people tend to do software risk analysis by thinking of the severe risks first, and then the more manageable risks. So the more risk analysis that's done, the less severe the last risk imagined, and thus the greater the underestimation of the total risk. The third explanation is similar: the peak end rule. When thinking about a total experience, people tend to place too much weight on the last part of the experience. In one experiment, people had to hold their hands under cold water for one minute. Then, they had to hold their hands under cold water for one minute again, then keep their hands in the water for an additional 30 seconds while the temperature was gradually raised. When asked about it afterwards, most people preferred the second option to the first, even though the second had more total discomfort. (An intrusive medical device was redesigned along these lines, resulting in a longer period of discomfort but a relatively comfortable final few seconds. People liked it a lot better.) This means, like the second explanation, that the least severe last risk imagined gets greater weight than it deserves. Fascinating stuff. But the biases produce the reverse effect when it comes to movie-plot threats. The more you think about far-fetched terrorism possibilities, the more outlandish and scary they become, and the less control you think you have. This causes us to overestimate the risks. Think about this in the context of terrorism. If you're asked to come up with threats, you'll think of the significant ones first. If you're pushed to find more, if you hire science-fiction writers to dream them up, you'll quickly get into the low-probability movie plot threats. But since they're the last ones generated, they're more available. (They're also more vivid -- science fiction writers are good at that -- which also leads us to overestimate their probability.) They also suggest we're even less in control of the situation than we believed. Spending too much time imagining disaster scenarios leads people to overestimate the risks of disaster. I'm sure there's also an anchoring effect in operation. This is another cognitive bias, where people's numerical estimates of things are affected by numbers they've most recently thought about, even random ones. People who are given a list of three risks will think the total number of risks are lower than people who are given a list of 12 risks. So if the science fiction writers come up with 137 risks, people will believe that the number of risks is higher than they otherwise would -- even if they recognize the 137 number is absurd. Jorgensen does not believe risk analysis is useless in software projects, and I don't believe scenario brainstorming is useless in counterterrorism. Both can lead to new insights and, as a result, a more intelligent analysis of both specific risks and general risk. But an over-reliance on either can be detrimental. Last month, at the 2009 Homeland Security Science & Technology Stakeholders Conference in Washington D.C., science fiction writers helped the attendees think differently about security. This seems like a far better use of their talents than imagining some of the zillions of ways terrorists can attack America. This essay originally appeared on Wired.com. http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2009/06/s… or http://tinyurl.com/nm6tj7 A copy of this essay, with all embedded links, is here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/imagining_threa.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Security, Group Size, and the Human Brain If the size of your company grows past 150 people, it's time to get name badges. It's not that larger groups are somehow less secure, it's just that 150 is the cognitive limit to the number of people a human brain can maintain a coherent social relationship with. Primatologist Robin Dunbar derived this number by comparing neocortex -- the "thinking" part of the mammalian brain -- volume with the size of primate social groups. By analyzing data from 38 primate genera and extrapolating to the human neocortex size, he predicted a human "mean group size" of roughly 150. This number appears regularly in human society; it's the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village, the size at which Hittite settlements split, and the basic unit in professional armies from Roman times to the present day. Larger group sizes aren't as stable because their members don't know each other well enough. Instead of thinking of the members as people, we think of them as groups of people. For such groups to function well, they need externally imposed structure, such as name badges. Of course, badges aren't the only way to determine in-group/out-group status. Other markers include insignia, uniforms, and secret handshakes. They have different security properties and some make more sense than others at different levels of technology, but once a group reaches 150 people, it has to do something. More generally, there are several layers of natural human group size that increase with a ratio of approximately three: 5, 15, 50, 150, 500, and 1500 -- although, really, the numbers aren't as precise as all that, and groups that are less focused on survival tend to be smaller. The layers relate to both the intensity and intimacy of relationship and the frequency of contact. The smallest, three to five, is a "clique": the number of people from whom you would seek help in times of severe emotional distress. The twelve to 20 group is the "sympathy group": people with which you have special ties. After that, 30 to 50 is the typical size of hunter-gatherer overnight camps, generally drawn from the same pool of 150 people. No matter what size company you work for, there are only about 150 people you consider to be "co-workers." (In small companies, Alice and Bob handle accounting. In larger companies, it's the accounting department -- and maybe you know someone there personally.) The 500-person group is the "megaband," and the 1,500-person group is the "tribe." Fifteen hundred is roughly the number of faces we can put names to, and the typical size of a hunter-gatherer society. These numbers are reflected in military organization throughout history: squads of 10 to 15 organized into platoons of three to four squads, organized into companies of three to four platoons, organized into battalions of three to four companies, organized into regiments of three to four battalions, organized into divisions of two to three regiments, and organized into corps of two to three divisions. Coherence can become a real problem once organizations get above about 150 in size. So as group sizes grow across these boundaries, they have more externally imposed infrastructure -- and more formalized security systems. In intimate groups, pretty much all security is ad hoc. Companies smaller than 150 don't bother with name badges; companies greater than 500 hire a guard to sit in the lobby and check badges. The military have had centuries of experience with this under rather trying circumstances, but even there the real commitment and bonding invariably occurs at the company level. Above that you need to have rank imposed by discipline. The whole brain-size comparison might be bunk, and a lot of evolutionary psychologists disagree with it. But certainly security systems become more formalized as groups grow larger and their members less known to each other. When do more formal dispute resolution systems arise: town elders, magistrates, judges? At what size boundary are formal authentication schemes required? Small companies can get by without the internal forms, memos, and procedures that large companies require; when does what tend to appear? How does punishment formalize as group size increase? And how do all these things affect group coherence? People act differently on social networking sites like Facebook when their list of "friends" grows larger and less intimate. Local merchants sometimes let known regulars run up tabs. I lend books to friends with much less formality than a public library. What examples have you seen? An edited version of this essay, without links, appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of IEEE Security & Privacy. A copy of this essay, with all embedded links, is here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/security_group.