Category Archives: News coverage

Media reports that may interest you

NHS Computer Project Failing

News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology, Security engineering

The House of Commons Health Select Committee has just published a Report on the Electronic Patient Record. This concludes that the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), the 20-billion-pound project to rip out all the computers in the NHS and replace them with systems that store data in central server farms rather than in the surgery or hospital, is failing to meet its stated core objective – of providing clinically rich, interoperable detailed care records. What’s more, privacy’s at serious risk. Here is comment from e-Health Insider.

For the last few years I’ve been using the London Ambulance Service disaster as the standard teaching example of how things go wrong in big software projects. It looks like I will have to refresh my notes for the Software Engineering course next month!

I’ve been warning about the safety and privacy risks of the Department of Health’s repeated attempts to centralise healthcare IT since 1995. Here is an analysis of patient privacy I wrote earlier this year, and here are my older writings on the security of clinical information systems. It doesn’t give me any great pleasure to be proved right, though.

Econometrics of wickedness

Banking security, Legal issues, News coverage, Security economics, Security engineering

Last Thursday I gave a tech talk at Google; you can now watch it online. It’s about work a number of us have done on searching for covert communities, with a focus on reputation thieves, phisherman, fake banks and other dodgy businesses.

While in California I also gave a talk on Information Security Economics, first as a keynote talk at Crypto and later as a seminar at Berkeley (the slides are here).

House of Lords Inquiry: Personal Internet Security

News coverage, Politics, Security economics

For the last year I’ve been involved with the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s Inquiry into “Personal Internet Security”. My role has been that of “Specialist Adviser”, which means that I have been briefing the committee about the issues, suggesting experts who they might wish to question, and assisting with the questions and their understanding of the answers they received. The Committee’s report is published today (Friday 10th August) and can be found on the Parliamentary website here.

For readers who are unfamiliar with the UK system — the House of Lords is the second chamber of the UK Parliament and is currently composed mainly of “the great and the good” although 92 hereditary peers still remain, including the Earl of Erroll who was one of the more computer-literate people on the committee.

The Select Committee reports are the result of in-depth study of particular topics, by people who reached the top of their professions (who are therefore quick learners, even if they start by knowing little of the topic), and their careful reasoning and endorsement of convincing expert views, carries considerable weight. The Government is obliged to formally respond, and there will, at some point, be a few hours of debate on the report in the House of Lords.

My appointment letter made it clear that I wasn’t required to publicly support the conclusions that their lordships came to, but I am generally happy to do so. There’s quite a lot of these conclusions and recommendations, but I believe that three areas particularly stand out.

The first area where the committee has assessed the evidence, not as experts, but as intelligent outsiders, is where the responsibility for Personal Internet Security lies. Almost every witness was asked about this, but very few gave an especially wide-ranging answer. A lot of people, notably the ISPs and the Government, dumped a lot of the responsibility onto individuals, which neatly avoided them having to shoulder very much themselves. But individuals are just not well-informed enough to understand the security implications of their actions, and although it’s desirable that they aren’t encouraged to do dumb things, most of the time they’re not in a position to know if an action is dumb or not. The committee have a series of recommendations to address this — there should be BSI kite marks to allow consumers to select services that are likely to be secure, ISPs should lose mere conduit exemptions if they don’t act to deal with compromised end-user machines and the banks should be statutorily obliged to bear losses from phishing. None of these measures will fix things directly, but they will change the incentives, and that has to be the way forward.

Secondly, the committee are recommending that the UK bring in a data breach notification law, along the general lines of the California law, and 34 other US states. This would require companies that leaked personal data (because of a hacked website, or a stolen laptop, or just by failing to secure it) to notify the people concerned that this had happened. At first that might sound rather weak — they just have to tell people; but in practice the US experience shows that it makes a difference. Companies don’t like the publicity, and of course the people involved are able to take precautions against identity theft (and tell all their friends quite how trustworthy the company is…) It’s a simple, low-key law, but it produces all the right incentives for taking security seriously, and for deploying systems such as whole-disk encryption that mean that losing a laptop stops being synonymous with losing data.

The third area, and this is where the committee has been most far-sighted, and therefore in the short term this may well be their most controversial recommendation, is that they wish to see a software liability regime, viz: that software companies should become responsible for their security failures. The benefits of such a regime were cogently argued by Bruce Schneier, who appeared before the committee in February, and I recommend reading his evidence to understand why he swayed the committee. Unlike the data breach notification law the committee recommendation isn’t to get a statute onto the books sooner rather than later. There’s all sorts of competition issues and international ramifications — and in practice it may be a decade or two before there’s sufficient case law for vendors to know quite where they stand if they ship a product with a buffer overflow, or a race condition, or just a default password. Almost everyone who gave evidence, apart from Bruce Schneier, argued against such a law, but their lordships have seen through the special pleading and the self-interest and looked to find a way to make the Internet a safer place. Though I can foresee a lot of complications and a rocky road towards liability, looking to the long term, I think their lordships have got this one right.

