- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

[Cryptography] Hardware Trojan Protection
by Eugen Leitl 25 Sep '13

25 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from Bill Frantz <frantz(a)pwpconsult.com> ----- Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:36:13 -0700 From: Bill Frantz <frantz(a)pwpconsult.com> To: cryptography(a)metzdowd.com Subject: [Cryptography] Hardware Trojan Protection X-Mailer: Mailsmith 2.3.1 (422) On 9/22/13 at 6:07 PM, leichter(a)lrw.com (Jerry Leichter) wrote in another thread: > Still, it raises the question: If you can't trust your > microprocessor chips, what do you do? One possible answer: Build > yourself a processor out of MSI chips. We used to do that, not so > long ago, and got respectable performance (if not, perhaps, on > anything like today's scale). An MSI chip doesn't have enough > intrinsic computation to provide much of a hook for an attack. Oh, > sure, the hardware could be spiked - but to do *what*? Any given > type of MSI chip could go into many different points of many > different circuit topologies, and won't see enough of the data to > do much anyway. There may be some interface issues: This stuff > might not be fast enough to deal with modern memory chips. (How > would you attack a memory chip? Certainly possible if you're make > a targeted attack - you can slip in a small processor in the design > to do all kinds of nasty things. But commercial of the shelf > memory chips are built right up to the edge of what we can make, so > you can't change a > ll that much.) > > Some stuff is probably just impossible with this level of > technology. I doubt you can build a Gig-E Ethernet interface > without large-scale integration. You can certainly do the original > 10 Mb/sec - after all, people did! I have no idea if you could get > to 100 Mb/sec. > > Do people still make bit-slice chips? Are they at a low-enough > level to not be a plausible attack vector? > > You could certainly build a respectable mail server this way - > though it's probably not doing 2048-bit RSA at a usable speed. > > We've been talking about crypto (math) and coding (software). > Frankly, I, personally, have no need to worry about someone > attacking my hardware, and that's probably true of most people. > But it's *not* true of everyone. So thinking about how to build > "harder to attack" hardware is probably worth the effort. You might get a reasonable level of protection implementing the core of the crypto operations in a hardware security module (HSM) using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) or Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD). There is an open source set of tools for programming these beasts based on Python called MyHDL <www.myhdl.org>. The EFF DES cracker may have some useful ideas too. The largest of these devices are also pressing the current chip limits. There isn't a lot of extra space for Trojans. In addition, knowing what to look at is somewhat difficult if pin assignments etc are changed from chip to chip at random. As with any system, there are tool chain issues. Open source helps, but there is always the Key Thompson attack. The best solution I can think of is to audit the output. Look very carefully at the output of the tool chain, and at the final piece that loads the configuration data into the device. Cheers - Bill --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz |"Web security is like medicine - trying to do good for 408-356-8506 |an evolved body of kludges" - Mark Miller www.pwpconsult.com | _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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[DIYbio] Re: Downloading JoVE videos?
by Eugen Leitl 25 Sep '13

25 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from code elusive <code.elusive(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 10:38:01 -0700 (PDT) From: code elusive <code.elusive(a)gmail.com> To: diybio(a)googlegroups.com Subject: [DIYbio] Re: Downloading JoVE videos? Reply-To: diybio(a)googlegroups.com hello :) A method to extract the full JoVE video files, using Firefox, is described below. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Extraction of full JoVE video files 1. In Firefox, open a new tab (my FF version is 23.0.1) 2. Press Ctr+Shift+K to open the Web console window (Or go from Firefox>Web developer>Web console) 3. On the web console, the following buttons must be pressed (if they are not, press them): "Net" and "Logging" 4. Paste the url of the webpage you're interested in and start playing the short video segment. >From the lines that have appeared on the web console, we want the video file links, which most probably include a .mov or .mp4 extension. 5. Once the short video segment has ended, filter the lines using the"filter output"box of the web console (next to the "clear" button) and search for .mov or .mp4. The lines with the link start as GET "http://ecsource.jove.com/CDNSource/.. " 6. Right click the appropriate line, select "copy link location" and either paste in a new tab, or download with your favorite download manager. that's it :) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Of course it is possible that an even easier method exists. I hope the explanation is clear. Let me know if I can clarify anything. For those that are interested in the video files from the links that Patrik posted, the links are: http://ecsource.jove.com/CDNSource/3740_Mahoney_Perfusion_010512_P_Web.mov http://ecsource.jove.com/CDNSource/3940_Bueter_050112_F_Web.mov http://ecsource.jove.com/CDNSource/1138_Cowan_F2.mp4 have a nice evening :) -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups DIYbio group. To post to this group, send email to diybio(a)googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/diybio?hl=en Learn more at www.diybio.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to diybio+unsubscribe(a)googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to diybio(a)googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/52ddb906-43b2-45a3-a223-b66a8485e3…. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Re: [p2p-hackers] BitWeav: open P2P micropublishing
by Eugen Leitl 25 Sep '13

25 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from Liam Edwards-Playne <liamzebedee(a)yahoo.com.au> ----- Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 12:13:48 +1000 From: Liam Edwards-Playne <liamzebedee(a)yahoo.com.au> To: p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com Subject: Re: [p2p-hackers] BitWeav: open P2P micropublishing User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.0 Reply-To: theory and practice of decentralized computer networks <p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com> A good point about the SHA2-256 + RIPEMD-160 usage that I hadn't considered. I'll change the design to use a single truncated SHA2-256 hash. As for length extension attacks, I don't believe I should be concerned, should I? The transfer of messages within the network is dependent on a defined protocol, so any extra bytes would just be interpreted as a malformed message. Out of interest, could you elaborate on the potential weaknesses in the pairing? As for a decentralised identity, it's an interesting problem, but I'll be focusing on the micropublishing idea first. With my last project, I delved into too many areas, trying to decentralise DNS, creating an improved Kademlia DHT, providing a framework for P2P mutable documents. Ultimately I built nothing (but learnt a lot). Nonetheless I think technology develops too quickly to define any sort of single specification for an online identity. The best we have are public keys certified by webs of trust. Le 25/09/13 08:16, Sean Lynch a écrit : > I don't think Bitcoin's SHA2-256 + RIPEMD-160 usage is based on > sound crypto. It's not terrible but it's also a little bit silly > since a collision in SHA2-256 will be a collision in the pair, > which means all you're doing is shortening the hash while avoiding > the length extension attack. There are also potential weaknesses in > the pair that may not exist in either one due to the fact that the > pairing has not been well studied. You could accomplish the same > end with less CPU and less code by using a truncated SHA-512 hash. > > Otherwise, I tend to agree with your goals and approach, though I > think it may be more impactful to simply bring the decentralized > identity aspect of it to the web. The fact that I have no portable > identity with which to comment on or post arbitrary content around > the web is very annoying. At best, the current system could be > described as federated, but even that's not entirely true since few > sites actually support OpenID and fewer users know what their > OpenID URL is. > > > On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 9:48 PM, Liam Edwards-Playne > <liamzebedee(a)yahoo.com.au <mailto:liamzebedee@yahoo.com.au>> wrote: > > I've been working on a new open micropublishing network that's > entirely peer-to-peer, relying on a publish-subscribe overlay to > facilitate scalable distribution of messages on hashtags, profiles > and threads. > > You can peruse its design in this document: > http://bitweav.org/whitepaper.pdf > > Its main features: > - first of its kind to support publish/subscribe to topics > (profiles, hashtags, threads) > - doesn't use rendez-vous nodes for topics (meaning only nodes > who are subscribed to a topic will help distribute messages on it) > - message threading and replies. multilingual support. > - more scalable approach to message dissemination using rings, > rather than gossip-based flooding (see ch. 7 of whitepaper) > > I'd appreciate any constructive criticism / discussion and if > anyone would like to help I would greatly appreciate it. I'm > currently developing the frontend graphical client, afterwhich I > will progress to implementing the backend daemon. > > Cheers, > Liam Edwards-Playne. > _______________________________________________ > p2p-hackers mailing list > p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com <mailto:p2p-hackers@lists.zooko.com> > http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers > > > > > _______________________________________________ > p2p-hackers mailing list > p2p-hackers(a)lists.zooko.com > http://lists.zooko.com/mailman/listinfo/p2p-hackers _______________________________________________ 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://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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<nettime> "Internet Freedom" and Post-Snowden Global Internet Governance
by Eugen Leitl 25 Sep '13

