All posts by Ross Anderson

Manifestos and tech

Authentication, Cybercrime, Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Security economics

The papers went to town yesterday on the Conservative manifesto but missed some interesting bits.

First, no-one seems to have noticed that the smart meter programme is being quietly put to death. We read on page 60 that everyone will be offered a smart meter by 2020. So a mandatory national programme has become voluntary, just like that. Regular readers of this blog will recall that the programme was sold in 2008 by Ed Milliband using a dishonest impact assessment, yet all the parties backed it after 2010, leaving no-one to point out that it was going to cost us all a fortune and never save any carbon. May says she wants to reduce energy costs; this was surely a no-brainer.

That was the good news for England. The good news for friends in rural Scotland is high-speed broadband for all by 2020. But there are some rather weird things in there too.

What on earth is “the right of businesses to insist on a digital signature”? Digital signatures are very 1998, and we already have the electronic signature directive. From whom will businesses be able to insist on a signature, and if I’m one of the legislated victims, how much do I have to pay to buy the apparatus?

All digital businesses will have “to support new digital proofs of identification”. That presumably means forcing firms to use Verify, a dysfunctional online authentication service whose roots lie in Blair’s obsession with identity. If a newspaper currently identifies its subscribers via a proprietary logon, will they have to offer Verify as an option? Will it have to be the only option, displacing Facebook and Twitter? The manifesto also says that local government will have to use Verify; and elsewhere that councils must publish planning applications and bus routes “without the hassle and delay that currently exists.” OK, so some councils could so with more competent webmasters, but don’t worry: “hundreds of leaders from the world of tech can come into government to help deliver better public services.”

The Land Registry, the Ordnance Survey and other quangos that do geography (our leader’s degree subject) will all band together to create the largest open repository of land data in the world. So where will the Ordnance Survey get its money from then? That small question killed the same idea in 2010 after Tim Berners-Lee sold it to Cameron.

There will be a levy on social media companies, like on gambling companies, to support awareness and preventive activity. And they must not direct users, even unintentionally, to hate speech. So will Facebook be fined whenever they let users like a xenophobic article in the Daily Mail?

No doubt in view of the delicacy of such regulatory decisions, Leveson II is killed; there will be a Data Use and Ethics Commission instead. It will advise regulators and develop the principles and rules that will give people confidence their data are being handled properly. Wow. We now have the Charter of Fundamental Rights to give us principles, the GDPR to give us rules, and the ECJ to hammer out the case law. Now the People don’t have confidence in such experts we’re going to let the Prime Minister of the day appoint a different lot.

The next government will further strengthen cyber security standards for government and public services, so presumably all such services will have to use expensive networks such as the NHS-wide network from BT which will expect them to manage their own firewalls without telling them how to.

But don’t worry. It will become “as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically”. There is text about working “with international law enforcement agencies to ensure perpetrators are brought to justice” but our local police force isn’t allowed to do anything effective about online accommodation fraud committed by a gang in Germany. They have to work through the NCA – who don’t care. The manifesto signals more of the same: the NCA will get to eat the SFO, which does crimes over £100m, leaving them even less interested in online crooks who steal a thousand pounds of deposit from dozens of students a year.

In fact there is no signal anywhere in the manifesto that May understands the impact of volume cybercrime, even though it’s now most of the property crime in the UK. She rather prefers to boast of the falling crime over the past seven years, as if it were her achievement as Home Secretary. The simple fact is that crime has been going online like everything else, and until 2015 the online part of it wasn’t recorded properly. This was not the doing of Theresa May, but of Margaret Hodge.

The manifesto rather seems to have been drafted in a geek-free room. And let’s not spoil the party by mentioning the impact that tight immigration targets will have on the IT industry, or for that matter on higher education. Perhaps they want us to hope that they don’t really mean that part of it, but perhaps we’d better make a plan to open a campus in India or Canada, just in case.

Bad malware, worse reporting

Cybercrime, Legal issues, News coverage, Security economics, Security psychology

The Wannacry malware that has infected some UK hospital computers should interest not just security researchers but also people interested in what drives fake news.

Some made errors of fact: the Daily Mail inititally reported the ransom demand as 300 bitcoin, or £415,000, rather than $300 in bitcoin. Others made errors of logic: the Indy, for example, reported that “Up to 90 percent of NHS computers still run XP, released in 2001”, citing as its source a BMJ article which stated that 90% of trusts run this version of Windows. And some made errors of concurrency. After dinner I found inquiries from journalists about my fight with the Prime Minister. My what? Eventually I found that the Guardian had followed something Mrs May’s spokesman had said (“not aware of any evidence that patient data has been compromised”) with something I’d said a couple of hours earlier (“The NHS are saying that patient privacy hasn’t been compromised, but if significant numbers of hospitals have been negligently running unpatched computers for two months after the patch came out, how do they know?”). The Home Secretary later helpfully glossed the PM’s stonewall as “No patient data has been accessed or transferred in any way” but leaving the get-out-of-jail card “that’s the information we’ve been given.”

