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AES winner webcast 4pm today
by Ian Brown 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

COMMERCE DEPARTMENT TO ANNOUNCE CHOICE FOR PROPOSED CRYPTOGRAPHY STANDARD On October 2 at 11 a.m. ET, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the Commerce Department's Technology Administration, will hold a press briefing to announce its proposed choice to become the Advanced Encryption Standard, a new code designed to scramble information in the 21st century. This announcement marks the completion of a three-year, open competition conducted by NIST to select the final AES candidate. Dr. Cheryl L. Shavers, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology, and Ray Kammer, Director of NIST, will make brief presentations followed by a question and answer period for reporters. The public is invited to follow the announcement by live webcast at http://real.nist.gov/ --- end forwarded text --- 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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"Low-Resource Routing Attacks Against Anonymous Systems"
by James Muir 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

No one seems to have posted this to the list yet, so I thought I should: "Low-Resource Routing Attacks Against Anonymous Systems", K. Bauer, D. McCoy, D. Grunwald, T. Kohno, D. Sicker Technical Report, University of Colorado http://www.cs.colorado.edu/department/publications/reports/docs/CU-CS-1025-… .pdf It was posted on Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/02/25/1913219.shtml -James ----- 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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AES winner webcast 4pm today
by Ian Brown 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

COMMERCE DEPARTMENT TO ANNOUNCE CHOICE FOR PROPOSED CRYPTOGRAPHY STANDARD On October 2 at 11 a.m. ET, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the Commerce Department's Technology Administration, will hold a press briefing to announce its proposed choice to become the Advanced Encryption Standard, a new code designed to scramble information in the 21st century. This announcement marks the completion of a three-year, open competition conducted by NIST to select the final AES candidate. Dr. Cheryl L. Shavers, Under Secretary of Commerce for Technology, and Ray Kammer, Director of NIST, will make brief presentations followed by a question and answer period for reporters. The public is invited to follow the announcement by live webcast at http://real.nist.gov/ --- end forwarded text --- 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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"Low-Resource Routing Attacks Against Anonymous Systems"
by James Muir 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

No one seems to have posted this to the list yet, so I thought I should: "Low-Resource Routing Attacks Against Anonymous Systems", K. Bauer, D. McCoy, D. Grunwald, T. Kohno, D. Sicker Technical Report, University of Colorado http://www.cs.colorado.edu/department/publications/reports/docs/CU-CS-1025-… .pdf It was posted on Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/02/25/1913219.shtml -James ----- 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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[>Htech] Blindfolding Big Brother, Sort of
by codehead＠readysetsurf.com 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

From: http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech-Software/wtr_16209,300,p1.html Monday, January 30, 2006 Blindfolding Big Brother, Sort of Jeff Jonas is an IBM engineer who specializes in software that infuses powerful search technology with anonymity. By Kate Greene In 1983, entrepreneur Jeff Jonas founded Systems Research and Development (SRD), a firm that provided software to identify people and determine who was in their circle of friends. In the early 1990s, the company moved to Las Vegas, where it worked on security software for casinos. Then, in January 2005, IBM acquired SRD and Jonas became chief scientist in the company's Entity Analytic Solutions group. His newest technology, which allows entities such as government agencies to match an individual found in one database to that same person in another database, is getting a lot of attention from governments, banks, health-care providers, and, of course, privacy advocates. Jonas claims that his technology is as good at protecting privacy as it as at finding important information. Technology Review: Your most recent project at IBM, Anonymous Resolution [formerly known as ANNA], is software that can match a given individual across different databases, but in the process safeguards personal identifiers -- for example, name and social security number -- in those databases. Who would use this software? What problem does it solve? Jeff Jonas: The software is used by organizations that have data, have access to data, or have relationships with other entities with whom they want to exchange data. For example, a bank will take data about its customers and encrypt it. Then they'll send the data to a database marketing company. That company will decrypt it, and match the bank's customers to various records that the marketing company would have. For example, records that show what kind of magazines you subscribe to, how big your house is, the number of children you have, and so on. And then the marketing company will send back to the bank what's called a "database marketing append," so the bank will understand better who its customers are. That's very commonplace. But the risk is that even though the data is encrypted while being transported, it is decrypted by the other party. If the people who are managing that data happen to be corrupt or they have a breech of their system's security, that data's at risk for an unintended disclosure event. TR: How does your software solve this problem? JJ: The technique that we have created allows the bank to anonymize its customer data. When I say "anonymize," I mean it changes the name and address and date of birth, or whatever data they have about an identity, into a numeric value that is nonhuman readable and nonreversible. You can't run the math backwards and compute from the anonymized value what the original input