Schneier on Security

A blog covering security and security technology.

Squids on the Economist Cover

Four squids on the cover of this week's Economist represent the four massive (and intrusive) data-driven Internet giants: Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.

Interestingly, these are the same four companies I've been listing as the new corporate threat to the Internet.

The first of three pillars propping up this outside threat are big data collectors, which in addition to Apple and Google, Schneier identified as Amazon and Facebook. (Notice Microsoft didn't make the cut.) The goal of their data collection is for marketers to be able to make snap decisions about the product tastes, credit worthiness, and employment suitability of millions of people. Often, this information is fed into systems maintained by governments.

Notice that Microsoft didn't make the Economist's cut either.

I gave that talk at the RSA Conference in February of this year. The link in the article is from another conference the week before, where I test-drove the talk.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.

Posted on December 7, 2012 at 4:04 PM • 12 Comments

Comedy and Cryptography

Not the sort of pairing I normally think of, but:

Robin Ince and Brian Cox are joined on stage by comedian Dave Gorman, author and Enigma Machine owner Simon Singh and Bletchley Park enthusiast Dr Sue Black as they discuss secret science, code-breaking and the extraordinary achievements of the team working at Bletchley during WW II.

Audio here.

Posted on December 6, 2012 at 10:59 AM • 8 Comments

Roger Williams' Cipher Cracked

Another historical cipher, this one from the 1600s, has been cracked:

Senior math major Lucas Mason-Brown, who has done the majority of the decoding, said his first instinct was to develop a statistical tool. The 21-year-old from Belmont, Mass., used frequency analysis, which looks at the frequency of letters or groups of letters in a text, but initially didn't get far.

He picked up critical clues after learning Williams had been trained in shorthand as a court stenographer in London, and built his own proprietary shorthand off an existing system. Mason-Brown refined his analysis and came up with a rough key.

Williams' system consisted of 28 symbols that stand for a combination of English letters or sounds. How they're arranged is key to their meaning; arrange them one way and you get one word, arrange them another, you get something different. One major complication, according to Mason-Brown: Williams often improvised.

Posted on December 5, 2012 at 6:01 AM • 14 Comments

Feudal Security

It’s a feudal world out there.

Some of us have pledged our allegiance to Google: We have Gmail accounts, we use Google Calendar and Google Docs, and we have Android phones. Others have pledged allegiance to Apple: We have Macintosh laptops, iPhones, and iPads; and we let iCloud automatically synchronize and back up everything. Still others of us let Microsoft do it all. Or we buy our music and e-books from Amazon, which keeps records of what we own and allows downloading to a Kindle, computer, or phone. Some of us have pretty much abandoned e-mail altogether … for Facebook.

These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals. We might refuse to pledge allegiance to all of them -- or to a particular one we don't like. Or we can spread our allegiance around. But either way, it's becoming increasingly difficult to not pledge allegiance to at least one of them.

Feudalism provides security. Classical medieval feudalism depended on overlapping, complex, hierarchical relationships. There were oaths and obligations: a series of rights and privileges. A critical aspect of this system was protection: vassals would pledge their allegiance to a lord, and in return, that lord would protect them from harm.

Of course, I'm romanticizing here; European history was never this simple, and the description is based on stories of that time, but that's the general model.

And it's this model that's starting to permeate computer security today.

I Pledge Allegiance to the United States of Convenience

Traditional computer security centered around users. Users had to purchase and install anti-virus software and firewalls, ensure their operating system and network were configured properly, update their software, and generally manage their own security.

This model is breaking, largely due to two developments:

1. New Internet-enabled devices where the vendor maintains more control over the hardware and software than we do -- like the iPhone and Kindle; and
2. Services where the host maintains our data for us -- like Flickr and Hotmail.

Now, we users must trust the security of these hardware manufacturers, software vendors, and cloud providers.

We choose to do it because of the convenience, redundancy, automation, and shareability. We like it when we can access our e-mail anywhere, from any computer. We like it when we can restore our contact lists after we've lost our phones. We want our calendar entries to automatically appear on all of our devices. These cloud storage sites do a better job of backing up our photos and files than we would manage by ourselves; Apple does a great job keeping malware out of its iPhone apps store.