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* North Korean Cyberattacks To hear the media tell it, the United States suffered a major cyberattack last week. Stories were everywhere. "Cyber Blitz hits U.S., Korea" was the headline in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. North Korea was blamed. Where were you when North Korea attacked America? Did you feel the fury of North Korea's armies? Were you fearful for your country? Or did your resolve strengthen, knowing that we would defend our homeland bravely and valiantly? My guess is that you didn't even notice, that -- if you didn't open a newspaper or read a news website -- you had no idea anything was happening. Sure, a few government websites were knocked out, but that's not alarming or even uncommon. Other government websites were attacked but defended themselves, the sort of thing that happens all the time. If this is what an international cyberattack looks like, it hardly seems worth worrying about at all. Politically motivated cyber attacks are nothing new. We've seen UK vs. Ireland. Israel vs. the Arab states. Russia vs. several former Soviet Republics. India vs. Pakistan, especially after the nuclear bomb tests in 1998. China vs. the United States, especially in 2001 when a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet. And so on and so on. The big one happened in 2007, when the government of Estonia was attacked in cyberspace following a diplomatic incident with Russia about the relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial. The networks of many Estonian organizations, including the Estonian parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters, were attacked and -- in many cases -- shut down. Estonia was quick to blame Russia, which was equally quick to deny any involvement. It was hyped as the first cyberwar, but after two years there is still no evidence that the Russian government was involved. Though Russian hackers were indisputably the major instigators of the attack, the only individuals positively identified have been young ethnic Russians living inside Estonia, who were angry over the statue incident. Poke at any of these international incidents, and what you find are kids playing politics. Last Wednesday, South Korea's National Intelligence Service admitted that it didn't actually know that North Korea was behind the attacks: "North Korea or North Korean sympathizers in the South" was what it said. Once again, it'll be kids playing politics. This isn't to say that cyberattacks by governments aren't an issue, or that cyberwar is something to be ignored. The constant attacks by Chinese nationals against U.S. networks may not be government-sponsored, but it's pretty clear that they're tacitly government-approved. Criminals, from lone hackers to organized crime syndicates, attack networks all the time. And war expands to fill every possible theater: land, sea, air, space, and now cyberspace. But cyberterrorism is nothing more than a media invention designed to scare people. And for there to be a cyberwar, there first needs to be a war. Israel is currently considering attacking Iran in cyberspace, for example. If it tries, it'll discover that attacking computer networks is an inconvenience to the nuclear facilities it's targeting, but doesn't begin to substitute for bombing them. In May, President Obama gave a major speech on cybersecurity. He was right when he said that cybersecurity is a national security issue, and that the government needs to step up and do more to prevent cyberattacks. But he couldn't resist hyping the threat with scare stories: "In one of the most serious cyber incidents to date against our military networks, several thousand computers were infected last year by malicious software -- malware," he said. What he didn't add was that those infections occurred because the Air Force couldn't be bothered to keep its patches up to date. This is the face of cyberwar: easily preventable attacks that, even when they succeed, only a few people notice. Even this current incident is turning out to be a sloppily modified five-year-old worm that no modern network should still be vulnerable to. Securing our networks doesn't require some secret advanced NSA technology. It's the boring network security administration stuff we already know how to do: keep your patches up to date, install good anti-malware software, correctly configure your firewalls and intrusion-detection systems, monitor your networks. And while some government and corporate networks do a pretty good job at this, others fail again and again. Enough of the hype and the bluster. The news isn't the attacks, but that some networks had security lousy enough to be vulnerable to them. This essay originally appeared on the Minnesota Public Radio website. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/07/10/schneier/ A copy of this essay, with all embedded links, is here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/north_korean_cy.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Why People Don't Understand Risks Last week's Minneapolis Star Tribune had the front-page headline: "Co-sleeping kills about 20 infants each year." The only problem is that there's no additional information with which to make sense of the statistic. How many infants don't die each year? How many infants die each year in separate beds? Is the death rate for co-sleepers greater or less than the death rate for separate-bed sleepers? Without this information, it's impossible to know whether this statistic is good or bad. But the media rarely provides context for the data. The story is in the aftermath of an incident where a baby was accidentally smothered in his sleep. Oh, and that 20-infants-per-year number is for Minnesota only. No word as to whether the situation is better or worse in other states. The headline in the web article is different. http://www.startribune.com/local/49985722.html?elr=KArksUUUoDEy3LGDiO7aiU or http://tinyurl.com/nfzgcl ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Fraud on eBay I expected selling my computer on eBay to be easy. Attempt 1: I listed it. Within hours, someone bought it -- from a hacked account, as eBay notified me, canceling the sale. Attempt 2: I listed it again. Within hours, someone bought it, and asked me to send it to her via FedEx overnight. The buyer sent payment via PayPal immediately, and then -- near as I could tell -- immediately opened a dispute with PayPal so that the funds were put on hold. And then she sent me an e-mail saying "I paid you, now send me the computer." But PayPal was faster than she expected, I think. At the same time, I received an e-mail from PayPal saying that I might have received a payment that the account holder did not authorize, and that I shouldn't ship the item until the investigation is complete. I was willing to make Attempt 3, but someone on my blog bought it first. It looks like eBay is completely broken for items like this. It's not just me. http://consumerist.com/5007790/its-now-completely-impossible-to-sell-a-lapt… or http://tinyurl.com/55hprp A copy of this essay, with all embedded links, is here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/fraud_on_ebay.