value was. When I went to invent this software, I could have done this with encryption, where the data could be decrypted; but I felt like it would be a stronger privacy product if we didn't invent it that way. So the unique thing about the technique is that instead of me encrypting data and sending it to you, and you decrypting it to use it, the technique allows me to encrypt my data, you to encrypt your data, and this new technology is capable of performing robust matching of identities using only encrypted data. To put [data] on the highest possible privacy grounds, instead of making it encrypted, we actually used one of the components of encryption called one-way hashing that is not reversible. TR: Who currently uses your software? JJ: The current customers are governments that are interested in using this to share data with themselves. This is an interesting notion that I think would be a shock to most citizens of any country: You can walk into any government organization and you'll have one group working on, say, money laundering, and ten doors down you have another group working on drug cartels. The only way they have today to figure out whether they're working on the same person is to play the game that I refer to as Go Fish. That means one of them has to pick up the phone and call the other and say "Majed Moqed? Khalid al Mihdhar? Threes? Tens? Jacks? Twos?" They're not going to read the whole list. This technique allows an entity, whether it's corporate or government, to compare data that's trapped in silos, sensitive data that you wouldn't want to escape. The identity data flows into a central index, and in that index, it figures out when people are the same or related. But it can't tell you the name or the address or the phone number of the people who are the same because it doesn't know. When there's a match, each of the records that match has its pedigree or attribution on it that tells you which system and which record. So it creates a pointer and tells you which record to ask the other group about. TR: And this is obviously useful for counterterrorism. JJ: Here's the scenario: The government has a list of people we should never let into the country. It's a secret. They don't want people in other countries to know. And the government tends to not share this list with corporate America. Now, if you have a cruise line, you want to make sure you don't have people getting on your boat who shouldn't even be in the United States in the first place. Prior to the U.S. Patriot Act, the government couldn't go and subpoena 100,000 records every day from every company. Usually, the government would have to go to a cruise line and have a subpoena for a record. Section 215 [of the Patriot Act] allows the government to go to a business entity and say, "We want all your records." Now, the Fourth Amendment, which is "search and seizure," has a legal test called "reasonable and particular." Some might argue that if a government goes to a cruise line and says, "Give us all your data," it is hard to envision that this would be reasonable and particular. But what other solution do they have? There was no other solution. Our Anonymous Resolution technology would allow a government to take its secret list and anonymize it, allow a cruise line to anonymize their passenger list, and then when there's a match it would tell the government: "record 123." So they'd look it up and say, "My goodness, it's Majed Moqed." And it would tell them which record to subpoena from which organization. Now it's back to reasonable and particular. TR: What were the challenges with developing this software? JJ: One of the challenges is when you one-way hash the data, it becomes "infinitely sensitive." What I mean by that is that the word robert, if you one-way hash it, and take Robert, where the r is capital and not lowercase, the one-way hash generated by this subtle difference is completely different. One of the reasons people didn't try to do this before, or it was believed that maybe it wasn't useful, is that people's identity data is always quite different -- sometimes with a middle initial, sometimes without. Identities just don't show up the same. That was the trick we had to solve: allowing it to match data that's fuzzy while only using one-way hashed values. The trick is in how we prepare the data. Here's a simple example. One list says Bob and one says Rob. Well, we know that both Bob and Rob belong to the same root name, in this case, Robert. So before we anonymize each side, we throw in the most rooted form, which is Robert. So we've added Robert to both lists, and we then one-way hash both lists so it turns out the Robert matches. TR: How is this is based on earlier work you did for Las Vegas casinos? JJ: The ability to figure out if two people are the same despite all the natural variability of how people express their identity is something we really got a good understanding of assisting the gaming industry. We also learned how people try to fabricate fake identities and how they try to evade systems. It was learning how to do that at high speed that opened the door to make this next thing possible. Had we not solved that in the 1990s, we would not have been able to conjure up a method to do anonymous resolution. TR: You've said that 40 percent of your time is spent on privacy and civil liberties issues and that a privacy strategist works with you. Could you give me an example of the sort of things you and your privacy strategist discuss? JJ: When the government has a watch list ?