Whodunnit? Fascinating Forensics by BBC’s Naked Scientists

News coverage, Security psychology

BBC’s Naked Scientists recently did an hour-long show with live audience about forensic science,  during which they solved a (fictitious) murder with the help of six forensic scientists and practitioners.

Chris Smith and Ginny Smith covered the forensic process from crime scene to court room and discussed all the evidence in between, including how to retrieve forensic evidence from a crime scene, digital forensics and the (lack of) randomness of numbers, toxicology, pathology, eye-witness testimony and our work on motion-based lie detection.

You can find the podcast here.

Decepticon: International Conference on Deceptive Behavior

Call for papers, Security psychology

Call for papers

We are proud to present DECEPTICON 2015 – International Conference on Deceptive Behavior, to be held 24-26 August 2015 at the University of Cambridge, UK. Decepticon brings together researchers, practitioners, and like-minded individuals with a taste for interdisciplinary science in the detection and prevention of deception.

We are organising two panel sessions; one on Future Directions in Lie Detection Research with Aldert Vrij, Par-Anders Granhag, Steven Porter and Timothy Levine, and one on Technology Assisted Lie Detection with Jeff Hancock, Judee Burgoon, Bruno Verschuere and Giorgio Ganis. We broadly and warmly welcome people with varying scientific backgrounds. To cover the diversity of approaches to deception research, our scientific committee members are experts in fields from psychology to computer science, and from philosophy to behavioral economics. For example, scientific committee members from the University of Cambridge are Ross Anderson, Nicholas Humphrey, Peter Robinson and Sophie Van Der Zee.

We strongly encourage practitioners, academics and students alike to submit abstracts that touch on the topic of deception. The extended deadline for abstract submissions (max. 300 words) for an oral, panel or poster presentation is 8 APRIL 2015. Interested in attending, but don’t feel like presenting? You can register for the conference here.

Please visit our webpage for more information. We are happy to answer any questions!

We hope to see you in Cambridge,

DECEPTICON TEAM

 

Talk in Oxford at 5pm today on the ethics and economics of privacy in a world of Big Data

Academic papers, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics, Security psychology, Seminars

Today at 5pm I’ll be giving the Bellwether Lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute. My topic is Big Conflicts: the ethics and economics of privacy in a world of Big Data.

I’ll be discussing a recent Nuffield Bioethics Council report of which I was one of the authors. In it, we asked what medical ethics should look like in a world of ‘Big Data’ and pervasive genomics. It will take the law some time to catch up with what’s going on, so how should researchers behave meanwhile so that the people whose data we use don’t get annoyed or surprised, and so that we can defend our actions if challenged? We came up with four principles, which I’ll discuss. I’ll also talk about how they might apply more generally, for example to my own field of security research.

There exists a classical model of the photon after all

Academic papers, Cryptology, Hardware & signals, Seminars

Many people assume that quantum mechanics cannot emerge from classical phenomena, because no-one has so far been able to think of a classical model of light that is consistent with Maxwell’s equations and reproduces the Bell test results quantitatively.

Today Robert Brady and I unveil just such a model. It turns out that the solution was almost in plain sight, in James Clerk Maxwell’s 1861 paper On Phyiscal Lines of Force in which he derived Maxwell’s equations, on the assumption that magnetic lines of force were vortices in a fluid. Updating this with modern knowledge of quantised magnetic flux, we show that if you model a flux tube as a phase vortex in an inviscid compressible fluid, then wavepackets sent down this vortex obey Maxwell’s equations to first order; that they can have linear or circular polarisation; and that the correlation measured between the polarisation of two cogenerated wavepackets is exactly the same as is predicted by quantum mechanics and measured in the Bell tests.

This follows work last year in which we explained Yves Couder’s beautiful bouncing-droplet experiments. There, a completely classical system is able to exhibit quantum-mechanical behaviour as the wavefunction ψ appears as a modulation on the driving oscillation, which provides coherence across the system. Similarly, in the phase vortex model, the magnetic field provides the long-range order and the photon is a modulation of it.

We presented this work yesterday at the 2015 Symposium of the Trinity Mathematical Society. Our talk slides are here and there is an audio recording here.

If our sums add up, the consequences could be profound. First, it will explain why quantum computers don’t work, and blow away the security ‘proofs’ for entanglement-based quantum cryptosystems (we already wrote about that here and here). Second, if the fundamental particles are just quasiparticles in a superfluid quantum vacuum, there is real hope that we can eventually work out where all the mysterious constants in the Standard Model come from. And third, there is no longer any reason to believe in multiple universes, or effects that propagate faster than light or backward in time – indeed the whole ‘spooky action at a distance’ to which Einstein took such exception. He believed that action in physics was local and causal, as most people do; our paper shows that the main empirical argument against classical models of reality is unsound.