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* News Did a public Twitter post lead to a burglary? http://www.usatoday.com/travel/news/2009-06-08-twitter-vacation_N.htm Prairie dogs hack Baltimore Zoo; an amusing story that echoes a lot of our own security problems. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bal-md.ci.zoo12jun… or http://tinyurl.com/mcuzam The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has a blog. I don't know if it will be as interesting or entertaining as the TSA's blog. http://www.dhs.gov/journal/theblog Carrot-bomb art project bombs in Sweden: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8099561.stm Fascinating research on the psychology of con games. "The psychology of scams: Provoking and committing errors of judgement" was prepared for the UK Office of Fair Trading by the University of Exeter School of Psychology. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/the_psychology_3.html New computer snooping tool: http://investors.guidancesoftware.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=384544 or http://tinyurl.com/lwhuod This week's movie-plot threat -- fungus: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/this_weeks_movi.html Engineers are more likely to become Muslim terrorists. At least, that's what the facts indicate. Is it time to start profiling? http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227127.200-can-university-subjects-… or http://tinyurl.com/m5r56h http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf John Mueller on nuclear disarmament: "The notion that the world should rid itself of nuclear weapons has been around for over six decades -- during which time they have been just about the only instrument of destruction that hasn't killed anybody." http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/john_mueller_on.html Eavesdropping on dot-matrix printers by listening to them. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/eavesdropping_o_3.html Research on the security of online games: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/research_on_the.html Ross Anderson liveblogged the 8th Workshop on Economics of Information Security (WEIS) at University College London. http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2009/06/24/weis-2009-liveblog/ I wrote about WEIS 2006 back in 2006. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/economics_and_i_1.html Clear, the company that sped people through airport security, has ceased operations. It is unclear what will happen to all that personal data they have collected. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/clear_shuts_dow.html This no-stabbing knife seems not to be a joke. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6501720.ece I've already written about the risks of pointy knives. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/risks_of_pointy.html The Communication Security Establishment (CSE, basically Canada's NSA) is growing so fast they're running out of room and building new office buildings. http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Canadas-CSE-ELINT-Agency-Building-New-F… or http://tinyurl.com/leu79h Cryptography spam: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/cryptography_sp.html More security countermeasures from the natural world: 1. The plant caladium steudneriifolium pretends to be ill so mining moths won't eat it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8108000/8108940.stm 2. Cabbage aphids arm themselves with chemical bombs. http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/06/aphids_defend_themselves_w… or http://tinyurl.com/ksegwk 3. The dark-footed ant spider mimics an ant so that it's not eaten by other spiders, and so it can eat spiders itself. http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/06/spiders_gather_in_groups_t… or http://tinyurl.com/p9u8r9 http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/07/spider_mimics_ant_to_eat_s… or http://tinyurl.com/mhjxh3 Information leakage from keypads. (You need to click on the link to see the pictures.) http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/information_lea_1.html Good essay -- "The Staggering Cost of Playing it 'Safe'" -- about the political motivations for terrorist security policy. http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/16/743102/-The-Staggering-Cost-of-… or http://tinyurl.com/m8dlvr My commentary on a article hyping the terrorist risk of cloud computing: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/terrorist_risk.html Pocketless trousers to protect against bribery in Nepal: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gmKIu2qKjavgL6B0s7161VCy… or http://tinyurl.com/mexcdy Anti-theft lunch bags: http://design-milk.com/anti-theft-lunch-bags/ U.S. court institutes limits on TSA searches. This is good news. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/court_limits_on.html Spanish police foil remote-controlled zeppelin jailbreak. Sometimes movie plots actually happen. http://gizmodo.com/5307943/spanish-police-foil-remote+controlled-zeppelin-j… or http://tinyurl.com/qcns4y http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/660875 Almost two years ago, I wrote about my strategy for encrypting my laptop. One of the things I said was: "There are still two scenarios you aren't secure against, though. You're not secure against someone snatching your laptop out of your hands as you're typing away at the local coffee shop. And you're not secure against the authorities telling you to decrypt your data for them." Here's a free program that defends against that first threat: it locks the computer unless a key is pressed every n seconds. Honestly, this would be too annoying for me to use, but you're welcome to try it. http://www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=18656.0 http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/protecting_agai.html http://www.schneier.com/essay-199.html You won't hear about this ATM vulnerability, because the presentation has been pulled from the BlackHat conference: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/the_atm_vulnera.html The NSA is building a massive data center in Utah. http://www.sltrib.com/ci_12735293 http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705314456/Psst-Big-spy-center-is-coming-… or http://tinyurl.com/nrn64r I was quoted as calling Google's Chrome operating system "idiotic." Here's additional explanation and context. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/making_an_opera.html How to cause chaos in an airport: leave a suitcase in a restroom. