All posts by Ross Anderson

Untrue claims by NHS IT chief

Legal issues, News coverage, Politics

If you listen to Radio 4 from 0810 on BBC iPlayer, you’ll hear a debate between Phil Booth of MedConfidential and Tim Kelsey of NHS England – the guy driving the latest NHS data grab.

Tim Kelsey made a number of misleading claims. He claimed for example that in 25 years there had never been a single case of patient confidentiality compromise because of the HES data kept centrally on all hospital treatments. This was untrue. A GP practice manager, Helen Wilkinson, was stigmatised as an alcoholic on HES because of a coding error. She had to get her MP to call a debate in Parliament to get this fixed (and even after the minister promised it had been fixed, it hadn’t been; that took months more pushing).

Second, when Tim pressed Phil for a single case where data had been compromised, Phil said “Gordon Brown”. Kelsey’s rebuttal was “That was criminal hacking.” Again, this was untrue; Gordon Brown’s information was accessed by Andrew Jamieson, a doctor in Dunfermline, who abused his authorised access to the system. He was not prosecuted because this was not in the public interest. Yeah, right. And now Kelsey is going to give your GP records not just to almost everyone in the NHS but to university researchers (I have been offered access though I’m not even a medic and despite the fact that academics have lost millions of records in the past), to drug firms like GlaxoSmithKline, and even to Silicon-Valley informatics companies such as 23andme.

Why bouncing droplets are a pretty good model of quantum mechanics

Academic papers, Cryptology

Today Robert Brady and I publish a paper that solves an outstanding problem in physics. We explain the beautiful bouncing droplet experiments of Yves Couder, Emmanuel Fort and their colleagues.

For years now, people interested in the foundations of physics have been intrigued by the fact that droplets bouncing on a vibrating tray of fluid can behave in many ways like quantum mechanical particles, with single-slit and double-slit diffraction, tunneling, Anderson localisation and quantised orbits.

In our new paper, Robert Brady and I explain why. The wave field surrounding the droplet is, to a good approximation, Lorentz covariant with the constant c being the speed of surface waves. This plus the inverse square force between bouncing droplets (which acts like the Coulomb force) gives rise to an analogue of the magnetic force, which can be observed clearly in the droplet data. There is also an analogue of the Schrödinger equation, and even of the Pauli exclusion principle.

These results not only solve a fascinating puzzle, but might perhaps nudge more people to think about novel models of quantum foundations, about which we’ve written three previous papers.

Opting out of the latest NHS data grab

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

The next three weeks will see a leaflet drop on over 20 million households. NHS England plans to start uploading your GP records in March or April to a central system, from which they will be sold to a wide range of medical and other research organisations. European data-protection and human-rights laws demand that we be able to opt out of such things, so the Information Commissioner has told the NHS to inform you of your right to opt out.

Needless to say, their official leaflet is designed to cause as few people to opt out as possible. It should really have been drafted like this. (There’s a copy of the official leaflet at the MedConfidential.org website.) But even if it had been, the process still won’t meet the consent requirements of human-rights law as it won’t be sent to every patient. One of your housemates could throw it away as junk before you see it, and if you’ve opted out of junk mail you won’t get a leaflet at all.

Yet if you don’t opt out in the next few weeks your data will be uploaded to central systems and you will not be able to get it deleted, ever. If you don’t opt out your kids in the next few weeks the same will happen to their data, and they will not be able to get their data deleted even if they decide they prefer privacy once they come of age. If you opted out of the Summary Care Record in 2009, that doesn’t count; despite a ministerial assurance to the contrary, you now need to opt out all over again. For further information see the website of GP Neil Bhatia (who drafted our more truthful leaflet) and previous LBT posts on medical privacy.

Reading this may harm your computer

Academic papers, Legal issues, Security economics, Security psychology

David Modic and I have just published a paper on The psychology of malware warnings. We’re constantly bombarded with warnings designed to cover someone else’s back, but what sort of text should we put in a warning if we actually want the user to pay attention to it?

To our surprise, social cues didn’t seem to work. What works best is to make the warning concrete; people ignore general warnings such as that a web page “might harm your computer” but do pay attention to a specific one such as that the page would “try to infect your computer with malware designed to steal your bank account and credit card details in order to defraud you”. There is also some effect from appeals to authority: people who trust their browser vendor will avoid a page “reported and confirmed by our security team to contain malware”.

We also analysed who turned off browser warnings, or would have if they’d known how: they were people who ignored warnings anyway, typically men who distrusted authority and either couldn’t understand the warnings or were IT experts.

Crypto festival video

Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage, Open-source security, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security psychology, Social networks

We had a crypto festival in London in London in November at which a number of cryptographers and crypto policy folks got together with over 1000 mostly young attendees to talk about what might be done in response to the Snowden revelations.

Here is a video of the session in which I spoke. The first speaker was Annie Machon (at 02.35) talking of her experience of life on the run from MI5, and on what we might do to protect journalists’ sources in the future. I’m at 23.55 talking about what’s changed for governments, corporates, researchers and others. Nick Pickles of Big Brother Watch follows at 45.45 talking on what can be done in terms of practical politics; it turned out that only two of us in the auditorium had met our MPs over the Comms Data Bill. The final speaker, Smari McCarthy, comes on at 56.45, calling for lots more encryption. The audience discussion starts at 1:12:00.