- this, by the way, doesn't have to do with our tech, this is about responsible usage of tech and improved processes -- when you have a watch list, the questions come up: Who's on the list? How can people find out if they're on the list? How can they get off the list if they're not supposed be on it? If a government has a list and they're sharing it, making copies of it, and somebody's removed from the list because they've made a mistake, how can you be sure that they're removed from everywhere else they shared it? Another thing that my privacy strategist and I have been talking about is called an "immutable audit log." TR: What's that? JJ: You want to make sure that someone who is using a secret government system isn't putting their ex-wife in a watch list or searching for their ex-wife or their neighbor just because they're curious. That would be a misuse. An immutable audit log is the notion that every time a user queries for a record, this new kind of audit log records it in an indelible way that's like etching it into stone. In other words, even if a database administrator was in cahoots with them, or the database administrator was a corrupt entity, they couldn't erase their own footprints. TR: Is there anything a person can do, other than living off the grid, to keep their digital trail to a minimum? JJ: Oh, boy -- that's a great, great question. As consumers, we often trade our information, creating a bigger footprint, because of some opportunity being extended to us. And the biggest privacy problem I have with that is when it is a surprise to the consumer. My advice to companies and governments is to avoid consumer surprise. That's one of the most offensive things: when you find out somebody's doing something with your data about which you had no clue. So my advice is to avoid consumer surprise, and that means having some degree of transparency. I believe consumers should be offered the opportunity to opt out. So the organizations that you transact with, the ones that allow the consumer to say "Hey, please don't sell my data" and those organizations that make it easy for the consumer to opt in or out -- I think consumers may eventually flock to those places where they feel the risk of consumer surprise is less. TR: The Department of Justice has subpoenaed some of Google's data, and the company is refusing to cooperate. What is your opinion on this? JJ: I haven't been following this very closely. But let's talk about consumer surprise. I think it would be a surprise to consumers [to find] that they would be identified to the government at individual levels. I think consumers would be less surprised if Google provided just statistics. TR: As an engineer concerned with privacy issues, what is your opinion on the NSA domestic wiretapping program? JJ: I have not read up much on that. I don't know whether it's legal or not legal. I would say if it turns out to be legal and it's going to continue, then I would say, "Could you do it with anonymous data?" TR: As an entrepreneur, you've successfully looked around, found a problem, and solved it with software. In your mind, what is the most important problem to be solved today? JJ: Picture this: We're in a canyon, and on the left there's this wall, and behind it is this back pressure, and that back pressure is "ill-will" that wants to do harm to democracy or the United States. And behind the other wall it is a police surveillance state. And the number of technology options that you have that don't turn you into a police surveillance state and that prevent the ill-will intent on the left are in the middle. There are a very narrow number of solutions between these canyon walls. But the problem is, should ill-will continue to grow, the pressure behind the wall on the left becomes such that, as we march forward through time, the canyon gets narrower and narrower, and eventually you have bad things happening and you have to be a police surveillance state to protect yourself. But the real thing that has nothing to do with technology is, if we don't figure out how to lower ill-will, our future is darker. "Approximately four thousand years ago, aliens invaded Earth and began implementing a diabolical plan to enslave humanity. These aliens have come to be known as "cats." They had one overwhelmingly superior ability. They understood calculus. And humans did not. The plan has been wildly successful and the proof is obvious: cats rule the world and very few humans understand calculus." - Kenn Amdahl and Jim Loats, Calculus for Cats Post message: transhumantech(a)yahoogroups.com Subscribe: transhumantech-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: transhumantech-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com List owner: transhumantech-owner(a)yahoogroups.com List home: http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/transhumantech/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transhumantech/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: transhumantech-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ----- 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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[p2p-hackers] on mobile meshes
by Adam Fisk 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I somehow missed all the discussion of Egypt here, so I apologize for coming late to the game. There's *a lot* of work on the mesh and mobile side that's been happening largely separately but in parallel to p2p development over the last 10 years or so. The best I know of is from Sascha Meinrath and the people over at OTI. Have a look here, for example: http://www.saschameinrath.com/2011/feb/18/gigaom_covers_otis_mesh_work_buil… There's also a great deal of activity in the censorship circumvention world surrounding all these issues, with most of the funding coming directly from State. As an aside, there are rumors that the Egyptian communications minister pulled the plug at the IXP in Egypt as the lessor of two evils with the other option being monitoring, geolocating, and arresting all dissidents at the behest of Egyptian intelligence. -Adam -- Adam Fisk http://www.littleshoot.org | http://adamfisk.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/adamfisk _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- 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] on mobile meshes
by Adam Fisk 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

I somehow missed all the discussion of Egypt here, so I apologize for coming late to the game. There's *a lot* of work on the mesh and mobile side that's been happening largely separately but in parallel to p2p development over the last 10 years or so. The best I know of is from Sascha Meinrath and the people over at OTI. Have a look here, for example: http://www.saschameinrath.com/2011/feb/18/gigaom_covers_otis_mesh_work_buil… There's also a great deal of activity in the censorship circumvention world surrounding all these issues, with most of the funding coming directly from State. As an aside, there are rumors that the Egyptian communications minister pulled the plug at the IXP in Egypt as the lessor of two evils with the other option being monitoring, geolocating, and arresting all dissidents at the behest of Egyptian intelligence. -Adam -- Adam Fisk http://www.littleshoot.org | http://adamfisk.wordpress.com | http://twitter.com/adamfisk _______________________________________________ p2p-hackers mailing list p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers ----- 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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[liberationtech] Blogged: So, what about Cybercrime in Switzerland? A visit to KOBIK
