Category Archives: News coverage

Media reports that may interest you

Scrambling for Safety 2012

Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Seminars

On the first of April, the Sunday Times carried a story that the Home Secretary planned to expand the scope of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Some thought this was an April Fool, but no: security minister James Brokenshire confirmed the next day that it was for real. This led to much media coverage; here is a more detailed historical timeline.

There have been eight previous Scrambling for Safety conferences organised while the UK government was considering the RIP Act and the regulations that followed it. The goal is to bring together different stakeholders interested in surveillance policy for an open exchange of views. The conference is open to the public, but you have to register here.

Here is the programme and the event website.

Social authentication – harder than it looks!

Academic papers, News coverage, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security psychology, Usability

This is the title of a paper we’ll be presenting next week at the Financial Crypto conference (slides). There is also coverage in the New Scientist.

Facebook has a social authentication mechanism where you may be asked to recognise some of your friends from photos as part of the login process. We analysed this and found it to be vulnerable to guessing by your friends, and also to modern face-recognition systems. Most people want privacy only from those close to them; if you’re having an affair then you want your partner to not find out but you don’t care if someone in Mongolia learns about it. And if your partner finds out and becomes your ex, then you don’t want them to be able to cause havoc on your account. Celebrities are similar, except that everyone is their friend (and potentially their enemy).

Second, if someone outside your circle of friends is doing a targeted attack on you, then by friending your friends they can get some access to your social circle to collect photos, which they might use in image-recognition software or even manually to pass the test.
Continue reading Social authentication – harder than it looks! →

Beware of cybercrime data memes

News coverage, Security economics, Spam

Last year when I wrote a paper about mitigating malware I needed some figures on the percent of machines infected with malware. There are a range of figures, mainly below 10%, but one of the highest was 25%.

I looked into why this occurred and wrote it up in footnote #9 (yes, it’s a paper with a lot of footnotes!). My explanation was:

The 2008 OECD report on Malware [14] contained the sentence “Furthermore, it is estimated that 59 million users in the US have spyware or other types of malware on their computers.” News outlets picked up on this, e.g. The Sydney Morning Herald [20] who divided the 59 million figure into the US population, and then concluded that around a quarter of US computers were infected (assuming that each person owned one computer). The OECD published a correction in the online copy of the report a few days later. They were actually quoting PEW Internet research on adware/spyware (which is a subtly different threat) from 2005 (which was a while earlier than 2008). The sentence should have read “After hearing descriptions of ‘spyware’ and ‘adware’, 43% of internet users, or about 59 million American adults, say they have had one of these programs on their home computer.” Of such errors in understanding the meaning of data is misinformation made.

We may be about to have a similar thing happen with Facebook account compromises.
Continue reading Beware of cybercrime data memes →

Bankers’ Christmas present

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

Every Christmas we give our friends in the banking industry a wee present. Sometimes it’s the responsible disclosure of a vulnerability, which we publish the following February: 2007’s was PED certification, 2008’s was CAP while in 2009 we told the banking industry of the No-PIN attack. This year too we have some goodies in the hamper: watch our papers at Financial Crypto 2012.

In other years, we’ve had arguments with the bankers’ PR wallahs. In 2010, for example, their trade association tried to censor one of our students’ thesis. That saga also continues; Britain’s bankers tried once more to threaten us so we told them once more to go away. We have other conversations in progress with bankers, most of them thankfully a bit more constructive.

This year’s Christmas present is different: it’s a tale with a happy ending. Eve Russell was a fraud victim whom Barclays initially blamed for her misfortune, as so often happens, and the Financial Ombudsman Service initially found for the bank as it routinely does. Yet this was clearly not right; after many lawyers’ letters, two hearings at the ombudsman, two articles in The Times and a TV appearance on Rip-off Britain, Eve won. This is the first complete case file since the ombudsman came under the Freedom of Information Act; by showing how the system works, it may be useful to fraud victims in the future.

(At Eve’s request, I removed the correspondence and case papers from my website on 5 Oct 2015. Eve was getting lots of calls and letters from other fraud victims and was finally getting weary. I have left just the article in the Times.)

Privacy event on Wednesday

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

I will be talking in London on Wednesday at a workshop on Anonymity, Privacy, and Open Data about the difficulty of anonymising medical records properly. I’ll be on a panel with Kieron O’Hara who wrote a report on open data for the Cabinet Office earlier this year, and a spokesman from the ICO.

This will be the first public event on the technology and policy issues surrounding anonymisation since yesterday’s announcement that the government will give wide access to anonymous versions of our medical records. I’ve written extensively on the subject: for an overview, see my book chapter which explores the security of medical systems in general from p 282 and the particular problems of using “anonymous” records in research from p 298. For the full Monty, start here.

Anonymity is hard enough if the data controller is capable, and motivated to try hard. In the case of the NHS, anonymity has always been perfunctory; the default is to remove patient names and addresses but leave their postcodes and dates of birth. This makes it easy to re-identify about 99% of patients (the exceptions are mostly twins, soldiers, students and prisoners). And since I wrote that book chapter, the predicted problems have come to pass; for example the NHS lost a laptop containing over eight million patients’ records.

Here we go again

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

The Sunday media have been trailing a speech by David Cameron tomorrow about giving us online access to our medical records and our kids’ school records, and making anonymised versions of them widely available to researchers, companies and others. Here is coverage in the BBC, the Mail and the Telegraph; there’s also a Cabinet Office paper. The measures are supported by the CEO of Glaxo and opposed by many NGOs.