WEIS 2014 call for papers

Academic papers, Call for papers, Security economics

Next year’s Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2014) will be at Penn State on June 23–24. The call for papers is now out; papers are due by the end of February.

It will be fascinating to see what effects the Snowden revelations will have on the community’s thinking about security standards and regulation, the incentives for information sharing and cooperation, and the economics of privacy, to mention only three of the workshop’s usual topics. Now that we’ve had six months to think things through, how do you think the security game has changed, and why? Do we need minor changes to our models, or major ones? Are we in the same policy world, or a quite different one? WEIS could be particularly interesting next year. Get writing!

Your medical records – now on sale

Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics

Your medical records are now officially on sale. American drug companies now learn that MedRed BT Health Cloud will provide public access to 50 million de-identified patient records from UK.

David Cameron announced in 2011 that every NHS patient would be a research patient, with their records opened up to private healthcare firms. He promised that our records would be anonymised and we’d have a right to opt out. I pointed out that anonymisation doesn’t work very well (as did the Royal Society) but the Information Commissioner predictably went along with the charade (and lobbyists are busy fixing up the new data protection regulation in Brussels to leave huge loopholes for health service management and research). The government duly started to compel the upload of GP data, to join the hospital data it already has. During the launch of a medical confidentiality campaign the health secretary promised to respect existing opt-outs but has now reneged on his promise.

The data being put online by BT appear to be the data it already manages from the Secondary Uses Service, which is mostly populated by records of finished consultant episodes from hospitals. These are pseudonymised by removing names and addresses but still have patient postcodes and dates of birth; patient views on this were ignored. I wonder if US purchasers will get these data items? I also wonder whether patients will be able to opt out of SUS? Campaigners have sent freedom of information requests to hundreds of hospitals to find out; so we should know soon enough.

A new side channel attack

Academic papers, Banking security, Hardware & signals, Operating systems, Privacy technology, Security engineering, Usability

Today we’re presenting a new side-channel attack in PIN Skimmer: Inferring PINs Through The Camera and Microphone at SPSM 2013. We found that software on your smartphone can work out what PIN you’re entering by watching your face through the camera and listening for the clicks as you type. Previous researchers had shown how to work out PINs using the gyro and accelerometer; we found that the camera works about as well. We watch how your face appears to move as you jiggle your phone by typing.

There are implications for the design of electronic wallets using mechanisms such as Trustzone which enable some apps to run in a more secure sandbox. Such systems try to prevent sensitive data such as bank credentials being stolen by malware. Our work shows it’s not enough for your electronic wallet software to grab hold of the screen, the accelerometers and the gyro; you’d better lock down the video camera, and the still camera too while you’re at it. (Our attack can use the still camera in burst mode.)

We suggest ways in which mobile phone operating systems might mitigate the risks. Meanwhile, if you’re developing payment apps, you’d better be aware that these risks exist.

Offender tagging 2.0

Academic papers, Legal issues, News coverage, Security engineering

Three of our clients have been acquitted of tampering with curfew tags after the Ministry of Justice and G4S were unwilling to have an independent forensic team examine their evidence. This brings to five the number of tag-tampering prosecutions that have been withdrawn or collapsed when the defence says “Right, prove it then.” I reported the first case here.

The three latest matters were high-profile terrorism cases, involving three of the nine men tagged under the new Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measure (TPIM) – a kind of national-security ASBO handed out by MI5, and which had already been criticised by David Anderson QC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, for low standards of proof. Unlike a normal ASBO which a court gives “on the balance of probabilities”, you can get a TPIM if the Home Secretary declares she has a “reasonable suspicion”.

The Ministry of Justice should perhaps, when they let the tagging contracts, have read our 1994 paper on the John Munden case, or the post here about the similar case of Jane Badger. If you’re designing a system one of whose functions is to provide evidence, you’d better design it to withstand hostile review. “Trust us” doesn’t cut it in criminal trials, and neither does “I’m afraid that’s commercially confidential.”

How to deal with emergencies better

Academic papers, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Security psychology

Britain has just been hit by a storm; two people have been killed by falling trees, and one swept out to sea. The rail network is in chaos and over 100,000 homes lost electric power. What can security engineering teach about such events?

Risk communication could be very much better. The storm had been forecast for several days but the instructions and advice from authority have almost all been framed in vague and general terms. Our research on browser warnings shows that people mostly ignore vague warnings (“Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!”) but pay much more attention to concrete ones (such as “The site you are about to visit has been confirmed to contain software that poses a significant risk to you, with no tangible benefit. It would try to infect your computer with malware designed to steal your bank account and credit card details in order to defraud you”). In fact, making warnings more concrete is the only thing that works here – nudge favourites such as appealing to social norms, or authority, or even putting a cartoon face on the page to activate social cognition, don’t seem to have a significant effect in this context.

So how should the Met Office and the emergency services deal with the next storm?

Continue reading How to deal with emergencies better →