Electoral Commission releases e-voting and e-counting reports

Electronic voting, News coverage

Today, the Electoral Commission released their evaluation reports on the May 2007 e-voting and e-counting pilots held in England. Each of the pilot areas has a report from the Electoral Commission and the e-counting trials are additionally covered by technical reports from Ovum, the Electoral Commission’s consultants. Each of the changes piloted receives its own summary report: electronic counting, electronic voting, advanced voting and signing in polling stations. Finally, there are a set of key findings, both from the Electoral Commission and from Ovum.

Richard Clayton and I acted as election observers for the Bedford e-counting trial, on behalf of the Open Rights Group, and our discussion of the resulting report can be found in an earlier post. I also gave a talk on a few of the key points.

The Commission’s criticism of e-counting and e-voting was scathing; concerning the latter saying that the “security risk involved was significant and unacceptable.” They recommend against further trials until the problems identified are resolved. Quality assurance and planning were found to be inadequate, predominantly stemming from insufficient timescales. In the case of the six e-counting trials, three were abandoned, two were delayed, leaving only one that could be classed as a success. Poor transparency and value for money are also cited as problems. More worryingly, the Commission identify a failure to learn from the lessons of previous pilot programmes.

The reports covering the Bedford trials largely match my personal experience of the count and add some details which were not available to the election observers (in particular, explaining that the reason for some of the system shutdowns was to permit re-configuration of the OCR algorithms, and that due to delays at the printing contractor, no testing with actual ballot papers was performed). One difference is that the Ovum report was more generous than the Commission report regarding the candidate perceptions, saying “Apart from the issue of time, none of the stakeholders questioned the integrity of the system or the results achieved.” This discrepancy could be because the Ovum and Commission representatives left before the midnight call for a recount, by candidates who had lost confidence in the integrity of the results.

There is much more detail to the reports than I have been able to summarise here, so if you are interested in electronic elections, I suggest you read them yourselves.

The Open Rights Group has in general welcomed the Electoral Commission’s report, but feel that the inherent problems resulting from the use of computers in elections have not been fully addressed. The results of the report have also been covered by the media, such as the BBC: “Halt e-voting, says election body” and The Guardian: “Electronic voting not safe, warns election watchdog”.

Results of global Internet filtering survey

Internet censorship, News coverage

At their conference in Oxford, the OpenNet Initiative have released the results from their first global Internet filtering survey. This announcement has been widely covered in the media.

Out of the 41 countries surveyed, 25 were found to impose filtering, though the topics blocked and extent of blocking varies dramatically.

Results can be seen on the filtering map and an URL checker. The full report, including detailed country and region summaries, will be published in the book “Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering“.

Extreme online risks

Banking security, Legal issues, News coverage

An article in the Guardian, and a more detailed story in PC Pro, give the background to Operation Ore. In this operation, hundreds (and possibly thousands) of innocent men were raided by the police on suspicion of downloading child pornography, when in fact they had simply been victims of credit card fraud. The police appear to have completely misunderstood the forensic evidence; once the light began to dawn, it seems that they closed ranks and covered up. These stories follow an earlier piece in PC Pro which first brought the problem to public attention in 2005.

Recently we were asked by the Lords Science and Technology Committee whether failures of online security caused real problems, or were exaggerated. While there is no doubt that many people talk up the threats, here is a real case in which online fraud has done much worse harm than simply emptying bank accounts. Having the police turn up at six in the morning, search your house, tell your wife that you’re a suspected pedophile, and with social workers in tow to interview your children, must be a horrific experience. Over thirty men have killed themselves. At least one appears to have been innocent. As this story develops, I believe it will come to be seen as the worst policing scandal in the UK for many years.

I remarked recently that it was a bad idea for the police to depend on the banks for expertise on card fraud, and to accept their money to fund such investigations as the banks wanted carried out. Although Home Office and DTI ministers say they’re happy with these arrangements, the tragic events of Operation Ore show that the police should not compromise their independence and their technical capability for short-term political or financial convenience. The results can simply be tragic.

TK Maxx and banking regulation

Banking security, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Security economics

Today’s news coverage of the theft of 46m credit card numbers from TK Maxx underlines a number of important issues in security, economics and regulation. First, US cardholders are treated much better than customers here – over there, the store will have to write to them and apologise. Here, cardholders might not have been told at all were it not that some US cardholders also had their data stolen from the computer centre in Watford. We need a breach reporting law in the UK; even the ICO agrees.

