Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • November 10, 2023 8:47 PM

@ vas pup, ALL,

“Sergey Brin’s zeppelin: The biggest, greenest aircraft in the world”

It also has the largest “sail area” thus is very susceptable to wind and weather.

The other issue is it uses hellium a nobal gas which is in limited supply and getting rarer each year for various reasons.

Also hellium does not give much in the way of lift per cubic meter.

All of which is why scientists and engineers are still looking at hydrogen. As a “lift gas” it is probably the most plentiful not just on Earth but in the Universe.

Despite it’s undeserved reputation, contrary to what people think hydrogen when used as a lift gas does not “explode”[1], yes it burns when oxygen is present and releases significant energy but not much differently to the myriad of hydrocarbon gasses we chose to have around us on a daily basis (have a look at acetylene which can be more problematic).

You are actually in more danger from hydrogen’s use with fuel-cells and similar due to it being stored both cryogenically and at preasure (also you can actually “drown” in the vapour trappend in overhead spaces). Part of which is it’s main disadvantage is that it is so small as a molecule it can escape through most forms of seals, pipes and containment vessels and can cause “embrittlement” in the process.

[1] Hydrogen when used as a lift gas actually burns as the surface of a vapour cloud as oxygen in the air comes into contact with it. Called an “Expanding vapour fire” it’s actually got little or no kinetic energy involved and burns quite slowely and without a shockwave. What engineers tend to worry about more is preasure container vessel explosions of liquified gases that get heated by a fire or similar to the point of containment rupture these are called “Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion”(BLEVE) and the kinetic energy is due to the sudden preasure release, BLEVE do not involve chemical reactions of the liquid just it’s expanding phase change (which is why superheated water can and does BLEVE). When the liquid is a fuel that at or near atmospheric preasure is involved and is ignited it is considered a secondary expanding vapour fire, in both cases the energy wave is usually subsonic. To make it hypersonic generally requires specialised conditions, that is the fuel and oxidizing agent have to be pre-mixed at near optimal values, and the chemical reaction start at or near the center of the cloud of vapour and expands outwards at a rate considerably above the speed of sound, thus causing a conpressed energy shock wave as seen with high explosives. This is the principle used with “Fuel Air Explosives”(FAE/FAX) used in the likes of hyperbaric weapons and is going to be a very very low probability of occurance within an airship lift gas system, some might say vanishingly improbable to impossible.

Clive Robinson • November 10, 2023 11:36 PM

@ Type1Font,

Re : There is only one secure authentication factor.

“I want a “secret” that isn’t based on my biometrics to be part of what secures my info.”

1, Something you are : Biometrics.

Remember bio-metrics are grossly inacurate or highly unreliable, worse as some one noted,

“You need a meat cleaver or major surgery to change them, and a fraudster needs only the first to steal them.”

Actually it’s worse a lot worse… One of the fundemental principles of Forensics expressed just over a century ago is the,

“Locard exchange principle”

Also said to be,

“Every contact leaves a trace, however small.”

That is the suspect leaves part of them at the scene, and takes part of the scene away on them. Find either and you link the suspect to the scene.

But think about it a little further, these are for instance,

Fingerprints, DNA, footwear marks, gait stretch, hand prints, video and audio recordings.

All of which are “bio-metric measures”. So have no security value at all as they are easily replicated in most cases.

Worse still you can be forced against your will to use them, on the basic principle of “Might is right” and some thug in a back room claiming to be “Guard Labour” will physically assult and mentally abuse you to do so.

2, Something you have : Tokens.

Similar arguments can be made about these.

But a point to note they are also a “Physical Distinquisher” thus remove any potential for “deniability”.

3, Something you know : Information.

The first two Biometrics and Tokens are when all is said and done at the base of it “Based on tangible physical items”.

As such these are never going to be secure and also have other attributes that are worse.

Information however is “intangible non physical items”. Few of us can remember a sufficiently secure “secret” and judges are well versed in locking people up indefinitely on “contempt charges” to make them disclose them.

Thus something you know whilst better than the other two is insufficient on their own.

There are two limitations judges can not coerce you against,

1, Time.
2, Outside of jurisdiction.

And also in some but not all cases,

3, Out of jurisdiction secret holder.

Let’s say your mobile phone is locked by default, thus if it’s grabbed from you it’s use is in theory limited.