25 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from michael gurstein <gurstein(a)gmail.com> ----- Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 15:37:36 -0700 From: michael gurstein <gurstein(a)gmail.com> To: Nettime-L <nettime-l(a)kein.org> Subject: <nettime> "Internet Freedom" and Post-Snowden Global Internet Governance Reply-To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism <nettime-l(a)mail.kein.org> With links http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/internet-freedom-and-post-snowden-g lobal-internet-governance/ http://tinyurl.com/n3onw87 "Internet Freedom" and Post-Snowden Global Internet Governance: Michael Gurstein The big story for the 2012 Internet Governance Forum in Baku was the almost overwhelming (and overpowering) emphasis placed by the US government delegation and its corporate allies (primarily Google) and its associates in (primarily US based) Civil Society on what was termed "Internet Freedom" and Multistakeholderism as its primary governance modality. The campaign was very well orchestrated and coordinated (through the US delegation led by a US Ambassador and the head of the NTIA Lawrence Strickling) who insisted that any "Internet governance" position which included any form of "government involvement" would necessarily imply or result in government's "takeover" or "control" of the Internet. Further, it was vociferously asserted that any deviation from this path was by definition an infringement of "Internet Freedom" and part of a slippery slope leading to full-on government suppression of "free speech" on the Internet. Those who pointed out that there already was quite considerable involvement of various governments in various aspects of Internet management were effectively shouted down as being sympathizers with the autocrats and enemies of "freedom" in such states as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. The overwhelming response was that Internet "governance" was optimal as it was (or at least the corporate, (inter) governmental, and technical mechanisms governing its evolution were optimal); and that the only possible position for "lovers of the Internet" was to support the existing status quo with respect to Internet ("non") governance. Precisely what might be meant by "Internet Freedom" apart from rather fuzzy libertarian notions of keeping "the dead hand of government" as far as possible from the Internet as a hub of innovation and enterprise, was never made very clear beyond the level of slogan and exhortation. Rather it was loudly proclaimed that any form of formal governance of the Internet would be the greatest sin that could be perpetrated against the Internet as a burgeoning global infrastructure. In choosing among the various ways in which "Freedom" might be characterized this lobbying steamroller made quite clear that they were referring to Freedom "from"-government interference, government oversight, government regulation of anything to do with the Internet. And this theme and its ITU focused counterparts were equally evident at the ITU policy meeting held in Dubai some few months later (the WCIT). When some few small voices suggested that this full court press in support of "Freedom from" might also mean for example a freedom from the means for countries, particularly Less Developed Countries to introduce some form of taxation on the currently small but rapidly growing flow of Internet based revenues from already impoverished economies to already stupendously wealth private (and primarily US based) Internet corporations; or that there might be something wrong with the current way in which the basic "naming system" of the Internet via ICANN might be structured (as a sub-contractor to the US Department of Commerce); or that some issues such as privacy might require mechanisms for policy development and global enforcement, these comments were met with derision and howls that the authors of such positions were secret sympathizers of communications censors (ComSymps) of those on the other side of the emerging Internet cold war - i.e. the Russia's, China's, Saudi Arabia's of the world. But that was then and this is now and as startling revelation after revelation tumbles from the thumb drives of Mr. Edward Snowden the import if not the intent of (one hopes) certain of those Internet Freedom warriors (speculating on precisely who knew what, when, and how in this context makes for an interesting exercise) becomes clear. While so loudly advocating for Freedom "from" (whatever.), the Internet Freedom (IF) coalition was in fact, providing the diplomatic cover and lobbying campaign to ensure that no outcome of Internet governance would interfere with what would appear to be the overall US strategy of Freedom "to" - surveille, subvert, suborn and overall embed and maintain (as the NSA so aptly put it)-"total information dominance" of the Internet and all of its various manifestations now and presumably forever, in the service of US "security" and US interests. Such "security" it is clear from the Snowden documents means not only security against terrorism but also it seems (as enabled by the NSA's surveillance machine) security against potentially independent comment (and ultimately action) by both opposing and allied states; against fair competition since one side has access to all its information and the information from the other side as well; and quite startlingly the security of having the means to listen in on and ultimately control independent action, comment, commerce, and thought itself not only among "foreigners" (i.e. everyone else) but also even among those (in theory) protected by that most oft cited of documents the US constitution. That this "Freedom from" campaign has now been fully revealed for what it was (providing the ideological justification for an on-going coup d'etat against the republic of the Internet), leaves the matters of Internet Governance (where this all started) completely up in the air. But once having been revealed that we are no longer in Kansas and that the wicked witches of the North, South, East and West will be relentless in their pursuit of control including through the use of their boundless financial and technical resources; a response of some sort however reluctantly and with what trepidations seems to be in the cards as per the recent speech to the UN General Assembly by President Rousseff of Brazil. And so we have the upcoming 8th session of the Internet Governance Forum in Bali with many of the main protagonists having been more or less completely discredited (it might be fun if the same coalition were to try for another round of "Internet Freedom" confabulations but one can't imagine that even those folks have been sufficiently well trained to carry that one off with a straight face). So, what will be discussed at the IGF apart from the usual empty rhetoric about capacity building for LDC's and legitimate campaigns against online skullduggery of the spam, kiddieporn, phishing variety. Perhaps I could make a modest suggestion for the discussion. Perhaps we could discuss "Internet Freedom" but Internet Freedom in a post-Snowden world and without the hypocrisy and sanctimony of the previous discussions. Perhaps we could discuss Internet Freedom as Freedom from undue and unaccountable surveillance. Internet Freedom as true Freedom of Expression where the forces of repression whether in Langley or in Moscow or Shanghai are made transparent and accountable; where Internet Freedom is anchored in the rule of law-not the, shall we say, rather "flexible" law of the world's single superpower but a rule of law to which all are expected to adhere and where mechanisms are in place to ensure that, to the degree possible, all are responsive and accountable; where Internet Freedom is not just for some but where it's responsibilities and most importantly its protections are available for all of us - "foreigners" or no and where all have some degree of input into how those laws are constructed and administered; where Internet Freedom does not mean that actions on and through the Internet will be subverted and directed simply to further enrich the already obscenely enriched but rather to ensure that the benefits including financial benefits accruing from the Internet serve to reduce global inequalities. I look for those who a year ago, were so eager to rally forces in support of Internet Freedom to rally again to this somewhat battered standard but now one that is rather less naive and rather more reflective of the underlying reality of this technology enabled world in which we live. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

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Dissentr: A High-Latency Overlay Mix Network
by Eugen Leitl 25 Sep '13

