All posts by Steven J. Murdoch

About Steven J. Murdoch

I am Professor of Security Engineering and Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Information Security Research Group of the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), and a member of the UCL Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. I am also a bye-fellow of Christ’s College, Innovation Security Architect at the OneSpan, Cambridge, a member of the Tor Project, and a Fellow of the IET and BCS. I teach on the UCL MSc in Information Security. Further information and my papers on information security research is on my personal website. I also blog about information security research and policy on Bentham's Gaze.

Call for Nominations: 2013 PET Award

Academic papers, Awards, Call for papers, Privacy technology

I am on the award committee for the 2013 PET Award and we are looking for nominations of papers which have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technology.

The 2013 award will be presented at Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) and carries a prize of $3,000 USD thanks to the generous support of Microsoft. The crystal prize itself is offered by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada.

Any paper by any author written in the area of privacy enhancing technologies is eligible for nomination. However, the paper must have appeared in a refereed journal, conference, or workshop with proceedings published in the period from 16 April 2011 until 31 March 2013.

To submit a nomination, please see the instructions on the award page.

UK bank fraud up by 11% in 2012, but how much do customers lose?

Banking security, News coverage, Security economics

Today, the UK Cards Association (UKCA) published their summary of bank fraud for 2012. This provides an important insight into banking fraud, and the level of detail which the UK banks provide is very welcome. The UKCA figures go back to 2007, but I’ve collected the figures from previous releases going back to 2004. This data reveals some interesting trends, especially related to the deployment of new security technologies.

UK Cards Association fraud statistics 2012
larger version (PDF)

The overall fraud losses in 2012 are £475.3m, up 11% from the 2011 level, but for the purposes of comparison it is helpful to exclude the losses from phone banking since these figures were only available since 2009 (and are only 2.7% of the total). If we look at the resulting trend in total fraud  (£462.7m) we can see that while there was an increase in 2012, that is from a starting position of a 10-year low in 2011 so isn’t a reason to panic. We are still far from the peak in 2008 of £704.3m.

[You may have noticed the miniaturised graph in line with the text above, which an an example of a sparkline and I’ll be using these throughout this post to more clearly show trends in the data. Each graph shows the change in a single value over the 2004–2012 period, and is followed by the figure for 2012 in red.]

However, there is a large omission in the UKCA data – it records losses of the banks and merchants but not customers. If a customer is a victim of fraud, but the bank refuses to refund them (because the bank claims the customer was negligent), we won’t see it in these figures – as confirmed by a UKCA representative in an interview on BBC Radio Merseyside on 2007-02-19. We don’t know how much is missing from the fraud statistics as a result, but from the Financial Services Authority statistics we can see that there were 483,666 complaints in the first half of 2012 against firms regarding disputed charges, so the sums in question could be substantial. But despite this limitation, the statistics from the UKCA are valuable, especially in that it gives a break down of fraud by type.

Continue reading UK bank fraud up by 11% in 2012, but how much do customers lose? →

Fixing popping/clicking audio on Raspberry Pi

Hardware & signals, Operating systems, Useful software

I’m working on a security-related project with the Raspberry Pi and have encountered an annoying problem with the on-board sound output. I’ve managed to work around this, so thought it might be helpful the share my experiences with others in the same situation.

The problem manifests itself as a loud pop or click, just before sound is output and just after sound output is stopped. This is because a PWM output of the BCM2835 CPU is being used, rather than a standard DAC. When the PWM function is activated, there’s a jump in output voltage which results in the popping sound.

Until there’s a driver modification, the work-around suggested (other than using the HDMI sound output or an external USB sound card) is to run PulseAudio on top of ALSA and keep the driver active even when no sound is being output. This is achieved by disabling the module-suspend-on-idle PulseAudio module, then configuring applications to use PulseAudio rather than ALSA. Daniel Bader describes this work-around and how to configure MPD, in a blog post. However, when I tried this approach, the work-around didn’t work.