Now assume that the information on it is encrypted with a password you have no knowledge of. To access the information the encryption key inside it has to be accessed. Lets assume it’s stored in three parts such that all three have to be available and in the right way. One of which you know. But one or both the others are shuffeled around by a time based countdown. If you don’t access the phone within say 24hours on of the other two parts is deleted.

Thus you only have to hold out for 25hours and then you won’t be able to “assist” irespective of if you wish to or not.

Similar can be done with “a time and a place” easy for most to remember but well neigh impossible for others to guess.

But also if the place is “out of jurisdiction” it gives the guard labour an issue, that if done correctly makes it not legal.

But also there is the idea of “shared secrets” if two or more people are out of jurisdiction they can not in theory be compelled by the judge. If either decides the secrets are best kept then they have “deniability” as you do with “duress codes” that use a covert channel for signaling. The more shares there are the greater the deniability.

The point is that all the current encryption key legislation requires you to disclose the key, which you can not do if you do not know it and provably never did, or requires you to assist in it’s recovery which you can not do if it’s been destroyed or you provably can not obtain it.

Clive Robinson • November 11, 2023 12:20 AM

@ Ismar, ResearcherZero, ALL

“Optus chief executive set to face Senate inquiry over nationwide outage…”

Something tells me it won’t be the boot up the backside towards the curb she so richly deserves.

We can already see the excuses being formulated and thus guess it will be in effect “nobodies fault” because…

The reality, is most likely,

“Too few competent staff, because they cost money and that cuts profit.”

Clive Robinson • November 12, 2023 8:30 AM

@ Brodie, ALL,

Re : Crypto and Hamas,

You have brought this political nonsense up before and had it strongly repudiated.

The fact you are doing so again, suggests very strongly that you hsve significant political intent.

Further that you “just appeared” gives a strong suggestion that you are,

1, A Troll
2, A Sock Puppet
3, Both.

And potentially being paid for your services in some kind pecuniary or favour.

Which you would chose to have revealed is I suspect something you would not want want to make, as it would show what you actually are, instead of having others make warranted assumptions.

Clive Robinson • November 12, 2023 10:54 PM

@ vas pup, Ferritecore, ALL,

Re : Helium v Hydrogen lift gases.

“Use of hydrogen instead of helium”

It’s actually complex and subject to current on-going research.

But… you need to remember that for oceanic cargo shipping ship design is such that it’s almost certainly going to stay more fuel efficient and produce less greenhouse gases in total than “Lighter Than Air”(LTA) transport ever will and for the same effective knots rating.

This means that LTA systems will be for restricted use in many respects.

One area that is supposadly “hush hush” is to act as a lift / elevator for solar powered gliders… The idea is not to disimilar to Virgin’s space flight system, which uses a plane to lift a rocket and give it initial velocity before dropping it. Put simply you use a hydrogen gas bag to lift a glider above the clouds and drop it into flight. Where solar film panels on the flight surfaces give enough energy to keep the glider in flight for weeks if not months at a time. These would then be used for what most “Low Earth Orbit”(LEO) satellites do but at a very small fraction of the cost and other issues[1]. China has recently proved much to the US Militaries embarrassment that you don’t even need the glider, just the gas bag and favourable winds.

Realistically this is where we will see the development of new lift gas LTA systems on what appears to be SciFi / “fringe thinking” applications, that have very real commercial advantage to current entrenched technologies.

The first consideration is the cost and limited availability of helium. It’s been said that,

“Hydrogen only requires water and a wire”

To obtain, which is a gross over simplification, and very inefficient. Worse much commercial hydrogen is obtained in ways that just move the huge carbon-footprint rather than reduce it (though this in theory alows carbon-recapture to be more viable…). Then there are the transportation issues of hydrogen which are still very much an on-going scientific and engineering technology race as the “other half” problem of using fuel cells for “Electric Vehicle”(EV) systems as current battery tech power density and charge times are still major EV stumbling blocks.