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/lost_suitcases.html Interesting paper from HotSec '07: "Do Strong Web Passwords Accomplish Anything?" by Dinei Florencio, Cormac Herley, and Baris Coskun. http://www.usenix.org/event/hotsec07/tech/full_papers/florencio/florencio.p… or http://tinyurl.com/ca9mp9 Interesting use of gaze tracking software to protect privacy: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/gaze_tracking_s.html Poor man's steganography -- hiding documents in corrupt PDF documents: http://blog.didierstevens.com/2009/07/01/embedding-and-hiding-files-in-pdf-… or http://tinyurl.com/m6onbo ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Authenticating Paperwork It's a sad, horrific story. Homeowner returns to find his house demolished. The demolition company was hired legitimately but there was a mistake and it demolished the wrong house. The demolition company relied on GPS co-ordinates, but requiring street addresses isn't a solution. A typo in the address is just as likely, and it would have demolished the house just as quickly. The problem is less how the demolishers knew which house to knock down, and more how they confirmed that knowledge. They trusted the paperwork, and the paperwork was wrong. Informality works when everybody knows everybody else. When merchants and customers know each other, government officials and citizens know each other, and people know their neighbors, people know what's going on. In that sort of milieu, if something goes wrong, people notice. In our modern anonymous world, paperwork is how things get done. Traditionally, signatures, forms, and watermarks all made paperwork official. Forgeries were possible but difficult. Today, there's still paperwork, but for the most part it only exists until the information makes its way into a computer database. Meanwhile, modern technology -- computers, fax machines and desktop publishing software -- has made it easy to forge paperwork. Every case of identity theft has, at its core, a paperwork failure. Fake work orders, purchase orders, and other documents are used to steal computers, equipment, and stock. Occasionally, fake faxes result in people being sprung from prison. Fake boarding passes can get you through airport security. This month hackers officially changed the name of a Swedish man. A reporter even changed the ownership of the Empire State Building. Sure, it was a stunt, but this is a growing form of crime. Someone pretends to be you -- preferably when you're away on holiday -- and sells your home to someone else, forging your name on the paperwork. You return to find someone else living in your house, someone who thinks he legitimately bought it. In some senses, this isn't new. Paperwork mistakes and fraud have happened ever since there was paperwork. And the problem hasn't been fixed yet for several reasons. One, our sloppy systems generally work fine, and it's how we get things done with minimum hassle. Most people's houses don't get demolished and most people's names don't get maliciously changed. As common as identity theft is, it doesn't happen to most of us. These stories are news because they are so rare. And in many cases, it's cheaper to pay for the occasional blunder than ensure it never happens. Two, sometimes the incentives aren't in place for paperwork to be properly authenticated. The people who demolished that family home were just trying to get a job done. The same is true for government officials processing title and name changes. Banks get paid when money is transferred from one account to another, not when they find a paperwork problem. We're all irritated by forms stamped 17 times, and other mysterious bureaucratic processes, but these are actually designed to detect problems. And three, there's a psychological mismatch: it is easy to fake paperwork, yet for the most part we act as if it has magical properties of authenticity. What's changed is scale. Fraud can be perpetrated against hundreds of thousands, automatically. Mistakes can affect that many people, too. What we need are laws that penalize people or companies -- criminally or civilly -- who make paperwork errors. This raises the cost of mistakes, making authenticating paperwork more attractive, which changes the incentives of those on the receiving end of the paperwork. And that will cause the market to devise technologies to verify the provenance, accuracy, and integrity of information: telephone verification, addresses and GPS co-ordinates, cryptographic authentication, systems that double- and triple-check, and so on. We can't reduce society's reliance on paperwork, and we can't eliminate errors based on it. But we can put economic incentives in place for people and companies to authenticate paperwork more. This essay originally appeared in The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/24/read-me-first-identity-fra… or http://tinyurl.com/ls3cdp A copy of this essay, with all embedded links, is here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/authenticating_1.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* The Pros and Cons of Password Masking Usability guru Jakob Nielsen opened up a can of worms when he made the case against password masking -- the practice of hiding computer password characters behind asterisks -- in his blog. I chimed in that I agreed. Almost 165 comments on my blog (and several articles, essays, and many other blog posts) later, the consensus is that we were wrong. I was certainly too glib. Like any security countermeasure, password masking has value. But like any countermeasure, password masking is not a panacea. And the costs of password masking need to be balanced with the benefits. The cost is accuracy. When users don't get visual feedback from what they're typing, they're more prone to make mistakes. This is especially true with character strings that have non-standard characters and capitalization. This has several ancillary costs: * Users get pissed off. * Users are more likely to choose easy-to-type passwords, reducing both mistakes and security. Removing password masking will make people more comfortable with complicated passwords: they'll become easier to memorize and easier to use. The benefits of password masking are more obvious: *Security from shoulder surfing. If people can't look over your shoulder and see what you're typing, they're much less likely to be able to steal your password. Yes, they can look at your fingers instead, but that's much harder than looking at the screen. Surveillance cameras are also an issue: it's easier to watch someone's fingers on recorded video, but reading a cleartext password off a screen is trivial. * In some situations, there is a trust dynamic involved. Do you type your password while your boss is standing over your shoulder watching? How about your spouse or partner? Your parent or child? Your teacher or students? At ATMs, there's a social convention of standing away from someone using the machine, but that convention doesn't apply to computers. You might not trust the person standing next to you enough to let him see your password, but don't feel comfortable telling him to look away. Password masking solves that social awkwardness. * Security from screen scraping malware. This is less of an issue; keyboard loggers are more common and unaffected by password masking. And if you have that kind of malware on your computer, you've got all sorts of problems. * A security "signal." Password masking alerts users, and I'm thinking users who aren't particularly security savvy, that passwords are a secret. I believe that shoulder surfing isn't nearly the problem it's made out to be. One, lots of people use their computers in private, with no one looking over their shoulders. Two, personal handheld devices are used