In this new world of computing, we give up a certain amount of control, and in exchange we trust that our lords will both treat us well and protect us from harm. Not only will our software be continually updated with the newest and coolest functionality, but we trust it will happen without our being overtaxed by fees and required upgrades. We trust that our data and devices won't be exposed to hackers, criminals, and malware. We trust that governments won't be allowed to illegally spy on us.

Trust is our only option. In this system, we have no control over the security provided by our feudal lords. We don't know what sort of security methods they're using, or how they're configured. We mostly can't install our own security products on iPhones or Android phones; we certainly can't install them on Facebook, Gmail, or Twitter. Sometimes we have control over whether or not to accept the automatically flagged updates -- iPhone, for example -- but we rarely know what they're about or whether they'll break anything else. (On the Kindle, we don't even have that freedom.)

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I'm not saying that feudal security is all bad. For the average user, giving up control is largely a good thing. These software vendors and cloud providers do a lot better job of security than the average computer user would. Automatic cloud backup saves a lot of data; automatic updates prevent a lot of malware. The network security at any of these providers is better than that of most home users.

Feudalism is good for the individual, for small startups, and for medium-sized businesses that can't afford to hire their own in-house or specialized expertise. Being a vassal has its advantages, after all.

For large organizations, however, it's more of a mixed bag. These organizations are used to trusting other companies with critical corporate functions: They've been outsourcing their payroll, tax preparation, and legal services for decades. But IT regulations often require audits. Our lords don't allow vassals to audit them, even if those vassals are themselves large and powerful.

Yet feudal security isn't without its risks.

Our lords can make mistakes with security, as recently happened with Apple, Facebook, and Photobucket. They can act arbitrarily and capriciously, as Amazon did when it cut off a Kindle user for living in the wrong country. They tether us like serfs; just try to take data from one digital lord to another.

Ultimately, they will always act in their own self-interest, as companies do when they mine our data in order to sell more advertising and make more money. These companies own us, so they can sell us off -- again, like serfs -- to rival lords...or turn us in to the authorities.

Historically, early feudal arrangements were ad hoc, and the more powerful party would often simply renege on his part of the bargain. Eventually, the arrangements were formalized and standardized: both parties had rights and privileges (things they could do) as well as protections (things they couldn't do to each other).

Today's internet feudalism, however, is ad hoc and one-sided. We give companies our data and trust them with our security, but we receive very few assurances of protection in return, and those companies have very few restrictions on what they can do.

This needs to change. There should be limitations on what cloud vendors can do with our data; rights, like the requirement that they delete our data when we want them to; and liabilities when vendors mishandle our data.

Like everything else in security, it's a trade-off. We need to balance that trade-off. In Europe, it was the rise of the centralized state and the rule of law that undermined the ad hoc feudal system; it provided more security and stability for both lords and vassals. But these days, government has largely abdicated its role in cyberspace, and the result is a return to the feudal relationships of yore.

Perhaps instead of hoping that our Internet-era lords will be sufficiently clever and benevolent -- or putting our faith in the Robin Hoods who block phone surveillance and circumvent DRM systems -- it's time we step in in our role as governments (both national and international) to create the regulatory environments that protect us vassals (and the lords as well). Otherwise, we really are just serfs.

A version of this essay was originally published on Wired.com.

Posted on December 3, 2012 at 7:24 AM • 72 Comments

Friday Squid Blogging: Possible Squid Eyeball Found in Florida

It's the size of a softball. No sign of the squid it came from.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.

Posted on November 30, 2012 at 2:18 PM • 60 Comments

IT for Oppression

I've been thinking a lot about how information technology, and the Internet in particular, is becoming a tool for oppressive governments. As Evgeny Morozov describes in his great book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, repressive regimes all over the world are using the Internet to more efficiently implement surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. And they're getting really good at it.

For a lot of us who imagined that the Internet would spark an inevitable wave of Internet freedom, this has come as a bit of a surprise. But it turns out that information technology is not just a tool for freedom-fighting rebels under oppressive governments, it's also a tool for those oppressive governments. Basically, IT magnifies power; the more power you have, the more it can be magnified in IT.