Many papers caught the international political aspect: that the vulnerability was discovered by the NSA, kept secret rather than fixed (contrary to the advice of Obama’s NSA review group), then stolen from the CIA by the Russians and published via wikileaks. Scary stuff, eh? And we read of some surprising overreactions, such as the GP who switched off his networking as a precaution and found he couldn’t access any of his patients’ records.

As luck would have it, yesterday was the day that I gave my talk on entomology – the classification of software bugs and other security vulnerabilities – to my first-year security and software engineering class. So let’s try to look at it calmly as I’d expect of a student writing an assignment.

The first point is that there’s not a really lot of this malware. The NHS has over 200 hospitals, and the typical IT director is a senior clinician supported by technicians. Yet despite having their IT run by well-meaning amateurs, only 16 NHS organisations have been hit, according to the Register and Kaspersky – including several hospitals.

So the second point is that when the Indy says that “The NHS is a perfect combination of sensitive data and insecure storage. And there’s very little they can do about it” the answer is simple: in well over 90% of NHS organisations, the well-meaning amateurs managed perfectly well. What they did was to keep their systems patched up-to-date; simple hygiene, like washing your hands after going to the toilet.

The third takeaway is that it’s worth looking at the actual code. A UK researcher did so and discovered a kill switch.

Now I am just listening on the BBC morning news to a former deputy director of GCHQ who first cautions against alarmist headlines and argues that everyone develops malware; that a patch had been issued by Microsoft halfway through March; that you can deal with ransomware by keeping decent backups; and that paying ransom will embolden the bad guys. However he claims that it’s clearly an organised criminal attack. (when it could be one guy in his bedroom somewhere) and says that the NCSC should look at whether there is some countermeasure that everyone should have taken (for answer see above).

So our fourth takeaway is that although the details matter, so do the economics of security. When something unexpected happens, you should not just get your head down and look at the code, but look up and observe people’s agendas. Politicians duck and weave; NHS managers blame the system rather than step up to the plate; the NHS as a whole turns every incident into a plea for more money; the spooks want to avoid responsibility for the abuse of their stolen cyberweaponz, but still big up the threat and get more influence for a part of their agency that’s presented as solely defensive. And we academics? Hey, we just want the students to pay attention to what we’re teaching them.

Hope this helps!

Video on Edge

Banking security, Cybercrime, Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Security economics, Security engineering, Social networks

John Brockman of Edge interviewed me in London in March. The video of the interview, and a transcript, are now available on the Edge website. Edge runs big interviews with several dozen scientists a year, with particular interest in people who do cross-disciplinary work. For me, the interaction of economics, psychology and engineering is one of the things that makes security so fascinating, as well as the creativity driven by adversarial behaviour.

The topics covered include the last thirty years of progress (of lack of it) in information security, from the early beginnings, through the crypto wars and crime moving online, to the economics of security. We talked about how cryptography can help less developed countries; about managing complexity in big projects; about how network effects lead firms to design insecure products; about whether big data can undermine democracy by empowering elites; and about how in a future world of intelligent things, security may become more about safety than anything else. Finally I talk about our current big project, the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre.

John runs a literary agency, and he’s worked on books by many of the scientists who feature on his site. This makes me wonder: on what topic should I write my next book?

The University is Hiring

Cybercrime, Jobs, Security engineering, Security psychology, Web security

We’re looking for a Chief Information Security Officer. This isn’t a research post here at the lab, but across the yard in University Information Services, where they manage our networks and our administrative systems. There will be opportunities to work with security researchers like us, but the main task is protecting Cambridge from all sorts of online bad actors. If you would like to be in the thick of it, and you know what you’re doing, here’s how you can apply.

Banks biased against black fraud victims

Banking security, Legal issues, News coverage, Security economics

The following is an op-ed I wrote in today’s Times. It appeared in their Thunderer column.

You’re less likely to be treated fairly by your bank if you’re elderly, poor, female or black. We’ve suspected this for years, and finally The Times has dug up the numbers to prove it.

Fraud victims who’re refused compensation often contact our security research group at Cambridge after they find we work on payment fraud. We call this stream of complaints our ‘fraud telescope’ as it gives us early warning of what the bad guys are up to. We’ve had more than 2,000 cases over 25 years.

In recent years we’ve started to realise what we weren’t seeing. The “dark matter” in the fraud universe is the missing victims: we don’t see that many middle-class white men. The victims who do come to us are disproportionately elderly, poor, female, or black. But crime surveys tell us that the middle classes and the young are more likely to be victims of fraud, so it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that banks are less generous to some of their customers.

We raised the issue of discrimination in 2011 with one of the banks and with the Commission for Racial Equality, but as no-one was keeping records, nothing could be proved, until today.

How can this discrimination happen? Well, UK rules give banks a lot of discretion to decide whether to refund a victim, and the first responders often don’t know the full story. If your HSBC card was compromised by a skimmer on a Tesco ATM, there’s no guarantee that Tesco will have told anyone (unlike in America, where the law forces Tesco to tell you). And the fraud pattern might be something entirely new. So bank staff end up making judgement calls like “Is this customer telling the truth?” and “How much is their business worth to us?” This in turn sets the stage for biases and prejudices to kick in, however subconsciously. Add management pressure to cut costs, sometimes even bonuses for cutting them, and here we are.

