Category Archives: Legal issues

Security-related legislation, government initiatives, court cases

Will LBT be blocked?

Academic papers, Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage

Back in July I wrote a blog article “Will Newzbin be blocked?” which discussed the granting of an injunction to a group of movie companies to force BT to block access to “Newzbin2“.

The parties were back in court this last week to hammer out the exact details of the injunction.

The final wording of the injunction requires BT to block customer access to Newzbin2 by #1(1) rerouting traffic to relevant IPs and #1(2) applying “DPI based” URL blocking. The movie companies have to tell BT which IPs and which URLs are relevant.

#2 of the injunction says that BT can use its existing “Cleanfeed” system (which I wrote about here and at greater length in my PhD thesis here) to meet the requirements of #1, even though Cleanfeed isn’t believed to use DPI at all !

#3 and #4 of the injunction allows the parties to agree to suspend blocking and to come back to court in the future, and #5 relates to the costs of the court action.

One of the (few) upsides of this injunction will be to permit lawful experimentation as to the effectiveness of the Cleanfeed system, assuming that it is used — if the studios ask for all URLs on a website to be blocked, I expect that null routing the website entirely will be simpler for BT than redirecting traffic to the Cleanfeed proxy.

Up until now, discovering a flaw in the technical implementation of Cleanfeed would result in successful access to a child sexual abuse image website. Anyone monitoring the remote end of the connection might then draw the conclusion that images had been viewed and a criminal offence committed. Although careful experimental design could avoid law-breaking, it might be some time into the investigation process before this was properly understood by the criminal justice system, and the intervening period would be somewhat stressful for the investigator.

There is no law that prevents viewing of the contents of Newsbin2, and so the block circumvention techniques proposed over the past few years (starting of course with just using “https”) can now start to be evaluated as to their actual effectiveness.

However, there is more to #1 of the injunction, in that it applies to:

[…] www.newzbin.com, its domains and sub-domains and including payments.newzbin.com and any other IP address or URL whose sole or predominant purpose is to enable or facilitate access to the Newzbin2 website.

I don’t expect that publishing circumvention experience here on LBT could be seen as the predominant purpose of this blog… so I don’t really expect these pages to suddenly become invisible to BT customers. But, since the whole process has an Alice in Wonderland feel to it (someone who believes that blocking websites is possible clearly had little else to do before breakfast), it cannot be entirely ruled out.

Trusted Computing 2.1

Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology, Security engineering

We’re steadily learning more about the latest Trusted Computing proposals. People have started to grok that building signed boot into UEFI will extend Microsoft’s power over the markets for AV software and other security tools that install around boot time; while ‘Metro’ style apps (i.e. web/tablet/html5 style stuff) could be limited to distribution via the MS app store. Even if users can opt out, most of them won’t. That’s a lot of firms suddenly finding Steve Ballmer’s boot on their jugular.

We’ve also been starting to think about the issues of law enforcement access that arose during the crypto wars and that came to light again with CAs. These issues are even more wicked with trusted boot. If the Turkish government compelled Microsoft to include the Tubitak key in Windows so their intelligence services could do man-in-the-middle attacks on Kurdish MPs’ gmail, then I expect they’ll also tell Microsoft to issue them a UEFI key to authenticate their keylogger malware. Hey, I removed the Tubitak key from my browser, but how do I identify and block all foreign governments’ UEFI keys?

Our Greek colleagues are already a bit cheesed off with Wall Street. How happy will they be if in future they won’t be able to install the security software of their choice on their PCs, but the Turkish secret police will?

Trusted Computing 2.0

Hardware & signals, Legal issues, Security economics, Security engineering

There seems to be an attempt to revive the “Trusted Computing” agenda. The vehicle this time is UEFI which sets the standards for the PC BIOS. Proposed changes to the UEFI firmware spec would enable (in fact require) next-generation PC firmware to only boot an image signed by a keychain rooted in keys built into the PC. I hear that Microsoft (and others) are pushing for this to be mandatory, so that it cannot be disabled by the user, and it would be required for OS badging. There are some technical details here and here, and comment here.