If the Government is going to “ensure all NHS patients can access their personal GP records online by the end of this Parliament”, they’ll have to compel the thousands of GPs who still keep patient records on their own machines to transfer them to centrally-hosted facilities. The systems are maintained by people who have to please the Secretary of State rather than GPs, and thus become progressively less useful. This won’t just waste doctors’ time but will have real consequences for patient safety and the quality of care.

We’ve seen this repeatedly over the lifetime of NPfIT and its predecessor the NHS IM&T strategy. Officials who can’t develop working systems become envious of systems created by doctors; they wrest control, and the deterioration starts.

It’s astounding that a Conservative prime minister could get the idea that nationalising something is the best way to make it work better. It’s also astonishing that a Government containing Liberals who believe in human rights, the rule of law and privacy should support the centralisation of medical records a mere two years after the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, a Liberal charity, produced the Database State report which explained how the centralisation of medical records (and for that matter children’s records) destroys privacy and contravenes human-rights law. The coming debate will no doubt be vigorous and will draw on many aspects of information security, from the dreadful security usability (and safety usability) of centrally-purchased NHS systems, through the real hazards of coerced access by vulnerable patients, to the fact that anonymisation doesn’t really work. There’s much more here. Of course the new centralisation effort will probably fail, just like the last two; health informatics is a hard problem, and even Google gave up. But our privacy should not depend on the government being incompetent at wrongdoing. It should refrain from wrongdoing in the first place.

DNSChanger might change the BGPSEC landscape

Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics

In early November, a sophisticated fraud was shut down and a number of people arrested. Malware from a family called “DNSChanger” had been placed on around four million machines (Macs as well as Windows machines) over several years.

The compromised users had their DNS traffic redirected to criminally operated servers. The main aim of the criminals seems to have been to redirect search queries and thereby to make money from displaying adverts.

Part of the mitigation of DNSChanger involves ISC running DNS servers for a while (so that 4 million people whose DNS servers suddenly disappear don’t simultaneously ring their ISP helpdesks complaining that the Internet is broken).

To prevent bad people running the DNS servers instead, the address blocks containing the IPs of the rogue DNS servers which used to belong to the criminals (but are now pointed at ISC) have been “locked”.

This is easy for ARIN (the organisation who looks after North American address space) to acquiesce to, because they have US legal paperwork compelling their assistance. However, the Dutch police have generated some rather less compelling paperwork and served that on RIPE; so RIPE is now asking the Dutch court to clarify the position.

Further details of the issues with the legal paperwork can be found on (or linked from) the Internet Governance Project blog. The IGP is a group of mainly but not entirely US academics working on global Internet policy issues.

As the IGP rightly point out, this is going to be an important case because it is going to draw attention to the role of the RIRs — just at the time when that role is set to become even more important.

As we move to crypto-secured BGP routing, the RIRs (ARIN, RIPE etc) will be providing cryptographic assurance of the validity of address block ownership. Which means, in effect, that we are building a system where the courts in one country (five countries in all, for five RIRs) could remove ISPs and hosting providers from the Internet… and some ISPs [and their governments] (who are beginning to think ahead) are not entirely keen on this prospect.

If, as one might expect, the Dutch courts eventually uphold the DNSChanger compulsion on RIPE (even if the Dutch police have to have a second go at making the paperwork valid) then maybe this will prove the impetus to abandon a pyramid structure for BGP security and move to a “sea of certificates” model (where one independently chooses from several overlapping roots of authority) — which more closely approximates the reality of a global system which touches a myriad set of local jurisdictions.

Oral evidence to the malware inquiry

Academic papers, News coverage, Politics

The House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee is currently holding an inquiry into malware.

I submitted written evidence in September and today I was one of three experts giving oral evidence to the MPs. The session was televised and so conceivably it may turn up on the TV in some strange timeslot — but if you’re interested then there’s a web version for viewing at your convenience. Shortly there will be a written transcript as well.

The Committee’s original set of questions included one about whether malware infection might usefully be treated as a public health issue — of particular interest to me because I have a published paper which considers the role that Governments might play in countering malware for the public good!

In the event, this wasn’t asked about at all. The questions were much more basic, covering the security of hardware and software, the role of the police (and at one point, bizarrely, considering the merits of the Amstrad PCW; a product I was jointly involved in designing and building, some 25 years ago).

In fact it was all rather more about dealing with crime than dealing with malware — which is fine (and obviously closely connected) but it wasn’t the topic on which everyone submitted evidence. This may mean that the Committee has a shortage of material if their report aims to address the questions that they raised today.

Sovereignty and Cybercrime

Legal issues, News coverage

I spent the early part of this week at the London Conference on Cyberspace, organised by the UK Foreign Office.

Besides feel-good sessions on how wonderful the Internet can be for social engagement and economic growth, the two themes that had really drawn the participants were cybercrime and cyberwar (the latter being rebranded as ‘cyber security’ to avoid frightening the horses).

There was predictably little progress on the latter topic to be seen in public — Russia wants to strengthen national borders in cyberspace (and Evgeny Kaspersky spoke approvingly of strong online identity) and China’s position is similar (albeit their main intervention from the floor was an offer to investigate hacking attacks that came from their country).

Cybercrime was more straightforwardly condemned (which would not have surprised Calvin Coolidge) but the same fault-lines showed up in this topic as well.
Continue reading Sovereignty and Cybercrime →

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.