25 Sep '13

https://github.com/ShaneWilton/dissentr Note: This project was created as part of a 36-hour hackathon - and primarily as a proof of concept. While the ideas may be sound, and the prototype may work as designed, the protocols involved in this specific project have not been peer-reviewed, and so I cannot recommend that the network be used for anything requiring serious privacy. Dissentr A High-Latency Overlay Mix Network Essentially, Dissentr is a security-minded network, inspired by Tor, with a few important characteristics which serve to differentiate it. High-Latency Tor is a low-latency network. This makes it ideal for real time activities like web browsing, but as a result, opens it up to attacks involving large-scale traffic analysis methods known as end-to-end correlation. In these attacks, an adversary with the ability to analyze massive amounts of traffic in a short period of time is able to match up traffic entering the network with the corresponding traffic which will inevitably soon exit it. Dissentr manages to protect against these sorts of attacks by being engineered as a high-latency network. Assuming any given node has not been compromised, that node will intentionally hold off on forwarding its traffic to the next node in the network until it is able to forward a large amount of data in bulk, rendering the aforementioned end-to-end correlation far less feasible. For an excellent discussion on this attack, and possible countermeasures, see Practical Traffic Analysis: Extending and Resisting Statistical Disclosure. Cascades Much like any mix network, Dissentr models its network as a graph of nodes, each responsible for handling the relay of traffic as it moves along some path through the network. Where Dissentr differs from a network such as Tor is in how this path is constructed. In Dissentr, the network is constructed out of cascades (A term I first heard described by Ian Goldberg, but I've been unable to pin down an original source for): essentially directed, acyclic sub-graphs, in which a node defines a set of "trusted" nodes, through which they are willing to relay traffic through. Dissentr simplifies this model by only allowing for nodes of out-degree 1, at this time. This construction brings about a number of useful results: In the event that a node is known to be compromised, individual nodes are allowed the ability to either remove themselves from a cascade, or bypass untrusted nodes entirely, without the necessity of a trusted third-party. The network is protected from "supernode invasions," in which an attacker floods the network with compromised nodes, in the hopes of either endangering the network's health, or placing the security of users passing through their nodes at risk of traffic interception, and subsequent analysis. This can be guaranteed because cascades are constructed by virtue of a measure of trust between node-operators, and so long as there exists some non-zero subset of trusted operators, they retain the ability to form a cascade of their own, effectively shutting out the efforts of such an attacker. Use-Cases As mentioned previously, the high-latency nature of the network causes a shift in the sorts of activities best facilitated by its use, however, there do exist some unique opportunities which I have neither seen implemented in the context of a mix network, nor discussed in the literature. A personal favourite idea revolves around creating a platform for political blogging, which, assuming a noisy enough network, would offer political dissidents the ability to freely write about issues of corruption or government abuse, without many of the risks associated with using a lower-latency network like Tor. If it takes a week for a blog post to appear in circulation after the author posts it to the network, it becomes magnitudes more difficult for any assailant to trace the authorship of that blog post - especially if that author never visited the website which hosts their content in the first place! It also becomes a fairly trivial exercise to adapt the network to act as a mixing service for digital currency such as Bitcoin. Furthermore, by breaking the network into a number of smaller, disjoint networks for that purpose, one is be able to counter many of the current attacks which target existing mixing services. Cryptosystem I again emphasize that the cryptosystem in place is the result of a rather rushed 48-hour hackathon - in a production system, I would recommend implementing a peer-reviewed cryptosystem, such as the very lightweight Sphinx, or, pending their coming proof of security, the recently proposed Ibis. That being said, Dissentr works as follows: Every node in the network maintains an RSA-keypair, with the public key being exposed to every node in a given cascade. When a client wishes to send a message M through the network, they choose some cascade C. For each node in the cascade, beginning with the exit node, and continuing through to the entrance node, the client generates an AES CFB128 key, which it uses to encrypt M. The key is then encrypted using that node's public RSA key. M, now encrypted with AES CFB128 for every node in the cascade, is then passed to the entrance node along with the encrypted AES keys. The entrance node then uses its private RSA key to decrypt the AES key, so that it can subsequently decrypt M, yielding yet another cipher text. This process is repeated for every node in the cascade, until the final node decrypts M to a plaintext, which it then handles accordingly. Building and Running it If, after all of my warnings, you still want to see it in action, it's dead-easy to get setup. All you'll need is Erlang installed (Tested on R16B02), along with Elixir. From there, you'll want to invoke the following from within Dissentr's directory, on every machine you want to host a node: iex --sname {Any name, different per machine} --cookie {Any string, common between all machines} -S mix This will stick you into a REPL, loaded with Dissentr's namespaces and dependencies. Sorry, there's no interface yet. From there, if you're using more than one machine, you'll want to link them all together, by running the following on every machine you want to host a node on. Since Erlang node connections are transitive, you won't have to do this for every pair of nodes.: :net_adm.ping(binary_to_atom(hostname)) The hostname in question can be found in the iex prompt. Most likely it will be something@domain. Now, just spawn a few nodes to create a network. I've got some temporary methods in place for making this easy, using some hardcoded keys stored in example_data/ for testing. Ideally, each node will be hosted on a different machine, but for testing purposes it doesn't matter. Within your prompt, execute the following: Dissentr.Cascade.add_node(:node1, nil, 1) Dissentr.Cascade.add_node(:node2, :node1, 2) Dissentr.Cascade.add_node(:node3, :node2, 3) Dissentr.Cascade.add_node(:node4, :node3, 4) Dissentr.Cascade.add_node(:node5, :node4, 5) Finally, to send an encrypted message, run the following, substituting the node and message as desired: Dissentr.Cascade.mix(:node3, "Something, something, NSA") If all went well, you should see a debug statement print out the plaintext message, on the machine which is hosting :node1