I think we got this wrong -- anyone remember John Perry Barlow's 1996 manifesto? -- because, like most technologies, IT technologies are first used by the more agile individuals and groups outside the formal power structures. In the same way criminals can make use of a technological innovation faster than the police can, dissidents in countries all over the world were able to make use of Internet technologies faster than governments could. Unfortunately, and inevitably, governments have caught up.

This is the "security gap" I talk about in the closing chapters of Liars and Outliers.

I thought about all these things as I read this article on how the Syrian government hacked into the computers of dissidents:

The cyberwar in Syria began with a feint. On Feb. 8, 2011, just as the Arab Spring was reaching a crescendo, the government in Damascus suddenly reversed a long-standing ban on websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the Arabic version of Wikipedia. It was an odd move for a regime known for heavy-handed censorship; before the uprising, police regularly arrested bloggers and raided Internet cafes. And it came at an odd time. Less than a month earlier demonstrators in Tunisia, organizing themselves using social networking services, forced their president to flee the country after 23 years in office. Protesters in Egypt used the same tools to stage protests that ultimately led to the end of Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule. The outgoing regimes in both countries deployed riot police and thugs and tried desperately to block the websites and accounts affiliated with the revolutionaries. For a time, Egypt turned off the Internet altogether.

Syria, however, seemed to be taking the opposite tack. Just as protesters were casting about for the means with which to organize and broadcast their messages, the government appeared to be handing them the keys.

[...]

The first documented attack in the Syrian cyberwar took place in early May 2011, some two months after the start of the uprising. It was a clumsy one. Users who tried to access Facebook in Syria were presented with a fake security certificate that triggered a warning on most browsers. People who ignored it and logged in would be giving up their user name and password, and with them, their private messages and contacts.

I dislike this being called a "cyberwar," but that's my only complaint with the article.

There are no easy solutions here, especially because technologies that defend against one of those three things -- surveillance, censorship, and propaganda -- often make one of the others easier. But this is an important problem to solve if we want the Internet to be a vehicle of freedom and not control.

Posted on November 30, 2012 at 5:23 AM • 43 Comments

Advances in Attacking ATMs

Cash traps and card traps are the new thing:

[Card traps] involve devices that fit over the card acceptance slot and include a razor-edged spring trap that prevents the customer’s card from being ejected from the ATM when the transaction is completed.

"Spring traps are still being widely used," EAST wrote in its most recently European Fraud Update. "Once the card has been inserted, these prevent the card being returned to the customer and also stop the ATM from retracting it. According to reports from one country ­ despite warning messages that appear on the ATM screen or are displayed on the ATM fascia ­ customers are still not reporting when their cards are captured, leading to substantial losses from ATM or point-of-sale transactions."

More descriptions, and photos of the devices, in the article.

Posted on November 29, 2012 at 4:36 PM • 16 Comments

James Bond Movie-Plot Threats

Amusing post on the plausibility of the evil plans from the various movies.

Posted on November 28, 2012 at 1:30 PM • 21 Comments

The Psychology of IT Security Trade-offs

Good article. I agree with the conclusion that the solution isn't to convince people to make better choices, but to change the IT architecture so that it's easier to make better choices.

Posted on November 28, 2012 at 5:55 AM • 13 Comments

Classified Information Confetti

Some of the confetti at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York consisted of confidential documents from the Nassau County Police Department, shredded sideways.

Posted on November 27, 2012 at 12:12 PM • 15 Comments

Hackback

Stewart Baker, Orin Kerr, and Eugene Volokh on the legality of hackback.

Posted on November 27, 2012 at 6:39 AM • 17 Comments

Liars and Outliers Ebook 50% Off and DRM-Free

Today only, O'Reilly is offering 50% off all its ebooks, including Liars and Outliers. This is probably the cheapest you'll find a DRM-free copy of the book.

Posted on November 26, 2012 at 9:48 AM • 9 Comments

Schneier.com is a personal website. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of BT.