The dirty secret of Helium is “natural gas” and it’s massive carbon-footprint. Whilst Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe at ~25% and has about 80% of the neutrons in it, on Earth at best it’s a very very scarce non renuable natural resource we are going through at quite an alarming rate. What we have is the product of alpha radiation getting a full electron shell, which makes it effectively chemically inert so it quickly rises in our atmosphere and goes off into space as it gets stripped away by space weather. Thus our major source is where it’s trapped underground at the top of natural gas deposits… You don’t get the helium without the natural gas, and the natural gas is going to be burnt for energy production, hence the massive carbon footprint involved…

But helium is a real transportation issue, compressing it is realy not the route most want to go as it’s seen by some as a “bomb on wheels” issue. And cryo-liquification which gives much greater density, has it’s own issues as the tempratures involved are definately “snowflake in hell” survivability levels and that’s before the quaint issues of it’s superfluidity. After a couple of decades of Fullerene research we’ve not exactly moved to practical viability in that direction. So helium has quite an attendant carbon-footprint issue.

However which ever lift gas you use, a gas bag the size of a house will only give enough lift for a small child or family pet (~4stn / 25kg).

You can read up more on the lift-gas differences at,

https://www.airships.net/helium-hydrogen-airships/

But it assumes “control by venting” which whilst light weight is extreamly wastefull and drags those hidden carbon-footprints along like “a ball and shackle”.

[1] As some know 5G has gone into space but hit a few very recent road bumps due to “Chip-Wars”. The same technology but with much smaller antennas due to much less range are being looked at for being put into not just gliders but blimps. What is not much talked about is how much of the worlds militaries actually spend on doing “humanitarian” work and the issues and costs involved. That is environmental disasters are very much increasing due not just to changing weather issues but that populations are moving to land that was previously avoided for habitation. The use of altitude for communications is vital, using LTA systems which,

“Travel small and quick to deploy.”

Are seen by quite a few technologists as a low cost way forward and as such has entered “aerospace thinking” in not just the civilian but military sector. Getting a ballon to 300m with a lift capacity of 10kg is within “school science project” budget and gives a line of sight coverage of better than 100km diameter for a quite high bandwidth transponder that would be recoverable, reusable and maintainable.

Clive Robinson • November 15, 2023 4:57 AM

@ SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Re : WordPress vulnerability.

On reading the “Bleeping Computer” story we see,

“In this case, the flaw impacts the ‘is_user_admin’ function of the ‘WpFastestCacheCreateCache’ class within the WP Fastest Cache plugin, which is intended to check if a user is an administrator by extracting the ‘$username’ value from cookies.“

!!! From cookies !!!

Makes the brain jolt with a “For real?” thought, and a secondary “Why would someone be that daft in this day and age?” triggering the is this just a journalist/editor mistake…

Then you read the next paragraph,

“Because the ‘$username’ input isn’t sanitized, an attacker may manipulate this cookie value to alter the SQL query executes by the plugin, leading to unauthorized access to the database.”

At which point you “face palm” yup it looks like it’s “a for realsy”…

And for those that doubt the face palm thought as the article goes on to state,

“[I]t should be noted that the vulnerability isn’t a complex one and hackers can figure out how to exploit it.”

Yup… This sort of mistake of not sanatising “user input” via what were then call “tokens” used in browser returns goes back to the early to mid 1990’s when “Middleware” first became a thing as user interfaces to backend databases and similar were migrated off of servers into user browsers, and the bad trend of “migrating left” to off load functionality out of backend business logic on the server and into the user browser became a trend…

It requires an obligitory hat tip to the XKCD “little bobby tables”, more formally “Exploits of a Mom”,

https://xkcd.com/327/

To quote the words of the Peter Seeger and Joe Hickerson’s song[1],

“When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?”

Something I ask on an almost daily basis with the ICT industry…

[1] Written in 1955 it also includes the line “Long time passing” and nearly three quaters of a century later it is still being sung or played at this time of year,

https://performingsongwriter.com/pete-seeger-flowers-gone/

And still the insanity goes on…

Clive Robinson • November 16, 2023 6:10 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

Re : Black out comming to get you all?

This “OMG we’re Doomed” story about US Power infrastructure has just been rekindled for the XXXth time this decade,

https://thelibertydaily.com/grid-down-alert-north-america-risk-blackouts-during/

In part because we are aproaching Solar Maximum, in part because of political unrest and economic uncertainty.

And yes what it says is true the US Fed Gov reports with inputs from the likes of the CIA say that the power grid is “physically” in such a flaky state that should a suitable electromagnetic event happen the 66-90% of the US and North American population will have a high probability of being dead within a year…

Recentish news-worthy events in Texas and California have shown how quickly things can go bad. Less well known was NY State that should have got wiped of the planet, but by chance had started an upgrade program that “saved the bacon”.