These issues last arose in 2003, when we fought back with the Trusted Computing FAQ and economic analysis. That initiative petered out after widespread opposition. This time round the effects could be even worse, as “unauthorised” operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD just won’t run at all. (On an old-fashioned Trusted Computing platform you could at least run Linux – it just couldn’t get at the keys for Windows Media Player.)

The extension of Microsoft’s OS monopoly to hardware would be a disaster, with increased lock-in, decreased consumer choice and lack of space to innovate. It is clearly unlawful and must not succeed.

Will Newzbin be blocked?

Academic papers, Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage

This morning the UK High Court granted an injunction to a group of movie companies which is intended to force BT to block access to “newzbin 2” by their Internet customers. The “newzbin 2” site provides an easy way to search for and download metadata files that can be used to automate the downloading of feature films (TV shows, albums etc) from Usenet servers. ie it’s all about trying to prevent people from obtaining content without paying for a legitimate copy (so called “piracy“).

The judgment is long and spends a lot of time (naturally) on legal matters, but there is some technical discussion — which is correct so far as it goes (though describing redirection of traffic based on port number inspection as “DPI” seems to me to stretch the jargon).

But what does the injunction require of BT? According to the judgment BT must apply “IP address blocking in respect of each and every IP address [of newzbin.com]” and “DPI based blocking utilising at least summary analysis in respect of each and every URL available at the said website and its domains and sub domains“. BT is then told that the injunction is “complied with if the Respondent uses the system known as Cleanfeed“.

There is almost nothing about the design of Cleanfeed in the judgment, but I wrote a detailed account of how it works in a 2005 paper (a slightly extended version of which appears as Chapter 7 of my 2005 PhD thesis). Essentially it is a 2-stage system, the routing system redirects port 80 (HTTP) traffic for relevant IP addresses to a proxy machine — and that proxy prevents access to particular URLs.

So if BT just use Cleanfeed (as the injunction indicates) they will resolve newzbin.com (and www.newzbin.com) which are currently both on 85.112.165.75, and they will then filter access to http://www.newzbin.com/, http://newzbin.com and http://85.112.165.75. It will be interesting to experiment to determine how good their pattern matching is on the proxy (currently Cleanfeed is only used for child sexual abuse image websites, so experiments currently pose a significant risk of lawbreaking).

It will also be interesting to see whether BT actually use Cleanfeed or if they just ‘blackhole’ all access to 85.112.165.75. The quickest way to determine this (once the block is rolled out) will be to see whether or not https://newzbin.com works or not. If it does work then BT will have obeyed the injunction but the block will be trivial to evade (add a “s” to the URL). If it does not work then BT will not be using Cleanfeed to do the blocking!

BT users will still of course be able to access Newzbin (though perhaps not by using https), but depending on the exact mechanisms which BT roll out it may be a little less convenient. The simplest method (but not the cheapest) will be to purchase a VPN service — which will tunnel traffic via a remote site (and access from there won’t be blocked). Doubtless some enterprising vendors will be looking to bundle a VPN with a Newzbin subscription and an account on a Usenet server.

The use of VPNs seems to have been discussed in court, along with other evasion techniques (such as using web and SOCKS proxies), but the judgment says “It is common ground that, if the order were to be implemented by BT, it would be possible for BT subscribers to circumvent the blocking required by the order. Indeed, the evidence shows the operators of Newzbin2 have already made plans to assist users to circumvent such blocking. There are at least two, and possibly more, technical measures which users could adopt to achieve this. It is common ground that it is neither necessary nor appropriate for me to describe those measures in this judgment, and accordingly I shall not do so.”

There’s also a whole heap of things that Newzbin could do to disrupt the filtering or just to make their site too mobile to be effectively blocked. I describe some of the possibilities in my 2005 academic work, and there are doubtless many more. Too many people consider the Internet to be a static system which looks the same from everywhere to everyone — that’s just not the case, so blocking systems that take this as a given (“web sites have a single IP address that everyone uses”) will be ineffective.

But this is all moot so far as the High Court is concerned. The bottom line within the judgment is that they don’t actually care if the blocking works or not! At paragraph #198 the judge writes “I agree with counsel for the Studios that the order would be justified even if it only prevented access to Newzbin2 by a minority of users“. Since this case was about preventing economic damage to the movie studios, I doubt that they will be so sanguine if it is widely understood how to evade the block — but the exact details of that will have to wait until BT have complied with their new obligations.