by Moritz Bartl 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

So, what about Cybercrime in Switzerland? Swiss Cybercrime Coordination Unit (KOBIK) Yesterday, I joined some people from Chaos Computer Club ZC<rich (CCCZH) to visit the Cybercrime Coordination Unit (KOBIK) in Bern. The background was a Freedom of Information Act based request by the CCCZH: KOBIK provides a list of domain names that host child pornography. It is seen as a voluntary DNS blacklist for ISPs (and all the large Swiss ISPs apply this list). Naturally, groups like the CCCZH are worried given the non-public and intransparent nature of this list, lack of independent monitoring, and its possible implications for future expansion to other areas. This is not a theoretical danger, given that a court ordered Swiss ISPs to block swissjustice.net for b defamatory statementsb. $ dig @8.8.8.8 swissjustice.net any +short # google dns "v=spf1 a mx ip4:72.34.40.81 ?all" 0 swissjustice.net. ns1.mh.tc. accounts.elinuxservers.com. 2011102801 86400 7200 3600000 86400 ns1.mh.tc. ns2.mh.tc. 72.34.40.86 $ dig @62.2.24.162 swissjustice.net any +short # cablecom.ch dns $ KOBIK, the Cybercrime Unit, invited us to look at the list. The head of the organization and his assistant gave a presentation on the background of the unit and their main activities. We asked several questions, and were repeatedly encouraged to write more questions or come for another visit any time. Down to Earth in Switzerland The atmosphere was very friendly, and we felt welcome. In some way they even wanted us to be there, to hear their side of the story. I have no reason not to believe what they told us, and I did not sense any hidden agenda. In contrast to other law enforcement agents I had contact with in the past, they did not seem to be much depressed about external influences or wrong decisions being made b above themb. In some way, Switzerland seems to be successful in buying its freedom in some areas, and, due to this independence and size, does not appear to be under the same non-stop heat of lobbyism as I am used to in Germany. Knowing about our background, they constantly tried to assure us that they were against all sorts of b otherb blocking activities, and that the lists were provided more as a side project to providers who asked about them, not because anyone would believe it is a particularly useful measure against child pornography, but to b spare children and families from accidentially stumbling across the contentb. At the same time, they contact ISP and local law enforcement. They are well aware that DNS level blocks are no defense mechanism at all, and argue against IP level blocks for their coarse granularity and side effects (and any other categories of blocking for that matter). Cybercrimebs Just Images I reckon itbs still not much different in other European countries, but it still came as a surpise to us to experience that the whole Switzerland Cybercrime Coordination Unit, the (quote) b center of excellence for the public, authorities and Internet service providers about legal, technical and criminological issues on Internet crimesb plus b contact for foreign cybercrime authoritiesb (my emphases), has only 10 employees at a ~$1m budget. Maybe a somewhat special situation in Switzerland and for historical reasons, it still almost completely focusses on child pornography and display of violence (hard pornography illegal in Switzerland). They will slowly expand into other directions in the future, but specifically grew out of a working group around a large child pornography case in the 90s, Operation Genesis. Also, they themselves argue that most crimes involve the real world and are better suited to be dealt with in the traditional departments. Yes, Porn How do they find the sites in the first place? They have three main sources: a form where anyone can report suspicious websites banonymouslyb (they do log IPs and donbt offer HTTPS!). Secondly, INTERPOL seems to maintain a somewhat broader list, but KOBIK verifies each site again for specific violations of Swiss law. They also seem to conduct a limited number of own investigations. The head of department didnbt go into detail about this area, not only because they cannot talk too much about their operational strategies, but also because the whole event was more focussed on blacklist creation, distribution and verification. I donbt believe the budget allows for many investigations after all. (a few numbers are at the end of this post) Once the sites are added to the list, they are regularly checked again to see if content has changed. It sounded like a low number of countries and ISPs donbt cooperate well (but most do), and there isnbt much else they can do in such cases. The situation is different with pictures that directly involve Swiss citizens. In those cases they work together with the traditional pedocrime unit and try to seize the server. Independent monitoring So far there is no external inspection. Some ISPs seem to verify the content themselves before redirecting DNS (not all ISPs block all hostnames), which according to the KOBIK lawyer is perfectly legal to do in Switzerland. You get to see the website depicted in the screenshot, which ISPs can either self-host or use one hosted by KOBIK. Alledgely, IPs hitting the blocked sites are not stored/analyzed in any way, nor does KOBIK operate any honeypots or have legal or technical access to visitor information (no DPI/logging at ISPs). Most of the sites they deal with, at least concerning the blocks, are public websites full of advertisements and clearly not b insider exchangesb, and tend to move quickly. The turnaround time for the full list is only a few days (until most or all sites are either taken down or moved