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[RISKS] Risks Digest 27.48
by RISKS List Owner 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Tuesday 24 September 2013 Volume 27 : Issue 48 ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) Peter G. Neumann, moderator, chmn ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy ***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. ***** This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/27.48.html> The current issue can be found at <http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt> Contents: Girl's Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies (Lizette Alvarez via Monty Solomon) Police: BMW Door Locks Contributed To 14-Year-Old Girl's Death (Erik Rosales via Lauren Weinstein) Another major government IT failure (Peter Bernard Ladkin) United Airlines Agrees to Honor Accidental $0 Tickets (Joshua Freed via Monty Solomon) Million Second Quiz gets overloaded (Paul Robinson) Fake online reviews crackdown in New York sees 19 companies fined (Lauren Weinstein) "Verizon's diabolical plan to turn the Web into pay-per-view" (Bill Snyder via Gene Wirchenko) Freedom and the Social Contract (Vint Cerf via Dave Farber) WiReD: Apple's Fingerprint ID May Mean You Can't 'Take the Fifth' (Marcia Hoffman via Lauren Weinstein) The US government has betrayed the Internet. We need to take it back (Bruce Schneier via Matthew Kruk) FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack (Kevin Poulsen via Monty Solomon) Gov't standards agency "strongly" discourages use of NSA-influenced algorithm (Larson and Elliott via Monty Solomon) *The New York Times* provides new details about NSA backdoor (Ars Technica via David Farber) Malware Mining Civil Aviation Data - AVweb flash Article (Gabe Goldberg) E-ZPasses Get Read All Over New York, Not Just At Toll Booths (Kashmir Hill via Henry Baker) "Adobe issues critical security updates for Flash Player, Reader and Shockwave Player" (Lucian Constantin via Gene Wirchenko) "Microsoft pulls botched KB 2871630, while many Office patch problems remain" (Woody Leonhard via Gene Wirchenko) Sharing due to phone failure (Karl Goetz) HuffPost Essay by Charles Perrow on Fukushima (John Bosley via Dave Farber) BOOK: Rebecca Slayton, Arguments that Count (PGN) Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 01:31:47 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty(a)roscom.com> Subject: Girl's Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies (Lizette Alvarez) Lizette Alvarez, *The New York Times*, 13 Sep 2013 MIAMI - The clues were buried in her bedroom. Before leaving for school on Monday morning, Rebecca Ann Sedwick had hidden her schoolbooks under a pile of clothes and left her cellphone behind, a rare lapse for a 12-year-old girl. Inside her phone's virtual world, she had changed her user name on Kik Messenger, a cellphone application, to "That Dead Girl" and delivered a message to two friends, saying goodbye forever. Then she climbed a platform at an abandoned cement plant near her home in the Central Florida city of Lakeland and leaped to the ground, the Polk County sheriff said. In jumping, Rebecca became one of the youngest members of a growing list of children and teenagers apparently driven to suicide, at least in part, after being maligned, threatened and taunted online, mostly through a new collection of texting and photo-sharing cellphone `applications. Her suicide raises new questions about the proliferation and popularity of these applications and Web sites among children and the ability of parents to keep up with their children's online relationships. For more than a year, Rebecca, pretty and smart, was cyberbullied by a coterie of 15 middle-school children who urged her to kill herself, her mother said. The Polk County sheriff's office is investigating the role of cyberbullying in the suicide and considering filing charges against the middle-school students who apparently barraged Rebecca with hostile text messages. Florida passed a law this year making it easier to bring felony charges in online bullying cases. [...] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/us/suicide-of-girl-after-bullying-raises-… ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 17:37:40 -0700 From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren(a)vortex.com> Subject: Police: BMW Door Locks Contributed To 14-Year-Old Girl's Death (Erik Rosales) [This is not the first time I've heard of such problems with these electronic locking systems. LW] http://www.kmph.com/story/23421319/police-bmw-door-locks-contribute-to-14-y… ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 08:42:31 +0200 From: Peter Bernard Ladkin <ladkin(a)rvs.uni-bielefeld.de> Subject: Another major government IT failure 12 Sep 2013: "..... the [UK] Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) could write off up to 161 million pounds spent on an IT system for ambitious welfare changes......." Full story at http://gu.com/p/3ty4n ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 01:35:14 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty(a)roscom.com> Subject: United Airlines Agrees to Honor Accidental $0 Tickets (Joshua Freed) Joshua Freed, The Associated Press, 14 Sep 2013 United Airlines said on Friday that it will honor the tickets it accidentally gave away for free. The decision is good news for people who snapped up the tickets on Thursday after United listed airfares at $0. Many customers got tickets for $5 or $10, paying only the cost of the Sept. 11 security fee. The mistake was an especially good deal for any passengers who bought tickets for travel within the next week. For instance, a Houston to Washington Dulles flight for next weekend would have cost $877, according to United's website on Friday. ... http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/09/14/united-airlines-price-error-free-tic… ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 17:17:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Paul Robinson <paul(a)paul-robinson.us> Subject: Million Second Quiz gets overloaded Last night on the NBC TV network program "The Million Second Quiz," Host Ryan Seacrest admitted two things. (1) The App to allow viewers to play along with the TV show at home is the most-downloaded free app ever provided on iTunes. (2) So many people were playing the home game app that it crashed the servers. Tonight they admitted that there aren't even that many downloading the app, a mere 1000 downloads a minute. While that doesn't indicate how many were connecting to the servers, clearly a game where the money accumulating as a contestant is playing is $10/second and the grand prize which the 4 top winners (all of whom will probably have won a minimum six figures each by the time the game completes) will be going after is US$2,000,000 and it's possible for a home game contestant to be invited on the show (a "line jumper" as they call it), that it should have been obvious the home game would be getting a lot of hits on their servers. With inadequate provisioning like this, it doesn't even require attackers to try to DDOS or otherwise disable a system, the users can do it just by too many of them showing up all at once! ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 14:03:45 -0700 From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren(a)vortex.com> Subject: Fake online reviews crackdown in New York sees 19 companies fined http://j.mp/16CqA2Q (*The Guardian* via NNSquad) "Eric Schneiderman announced agreements with 19 firms Monday that commissioned fake reviews and several reputation-enhancement companies that helped place reviews on sites like Citysearch, Google, Yahoo and Yelp. They were fined a total of $350,000." ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:59:51 -0700 From: Gene Wirchenko <genew(a)telus.net> Subject: "Verizon's diabolical plan to turn the Web into pay-per-view" (Bill Snyder) Bill Snyder, InfoWorld, 12 Sep 2013 The carrier wants to charge websites for carrying their packets, but if they win it'd be the end of the Internet as we know it http://www.infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/verizons-diabolical-plan-t… ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2013 09:06:42 -0400 From: David Farber <farber(a)gmail.com> Subject: Freedom and the Social Contract, by Vint Cerf [In the CACM -- Vint's Comments on the Role of Government. DF] FROM THE PRESIDENT (of the ACM) Freedom and the Social Contract By Vinton G. Cerf Communications of the ACM, Vol. 56 No. 9, Page 7 10.1145/2500468.2500470 The last several weeks (as of this writing) have been filled with disclosures of intelligence practices in the U.S. and elsewhere. Edward Snowden's unauthorized release of highly classified information has stirred a great deal of debate about national security and the means used to preserve it. In the midst of all this, I looked to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's well-known 18th-century writings on the Social Contract (Du Contrat Social, Ou Principes du Droit Politique) for insight. Distilled and interpreted through my perspective, I took away several notions. One is that in a society, to achieve a degree of safety and stability, we as individuals give up some absolute freedom of action to what Rousseau called the sovereign will of the people. He did not equate this to government, which he argued was distinct and derived its power from the sovereign people. I think it may be fair to say that most of us would not want to live in a society that had no limits to individual behavior. In such a society, there would be no limit to the potential harm an individual could visit upon others. In exchange for some measure of stability and safety, we voluntarily give up absolute freedom in exchange for the rule of law. In Rousseau's terms, however, the laws must come from the sovereign people, not from the government. We approximate this in most modern societies creating representative government using public elections to populate the key parts of the government. I think it is also likely to be widely agreed that a society in which there was no privacy and every action or plan was visible to everyone might not be a place in which most of us might like to live. I am reminded, however, of my life in a small village of about 3,000 people in Germany. In the 1960s, no one had phones at home (well, very few). You went to the post office to mail letters, pick up mail, and make or receive phone calls. In some sense, the Postmaster was the most well-informed person about the doings of the town. He saw who was calling or writing to whom. There was not a lot of privacy. The modern notion of privacy may in part have derived from the growth of large urban concentrations in which few people know one another. In today's world, threats to our safety and threats to national security come from many directions and not all or even many of them originate from state actors. If I can use the term "cyber-safety" to suggest safety while making use of the content and tools of the Internet, World Wide Web, and computing devices in general, it seems fair to say the expansion of these services and systems has been accompanied by a growth in their abuse. Moreover, it has been frequently observed that there is an asymmetry in the degree of abuse and harm that individuals can perpetrate on citizens, and on the varied infrastructure of our society. Vast harm and damage may be inflicted with only modest investment in resources. Whether we speak of damage and harm using computer-based tools or damage from lethal, homemade explosives, the asymmetry is apparent. While there remain serious potential threats to the well-being of citizens from entities we call nation- states, there are similarly serious potential threats originating with individuals and small groups. Presuming we have accepted the theory that safety is partly found through voluntarily following law, we must also recognize that there are parties domestic and otherwise who wish us individual and collective harm. The societal response to this is to provide for law enforcement and intelligence gathering (domestic and non-domestic) in an attempt to detect and thwart harmful plans from becoming harmful reality. We do not always succeed. The tension we feel between preserving privacy and a desire to be protected from harm feeds the debate about the extent to which we are willing to trade one for the other. Not everyone, nor every culture, will find the same point of equilibrium. Moreover, as technology and society evolve, the equilibrium points may shift. It has been said that "security" is not found in apprehending a guilty party but in preventing the harm from occurring. While this notion can surely be overextended, it can also be understood to justify a certain degree of intelligence gathering in the service of safety and security. There is some irony in the fact that our privacy is more difficult than ever to preserve, given the advent of smartphones, tablets, laptops, the Web and the Internet, but that the threats against our safety and security use the same infrastructure to achieve nefarious ends. Our discipline, computer science, is deeply involved in the many dimensions of this conundrum and we owe it to our fellow citizens to be thoughtful in response and to contribute to reasoned consideration of the balance our society needs between potential policy extremes. Vinton G. Cerf, ACM PRESIDENT Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and full citation on the first page. Copyright for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or fee. Request permission to publish from permissions(a)acm.org or fax (212) 869-0481. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 17:21:13 -0700 From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren(a)vortex.com> Subject: Wired: Apple's Fingerprint ID May Mean You Can't 'Take the Fifth' (Marcia Hoffman) http://j.mp/17VN56u (Marcia Hoffman in *WiReD.com* via NNSquad) "But if we move toward authentication systems based solely on physical tokens or biometrics -- things we have or things we are, rather than things we remember -- the government could demand that we produce them without implicating anything we know. Which would make it less likely that a valid privilege against self-incrimination would apply." ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 20:48:59 -0600 From: "Matthew Kruk" <mkrukg(a)gmail.com> Subject: The US government has betrayed the Internet. We need to take it back Bruce Schneier, *The Guardian*, Thursday 5 September 2013 20.04 BST The NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. We engineers built the Internet - and now we have to fix it http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-in… ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 01:54:43 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty(a)roscom.com> Subject: FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack (Kevin Poulsen) Kevin Poulsen, *WiReD.com*, 13 Sep 2013 It wasn't ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting's operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It's not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale. He was denied bail today for the second time since his arrest in July. Freedom Hosting was a provider of turnkey "Tor hidden service" sites - special sites, with addresses ending in .onion, that hide their geographic location behind layers of routing, and can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. Tor hidden services are used by sites that need to evade surveillance or protect users' privacy to an extraordinary degree - including human rights groups and journalists. But they also appeal to serious criminal elements, child-pornography traders among them. On August 4, all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting - some with no connection to child porn - began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page. Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn't respond to inquiries from WIRED today. ... http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 01:57:35 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty(a)roscom.com> Subject: Gov't standards agency "strongly" discourages use of NSA-influenced algorithm (Larson and Elliott) NIST: "we are not deliberately... working to undermine or weaken encryption." Jeff Larson and Justin Elliott, ProPublica.org Sept 13 2013 Ars Technica Following revelations about the National Security Agency's (NSA) covert influence on computer security standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, announced earlier this week it is revisiting some of its encryption standards. But in a little-noticed footnote, NIST went a step further, saying it is "strongly" recommending against even using one of the standards. The institute sets standards for everything from the time to weights to computer security that are used by the government and widely adopted by industry. As ProPublica, The New York Times, and The Guardian reported last week, documents provided by Edward Snowden suggest that the NSA has heavily influenced the standard, which has been used around the world. In its statement Tuesday, the NIST acknowledged that the NSA participates in creating cryptography standards "because of its recognized expertise" and because the NIST is required by law to consult with the spy agency. "We are not deliberately, knowingly, working to undermine or weaken encryption," NIST chief Patrick Gallagher said at a public conference Tuesday. Various versions of Microsoft Windows, including those used in tablets and smartphones, contain implementations of the standard, though the NSA-influenced portion isn't enabled by default. Developers creating applications for the platform must choose to enable it. ... ... elliptic curve-based deterministic random bit generator http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/government-standards-agency-strongl… ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 04:42:17 -0400 From: David Farber <dave(a)farber.net> Subject: *The New York Times* provides new details about NSA backdoor http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/new-york-times-provides-new-details… NSA leaks, Ars Technica Of course NSA can crack crypto. Anyone can. The question is, how much? Long-shot bill forbidding NSA backdoors in encryption has renewed attention Spooks break most Internet crypto, but how? Google speeding up end-to-end crypto between data centers worldwide Let us count the ways: How the feds (legally, technically) get our data Today, *The New York Times* reported that an algorithm for generating random numbers, which was adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), contains a backdoor for the NSA. The news followed a *NYT* report from last week, which indicated that the National Security Agency (NSA) had circumvented widely used (but then-unnamed) encryption schemes by placing backdoors in the standards that are used to implement the encryption. In 2007, cryptographers Niels Ferguson and Dan Shumow presented research suggesting that there could be a potential backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm, which NIST had included in Special Publication 800-90. If the parameters used to define the algorithm were chosen in a particular way, they would allow the NSA to predict the supposedly random numbers produced by the algorithm. It wasn't entirely clear at the time that the NSA had picked the parameters in this way; as Ars noted last week, the rationale for choosing the particular Dual_EC_DRBG parameters in SP 800-90 was never actually stated. Today, *The NYT* says that internal memos leaked by Edward Snowden confirm that the NSA generated the Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm. Publicly, however, the agency's role in development was significantly underbilled: ``In publishing the standard, NIST acknowledged 'contributions' from NSA, but not primary authorship,'' wrote the NYT. From there, the NSA pushed the International Organization for Standardization to adopt the algorithm, calling it ``a challenge in finesse'' to convince the organization's leadership. ``Eventually, NSA became the sole editor'' of the international standard, according to one classified memo seen by the NYT. The details come just as NIST released a promise to reopen the public vetting process for SP 800-90. ``We want to assure the IT cybersecurity community that the transparent, public process used to rigorously vet our standards is still in place,'' a memo from the Institute read. ``NIST would not deliberately weaken a cryptographic standard. We will continue in our mission to work with the cryptographic community to create the strongest possible encryption standards for the US government and industry at large.'' Still, NIST asserted that its purpose was to protect the federal government first: ``NIST's mandate is to develop standards and guidelines to protect federal information and information systems. Because of the high degree of confidence in NIST standards, many private industry groups also voluntarily adopt these standards.'' The public comment period on SP 800-90 ends November 6, 2013. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 10:02:00 -0400 From: Gabe Goldberg <gabe(a)gabegold.com> Subject: Malware Mining Civil Aviation Data - AVweb flash Article A computer security company, TrendMicro, Thursday reported that it has found a particular family of malware gathering information "related to the civil aviation sector." [but doesn't mention how such a sector is targeted] The best defense against the Sykipot malware is to keep your computer systems updated with the most current security software. [Profoundly advises a company selling security software] Sykipot attacks normally arrive via email attachments that exploit applications like Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office but has evolved to use a target's operating system, web browsers and Java scripts. [Exploiting such innovative attack vectors...] http://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/news/Malware-Mining-Civil-Aviation-sykipot-… ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2013 05:17:12 -0700 From: Henry Baker <hbaker1(a)pipeline.com> Subject: E-ZPasses Get Read All Over New York, Not Just At Toll Booths (Kashmir Hill) Of course, with license plate readers everywhere, this is now old news... http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/09/12/e-zpasses-get-read-all-o… Kashmir Hill, *Forbes*, 12 Sep 2013 (PGN-ed) After spotting a police car with two huge boxes on its trunk -- that turned out to be license-plate-reading cameras -- a man in New Jersey became obsessed with the loss of privacy for vehicles on American roads. (He's not the only one.) The man, who goes by the Internet handle Puking Monkey, did an analysis of the many ways his car could be tracked and stumbled upon something rather interesting: his E-ZPass, which he obtained for the purpose of paying tolls, was being used to track his car in unexpected places, far away from any toll booths. Puking Monkey is an electronics tinkerer, so he hacked his RFID-enabled E-ZPass to set off a light and a `moo cow' every time it was being read. Then he drove around New York. His tag got milked multiple times on the short drive from Times Square to Madison Square Garden in mid-town Manhattan, and also on his way out of New York through Lincoln Tunnel, again in a place with no toll plaza. At Defcon, where he presented his findings, Puking Monkey said he found the reading of the E-ZPass outside of where he thought it would be read when he put it in his car ``intrusive and unsettling,'' quoting from Sen. Chuck Schumer's remarks about retailers tracking people who come into their stores using their cell phones. [...] [Also noted by Monty Solomon. PGN] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 10:59:35 -0700 From: Gene Wirchenko <genew(a)telus.net> Subject: "Adobe issues critical security updates for Flash Player, Reader and Shockwave Player" (Lucian Constantin) Does it seem to you that it has been a bad time lately for patches? Lucian Constantin, InfoWorld, 11 Sep 2013 The new updates address vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to compromise computers http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/adobe-issues-critical-security-updates-… ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 10:54:23 -0700 From: Gene Wirchenko <genew(a)telus.net> Subject: "Microsoft pulls botched KB 2871630, while many Office patch problems remain" (Woody Leonhard) Woody Leonhard, *InfoWorld*, 12 Sep 2013 Pulling the KB 2871630 patch took Microsoft more than 14 hours after the first warnings appeared, and admins are furious. What's Microsoft doing wrong? http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/microsoft-pulls-botched-kb-287… [Gene previously had noted an earlier article: It must be Wretched Wednesday -- the day after Black Tuesday. Watch out for automatic patches KB 2817630, KB 2810009, KB 2760411, KB 2760588, and KB 2760583. PGN-ed] http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/microsoft-botches-still-more-p… ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:23:13 +1000 From: Karl Goetz <karl(a)kgoetz.id.au> Subject: Sharing due to phone failure My partner's phone developed problems in the last few weeks and was finally taken in for repair this week. I will brush over the risks associated with over dependence on mobile devices (we have no fixed voice line so depend on our mobiles heavily) to consider what I found the most interesting bit of the experience. The loaner phone she was given still had the last users messages on it! I can see three places someone should have checked for data that shouldn't be shared: - when the previous user was done with the phone - when the shop received the phone back - before the phone was given out again An interesting vector for data leakage. ------------------------------ Date: September 23, 2013 9:43:56 AM EDT From: John Bosley <jandpbosley(a)verizon.net> Subject: HuffPost Essay by Charles Perrow on Fukushima (via Dave Farber) Dr. Perrow has a long history of studying how safe systems seem to go wrong. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-perrow/fukushima-forever_b_3941589.ht… ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 11:37:07 PDT From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann(a)csl.sri.com> Subject: BOOK: Rebecca Slayton, Arguments that Count Rebecca Slayton Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 MIT Press, 2013 xi + 325 (including 76 pages of end notes and a 21-page index) Here is a remarkably well researched and comprehensive book that is totally within the mainstream of RISKS. The MIT Press release includes this text: She compares how two different professional communities -- physicists and computer scientist -- constructed arguments about the risks of missile defense, and how these changed over time. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 Oct 2012 20:20:16 -0900 From: RISKS-request(a)csl.sri.com Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks) The ACM RISKS Forum is a MODERATED digest. Its Usenet manifestation is comp.risks, the feed for which is donated by panix.com as of June 2011. => SUBSCRIPTIONS: PLEASE read RISKS as a newsgroup (comp.risks or equivalent) if possible and convenient for you. 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Each issue of RISKS that you receive contains information on how to post, unsubscribe, etc. => The complete INFO file (submissions, default disclaimers, archive sites, copyright policy, etc.) is online. <http://www.CSL.sri.com/risksinfo.html> *** Contributors are assumed to have read the full info file for guidelines. => .UK users may contact <Lindsay.Marshall(a)newcastle.ac.uk>. => SPAM challenge-responses will not be honored. 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Lindsay has also added to the Newcastle catless site a palmtop version of the most recent RISKS issue and a WAP version that works for many but not all telephones: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/w/r <http://the.wiretapped.net/security/info/textfiles/risks-digest/> . ==> PGN's comprehensive historical Illustrative Risks summary of one liners: <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.html> for browsing, <http://www.csl.sri.com/illustrative.pdf> or .ps for printing is no longer maintained up-to-date except for recent election problems. *** NOTE: If a cited URL fails, we do not try to update them. Try browsing on the keywords in the subject line or cited article leads. ==> Special Offer to Join ACM for readers of the ACM RISKS Forum: <http://www.acm.org/joinacm1> ------------------------------ End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 27.48 ************************