very close to the body, making shoulder surfing all that much harder. Three, it's hard to quickly and accurately memorize a random non-alphanumeric string that flashes on the screen for a second or so. This is not to say that shoulder surfing isn't a threat. It is. And, as many readers pointed out, password masking is one of the reasons it isn't more of a threat. And the threat is greater for those who are not fluent computer users: slow typists and people who are likely to choose bad passwords. But I believe that the risks are overstated. Password masking is definitely important on public terminals with short PINs. (I'm thinking of ATMs.) The value of the PIN is large, shoulder surfing is more common, and a four-digit PIN is easy to remember in any case. And lastly, this problem largely disappears on the Internet on your personal computer. Most browsers include the ability to save and then automatically populate password fields, making the usability problem go away at the expense of another security problem (the security of the password becomes the security of the computer). There's a Firefox plug-in that gets rid of password masking. And programs like my own Password Safe allow passwords to be cut and pasted into applications, also eliminating the usability problem. One approach is to make it a configurable option. High-risk banking applications could turn password masking on by default; other applications could turn it off by default. Browsers in public locations could turn it on by default. I like this, but it complicates the user interface. A reader mentioned BlackBerry's solution, which is to display each character briefly before masking it; that seems like an excellent compromise. I, for one, would like the option. I cannot type complicated WEP keys into Windows -- twice! what's the deal with that? -- without making mistakes. I cannot type my rarely used and very complicated PGP keys without making a mistake unless I turn off password masking. That's what I was reacting to when I said "I agree." So was I wrong? Maybe. Okay, probably. Password masking definitely improves security; many readers pointed out that they regularly use their computer in crowded environments, and rely on password masking to protect their passwords. On the other hand, password masking reduces accuracy and makes it less likely that users will choose secure and hard-to-remember passwords, I will concede that the password masking trade-off is more beneficial than I thought in my snap reaction, but also that the answer is not nearly as obvious as we have historically assumed. A copy of this essay, with all embedded links, is here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/the_pros_and_co.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* The "Hidden Cost" of Privacy Forbes ran an article talking about the "hidden" cost of privacy. Basically, the point was that privacy regulations are expensive to comply with, and a lot of that expense gets eaten up by the mechanisms of compliance and doesn't go toward improving anyone's actual privacy. This is a valid point, and one that I make in talks about privacy all the time. It's particularly bad in the United States, because we have a patchwork of different privacy laws covering different types of information and different situations and not a single comprehensive privacy law. The meta-problem is simple to describe: those entrusted with our privacy often don't have much incentive to respect it. Examples include: credit bureaus such as TransUnion and Experian, who don't have any business relationship at all with the people whose data they collect and sell; companies such as Google who give away services -- and collect personal data as a part of that -- as an incentive to view ads, and make money by selling those ads to other companies; medical insurance companies, who are chosen by a person's employer; and computer software vendors, who can have monopoly powers over the market. Even worse, it can be impossible to connect an effect of a privacy violation with the violation itself -- if someone opens a bank account in your name, how do you know who was to blame for the privacy violation? -- so even when there is a business relationship, there's no clear cause-and-effect relationship. What this all means is that protecting individual privacy remains an externality for many companies, and that basic market dynamics won't work to solve the problem. Because the efficient market solution won't work, we're left with inefficient regulatory solutions. So now the question becomes: how do we make regulation as efficient as possible? I have some suggestions: * Broad privacy regulations are better than narrow ones. * Simple and clear regulations are better than complex and confusing ones. * It's far better to regulate results than methodology. * Penalties for bad behavior need to be expensive enough to make good behavior the rational choice. We'll never get rid of the inefficiencies of regulation -- that's the nature of the beast, and why regulation only makes sense when the market fails -- but we can reduce them. Forbes article: http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0608/034-privacy-research-hidden-cost-of-… or http://tinyurl.com/obpf6j ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Fixing Airport Security It's been months since the Transportation Security Administration has had a permanent director. If, during the job interview (no, I didn't get one), President Obama asked me how I'd fix airport security in one sentence, I would reply: "Get rid of the photo ID check, and return passenger screening to pre-9/11 levels." Okay, that's a joke. While showing ID, taking your shoes off and throwing away your water bottles isn't making us much safer, I don't expect the Obama administration to roll back those security measures anytime soon. Airport security is more about CYA than anything else: defending against what the terrorists did last time. But the administration can't risk appearing as if it facilitated a terrorist attack, no matter how remote the possibility, so those annoyances are probably here to stay. This would be my real answer: "Establish accountability and transparency for airport screening." And if I had another sentence: "Airports are one of the places where Americans, and visitors to America, are most likely to interact with a law enforcement officer - and yet no one knows what rights travelers have or how to exercise those rights." Obama has repeatedly talked about increasing openness and transparency in government, and it's time to bring transparency to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Let's start with the no-fly and watch lists. Right now, everything about them is secret: You can't find out if you're on one, or who put you there and why, and you can't clear your name if you're innocent. This Kafkaesque scenario is so un-American it's embarrassing. Obama should make the no-fly list subject to judicial review. Then, move on to the checkpoints themselves. What are our rights? What powers do the TSA officers have? If we're asked "friendly" questions by behavioral detection officers, are we allowed not to answer? If we object to the rough handling of ourselves or our belongings, can the TSA official retaliate against us by putting us on a watch list? Obama should make the rules clear and explicit, and allow people to bring legal action against the TSA for violating those rules; otherwise, airport checkpoints will remain a Constitution-free