somewhere else), and most sites and pictures pop up again under a different name. Need some hash? Another growing area for KOBIK is the maintenance of a database of b 100% illegal child pornographyb hashes for various commercial forensic tools used by the different Kantons (states). Looking for (or at) evidence in child pornography cases is arguably not a very delightful job, so investigators more and more turn to automatic tools for that. KOBIK stated that they are careful about only including definitive matches and pick out only 100% clear-cut child pornography images for this. Encryption and Tor Given my background, I was naturally quite interested in their take on Tor, and how often they come across encryption. While they are not involved in the seizure or forensic analysis of machines very much, they did say that b apparently most pedo criminals have their blood somewhere elseb. KOBIK uses Tor in their investigations. Technical Once ISPs subscribe to the service and sign some paperwork, they get SFTP access to a daily updated and zipped textfiles of hostnames. KOBIK seemed genuinely interested in extending the cooperation towards research institutes, especially since they donbt have the manpower to properly follow up on developing trends (what kind of ISPs and ASNs are more involved than others in this business etc). Conclusion The current staff seems to have its heart at the right place. The list serves a well-intentioned purpose and was not introduced by external pressure, but as an internal idea, not alone to save the investigators the trouble to have to justify that some websites might still be up b days after a report came in.b Still, changes in political climate can come faster than KOBIK expects. Even if they can hold powers back for a while, in the end either heads will roll or, more likely, some people will want to keep their job. What if, some day rather sooner than later, something like Cleanfeed UK repeats in Switzerland? Will KOBIK stand against a court order? Not likely. And Torproject.org is already listed in several b civilizedb blocklists around the globe. This is real. Some numbers * 5000-7000 reports coming in from the public p.a. * at the time of our visit, the blocklist contained 148 hostnames * the Interpol list was said to be a bit larger, but the same order of magnitude * 10 employees (including head of department) * budget around CHF 1m ($USD 1.1m) * ~200 access providers exist in Switzerland, around 10% use the list (large ISPs, cover 90% of the population) http://www.hackerbus.eu/blog/2012/03/27/so-what-about-cybercrime-in-switzer… -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech 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. You may ask for a reminder here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- 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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[>Htech] Blindfolding Big Brother, Sort of
by codehead＠readysetsurf.com 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

From: http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech-Software/wtr_16209,300,p1.html Monday, January 30, 2006 Blindfolding Big Brother, Sort of Jeff Jonas is an IBM engineer who specializes in software that infuses powerful search technology with anonymity. By Kate Greene In 1983, entrepreneur Jeff Jonas founded Systems Research and Development (SRD), a firm that provided software to identify people and determine who was in their circle of friends. In the early 1990s, the company moved to Las Vegas, where it worked on security software for casinos. Then, in January 2005, IBM acquired SRD and Jonas became chief scientist in the company's Entity Analytic Solutions group. His newest technology, which allows entities such as government agencies to match an individual found in one database to that same person in another database, is getting a lot of attention from governments, banks, health-care providers, and, of course, privacy advocates. Jonas claims that his technology is as good at protecting privacy as it as at finding important information. Technology Review: Your most recent project at IBM, Anonymous Resolution [formerly known as ANNA], is software that can match a given individual across different databases, but in the process safeguards personal identifiers -- for example, name and social security number -- in those databases. Who would use this software? What problem does it solve? Jeff Jonas: The software is used by organizations that have data, have access to data, or have relationships with other entities with whom they want to exchange data. For example, a bank will take data about its customers and encrypt it. Then they'll send the data to a database marketing company. That company will decrypt it, and match the bank's customers to various records that the marketing company would have. For example, records that show what kind of magazines you subscribe to, how big your house is, the number of children you have, and so on. And then the marketing company will send back to the bank what's called a "database marketing append," so the bank will understand better who its customers are. That's very commonplace. But the risk is that even though the data is encrypted while being transported, it is decrypted by the other party. If the people who are managing that data happen to be corrupt or they have a breech of their system's security, that data's at risk for an unintended disclosure event. TR: How does your software solve this problem? JJ: The technique that we have created allows the bank to anonymize its customer data. When I say "anonymize," I mean it changes the name and address and date of birth, or whatever data they have about an identity, into a numeric value that is nonhuman readable and nonreversible. You can't run the math backwards and compute from the anonymized value what the original input value was. When I went to invent this software, I could have done this with encryption, where the data could be decrypted; but I felt like it would be a stronger privacy product if we didn't invent it that way. So the unique thing about the technique is that instead of me encrypting data and sending it to you, and you decrypting it to use it, the technique allows me to encrypt my data, you to encrypt your data, and this new technology is capable