Category Archives: news comment

lock-down or personal control?

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A little piece of news (h/t Jonathan Zittrain) caught my eye:

The gist is that Cisco have been upgrading the firmware in Linksys routers so that they can be managed remotely (under the user’s control, normally) from Cisco’s cloud.  The impact of this is hotly debated, and I think Cisco disputes the conclusions reached by the journalists at Extreme Tech.  Certainly there’s a diffusion of control, a likelihood of future automatic updates, and various content restrictions (against, for example, using the service – whatever that entails – for “obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes”, things which are generally lawful), and a general diminution of privacy.

Some commentators have reacted by suggesting buying different products (fair enough, depending on where the market leads), ‘downgrading’ to older firmware (not a long-term solution, given the onward march of vulnerability discovery),  or flashing one’s own firmware from some open source router development project (this is a surprisingly fertile area).  To someone interested in trusted computing and secure boot, the latter is quite interesting – you can do it now, but can/should you be able to in the future?

One of the central themes of some of the stuff around secure boot is that we want cryptographically-strong ways to choose which software is and is not booted, and leave this choice well away from the users, because they can’t be trusted to make the right decision.  That’s not some patronizing comment about the uneducated or unaware – I’d apply it to myself.  (I speak as someone who hasn’t knowingly encountered a Windows virus/trojan/work in decades despite using Windows daily: I think my online behaviour is fairly safe, but I am under no illusions about how easy it would be to become a victim.)  Whilst there are good reasons to want to retain a general power to program something like a PC to do whatsoever I wish, I can imagine that the majority of internet-connected devices in the future will be really quite tightly locked-down.  And this, in general, seems a good thing. I don’t demand to be able to re-program my washing machine, and I shouldn’t be able to demand to re-program my digital photo frame, or even my TV set-top box.

However, whereas my washing machine has no immediate prospect of connection to the internet (though the smart grid could change all that), many other devices are connected – and their mis-design will compromise my privacy or my data’s integrity, or worse.  And, indeed, involuntary remote updates could break them or reduce their functionality (a mess that already exists, and is really not well-addressed by consumer protection legislation).  I might have a reasonably secure household of internet junk until some over-eager product manager decides to improve one of my devices overnight one day. I could wake to find that my household had seized up and all my privacy gone, if the attacker followed the locus of the product updates.  This really isn’t particularly far-fetched.

So, I am faced with a tension.  A paradox, almost.  I am not well-placed to make security decisions by myself; none of us is, especially when we don’t even realise the decisions we are making are security-related.  But in this complex advertising-driven world, those to whom I am likely to delegate (perhaps involuntarily) such decisions are (a) themselves imperfect, and much more worryingly (b) highly motivated to monetize my relationship with them in every way possible.  Goodbye privacy.

The market might help to remedy the worst excesses in these relationships,  but when its dominated by large vendors suing each other over imagined patent infringements, I’m not optimistic about it resolving this tension in a timely manner.

Regulation could be a solution, but is seldom timely and often regulates the wrong thing (as the current mess of cookie regulation in the EU amply demonstrates).

Perhaps there is a role for third-party, not-for-profit agencies which help to regulate the deployment of security and privacy-related technologies – receiving delegated control of a variety of authorization decisions, for example, to save you from wondering if you want App X to be allowed to do Y.  They could in principle represent consumer power and hold the ring against both the vendors who want to make the user into the product and the attackers whose motives are simpler.  But will we build technologies in such a way as to permit the rise of such agencies?  It will take a concerted effort, I think.

Any other ideas?

Guess again

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Over in a fenland blog, there is a little discussion going on about passwords.  Evidently, Google has been doing some advertising about what makes a good password, and this has come in for some criticism.

In that blog post, Joseph Bonneau proposes an alternative one-liner:

A really strong password is one that nobody else has ever used.

(One of the commentors (J. Carlio) suggests modifications to add something about memorability. )

This is a seductive idea: it is, broadly, true.  It encapsulates the idea that you are trying to defeat brute force attacks, and that these generally succeed by attempting plausible passwords.

But I don’t think it’s good advice.    That is mainly because many people are poor with estimates that surround very large numbers: whether the likelihood of my password being used by someone else is one in a thousand, one in a million, one in a trillion (the word of the week, thanks to national debts) is something that, I would say, few people have a good intuition about.  In just the same way, people are poor at risk assessment for unlikely events.

Continue reading →

secure boot gone viral

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After the spread of some information, and some mis-information, the story of secure boot in Windows 8, achieved through security features of UFEI has gone viral.  Linux forums all over the web are suddenly full of activists angry about some evil corporation wanting to deprive them of free software.  The aforementioned company has issued a long blog post by way of clarification.