1 0

feedback (update), was [8]
by brian carroll 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

error-corrected text (re:ly), edited for privacy/formatting https://www.dropbox.com/s/rutqiplhjcrsz0g/feedback8.pdf source code diagram, context of cryptologica https://www.dropbox.com/s/rno21ddinxv0gpo/flatland-framework1v27.svg {note}: begins @ arrow: (x,y) browser scroll of (80,-55)% ⚑ ⚑

1 0

Popular Deification of Transmission- and Crypto-Security
by John Young 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

NSA Technical Journal published in October 1959 an article titled "The Borders of Cryptology." http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/tech_journals/borders_cryptology.pdf A chart shows three main topics with subdivisions of each: Electronic Warfare Cryptology SIGINT http://cryptome.org/cryptology-borders.jpg Among 16 subdivisions only two are popularly deified today and whose all-too-human and vain weaknesses and vulnerabilities are hotly discussed here and elsewhere: Transmission Security Crypto-Security Knowledge of the other 14 could prove useful to compensate for the faults of the twin deities, now revealed to be not so hot conjoined. And perhaps overcome the icey ignorance of other less glorified means and methods used to profanely prop-up the pedestals.

1 0

[tt] NS 2935: Forget premiums: A peer-to-peer network will cover you
by Eugen Leitl 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

----- Forwarded message from Frank Forman <checker(a)panix.com> ----- Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:54:58 +0000 (GMT) From: Frank Forman <checker(a)panix.com> To: Transhuman Tech <tt(a)postbiota.org> Subject: [tt] NS 2935: Forget premiums: A peer-to-peer network will cover you NS 2935: Forget premiums: A peer-to-peer network will cover you http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929354.300-forget-premiums-a-peerto… * 22 September 2013 by Hal Hodson People can now insure one another in peer-to-peer networks and do away with big insurance companies and premiums INSURANCE is an unfortunate fact of life. We pay large premiums to cover ourselves for bad events that often never happen. But there is another way. An online insurance firm called Peercover lets groups of people insure each other on their own terms and at a fraction of the cost. Insurance is the latest financial service to get a shake-up from peer-to-peer (P2P) dynamics. Already, individuals can lend money for a return with interest. Similarly, people wanting to exchange currency can avoid banks and instead use P2P services to find other people looking to make the opposite trade. "The changes in financial services that are happening now are happening more quickly and dramatically than anything we've seen over the last 100 years," says Ron Suber of peer-to-peer loan company Prosper. "Peercover is a great example." P2P insurance is simpler and cheaper than mainstream methods. "People are paying profit and overhead to insurance firms when they pay premiums," says Peercover co-founder Jared Mimms. Peercover groups don't collect premiums. Instead, every individual in the group has a stake - each is both insurer and insuree. The group's founder sets the initial conditions for that group, including what can be insured and the maximum value of an item. The payout for a claim is split between all members but is only made when the majority of the group approve the claim. The amount you pay out is directly proportional to the value of the goods you have insured, as calculated by Peercover's algorithms. Someone insuring a $400 cellphone will pay a larger proportion of a member's claim than someone who is insuring a $100 cellphone, for example. Members who fail to pay are ejected from the group and are no longer covered. The reason all this is possible is, as with other P2P services, because of the rise of new ways to pay online. "The kind of insurance we're interested in wasn't possible a few years ago," says Mimms. "It only became possible because of micropayments." Behind micropayments are breakthroughs such as the virtual currency Bitcoin and the payment network Ripple, which Peercover uses. Both charge an extremely small fee for processing a transaction compared with traditional models such as credit card companies, making payments as low as 20 cents feasible. Initially, Peercover's focus is on building groups to cover small things like cellphones, and what Mimms calls positive insurance. This is where a group pays out when a member reaches an agreed goal, such as giving up smoking. But he has grander visions too, such as health insurance, where large groups of Peercover users could negotiate preferential rates for treatment. "The technology allows for the potential of collective bargaining in the negotiation of healthcare costs in which groups may band together to practise some of the bargaining techniques used by governments and traditional insurance behemoths," Mimms says. Ellen Carney, an insurance industry analyst with research firm Forrester, says Peercover points towards the future of insurance. "It's very clever. This model is at the historical roots of so many insurance companies." She backs the idea that Peercover has the potential to change how health insurance works in the US, although there are obvious regulatory hurdles. "Health insurance in the US has a lot of problems. You could see that this would be an interesting alternative." Richard Carter, CEO of financial software developer Nostrum Group, says that data from sources such as social networks will play a role in a peer-to-peer world. This won't just be in the form of finding friends to go in with on coverage, but to judge unknown group applicants too. "Consumers need to learn that everything they put into the public domain is going to be used to judge them in future, whether they like it or not," Carter says. _______________________________________________ tt mailing list tt(a)postbiota.org http://postbiota.org/mailman/listinfo/tt ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5