Media coverage “to freeze or not to freeze” paper

Academic papers, News coverage, Security psychology

On the 5th of January this year we presented a paper on the automatic detection of deception based on full-body movements at HICSS (Hawaii), which we blogged about here at LBT. We measured the movements of truth tellers and liars using full-body motion capture suits and found that liars move more than truth tellers; when combined with interviewing techniques designed to increase the cognitive load of liars, but not of truth tellers, liars even moved almost twice as much as truth tellers. These results indicate that absolute movement, when measured automatically, may potentially be a reliable cue to deceit. We are now aiming to find out if this increase in body movements when lying is stable across situations and people. Simultaneously, we are developing two lines of technology that will make this method more usable in practice. First, we are building software to analyse behaviors in real-time. This will enable us to analyse behavior whilst it is happening (i.e., during the interview), instead of afterwards. Second, we are investigating remote ways to analyse behavior, so interviewees will not have to wear a body-suit when being interviewed. We will keep you updated on new developments.

In the meantime, we received quite a lot of national and international media attention. Here is some tv and radio coverage on our work by Dailymotion, Fox (US), BBC world radio, Zoomin TV (NL), WNL Vandaag de dag (NL, deel 2, starts at 5:20min), RTL Boulevard (NL), Radio 2 (NL), BNR (NL), Radio 538 (NL). Our work was also covered by newspapers, websites and blogs, including the Guardian, the Register, the Telegraph, the Telegraph incl. polygraph, the Daily Mail, Mail Online, Cambridge News, King’s College Cambridge, Lancaster University, Security Lancaster, Bruce Schneier’s blog, International Business Times, RT,   PC World, PC Advisor, Engadget, News Nation, Techie News, ABP Live, TweakTown, Computer World, MyScience, King World News, La Celosia (Spanish),de Morgen (BE), NRC (NL), Algemeen Dagblad (NL), de Volkskrant (NL), KIJK (NL), and RTV Utrecht (NL).

 

 

A dubious article for a dubious journal

Academic papers, Security economics

This morning I received a request to review a manuscript for the “Journal of Internet and Information Systems“. That’s standard for academics — you regularly get requests to do some work for the community for free!

However this was a little out of the ordinary in that the title of the manuscript was “THE ASSESSING CYBER CRIME AND IT IMPACT ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN NIGERIA” which is not, I feel, particularly grammatical English. I’d expect an editor to have done something about that before I was sent the manuscript…

I stared hard at the email headers (after all I’d just been sent some .docx files out of the blue) and it seems that the Journals Review Department of academicjournals.org uses Microsoft’s platform for their email (so no smoking gun from a spear-fishing point of view). So I took some appropriate precautions and opened the manuscript file.

It was dreadful … and read like it had been copied from somewhere else and patched together — indeed one page appeared twice! However, closer examination suggested it had been scanned rather than copy-typed.

For example:

The primary maturation of malicious agents attacking information system has changed over time from pride and prestige to financial again.

Which, some searches will show you comes from page 22 of Policing Cyber Crime written by Petter Gottschalk in 2010 — a book I haven’t read so I’ve no idea how good it is. Clearly “maturation” should be “motivation”, “system” should “systems” and “again” should be “gain”.

Much of the rest of the material (I didn’t spend a long time on it) was from the same source. Since the book is widely available for download in PDF format (though I do wonder how many versions were authorised), it’s pretty odd to have scanned it.

I then looked harder at the Journal itself — which is one of a group of 107 open-access journals. According to this report they were at one time misleadingly indicating an association with Elsevier, although they didn’t do that on the email they sent me.

The journals appear on “Beall’s list“: a compendium of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers and journals. That is, publishing your article in one of these venues is likely to make your CV look worse rather than better.

In traditional academic publishing the author gets their paper published for free and libraries pay (quite substantial amounts) to receive the journal, which the library users can then read for free, but the article may not be available to non-library users. The business model of “open-access” is that the author pays for having their paper published, and then it is freely available to everyone. There is now much pressure to ensure that academic work is widely available and so open-access is very much in vogue.

There are lots of entirely legitimate open-access journals with exceedingly high standards — but also some very dubious journals which are perceived of as accepting most anything and just collecting the money to keep the publisher in the style to which they have become accustomed (as an indication of the money involved, the fee charged by the Journal of Internet and Information Systems is $550).

I sent back an email to the Journal saying “Even a journal with your reputation should not accept this item“.