of performing robust matching of identities using only encrypted data. To put [data] on the highest possible privacy grounds, instead of making it encrypted, we actually used one of the components of encryption called one-way hashing that is not reversible. TR: Who currently uses your software? JJ: The current customers are governments that are interested in using this to share data with themselves. This is an interesting notion that I think would be a shock to most citizens of any country: You can walk into any government organization and you'll have one group working on, say, money laundering, and ten doors down you have another group working on drug cartels. The only way they have today to figure out whether they're working on the same person is to play the game that I refer to as Go Fish. That means one of them has to pick up the phone and call the other and say "Majed Moqed? Khalid al Mihdhar? Threes? Tens? Jacks? Twos?" They're not going to read the whole list. This technique allows an entity, whether it's corporate or government, to compare data that's trapped in silos, sensitive data that you wouldn't want to escape. The identity data flows into a central index, and in that index, it figures out when people are the same or related. But it can't tell you the name or the address or the phone number of the people who are the same because it doesn't know. When there's a match, each of the records that match has its pedigree or attribution on it that tells you which system and which record. So it creates a pointer and tells you which record to ask the other group about. TR: And this is obviously useful for counterterrorism. JJ: Here's the scenario: The government has a list of people we should never let into the country. It's a secret. They don't want people in other countries to know. And the government tends to not share this list with corporate America. Now, if you have a cruise line, you want to make sure you don't have people getting on your boat who shouldn't even be in the United States in the first place. Prior to the U.S. Patriot Act, the government couldn't go and subpoena 100,000 records every day from every company. Usually, the government would have to go to a cruise line and have a subpoena for a record. Section 215 [of the Patriot Act] allows the government to go to a business entity and say, "We want all your records." Now, the Fourth Amendment, which is "search and seizure," has a legal test called "reasonable and particular." Some might argue that if a government goes to a cruise line and says, "Give us all your data," it is hard to envision that this would be reasonable and particular. But what other solution do they have? There was no other solution. Our Anonymous Resolution technology would allow a government to take its secret list and anonymize it, allow a cruise line to anonymize their passenger list, and then when there's a match it would tell the government: "record 123." So they'd look it up and say, "My goodness, it's Majed Moqed." And it would tell them which record to subpoena from which organization. Now it's back to reasonable and particular. TR: What were the challenges with developing this software? JJ: One of the challenges is when you one-way hash the data, it becomes "infinitely sensitive." What I mean by that is that the word robert, if you one-way hash it, and take Robert, where the r is capital and not lowercase, the one-way hash generated by this subtle difference is completely different. One of the reasons people didn't try to do this before, or it was believed that maybe it wasn't useful, is that people's identity data is always quite different -- sometimes with a middle initial, sometimes without. Identities just don't show up the same. That was the trick we had to solve: allowing it to match data that's fuzzy while only using one-way hashed values. The trick is in how we prepare the data. Here's a simple example. One list says Bob and one says Rob. Well, we know that both Bob and Rob belong to the same root name, in this case, Robert. So before we anonymize each side, we throw in the most rooted form, which is Robert. So we've added Robert to both lists, and we then one-way hash both lists so it turns out the Robert matches. TR: How is this is based on earlier work you did for Las Vegas casinos? JJ: The ability to figure out if two people are the same despite all the natural variability of how people express their identity is something we really got a good understanding of assisting the gaming industry. We also learned how people try to fabricate fake identities and how they try to evade systems. It was learning how to do that at high speed that opened the door to make this next thing possible. Had we not solved that in the 1990s, we would not have been able to conjure up a method to do anonymous resolution. TR: You've said that 40 percent of your time is spent on privacy and civil liberties issues and that a privacy strategist works with you. Could you give me an example of the sort of things you and your privacy strategist discuss? JJ: When the government has a watch list ?- this, by the way, doesn't have to do with our tech, this is about responsible usage of tech and improved processes -- when you have a watch list, the questions come up: Who's on the list? How can people find out if they're on the list? How can they get off the list if they're not supposed be on it? If a government has a list and they're sharing it, making copies of it, and somebody's removed from the list because they've made a mistake, how can you be sure that they're removed from everywhere else they shared it? Another thing that my privacy strategist and I have been talking about is called an "immutable audit log." TR: What's that? JJ: You want to make sure that someone who is using a secret government system isn't putting their ex-wife in a watch list or searching for their ex-wife or their neighbor just because they're curious. That would be a misuse. An immutable audit log is the notion that every time a user queries for a record, this new kind of audit log records it in an indelible way that's like etching it into stone. In other words, even if a database administrator was in cahoots with them, or the database administrator was a corrupt entity, they couldn't erase their own footprints. TR: Is there anything a person