2 1

How a Crypto ‘Backdoor’ Pitted the Tech World Against the NSA
by Eugen Leitl 24 Sep '13

24 Sep '13

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/nsa-backdoor/all/ How a Crypto ‘Backdoor’ Pitted the Tech World Against the NSA BY KIM ZETTER09.24.136:30 AM Illustration: alengo/Getty Images In August 2007, a young programmer in Microsoft’s Windows security group stood up to give a five-minute turbo talk at the annual Crypto conference in Santa Barbara. It was a Tuesday evening, part of the conference’s traditional rump session, when a hodge-podge of short talks are presented outside of the conference’s main lineup. To draw attendees away from the wine and beer that competed for their attention at that hour, presenters sometimes tried to sex up their talks with provocative titles like “Does Bob Go to Prison?” or “How to Steal Cars – A Practical Attack on KeeLoq” or “The Only Rump Session Talk With Pamela Anderson.” Dan Shumow and his Microsoft colleague Niels Ferguson titled theirs, provocatively, “On the Possibility of a Back Door in the NIST SP800-90 Dual Ec Prng.” It was a title only a crypto geek would love or get. The talk was only nine slides long (.pdf). But those nine slides were potentially dynamite. They laid out a case showing that a new encryption standard, given a stamp of approval by the U.S. government, possessed a glaring weakness that made an algorithm in it susceptible to cracking. But the weakness they described wasn’t just an average vulnerability, it had the kind of properties one would want if one were intentionally inserting a backdoor to make the algorithm susceptible to cracking by design. For such a dramatic presentation — by mathematicians’ standards — the reaction to it was surprisingly muted. “I think folks thought, ‘Well that’s interesting,’ and, ‘Wow, it looks like maybe there was a flaw in the design,’” says a senior Microsoft manager who was at the talk. “But there wasn’t a huge reaction.” Six years later, that’s all changed. Early this month the New York Times drew a connection between their talk and memos leaked by Edward Snowden, classified Top Secret, that apparently confirms that the weakness in the standard and so-called Dual_EC_DRBG algorithm was indeed a backdoor. The Times story implies that the backdoor was intentionally put there by the NSA as part of a $250-million, decade-long covert operation by the agency to weaken and undermine the integrity of a number of encryption systems used by millions of people around the world. The Times story has kindled a firestorm over the integrity of the byzantine process that produces security standards. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which approved Dual_EC_DRBG and the standard, is now facing a crisis of confidence, having been forced to re-open the standard for public discussion, while security and crypto firms scramble to unravel how deeply the suspect algorithm infiltrated their code, if at all. On Thursday, corporate giant RSA Security publicly renounced Dual_EC_DRBG, while also conceding that its commercial suite of cryptographic libraries had been using the bad algorithm as its default algorithm for years. But beneath the flames, a surprising uncertainty is still smoldering over whether Dual_EC_DRBG really is backdoored. The Times, crypto experts note, hasn’t released the memos that purport to prove the existence of a backdoor, and the paper’s direct quotes from the classified documents don’t mention any backdoor in the algorithm or efforts by the NSA to weaken it or the standard. They only discuss efforts to push the standard through committees for approval. Jon Callas, the CTO of Silent Circle, whose company offers encrypted phone communication, delivered a different rump session talk at the Crypto conference in 2007 and saw the presentation by Shumow. He says he wasn’t alarmed by it at the time and still has doubts that what was exposed was actually a backdoor, in part because the algorithm is so badly done. “If [NSA] spent $250 million weakening the standard and this is the best that they could do, then we have nothing to fear from them,” he says. “Because this was really ham-fisted. When you put on your conspiratorial hat about what the NSA would be doing, you would expect something more devious, Machiavellian … and this thing is just laughably bad. This is Boris and Natasha sort of stuff.” Indeed, the Microsoft presenters themselves — who declined to comment for this article — didn’t press the backdoor theory in their talk. They didn’t mention NSA at all, and went out of their way to avoid accusing NIST of anything. “WE ARE NOT SAYING: NIST intentionally put a back door in this PRNG,” read the last slide of their deck. The Microsoft manager who spoke with WIRED on condition of anonymity thinks the provocative title of the 2007 presentation overstates the issue with the algorithm and is being misinterpreted — that perhaps reporters at the Times read something in a classified document showing that the NSA worked on the algorithm and pushed it through the standards process, and quickly took it as proof that the title of the 2007 talk had been right to call the weakness in the standard and algorithm a backdoor. But Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research, says that regardless of the lack of evidence in the Times story, he discounts the “bad cryptography” explanation for the weakness, in favor of the backdoor one. “Bad cryptography happens through laziness and ignorance,” he says. “But in this case, a great deal of effort went into creating this and choosing a structure that happens to be amenable to attack. “What’s mathematically creative [with this algorithm] is that when you look at it, you can’t even prove whether there is a backdoor or not, which is very bizarre in cryptography,” he says. “Usually the presence of a backdoor is something you can prove is there, because you can see it and exploit it…. In my entire career in cryptography, I’ve never seen a vulnerability like this.” National Security Agency headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo: Wikipedia It’s not the first time the NSA has been accused of installing backdoors. Crypto trapdoors, real and imagined, have been part of NSA lore for decades. In some ways the current controversy echoes the long-ago debate over the first U.S. Data Encryption Standard in the 1970s. The NSA was widely suspected of weakening DES to make it more crackable by the agency by tinkering with a table of numeric constants called an S-Box and shortening the algorithm’s key length. In 1994, though, the NSA was exonerated when it turned out that the agency had actually changed the S-Box numbers to harden DES against a code-breaking technique that had been known only within NSA at the time. In 1995, another case came up that seemed to confirm suspicions about the NSA. The Baltimore Sun reported that year that the NSA had inserted a backdoor into cryptographic machines made by the respected Swiss company Crypto AG, apparently substantiating longstanding rumors to that effect. Then in 1999, Microsoft inadvertently kicked off another controversy when it leaked its internal name for a cryptographic signing key built into Windows NT. The key was called _NSAKEY, spawning speculation that Microsoft had secretly given the agency the power to write and sign its own updates to Windows NT’s crypto engine. Microsoft said this was incorrect, that the key was an internal Microsoft key only and that it was called “_NSAKEY” because the NSA was the technical reviewing authority for U.S. export controls. The key was part of Microsoft’s compliance with U.S. export laws. Suspicions about the NSA and backdoors were lingering in 2006 when Shumow and Ferguson began looking at Dual_EC_DRBG after NIST approved it for inclusion in a standard (.pdf). The standard discussed four federally sanctioned random number generators approved for use in encrypting government classified and unclassified-but-sensitive communication. Each of the four algorithms was based on a different cryptographic design family. One was based on hash functions, one on so-called HMAC (hash-based message authentication code), one on block ciphers and the fourth one was based on elliptic curves. The NSA had been pushing elliptic curve cryptography for a number of years, and it publicly championed the last one — Dual_EC_DRBG — to be included in the standard. Elliptic curve algorithms are based on slightly different mathematics than the more common RSA algorithm, and the NSA believes they’re the future of cryptography, asserting that elliptic curve algorithms are smaller, faster and offer better security. But as Shumow and Ferguson examined the properties of the elliptic curve random number generator in the standard, to determine how to incorporate it into the Windows operating system, a couple of strange things stood out. First, the random number generator was very slow – two to three orders of magnitude slower than another algorithm in the standard. Second, it didn’t seem to be very secure. “There was a property [in it] that seemed to make the prediction-resistance of the algorithm not what you would necessarily want it to be,” the Microsoft manager says. In non-geek speak, there was a weakness that made the random number generator not so random. Good random number generation is at the core of encryption, and a weak RNG can undo the entire encryption system. Random number generators play a role in creating cryptographic keys, in opening secure communications between users and web sites and in resetting passwords for email accounts. Without assured randomness, an attacker can predict what the system will generate and undermine the algorithm. Shumow and Ferguson found that the obstacles to predicting what the random number generator would generate was low. It wasn’t a catastrophic problem, but it seemed strange for a security system