Continue reading Fixing popping/clicking audio on Raspberry Pi →

How Certification Systems Fail: Lessons from the Ware Report

Academic papers, Authentication, Banking security, Cryptology, Legal issues, Security engineering

Research in the Security Group has uncovered various flaws in systems, despite them being certified as secure. Sometimes the certification criteria have been inadequate and sometimes the certification process has been subverted. Not only do these failures affect the owners of the system but when evidence of certification comes up in court, the impact can be much wider.

There’s a variety of approaches to certification, ranging from extremely generic (such as Common Criteria) to highly specific (such as EMV), but all are (at least partially) descendants of a report by Willis H. Ware – “Security Controls for Computer Systems”. There’s much that can be learned from this report, particularly the rationale for why certification systems are set up as the way they are. The differences between how Ware envisaged certification and how certification is now performed is also informative, whether these differences are for good or for ill.

Along with Mike Bond and Ross Anderson, I have written an article for the “Lost Treasures” edition of IEEE Security & Privacy where we discuss what can be learned, about how today’s certifications work and should work, from the Ware report. In particular, we explore how the failure to follow the recommendations in the Ware report can explain why flaws in certified banking systems were not detected earlier. Our article, “How Certification Systems Fail: Lessons from the Ware Report” is available open-access in the version submitted to the IEEE. The edited version, as appearing in the print edition (IEEE Security & Privacy, volume 10, issue 6, pages 40–44, Nov‐Dec 2012. DOI:10.1109/MSP.2012.89) is only available to IEEE subscribers.

Virgin Money sends email helping phishers

Authentication, Banking security, Usability, Web security

It’s not unusual for banks to send emails which are confusingly similar to phishing, but this recent one I received from Virgin Money is exceptionally bad. It tells customers that the bank (Northern Rock) is changing domain names from their usual one (northernrock.co.uk) to virginmoney.com and customers should use their usual security credentials to log into the new domain name. Mail clients will often be helpful and change the virginmoney.com into a link.

This message is exactly what phishers would like customers to fall for. While this email was legitimate (albeit very unwise), a criminal could follow up with an email saying that savings customers should access their account at virginsavings.net (which is currently available for registration). Virgin Money have trained their customers to accept such emails as legitimate, which is a very dangerous lesson to teach.

It would have been safer to not do the rebranding, but if that’s considered essential for commercial reasons, then customers should have been told to continue accessing the site at their usual domain name, and redirected them (via HTTPS) to the new site. It would mean keeping hold of the Northern Rock domain names for the foreseeable future, but that is almost certainly what Virgin Money are planning anyway.


[larger version]

Call for Papers: Internet Censorship and Control

Call for papers, Internet censorship

I am co-editing a special edition of IEEE Internet Computing on Internet Censorship and Control. We are looking for short (up to 5,000 words) articles on the technical, social, and political mechanisms and impacts of Internet censorship and control. We’re soliciting both technical and social science articles, and especially encourage those that combine the two. Appropriate topics include

  • explorations of how the Internet’s technical, social, and political structures impact its censorship and control;
  • evaluations of how existing technologies and policies affect Internet censorship and control;
  • proposals for new technologies and policies;
  • discussions on how proposed technical, legal, or governance changes to the Internet will impact censorship and control;
  • analysis of techniques, methodologies, and results of monitoring Internet censorship and control; and
  • examinations of trade-offs between control and freedom, and how these sides can be balanced.

Please email the guest editors a brief description of the article you plan to submit by 15 August 2012. For further details, see the full CFP. Please distribute this CFP, and use this printable flyer if you wish.

Extracting Microsoft Windows Backup (BKF) files on Mac OS X with mtftar

Useful software

With Windows NT, Microsoft introduced Windows Backup (also known as NTBackup), and it was subsequently included in versions of Windows up to and including Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. It can back up to tape drives, using the Microsoft Tape Format (MTF), or to disk using the closely related BKF file format.