can do, other than living off the grid, to keep their digital trail to a minimum? JJ: Oh, boy -- that's a great, great question. As consumers, we often trade our information, creating a bigger footprint, because of some opportunity being extended to us. And the biggest privacy problem I have with that is when it is a surprise to the consumer. My advice to companies and governments is to avoid consumer surprise. That's one of the most offensive things: when you find out somebody's doing something with your data about which you had no clue. So my advice is to avoid consumer surprise, and that means having some degree of transparency. I believe consumers should be offered the opportunity to opt out. So the organizations that you transact with, the ones that allow the consumer to say "Hey, please don't sell my data" and those organizations that make it easy for the consumer to opt in or out -- I think consumers may eventually flock to those places where they feel the risk of consumer surprise is less. TR: The Department of Justice has subpoenaed some of Google's data, and the company is refusing to cooperate. What is your opinion on this? JJ: I haven't been following this very closely. But let's talk about consumer surprise. I think it would be a surprise to consumers [to find] that they would be identified to the government at individual levels. I think consumers would be less surprised if Google provided just statistics. TR: As an engineer concerned with privacy issues, what is your opinion on the NSA domestic wiretapping program? JJ: I have not read up much on that. I don't know whether it's legal or not legal. I would say if it turns out to be legal and it's going to continue, then I would say, "Could you do it with anonymous data?" TR: As an entrepreneur, you've successfully looked around, found a problem, and solved it with software. In your mind, what is the most important problem to be solved today? JJ: Picture this: We're in a canyon, and on the left there's this wall, and behind it is this back pressure, and that back pressure is "ill-will" that wants to do harm to democracy or the United States. And behind the other wall it is a police surveillance state. And the number of technology options that you have that don't turn you into a police surveillance state and that prevent the ill-will intent on the left are in the middle. There are a very narrow number of solutions between these canyon walls. But the problem is, should ill-will continue to grow, the pressure behind the wall on the left becomes such that, as we march forward through time, the canyon gets narrower and narrower, and eventually you have bad things happening and you have to be a police surveillance state to protect yourself. But the real thing that has nothing to do with technology is, if we don't figure out how to lower ill-will, our future is darker. "Approximately four thousand years ago, aliens invaded Earth and began implementing a diabolical plan to enslave humanity. These aliens have come to be known as "cats." They had one overwhelmingly superior ability. They understood calculus. And humans did not. The plan has been wildly successful and the proof is obvious: cats rule the world and very few humans understand calculus." - Kenn Amdahl and Jim Loats, Calculus for Cats Post message: transhumantech(a)yahoogroups.com Subscribe: transhumantech-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: transhumantech-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com List owner: transhumantech-owner(a)yahoogroups.com List home: http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/transhumantech/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/transhumantech/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: transhumantech-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ ----- 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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[liberationtech] Blogged: So, what about Cybercrime in Switzerland? A visit to KOBIK
by Moritz Bartl 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

So, what about Cybercrime in Switzerland? Swiss Cybercrime Coordination Unit (KOBIK) Yesterday, I joined some people from Chaos Computer Club ZC<rich (CCCZH) to visit the Cybercrime Coordination Unit (KOBIK) in Bern. The background was a Freedom of Information Act based request by the CCCZH: KOBIK provides a list of domain names that host child pornography. It is seen as a voluntary DNS blacklist for ISPs (and all the large Swiss ISPs apply this list). Naturally, groups like the CCCZH are worried given the non-public and intransparent nature of this list, lack of independent monitoring, and its possible implications for future expansion to other areas. This is not a theoretical danger, given that a court ordered Swiss ISPs to block swissjustice.net for b defamatory statementsb. $ dig @8.8.8.8 swissjustice.net any +short # google dns "v=spf1 a mx ip4:72.34.40.81 ?all" 0 swissjustice.net. ns1.mh.tc. accounts.elinuxservers.com. 2011102801 86400 7200 3600000 86400 ns1.mh.tc. ns2.mh.tc. 72.34.40.86 $ dig @62.2.24.162 swissjustice.net any +short # cablecom.ch dns $ KOBIK, the Cybercrime Unit, invited us to look at the list. The head of the organization and his assistant gave a presentation on the background of the unit and their main activities. We asked several questions, and were repeatedly encouraged to write more questions or come for another visit any time. Down to Earth in Switzerland The atmosphere was very friendly, and we felt welcome. In some way they even wanted us to be there, to hear their side of the story. I have no reason not to believe what they told us, and I did not sense any hidden agenda. In contrast to other law enforcement agents I had contact with in the past, they did not seem to be much depressed about external influences or wrong decisions being made b above themb. In some way, Switzerland seems to be successful in buying its freedom in some areas, and, due to this independence and size, does not appear to be under the same non-stop heat of lobbyism as I am used to in Germany. Knowing about our background, they constantly tried to assure us that they were against all sorts of b otherb blocking activities, and that the lists were provided more as a side project to providers who asked about them, not because