Second, from the end of this month, UK citizens won’t be able to report bank or card fraud to the police; you’ll have to report it to the bank instead, which may or may not then report it to the police. (The Home Office wants to massage the crime statistics downwards, while the banks want to be able to control and direct such police investigations as take place.)

Third, this week the UK government agreed to support the EU Payment Services Directive, which (unless the European Parliament amends it) looks set to level down consumer protection against card fraud in Europe to the lowest common denominator.

Oh, and I think it’s disgraceful that the police’s Dedicated Cheque and Plastic Crime Unit is jointly funded and staffed by the banks. The Financial Ombudsman service, which is also funded by the banks, is notoriously biased against cardholders, and it’s not acceptable for the police to follow them down that path. When bankers tell customers who complain about fraud ‘Our systems are secure so it must be your fault’, that’s fraud. Police officers should not side with fraudsters against their victims. And it’s not just financial crime investigations that suffer because policemen leave it to the banks to investigate and adjudicate card fraud; when policemen don’t understand fraud, they screw up elsewhere too. For example, there have been dozens of cases where people whose credit card numbers were stolen and used to buy child pornography were wrongfully prosecuted, including at least one tragic case.

Passports and biometric certificates

News coverage, Security engineering

A recurring media story over the past half year has been that “a person’s identity can be stolen from new biometric passports”, which are “easy to clone” and therefore “not fit for purpose”. Most of these reports began with a widely quoted presentation by Lukas Grunwald in Las Vegas in August 2006, and continued with a report in the Guardian last November and one in this week’s Daily Mail on experiments by Adam Laurie.

I have closely followed the development of the ISO/ICAO standards for the biometric passport back in 2002/2003. In my view, the worries behind this media coverage are mainly based on a deep misunderstanding of what a “biometric passport” really is. The recent reports bring nothing to light that was not already well understood, anticipated and discussed during the development of the system more than four years ago. Continue reading Passports and biometric certificates →

Chip & PIN relay attacks

Banking security, Legal issues, News coverage, Security economics

Saar Drimer and myself have shown that the Chip & PIN system, used for card payments in the UK, is vulnerable to a new kind of fraud. By “relaying” information from a genuine card, a Chip & PIN terminal in another shop, can be made to accept a counterfeit card. We previously discussed this possibility in “Chip & Spin” but it was not until now that we implemented and tested the attack.

A fraudster sets up a fake terminal in a busy shop or restaurant. When a genuine customer inserts their card into this terminal, the fraudster’s accomplice, in another shop, inserts their counterfeit card into the merchant’s terminal. The fake terminal reads details from the genuine card, and relays them to the counterfeit card, so that it will be accepted. The PIN is recorded by the fake terminal and sent to the accomplice for them to enter, and they can then walk off with the goods. To the victim, everything was normal, but when their statement arrives, they will find that they have been defrauded.

Equipment used in relay attack

From the banks’ perspective, there will be nothing unusual about this transaction. To them, it will seem as if the real card was used, with a chip and along with the correct PIN. Banks have previously claimed that if a fraudulent Chip & PIN transaction was placed, then the customer must have been negligent in protecting their card and PIN, and so must be liable. This work shows that despite customers taking all due care in using their card, they can still be the victim of fraud.

For more information, we have a summary of the technique and FAQ. This attack will be featured on Watchdog, tonight (6 February) at 19:00 GMT on BBC One. The programme will show how we successfully sent details between two shops in the same street, but it should work equally well, via mobile phone, to the other side of the world.

It is unlikely that criminals are currently using techniques such as this, as there are less sophisticated attacks which Chip & PIN remains vulnerable to. However, as security is improved, the relay attack may become a significant source of fraud. Therefore, it is important that defences against this attack are deployed sooner rather than later. We discuss defences in our draft academic paper, submitted for review at a peer reviewed conference.

Update (2007-01-10): The segment of Watchdog featuring our contribution has been posted to YouTube.

Health database optout – latest news

Legal issues, News coverage, Security engineering

This morning I debated health privacy on Radio 4’s Today programme with health minister Lord Warner. You can listen to the debate here, and there is an earlier comment by Michael Summers of the Patients’ Association here.

I support a campaign by TheBigOptOut.org which has so far persuaded thousands of people to write to their GPs forbidding the upload of their patient records to central systems. Once they are uploaded, you’ll have to prove ‘substantial mental distress’ to the government (as Lord Warner says) to get them removed or restricted. It is much simpler to tell your GP not to upload them in the first place (and you can always change your mind later if the Government delivers on its claims about safety and privacy).

For more, see TheBigOptOut.org, nhs-it.info and my previous blog posts here, here and here, and our work on children’s databases (children’s safety and privacy might be particularly at risk from the proposals, as I explain in the debate).