Phone hacking, technology and policy

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

Britain’s phone hacking scandal touches many issues of interest to security engineers. Murdoch’s gumshoes listened to celebs’ voicemail messages using default PINs. They used false-pretext phone calls – blagging – to get banking and medical records.

We’ve known for years that private eyes blag vast amounts of information (2001 book, from page 167; 2006 ICO Report). Centralisation and the ‘Cloud’ are making things worse. Twenty years ago, your bank records were available only in your branch; now any teller at any branch can look them up. The dozen people who work at your doctor’s surgery used to be able to keep a secret, but the 840,000 staff with a logon to our national health databases?

Attempts to fix the problem using the criminal justice system have failed. When blagging was made illegal in 1995, the street price of medical records actually fell from £200 to £150! Parliament increased the penalty from fines to jail in 2006 but media pressure scared ministers off implementing this law.

Our Database State report argued that the wholesale centralisation of medical and other records was unsafe and illegal; and the NHS Population Demographics Service database appears to be the main one used to find celebs’ ex-directory numbers. Celebs can opt out, but most of them are unaware of PDS abuse, so they don’t. Second, you can become a celeb instantly if you are a victim of crime, war or terror. Third, even if you do opt out, the gumshoes can just bribe policemen, who have access to just about everything.

In future, security engineers must pay much more attention to compartmentation (even the Pentagon is now starting to get it), and we must be much more wary about the risk that law-enforcement access to information will be abused.

TalkTalk's new blocking system

Legal issues, News coverage, Security engineering, Web security

Back in January I visited TalkTalk along with Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group (ORG) to have their new Internet blocking system explained to us. The system was announced yesterday, and I’m now publishing my technical description of how it works (note that it was called “BrightFeed” when we saw it, but is now named “HomeSafe”).

Buried in all the detail of how the system works are two key points — the first is the notion that it is possible for a centralised checking system (especially one that tells a remote site its identity) to determine whether sites are malicious are not. This is problematic and I doubt that malware distributors will see this as much of a challenge — although on the other hand, perhaps by setting your browser’s User Agent string to pretend to be the checking system you might become rather safer!

The second is that although the system is described as “opt in”, that only applies to whether or not websites you visit might be blocked. What is not “opt in” is whether or not TalkTalk learns the details of the URLs that all of their customers visit, whether they have opted in or not. All of these sites will be visited by TalkTalk’s automated system — which may take some explaining if the remote system told you a URL in confidence and is checking their logs to see who visits.

On their site, ORG have expressed an opinion as to whether the system can be operated lawfully, along with TalkTalk’s own legal analysis. TalkTalk argue that the system’s purpose is to protect their network, which gives them a statutory exemption from wire-tapping legislation; whereas all the public relations material seems to think it’s been developed to protect the users….

… in the end though, the system will be judged by its effectiveness, and in a world where less than 20% of new threats are detected — that may not be all that high.

The Sony hack: passwords vs. financial details

Authentication, Banking security, Legal issues, Security economics

Sometime last week, Sony discovered that up to 77 M accounts on its PlayStation Network were compromised. Sony’s network was down for a week before they finally disclosed details yesterday. Unusually, there haven’t yet been any credible claims of responsibility for the hack, so we can only go on Sony’s official statements. The breach included names and addresses, passwords, and answers to personal knowledge questions, and possibly payment details. The risks of leaking payment card numbers are well-known, including fraudulent payment transactions and identity theft. Sony has responded by offering to provide free credit checks for affected customers and notifying major credit ratings bureaus with a list of affected customers. This hasn’t been enough for many critics, including a US Senator.