The issue

In brief, the point is that there are plans to replace the BIOS – the main body of firmware which sets up a PC to be ready to run an operating system.  A key task of the BIOS in most systems is to start the boot loader program (or ‘pre-OS environment’), which in turn loads the operating system and gets it running.  This process is prone to attack: if someone can run an alternative boot loader (or reconfigure it, or launch a different operating system), they can either steal all the data on your disk, or they can launch something which looks just like your operating system, but is subverted to send copies of all your secrets – such as everything you type – to the bad guys. Continue reading →

seeking evidence

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Conventional wisdom says:

  1. Security through obscurity doesn’t work.  You may hide your needle in a haystack, but it’s likely to come back and stick into you (or someone who will sue you) when you least want it to.  Much better to lock your needle in a safe.
  2. You shouldn’t roll your own controls: whether crypto, or software, or architectures, or procedures.  The wisdom of the crowd is great, and the vendor can afford better security expertise than your own project can, because the vendor can amortise the cost over a much broader base than you can ever manage.

And yet, when I want to protect an asset against a fairly run-of-the-mill set of threats, it’s very far from clear to me whether that asset will  be safer if I protect it with COTS products or if I build my own, perhaps quirky and not necessarily wonderful, product.

cloud failure modalities

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There’s a tale of woe getting some airtime on the interwebs from an angst-ridden New York undergraduate (reading between the lines) who has somehow had an entire, quite substantial, google account deleted. The post’s contention is (or includes) the idea that deleting such a profile is tantamount to deleting one’s life, I think. The facts of the case are murky – I’d link to some Google+ discussions, but I can’t find a way to do that – but regardless of this particular young person’s predicament, the story highlights some bigger questions about trusting cloud services. Continue reading →

Outsourcing undermined

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In the current headlong rush towards cloud services – outsourcing, in other words – leads to increasingly complex questions about what the service provider is doing with your data.  In classical outsourcing, you’d usually be able to drive to the provider’s data centre, and touch the disks and tapes holding your precious bytes (if you paid enough, anyway).  In a service-oriented world with global IT firms using data centres which follow the cheapest electricity, sometimes maybe themselves buying services from third parties, that becomes a more difficult task.

A while ago, I was at a meeting where someone posed the question “What happens when the EU’s Safe Harbour Provisions meet the Patriot Act?”.  The former is the loophole by which personal data (which normally cannot leave the EU) is allowed to be exported to data processors in third countries, provided they demonstrably meet standards equivalent to those imposed on data processors within the EU.  The latter is a far-reaching piece of legislation allowing US law enforcement agencies powers of interception and seizure of data.  The consensus at the meeting was that, of course the Patriot Act would win: the conclusion that Safe Harbour is of limited value.  Incidentally, this neatly illustrates the way that information assurance is about far more than just some crypto (or even cloud) technology.

Today, ZDNet reports that the data doesn’t even have to leave the EU for it to be within the reach of the Patriot Act:  Microsoft launched their ‘Office 365′ product, and admitted in answer to a question that data belonging to (relating to) someone in the EU, residing on Microsoft’s servers within the EU, would be surrendered by Microsoft – a US company – to US law enforcement upon a Patriot Act-compliant request.  Surely, then, any multinational (at least, those with offices? headquarters? in the US) is in the same position.  Where the subject of such a request includes personal information,  that faces them with a potential tension: they either break US law or they break EU law.  I suppose they just have to ask themselves which carries the stiffer penalties.

Now, is this a real problem or just a theoretical one? Is it a general problem with trusting the cloud, or a special case that need not delay us too long?   On one level, it’s a fairly unique degree of legal conflict, from two pieces of legislation that were rather deliberately made to be high minded and far reaching in their own domains.  But, in general, cloud-type activity is bound to raise jurisdictional conflicts: the data owner, the data processor, and the cloud service provider(s) may all be in different, or multiple, countries, and any particular legal remedy will be pursued in whichever country gives the best chance of success.

Can technology help with this?  Not as much as we might wish, I think.  The best we can hope for, I think, is an elaborate overlay of policy information and metadata so that the data owner can make rational risk-based decisions.  But that’s a big, big piece of standards work, and making it comprehensible and usable will be challenging. And, it looks like there could be at least a niche market for service providers who make a virtue of not being present in multiple jurisdictions.  In terms of trusted computing, and deciding whether the service metadata is accurate, perhaps we will need a new root of trust for location…

RSA gets a Chief Security Officer

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Just an interesting snippet from The Register (emphasis mine):

RSA has appointed its first chief security officer, three months after a data theft on its network contributed to the hack of the world’s biggest defense contractor, and possibly other important customers.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/10/rsa_chief_security_officer/

I’ve been telling people for ages that having a CISO is normal good practice these days.  Evidently nobody told the security industry.