There are two lessons. First, banks need to train staff to be aware of unconscious bias (as universities do), and monitor their performance.

Second, the Financial Conduct Authority needs to protect all customers properly. It seems to be moving in the right direction; after the recent fraud against tens of thousands of Tesco Bank account holders, it said it expected fraud victims to be made good immediately. This has been the law in the USA since the 1980s and it must become a firm rule here too.

Government U-turn on Health Privacy

Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology

Now that everyone’s distracted with the supreme court case on Brexit, you can expect the government to sneak out something it’s ashamed of. Health secretary Jeremy Hunt has decided to ignore the wishes of over a million people who opted out of having their hospital records given to third parties such as drug companies, and the ICO has decided to pretend that the anonymisation mechanisms he says he’ll use instead are sufficient. One gently smoking gun is the fifth bullet in a new webpage here, where the Department of Health claims that when it says the data are anonymous, your wishes will be ignored. The news has been broken in an article in the Health Services Journal (it’s behind a paywall, as a splendid example of transparency) with the Wellcome Trust praising the ICO’s decision not to take action against the Department. We are assured that “the data is seen as crucial for vital research projects”. The exchange of letters with privacy campaigners that led up to this decision can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

An early portent of this u-turn was reported here in 2014 when officials reckoned that the only way they could still do administrative tasks such as calculating doctors’ bonuses was to just pretend that the data are anonymous even though they know it isn’t really. Then, after the care.data scandal showed that a billion records had been sold to over a thousand purchasers, we reported here how HES data had also been sold and how the minister seemed to have misled parliament about this.

I will be talking about ethics of all this on Thursday. Even if ministers claim that stolen medical records are OK to use, researchers must not act as if this is true; if patients end up trusting doctors as little as we trust politicians, then medical research will be in serious trouble. There is a video of a previous version of this talk here.

Meanwhile, if you’re annoyed that Jeremy Hunt proposes to ignore not just your privacy rights but your express wishes, you can send him a notice under Section 10 of the Data Protection Act forbidding him from disclosing your data. The Department has complied with such notices in the past, albeit with bad grace as they have no automated way to do it. If thousands of people serve such notices, they may finally have to stand up to the drug company lobbyists and write the missing software. For more, see here.

DigiTally

Academic papers, Authentication, Banking security, News coverage, Open-source security, Protocols, Security engineering, Usability, Useful software

Last week I gave a keynote talk at CCS about DigiTally, a project we’ve been working on to extend mobile payments to areas where the network is intermittent, congested or non-existent.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation called for ways to increase the use of mobile payments, which have been transformative in many less developed countries. We did some research and found that network availability and cost were the two main problems. So how could we do phone payments where there’s no network, with a marginal cost of zero? If people had smartphones you could use some combination of NFC, bluetooth and local wifi, but most of the rural poor in Africa and Asia use simple phones without any extra communications modalities, other than those which the users themselves can provide. So how could you enable people to do phone payments by simple user actions? We were inspired by the prepayment electricity meters I helped develop some twenty years ago; meters conforming to this spec are now used in over 100 countries.

We got a small grant from the Gates Foundation to do a prototype and field trial. We designed a system, Digitally, where Alice can pay Bob by exchanging eight-digit MACs that are generated, and verified, by the SIM cards in their phones. For rapid prototyping we used overlay SIMs (which are already being used in a different phone payment system in Africa). The cryptography is described in a paper we gave at the Security Protocols Workshop this spring.

Last month we took the prototype to Strathmore University in Nairobi to do a field trial involving usability studies in their bookshop, coffee shop and cafeteria. The results were very encouraging and I described them in my talk at CCS (slides). There will be a paper on this study in due course. We’re now looking for partners to do deployment at scale, whether in phone payments or in other apps that need to support value transfer in delay-tolerant networks.

There has been press coverage in the New Scientist, Engadget and Impress (original Japanese version).

Security Economics MOOC

Cybercrime, Politics, Security economics, Security psychology

In two weeks’ time we’re starting an open course in security economics. I’m teaching this together with Rainer Boehme, Tyler Moore, Michel van Eeten, Carlos Ganan, Sophie van der Zee and David Modic.

Over the past fifteen years, we’ve come to realise that many information security failures arise from poor incentives. If Alice guards a system while Bob pays the cost of failure, things can be expected to go wrong. Security economics is now an important research topic: you can’t design secure systems involving multiple principals if you can’t get the incentives right. And it goes way beyond computer science. Without understanding how incentives play out, you can’t expect to make decent policy on cybercrime, on consumer protection or indeed on protecting critical national infrastructure

We first did the course last year as a paid-for course with EdX. Our agreement with them was that they’d charge for it the first time, to recoup the production costs, and thereafter it would be free.

So here it is as a free course. Spread the word!