Support for Windows Backup was dropped in Vista but Microsoft introduced the Windows NT Backup Restore Utility for both Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008 (supporting disk and tape backups) and for Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 (supporting disk backups only).

If you just need to restore a MTF/BKF file, the Microsoft-provided software above is probably the best option. However, if (like me) you don’t have a Windows computer handy, or you want to convert the backup into a format more likely to be readable a few years later, they are not ideal. That is why I tried out the mtftar utility, which converts MTF/BKF files into the extremely well-supported TAR file format.

Unfortunately, mtftar appears unmaintained since 2007 and in particular, it doesn’t build on Mac OS X. That’s why I set out to fix it. In case this is of help to anyone else, I have made the modified GPL’d source available on GitHub (diff). It works well enough for me, but use at your own risk.

Call for nominations for PET Award 2012

Academic papers, Awards, Call for papers, Internet censorship, Privacy technology

Nominations are invited for the 2012 PET Award by 31 March 2012.

The PET Award is presented annually to researchers who have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technology. It is awarded at the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS).

The PET Award carries a prize of 3000 USD thanks to the generous support of Microsoft. The crystal prize itself is offered by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada.

Any paper by any author written in the area of privacy enhancing technologies is eligible for nomination. However, the paper must have appeared in a refereed journal, conference, or workshop with proceedings published in the period from 1 June 2010 until 31 March 2012.

For eligibility requirements, refer to the award rules.

Anyone can nominate a paper by sending an email message containing the following to award-chairs12@petsymposium.org:

  • Paper title
  • Author(s)
  • Author(s) contact information
  • Publication venue and full reference
  • Link to an available online version of the paper
  • A nomination statement of no more than 500 words.

All nominations must be submitted by 31 March 2012. The Award Committee will select one or two winners among the nominations received. Winners must be present at the 2012 PET Symposium in order to receive the Award. This requirement can be waived only at the discretion of the PET Advisory board.

More information about the PET award (including past winners) is see the award website.

Observations from two weeks of SSH brute force attacks

Authentication, Protocols

Earlier this month, I blogged about monitoring password-guessing attacks on a server, via a patched OpenSSH. This experiment has now been running for just over two weeks, and there are some interesting results. I’ve been tweeting these since the start.

As expected, the vast majority of password-guessing attempts are quite dull, and fall into one of two categories. Firstly there are attempts with a large number of ‘poor’ passwords (e.g. “password”, “1234”, etc…) against a small number of accounts which are very likely to exist (almost always “root”, but sometimes others such as “bin”).

Secondly, there were attempts on a large number of accounts which might plausibly exist (e.g. common first names and software packages such as ‘oracle’). For these, there were a very small number of password attempts, normally only trying the username as password. Well established good practices such as choosing a reasonably strong password and denying password-based log-in to the root account will be effective against both categories of attacks. Surprisingly, there were few attempts which were obviously default passwords from software packages (but they perhaps were hidden in the attempts where username equalled password). However, one attempt was username: “rfmngr”, password: “$rfmngr$”, which is the default password for Websense RiskFilter (see p.10 of the manual).

There were, however, some more interesting attempts. Continue reading Observations from two weeks of SSH brute force attacks →

Call for Papers: 12th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2012)

Call for papers, Privacy technology

Privacy and anonymity are increasingly important in the online world. Corporations, governments, and other organizations are realizing and exploiting their power to track users and their behavior. Approaches to protecting individuals, groups, but also companies and governments, from profiling and censorship include decentralization, encryption, distributed trust, and automated policy disclosure.

The 12th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium addresses the design and realization of such privacy services for the Internet and other data systems and communication networks by bringing together anonymity and privacy experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives.

The symposium seeks submissions from academia and industry presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of privacy technologies, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems. We encourage submissions with novel technical contributions from other communities such as law, business, and data protection authorities, that present their perspectives on technological issues.

Submissions are due 20 February 2012, 23:59 UTC. Further details can be found in the full Call for Papers.