zone in our country. Next, Obama should refuse to use unfunded mandates to sneak expensive security measures past Congress. The Secure Flight program is the worst offender. Airlines are being forced to spend billions of dollars redesigning their reservations systems to accommodate the TSA's demands to preapprove every passenger before he or she is allowed to board an airplane. These costs are borne by us, in the form of higher ticket prices, even though we never see them explicitly listed. Maybe Secure Flight is a good use of our money; maybe it isn't. But let's have debates like that in the open, as part of the budget process, where it belongs. And finally, Obama should mandate that airport security be solely about terrorism, and not a general-purpose security checkpoint to catch everyone from pot smokers to deadbeat dads. The Constitution provides us, both Americans and visitors to America, with strong protections against invasive police searches. Two exceptions come into play at airport security checkpoints. The first is "implied consent," which means that you cannot refuse to be searched; your consent is implied when you purchased your ticket. And the second is "plain view," which means that if the TSA officer happens to see something unrelated to airport security while screening you, he is allowed to act on that. Both of these principles are well established and make sense, but it's their combination that turns airport security checkpoints into police-state-like checkpoints. The TSA should limit its searches to bombs and weapons and leave general policing to the police - where we know courts and the Constitution still apply. None of these changes will make airports any less safe, but they will go a long way to de-ratcheting the culture of fear, restoring the presumption of innocence and reassuring Americans, and the rest of the world, that - as Obama said in his inauguration speech - "we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." This essay originally appeared, without hyperlinks, in the New York Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2009/06/24/2009-06-24_clear_common_sens… or http://tinyurl.com/kwa2pd http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/fixing_airport.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Schneier News I am speaking at Black Hat and DefCon, in Las Vegas, on 30 and 31 July 2009. https://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-usa-09/bh-us-09-main.html http://defcon.org/html/defcon-17/dc-17-index.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Homomorphic Encryption Breakthrough Last month, IBM made some pretty brash claims about homomorphic encryption and the future of security. I hate to be the one to throw cold water on the whole thing -- as cool as the new discovery is -- but it's important to separate the theoretical from the practical. Homomorphic cryptosystems are ones where mathematical operations on the ciphertext have regular effects on the plaintext. A normal symmetric cipher -- DES, AES, or whatever -- is not homomorphic. Assume you have a plaintext P, and you encrypt it with AES to get a corresponding ciphertext C. If you multiply that ciphertext by 2, and then decrypt 2C, you get random gibberish instead of P. If you got something else, like 2P, that would imply some pretty strong nonrandomness properties of AES and no one would trust its security. The RSA algorithm is different. Encrypt P to get C, multiply C by 2, and then decrypt 2C -- and you get 2P. That's a homomorphism: perform some mathematical operation to the ciphertext, and that operation is reflected in the plaintext. The RSA algorithm is homomorphic with respect to multiplication, something that has to be taken into account when evaluating the security of a security system that uses RSA. This isn't anything new. RSA's homomorphism was known in the 1970s, and other algorithms that are homomorphic with respect to addition have been known since the 1980s. But what has eluded cryptographers is a fully homomorphic cryptosystem: one that is homomorphic under both addition and multiplication and yet still secure. And that's what IBM researcher Craig Gentry has discovered. This is a bigger deal than might appear at first glance. Any computation can be expressed as a Boolean circuit: a series of additions and multiplications. Your computer consists of a zillion Boolean circuits, and you can run programs to do anything on your computer. This algorithm means you can perform arbitrary computations on homomorphically encrypted data. More concretely: if you encrypt data in a fully homomorphic cryptosystem, you can ship that encrypted data to an untrusted person and that person can perform arbitrary computations on that data without being able to decrypt the data itself. Imagine what that would mean for cloud computing, or any outsourcing infrastructure: you no longer have to trust the outsourcer with the data. Unfortunately -- you knew that was coming, right? -- Gentry's scheme is completely impractical. It uses something called an ideal lattice as the basis for the encryption scheme, and both the size of the ciphertext and the complexity of the encryption and decryption operations grow enormously with the number of operations you need to perform on the ciphertext -- and that number needs to be fixed in advance. And converting a computer program, even a simple one, into a Boolean circuit requires an enormous number of operations. These aren't impracticalities that can be solved with some clever optimization techniques and a few turns of Moore's Law; this is an inherent limitation in the algorithm. In one article, Gentry estimates that performing a Google search with encrypted keywords -- a perfectly reasonable simple application of this algorithm -- would increase the amount of computing time by about a trillion. Moore's law calculates that it would be 40 years before that homomorphic search would be as efficient as a search today, and I think he's being optimistic with even this most simple of examples. Despite this, IBM's PR machine has been in overdrive about the discovery. Its press release makes it sound like this new homomorphic scheme is going to rewrite the business of computing: not just cloud computing, but "enabling filters to identify spam, even in encrypted email, or protection information contained in electronic medical records." Maybe someday, but not in my lifetime. This is not to take anything away anything from Gentry or his discovery. Visions of a fully homomorphic cryptosystem have been dancing in cryptographers' heads for thirty years. I never expected to see one. It will be years before a sufficient number of cryptographers examine the algorithm that we can have any confidence that the scheme is secure, but -- practicality be damned -- this is an amazing piece of work. A copy of this essay, with all embedded links, is here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/homomorphic_enc.