Still, this is far more than Sony has done regarding the leaked passwords. The risks here are very real—hackers can attempt to re-use the compromised passwords (possibly after inverting hashes using brute-force) at many other websites, including financial ones. There are no disclosure laws here though, and Sony has done nothing, not even disclosing the key technical details of how passwords were stored. The implications are very different if the passwords were stored in cleartext, hashed in a constant manner, or properly hashed and salted. Sony customers ought to know what really happened. Instead, towards the bottom of Sony’s FAQ they trail off mid sentence when discussing the leaked passwords:

Additionally, if you use the same user name or password for your PlayStation Network or Qriocity service account for other [no further text]

As we explored last summer, this is a serious market failure. Sony’s security breach has potentially compromised passwords at hundreds of other sites where its users re-use the same password and email address as credentials. This is a significant externality, but Sony bears no legal responsibility, and it shows. The options are never great once a breach has occurred, but Sony should at a minimum have promptly provided full details about their password storage, gave clear instructions to users to change their password at other sites, and notified at least the email providers of each account holder to instruct a forced password reset. The legal framework surrounding password breaches must catch up to that for financial breaches.

Can we Fix Federated Authentication?

Academic papers, Authentication, Banking security, Legal issues, Protocols, Security economics, Security engineering, Social networks, Web security

My paper Can We Fix the Security Economics of Federated Authentication? asks how we can deal with a world in which your mobile phone contains your credit cards, your driving license and even your car key. What happens when it gets stolen or infected?

Using one service to authenticate the users of another is an old dream but a terrible tar-pit. Recently it has become a game of pass-the-parcel: your newspaper authenticates you via your social networking site, which wants you to recover lost passwords by email, while your email provider wants to use your mobile phone and your phone company depends on your email account. The certification authorities on which online trust relies are open to coercion by governments – which would like us to use ID cards but are hopeless at making systems work. No-one even wants to answer the phone to help out a customer in distress. But as we move to a world of mobile wallets, in which your phone contains your credit cards and even your driving license, we’ll need a sound foundation that’s resilient to fraud and error, and usable by everyone. Where might this foundation be? I argue that there could be a quite surprising answer.

The paper describes some work I did on sabbatical at Google and will appear next week at the Security Protocols Workshop.

A Merry Christmas to all Bankers

Academic papers, Banking security, Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Security engineering

The bankers’ trade association has written to Cambridge University asking for the MPhil thesis of one of our research students, Omar Choudary, to be taken offline. They complain it contains too much detail of our No-PIN attack on Chip-and-PIN and thus “breaches the boundary of responsible disclosure”; they also complain about Omar’s post on the subject to this blog.

Needless to say, we’re not very impressed by this, and I made this clear in my response to the bankers. (I am embarrassed to see I accidentally left Mike Bond off the list of authors of the No-PIN vulnerability. Sorry, Mike!) There is one piece of Christmas cheer, though: the No-PIN attack no longer works against Barclays’ cards at a Barclays merchant. So at least they’ve started to fix the bug – even if it’s taken them a year. We’ll check and report on other banks later.

The bankers also fret that “future research, which may potentially be more damaging, may also be published in this level of detail”. Indeed. Omar is one of my coauthors on a new Chip-and-PIN paper that’s been accepted for Financial Cryptography 2011. So here is our Christmas present to the bankers: it means you all have to come to this conference to hear what we have to say!

Wikileaks, security research and policy

Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security engineering

A number of media organisations have been asking us about Wikileaks. Fifteen years ago we kicked off the study of censorship resistant systems, which inspired the peer-to-peer movement; we help maintain Tor, which provides the anonymous communications infrastructure for Wikileaks; and we’ve a longstanding interest in information policy.

I have written before about governments’ love of building large databases of sensitive data to which hundreds of thousands of people need access to do their jobs – such as the NHS spine, which will give over 800,000 people access to our health records. The media are now making the link. Whether sensitive data are about health or about diplomacy, the only way forward is compartmentation. Medical records should be kept in the surgery or hospital where the care is given; and while an intelligence analyst dealing with Iraq might have access to cables on Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, he should have no routine access to stuff on Korea or Brazil.

So much for the security engineering; now to policy. No-one questions the US government’s right to try one of its soldiers for leaking the cables, or the right of the press to publish them now that they’re leaked. But why is Wikileaks treated as the leaker, rather than as a publisher?

This leads me to two related questions. First, does a next-generation censorship-resistant system need a more resilient technical platform, or more respectable institutions? And second, if technological change causes respectable old-media organisations such as the Guardian and the New York Times to go bust and be replaced by blogs, what happens to freedom of the press, and indeed to freedom of speech?