anyone would believe it is a particularly useful measure against child pornography, but to b spare children and families from accidentially stumbling across the contentb. At the same time, they contact ISP and local law enforcement. They are well aware that DNS level blocks are no defense mechanism at all, and argue against IP level blocks for their coarse granularity and side effects (and any other categories of blocking for that matter). Cybercrimebs Just Images I reckon itbs still not much different in other European countries, but it still came as a surpise to us to experience that the whole Switzerland Cybercrime Coordination Unit, the (quote) b center of excellence for the public, authorities and Internet service providers about legal, technical and criminological issues on Internet crimesb plus b contact for foreign cybercrime authoritiesb (my emphases), has only 10 employees at a ~$1m budget. Maybe a somewhat special situation in Switzerland and for historical reasons, it still almost completely focusses on child pornography and display of violence (hard pornography illegal in Switzerland). They will slowly expand into other directions in the future, but specifically grew out of a working group around a large child pornography case in the 90s, Operation Genesis. Also, they themselves argue that most crimes involve the real world and are better suited to be dealt with in the traditional departments. Yes, Porn How do they find the sites in the first place? They have three main sources: a form where anyone can report suspicious websites banonymouslyb (they do log IPs and donbt offer HTTPS!). Secondly, INTERPOL seems to maintain a somewhat broader list, but KOBIK verifies each site again for specific violations of Swiss law. They also seem to conduct a limited number of own investigations. The head of department didnbt go into detail about this area, not only because they cannot talk too much about their operational strategies, but also because the whole event was more focussed on blacklist creation, distribution and verification. I donbt believe the budget allows for many investigations after all. (a few numbers are at the end of this post) Once the sites are added to the list, they are regularly checked again to see if content has changed. It sounded like a low number of countries and ISPs donbt cooperate well (but most do), and there isnbt much else they can do in such cases. The situation is different with pictures that directly involve Swiss citizens. In those cases they work together with the traditional pedocrime unit and try to seize the server. Independent monitoring So far there is no external inspection. Some ISPs seem to verify the content themselves before redirecting DNS (not all ISPs block all hostnames), which according to the KOBIK lawyer is perfectly legal to do in Switzerland. You get to see the website depicted in the screenshot, which ISPs can either self-host or use one hosted by KOBIK. Alledgely, IPs hitting the blocked sites are not stored/analyzed in any way, nor does KOBIK operate any honeypots or have legal or technical access to visitor information (no DPI/logging at ISPs). Most of the sites they deal with, at least concerning the blocks, are public websites full of advertisements and clearly not b insider exchangesb, and tend to move quickly. The turnaround time for the full list is only a few days (until most or all sites are either taken down or moved somewhere else), and most sites and pictures pop up again under a different name. Need some hash? Another growing area for KOBIK is the maintenance of a database of b 100% illegal child pornographyb hashes for various commercial forensic tools used by the different Kantons (states). Looking for (or at) evidence in child pornography cases is arguably not a very delightful job, so investigators more and more turn to automatic tools for that. KOBIK stated that they are careful about only including definitive matches and pick out only 100% clear-cut child pornography images for this. Encryption and Tor Given my background, I was naturally quite interested in their take on Tor, and how often they come across encryption. While they are not involved in the seizure or forensic analysis of machines very much, they did say that b apparently most pedo criminals have their blood somewhere elseb. KOBIK uses Tor in their investigations. Technical Once ISPs subscribe to the service and sign some paperwork, they get SFTP access to a daily updated and zipped textfiles of hostnames. KOBIK seemed genuinely interested in extending the cooperation towards research institutes, especially since they donbt have the manpower to properly follow up on developing trends (what kind of ISPs and ASNs are more involved than others in this business etc). Conclusion The current staff seems to have its heart at the right place. The list serves a well-intentioned purpose and was not introduced by external pressure, but as an internal idea, not alone to save the investigators the trouble to have to justify that some websites might still be up b days after a report came in.b Still, changes in political climate can come faster than KOBIK expects. Even if they can hold powers back for a while, in the end either heads will roll or, more likely, some people will want to keep their job. What if, some day rather sooner than later, something like Cleanfeed UK repeats in Switzerland? Will KOBIK stand against a court order? Not likely. And Torproject.org is already listed in several b civilizedb blocklists around the globe. This is real. Some numbers * 5000-7000 reports coming in from the public p.a. * at the time of our visit, the blocklist contained 148 hostnames * the Interpol list was said to be a bit larger, but the same order of magnitude * 10 employees (including head of department) * budget around CHF 1m ($USD 1.1m) * ~200 access providers exist in Switzerland, around 10% use the list (large ISPs, cover 90% of the population) http://www.hackerbus.eu/blog/2012/03/27/so-what-about-cybercrime-in-switzer… -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech 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. You may ask for a reminder here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- 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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