being promulgated by the government. Then they noticed something else. The standard for implementing the algorithm included a list of constants – static numbers – that were used in the elliptic curve on which the random number generator was based. Whoever generated the constants, which served as a kind of public key for the algorithm, could have generated a second set of numbers at the same time – a private key. Anyone possessing that second set of numbers would have what’s known in the cryptography community as “trapdoor information” – that is, they would be able to essentially unlock the encryption algorithm by predicting what the random number generator generated. And, Shumow and Ferguson realized, they could predict this after seeing as few as 32 bytes of output from the generator. With a very small sample, they could crack the entire encryption system used to secure the output. “Even if no one knows the secret numbers, the fact that the backdoor is present makes Dual_EC_DRBG very fragile,” cryptographer Bruce Schneier wrote at the time, in a piece for WIRED. “If someone were to solve just one instance of the algorithm’s elliptic-curve problem, he would effectively have the keys to the kingdom. He could then use it for whatever nefarious purpose he wanted. Or he could publish his result, and render every implementation of the random-number generator completely insecure.” No one knew who had produced the constants, but it was assumed that because the NSA had pushed the algorithm into the standard, the agency had generated the numbers. The spy agency might also, then, have generated a secret key. Schneier called it “scary stuff indeed,” but he also said at the time that it made no sense as a backdoor, since it was so obvious to anyone who looked at the algorithm and standard that there was this flaw in it. As a result, developers of web sites and software applications wouldn’t use it to help secure their products and systems, he said. But in fact, many developers did use it. The U.S. government has enormous purchasing power, and vendors soon were forced to implement the suspect standard as a condition of selling their products to federal agencies under so-called FIPS certification requirements. Microsoft added support for the standard, including the elliptic curve random-number generator, in a Vista update in February 2008, though it did not make the problematic generator the default algorithm. Asked why Microsoft supported the algorithm when two of its own employees had shown it to be weakened, a second Microsoft senior manager who spoke with WIRED said that while the weakness in the algorithm and standard was “weird” it “wasn’t a smoking gun.” It was more of an “odd property.” Microsoft decided to include the algorithm in its operating system because a major customer was asking for it, because it had been sanctioned by NIST, and because it wasn’t going to be enabled as the default algorithm in the system, thus having no impact on other customers. “In fact it is nearly impossible for any user to implement or to get this particular random number generator instantiating on their machines without going into the guts of the machine and reconfiguring it,” he says. Other major companies, like Cisco and RSA, added it as well. NIST in fact provides a lengthy list of companies that have included it in their libraries, though the list doesn’t say which companies made it the default algorithm in their library or which products have been developed that invoke the algorithm. A Cisco spokesman told WIRED that the algorithm was implemented in its standard crypto library around mid-2012, a library that is used in more than 120 product lines, but the algorithm is not the default, and the default algorithm cannot be changed by users. The company is currently completing an internal audit of all of its products that leverage the NIST standard. RSA, however, made the algorithm the default in its BShare toolkit for Java and C developers until this week when it told WIRED that it was changing the default following the renewed controversy over it. The company sent an advisory to developer customers “strongly” urging them to change the default to one of a number of other random number generator algorithms RSA supports. RSA also changed the default on its own end in BSafe and in an RSA key management system. The company is currently doing an internal review of all of its products to see where the algorithm gets invoked in order to change those. RSA actually added the algorithm to its libraries in 2004 or 2005, before NIST approved it for the standard in 2006 and before the government made it a requirement for FIPS certification, says Sam Curry, the company’s chief technology officer. The company then made it the default algorithm in BSafe and in its key management system after the algorithm was added to the standard. Curry said that elliptic curve algorithms were all the rage at the time and RSA chose it as the default because it provided certain advantages over the other random number generators, including what he says was better security. “Cryptography is a changing field. Some algorithms go up and some come down and we make the best decisions we can in any point in time,” he says.”A lot of the hash-based algorithms were getting struck down by some weaknesses in how they chose numbers and in fact what kind of sample set they chose for initial seeding. From our perspective it looked like elliptic curve would be immune to those things.” Curry says the fact that the algorithm is slower actually provides it with better security in at least one respect. “The length of time that you have to gather samples will determine the strength of your random number generation. So the fact that it’s slower sometimes gives it a wider sample set to do initial seeding,” he says. “Precisely because it takes a little longer, it actually winds up giving you more randomness in your initial seeding, and that can be an advantage.” Despite the renewed controversy over the algorithm and standard, Microsoft managers say they still don’t think the weaknesses constitute an intentional backdoor. Callas agrees. He thinks it is simply bad cryptography that was included in the standard to round-out the selection so that there would be at least one elliptic curve algorithm in the standard. But one advantage to having the algorithm supported in products like Vista — and which may be the reason the NSA pushed it into the standard — is that even if it’s not the default algorithm for encryption on a system, as long as it’s an option on the system, an intruder, like the NSA, can get into the system and change the registry to make it the default algorithm used for encryption, thereby theoretically making it easy for the NSA to undermine the encryption and spy on users of the machine. Schneier says this is a much more efficient and stealth way of undermining the encryption than simply installing a keystroke logger or other Trojan malware that could be detected. “A Trojan is really, really big. You can’t say that was a mistake. It’s a massive piece of code collecting keystrokes,” he said. “But changing a bit-one to a bit-two [in the registry to change the default random number generator on the machine] is probably going to be undetected. It is a low conspiracy, highly deniable way of getting a backdoor. So there’s a benefit to getting it into the library and into the product.” To date, the only confirmation that the algorithm has a backdoor comes in the Times story, based on NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden, which the Times and two other media outlets saw. “[I]nternal memos leaked by a former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, suggest that the NSA generated one of the random number generators used in a 2006 NIST standard — called the Dual EC DRBG standard — which contains a back door for the NSA,” the Times wrote. An editorial published by the Times this weekend re-asserted the claim: “Unbeknown to the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a ‘back door’ into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its technology.” But all of the quotes that the Times published from the memos refer to the NSA getting the standard passed by an international standards body; they do not say the NSA intentionally weakened the algorithm and standard, though the Times implies that this is what the memos mean by tying them to the 2007 presentation by Shumow and Ferguson. NIST has denied any knowledge of a backdoor and has also denied that the NSA authored its standard. The institute has, however, re-opened the standard for public comment as a result of the controversy and “strongly” urged against using the algorithm in question until the matter could be resolved. The public comments period will close Nov. 6. Even without more explicit confirmation that the weaknesses in the algorithm and standard constitute a backdoor, Kocher and Schneier believe they do. “It is extraordinarily bad cryptography,” says Kocher. “If you look at the NSA’s role in creating standards [over the years] and its general cryptographic sophistication, none of it makes sense if there isn’t a backdoor in this.” Schneier agrees and says the NSA has done too many other things for him to think, when he sees government-mandated crypto that’s weak, that it’s just by accident. “If we were living in a kinder world, that would be a plausible explanation,” he says. “But we’re living in a very malicious world, it turns out.” He adds that the uncertainty around the algorithm and standard is the worst part of the whole matter. “This is the worst problem that the NSA has done,” Schneier says. “They have so undermined the fundamental trust in the internet, that we don’t know what to trust. We have to suspect everything. We’re never sure. That’s the greatest damage.”

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