What does puzzle me is why anyone would submit a plagiarised article to an open-access journal with a poor reputation. Paying money to get your ripped-off material published in a dubious journal doesn’t seem to be good tactics for anyone. Perhaps it’s just that the journal wants to list me (enrolling my reputation) as one of their reviewers? Or perhaps I was spear-phished after all? Time will tell!

Can we have medical privacy, cloud computing and genomics all at the same time?

Academic papers, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security psychology

Today sees the publication of a report I helped to write for the Nuffield Bioethics Council on what happens to medical ethics in a world of cloud-based medical records and pervasive genomics.

As the information we gave to our doctors in private to help them treat us is now collected and treated as an industrial raw material, there has been scandal after scandal. From failures of anonymisation through unethical sales to the care.data catastrophe, things just seem to get worse. Where is it all going, and what must a medical data user do to behave ethically?

We put forward four principles. First, respect persons; do not treat their confidential data like were coal or bauxite. Second, respect established human-rights and data-protection law, rather than trying to find ways round it. Third, consult people who’ll be affected or who have morally relevant interests. And fourth, tell them what you’ve done – including errors and security breaches.

The collection, linking and use of data in biomedical research and health care: ethical issues took over a year to write. Our working group came from the medical profession, academics, insurers and drug companies. We had lots of arguments. But it taught us a lot, and we hope it will lead to a more informed debate on some very important issues. And since medicine is the canary in the mine, we hope that the privacy lessons can be of value elsewhere – from consumer data to law enforcement and human rights.

Financial Cryptography 2015

Academic papers, Authentication, Banking security, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security engineering

I will be trying to liveblog Financial Cryptography 2015.

The opening keynote was by Gavin Andresen, chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, and his title was “What Satoshi didn’t know.” The main unknown six years ago when bitcoin launched was whether it would bootstrap; Satoshi thought it might be used as a spam filter or a practical hashcash. In reality it was someone buying a couple of pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. Another unknown when Gavin got involved in 2010 was whether it was legal; if you’d asked the SEC then they might have classified it as a Ponzi scheme, but now their alerts are about bitcoin being used in Ponzi schemes. The third thing was how annoying people can be on the Internet; people will abuse your system for fun if it’s popular. An example was penny flooding, where you send coins back and forth between your sybils all day long. Gavin invented “proof of stake”; in its early form it meant prioritising payers who turn over coins less frequently. The idea was that scarcity plus utility equals value; in addition to the bitcoins themselves, another scarce resources emerges as the old, unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs). Perhaps these could be used for further DoS attack prevention or a pseudonymous identity anchor.

It’s not even clear that Satoshi is or was a cryptographer; he used only ECC / ECDSA, hashes and SSL (naively), he didn’t bother compressing public keys, and comments suggest he wasn’t up on the latest crypto research. In addition, the rules for letting transactions into the chain are simple; there’s no subtlety about transaction meaning, which is mixed up with validation and transaction fees; a programming-languages guru would have done things differently. Bitcoin now allows hashes of redemption scripts, so that the script doesn’t have to be disclosed upfront. Another recent innovation is using invertible Bloom lookup tables (IBLTs) to transmit expected differences rather than transmitting all transactions over the network twice. Also, since 2009 we have FHE, NIZLPs and SNARKs from the crypto research folks; the things on which we still need more research include pseudonymous identity, practical privacy, mining scalability, probabilistic transaction checking, and whether we can use streaming algorithms. In questions, Gavin remarked that regulators rather like the idea that there was a public record of all transactions; they might be more negative if it were completely anonymous. In the future, only recent transactions will be universally available; if you want the old stuff you’ll have to store it. Upgrading is hard though; Gavin’s big task this year is to increase the block size. Getting everyone in the world to update their software at once is not trivial. People say: “Why do you have to fix the software? Isn’t bitcoin done?”

I’ll try to blog the refereed talks in comments to this post.

Launch of security economics MOOC

Security economics, Security engineering, Security psychology

TU Delft has just launched a massively open online course on security economics to which three current group members (Sophie van der Zee, David Modoc and I) have contributed lectures, along with one alumnus (Tyler Moore). Michel van Eeten of Delft is running the course (Delft does MOOCs while Cambridge doesn’t yet), and there are also talks from Rainer Boehme. This was pre-announced here by Tyler in November.

The videos will be available for free in April; if you want to take the course now, I’m afraid it costs $250. The deal is that EdX paid for the production and will sell it as a professional course to security managers in industry and government; once that’s happened we’ll make it free to all. This is the same basic approach as with my book: rope in a commercial publisher to help produce first-class content that then becomes free to all. But if your employer is thinking of giving you some security education, you could do a lot worse than to support the project and enrol here.