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* New Attack on AES There's a new cryptanalytic attack on AES that is better than brute force: "Abstract. In this paper we present two related-key attacks on the full AES. For AES-256 we show the first key recovery attack that works for all the keys and has complexity 2^119, while the recent attack by Biryukov-Khovratovich-Nikolic works for a weak key class and has higher complexity. The second attack is the first cryptanalysis of the full AES-192. Both our attacks are boomerang attacks, which are based on the recent idea of finding local collisions in block ciphers and enhanced with the boomerang switching techniques to gain free rounds in the middle." In an e-mail, the authors wrote: "We also expect that a careful analysis may reduce the complexities. As a preliminary result, we think that the complexity of the attack on AES-256 can be lowered from 2^119 to about 2^110.5 data and time. We believe that these results may shed a new light on the design of the key-schedules of block ciphers, but they pose no immediate threat for the real world applications that use AES." Agreed. While this attack is better than brute force -- and some cryptographers will describe the algorithm as "broken" because of it -- it is still far, far beyond our capabilities of computation. The attack is, and probably forever will be, theoretical. But remember: attacks always get better, they never get worse. Others will continue to improve on these numbers. While there's no reason to panic, no reason to stop using AES, no reason to insist that NIST choose another encryption standard, this will certainly be a problem for some of the AES-based SHA-3 candidate hash functions. https://cryptolux.uni.lu/mediawiki/uploads/1/1a/Aes-192-256.pdf https://cryptolux.org/FAQ_on_the_attacks ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* MD6 Withdrawn from SHA-3 Competition In other SHA-3 news, Ron Rivest has suggested that his MD6 algorithm be withdrawn from the SHA-3 competition. From an e-mail to a NIST mailing list: "We suggest that MD6 is not yet ready for the next SHA-3 round, and we also provide some suggestions for NIST as the contest moves forward." Basically, the issue is that in order for MD6 to be fast enough to be competitive, the designers have to reduce the number of rounds down to 30-40, and at those rounds, the algorithm loses its proofs of resistance to differential attacks" "Thus, while MD6 appears to be a robust and secure cryptographic hash algorithm, and has much merit for multi-core processors, our inability to provide a proof of security for a reduced-round (and possibly tweaked) version of MD6 against differential attacks suggests that MD6 is not ready for consideration for the next SHA-3 round." This is a very classy withdrawal, as we expect from Ron Rivest -- especially given the fact that there are no attacks on it, while other algorithms have been seriously broken and their submitters keep trying to pretend that no one has noticed. A copy of this blog post, with all embedded links, is here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/md6.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Ever Better Cryptanalytic Results Against SHA-1 The SHA family (which, I suppose, should really be called the MD4 family) of cryptographic hash functions has been under attack for a long time. In 2005, we saw the first cryptanalysis of SHA-1 that was faster than brute force: collisions in 2^69 hash operations, later improved to 2^63 operations. A great result, but not devastating. But remember the great truism of cryptanalysis: attacks always get better, they never get worse. Last week, devastating got a whole lot closer. A new attack can, at least in theory, find collisions in 2^52 hash operations -- well within the realm of computational possibility. Assuming the cryptanalysis is correct, we should expect to see an actual SHA-1 collision within the year. Note that this is a collision attack, not a pre-image attack. Most uses of hash functions don't care about collision attacks. But if yours does, switch to SHA-2 immediately. This is why NIST is administering a SHA-3 competition for a new hash standard. And whatever algorithm is chosen, it will look nothing like anything in the SHA family (which is why I think it should be called the Advanced Hash Standard, or AHS). A copy of this essay, with all embedded links, is here: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/ever_better_cry.html ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* Comments from Readers There are thousands of comments -- many of them interesting -- on these topics on my blog. Search for the story you want to comment on, and join in. http://www.schneier.com/blog ** *** ***** ******* *********** ************* 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, 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) 2009 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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Do you know anyone looking for a Cryptography position?
by Lori Lister 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dear R.A., I am a technical recruiter, looking of for a Senior Security Engineer / Cryptography expert for an outstanding client of mine in Colorado. Your name has come up as someone strong in cryptography so I was wondering if you might know anyone who is looking for a full-time position in cryptography and who may be interested in a new opportunity? I am looking for a security engineer with strong experience in developing systems using a variety of standards (RSA, DES, AES, and/or PKI). Additional experience with DRM would be a plus, but is not required. This is a visionary position so the most important piece is in-depth and broad-based practical knowledge of the standards and their uses in high-tech systems. This is an outstanding opportunity for the right person - hands-on and leadership opportunity in a great company with super benefits and work on the cutting edge of very exciting technology developments. Please feel free to pass on my information or to contact me direct if you know of anyone who might be interested. This is message is being sent directly to you and is not intended as SPAM in any way. You have not been added to any mailing lists and your information has not been shared. If you do not wish to receive any further emails from Vita Group, Inc., please let me know and I will make sure that you do not. Thank you very much! Lori A. Lister, President Vita Group, Inc. - bringing life to business! Recruiting Services for IT, Engineering & Biotech Ph: 303.465.4944 email: llister(a)vitagroup.com URL: http://www.vitagroup.com/ Our mission is to always provide professional, ethical, and honest services. --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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PET 2005 Submission deadline approaching (7 Feb) and PET Award (21 Feb)
by George Danezis 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dear Colleagues, The submission deadline for the Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshop (PET 2005) is on the 7th February 2005. The latest CfP is appended. We also solicit nominations for the "Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies" by February 21. For more information about suggesting a paper for the award: http://petworkshop.org/award/ Yours, George Danezis 5th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Dubrovnik, Croatia May 30 - June 1, 2005 C A L L F O R P A P E R S http://petworkshop.org/2005/ Important Dates: Paper submission: February 7, 2005 Notification of acceptance: April 4, 2005 Camera-ready copy for preproceedings: May 6, 2005 Camera-ready copy for proceedings: July 1, 2005 Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies Nomination period: March 4, 2004 through March 7, 2005 Nomination instructions: http://petworkshop.org/award/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Privacy and anonymity are increasingly important in the online world. Corporations, governments, and other organizations are realizing and exploiting their power to track users and their behavior, and restrict the ability to publish or retrieve documents. Approaches to protecting individuals, groups, but also companies and governments from such profiling and censorship include decentralization, encryption, distributed trust, and automated policy disclosure. This 5th workshop addresses the design and realization of such privacy and anti-censorship services for the Internet and other communication networks by bringing together anonymity and privacy experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives. The workshop seeks submissions from academia and industry presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of privacy technologies, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems. We encourage submissions from other communities such as law and business that present their perspectives on technological issues. As in past years, we will publish proceedings after the workshop in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Suggested topics include but are not restricted to: * Anonymous communications and publishing systems * Censorship resistance * Pseudonyms, identity management, linkability, and reputation * Data protection technologies * Location privacy * Policy, law, and human rights relating to privacy * Privacy and anonymity in peer-to-peer architectures * Economics of privacy * Fielded systems and techniques for enhancing privacy in existing systems * Protocols that preserve anonymity/privacy * Privacy-enhanced access control or authentication/certification * Privacy threat models * Models for anonymity and unobservability * Attacks on anonymity systems * Traffic analysis * Profiling and data mining * Privacy vulnerabilities and their impact on phishing and identity theft * Deployment models for privacy infrastructures * Novel relations of payment mechanisms and anonymity * Usability issues and user interfaces for PETs * Reliability, robustness and abuse prevention in privacy systems Stipends to attend the workshop will be made available, on the basis of need, to cover travel expenses, hotel, or conference fees. You do not need to submit a technical paper and you do not need to be a student to apply for a stipend. For more information, see http://petworkshop.org/2005/stipends.html General Chair: Damir Gojmerac (damir.gojmerac(a)fina.hr) Fina Corporation, Croatia Program Chairs: George Danezis (George.Danezis(a)cl.cam.ac.uk) University of Cambridge, UK David Martin (dm(a)cs.uml.edu) University of Massachusetts at Lowell, USA Program Committee: Martin Abadi, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA Alessandro Acquisti, Heinz School, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Caspar Bowden, Microsoft EMEA, UK Jean Camp, Indiana University at Bloomington, USA Richard Clayton, University of Cambridge, UK Lorrie Cranor, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Roger Dingledine, The Free Haven Project, USA Hannes Federrath, University of Regensburg, Germany Ian Goldberg, Zero Knowledge Systems, Canada Philippe Golle, Palo Alto Research Center, USA Marit Hansen, Independent Centre for Privacy Protection Schleswig-Holstein, Germany Markus Jakobsson, Indiana University at Bloomington, USA Dogan Kesdogan, Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany Brian Levine, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA Andreas Pfitzmann, Dresden University of Technology, Germany Matthias Schunter, IBM Zurich Research Lab, Switzerland Andrei Serjantov, The Free Haven Project, UK Paul Syverson, Naval Research Lab, USA Latanya Sweeney, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Matthew Wright, University of Texas at Arlington, USA Papers should be at most 15 pages excluding the bibliography and well-marked appendices (using an 11-point font), and at most 20 pages total. Submission of shorter papers (from around 4 pages) is strongly encouraged whenever appropriate. Papers must conform to the Springer LNCS style. Follow the "Information for Authors" link at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Reviewers of submitted papers are not required to read the appendices and the paper should be intelligible without them. The paper should start with the title, names of authors and an abstract. The introduction should give some background and summarize the contributions of the paper at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader. A preliminary version of the proceedings will be made available to workshop participants. Final versions are not due until after the workshop, giving the authors the opportunity to revise their papers based on discussions during the meeting. Submit your papers in Postscript or PDF format. To submit a paper, compose a plain text email to pet2005-submissions(a)petworkshop.org containing the title and abstract of the paper, the authors' names, email and postal addresses, phone and fax numbers, and identification of the contact author (to whom we will address all subsequent correspondence). Attach your submission to this email and send it. By submitting a paper, you agree that if it is accepted, you will sign a paper distribution agreement allowing for publication, and also that an author of the paper will register for the workshop and present the paper there. Our current working agreement with Springer is that authors will retain copyright on their own works while assigning an exclusive 3-year distribution license to Springer. Authors may still post their papers on their own Web sites. See http://petworkshop.org/2004/paper-dist-agreement-5-04.html for the 2004 version of this agreement. Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings. Paper submissions must be received by February 7. We acknowledge all submissions manually by email. If you do not receive an acknowledgment within a few days (or one day, if you are submitting right at the deadline), then contact the program committee chairs directly to resolve the problem. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to authors no later than April 4 and authors will have the opportunity to revise for the preproceedings version by May 6. We also invite proposals of up to 2 pages for panel discussions or other relevant presentations. In your proposal, (1) describe the nature of the presentation and why it is appropriate to the workshop, (2) suggest a duration for the presentation (ideally between 45 and 90 minutes), (3) give brief descriptions of the presenters, and (4) indicate which presenters have confirmed their availability for the presentation if it is scheduled. Otherwise, submit your proposal by email as described above, including the designation of a contact author. The program committee will consider presentation proposals along with other workshop events, and will respond by the paper decision date with an indication of its interest in scheduling the event. The proceedings will contain 1-page abstracts of the presentations that take place at the workshop. Each contact author for an accepted panel proposal must prepare and submit this abstract in the Springer LNCS style by the "Camera-ready copy for preproceedings" deadline date. _______________________________________________ NymIP-res-group mailing list NymIP-res-group(a)nymip.org http://www.nymip.org/mailman/listinfo/nymip-res-group --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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