However the articak should not make people panic, nor the luck of the New York incident complacent. What they should do is dig a little deeper and gain an understanding as to why the North Anerican power grid is so vulnerable.

Unfortunately two major reasons that will pop uo are,

1, It was designed to be a failure.
2, In more recent times lack of maintainance has made it worse.

The first is something kind of unique to the US in Western First World countries. Basically the infrastructure is done on the very cheap and a half century life time at best is what it’s designed for. With traditionaly design for fast maintainance making “the rot” due to the element’s much faster. The theory was that although it cost a lot more over the half century life, the initial costs would be low. Not quite “lop the branches off of a tree strap on a transformer and daisy chain some wire”, but many on seeing it will understand the sentiment.

The second problem is “pull the profit and run” thinking as part of the “don’t leave money on the table” neo-con mantra. As noted maintaining such a network is very expensive as it’s not designed to be resiliant or fault tolerant thus maintainance heavy with lots of emoloyees. BUT… if you stop the maintenance then the employment and materials costs disapear. But also failure issues do not immediately appear. So for a few years shareholder value looks great and the bonus as a C-suit accordingly high.

Then the rot bites, disasters strike, law suits spring up like mushrooms overnight, so the C-suits pull the “too critical to be alowed to fail” cord and protection from bankruptcy etc.

And you the consumer who has by various tricks of legislation and regulation discover you are paying more money for mains power per kW hour than the equivalent from batteries and gas guzzling generators…

But if it’s only for a few hours or a week then most will survive, so why the oft quoted 66 to 90% death rate? Well that’s for the mains power being gone for 6-24 months.

Why so long? Lets talk about transformers, they are all over the US grid and mostly unprotected against electromagnetic events, that are many many times worse with barely in spec overhead wires than with buried cables. Natural events due to solar weather such as CME’s and Charington events, cause the equivalent of massive DC currents to flow, and transformer windings over heat and melt or burn out rapidly. The problem, the US does not wind it’s own grid transformers, they come in from abroad, and whilst they are not quite “hand made” they are generally on a 12-24month order to delivery time, and they are very difficult to transport and install.

Now look around your home, what won’t work without power?

Well virtually everything. Heating, AC, cooking, freezer, computers, and communications. But after maybe a week water will stop flowing and sewage will back up with disease and death following to nearly every door… The higher the housing/population density in any given area the worse it will be.

But what about food? well it will become not just scarce but very expensive… Not that you will be able to buy it because “No power = No Job = No money = No food, health care, or roof over your head” (and social safety nets for the good of all are an anathema to way to many in the US).

We saw during the previous administration that you can forget about federal assistance and I think those in Texas and California know that state level assistance would be at best high velocity lead poisoning for the desperate.

But note I’ve only mentioned “natural electromagnetic events” that happen every 10-150 years depending on how you want to characterize them. I’ve not talked of EMP from nuclear or HERF devices, or cyber-security adverse events all of which tend to be more local than continental / worldwide, but certainly directed at critical nexi where possible.

For obvious reasons some people are getting twitchy about the “N-word” but in all honesty I still think the risk of that is about the same as normal which is low. In part because I conversly think the risk of cyber-security events are way way higher and rising. With the question of if they will become more of a defence rather than offence issue. Because ultimately cyber attacks only work for two reasons,

1, The attackers can reach them.
2, The attackers can take them over.

If people took a little thought into what they do, then their contingency planning would take “communications failure” into account and have a mittigation. Thus pulling the plug from the Internet should be possible. Which leaves the issue of a “dead hand payload” of an APT agent already in place waiting for a lack of “heart-beat”.

I won’t go into details but there are ways you can mitigate even “dead hand” APT if you plan sensibly in advance.

Things that have happened in the Ukraine with regards Cyber-Security should not have happened. In part it’s cost minimization, but also lets be honest as @JonKnowsNothing has pointed out today “crap-sodtware”. The lesson is none of our infrastructure systems should be in any way remotely connected to public networks, especially with the really crap awfull software in “embeded” and “appliance” devices for networking. The likes of Cisco should be ashamed of selling that sort of crapware junk.

The advantage of cyber-security adverse events from a defenders point of view is both the lack of, and difficulty of, “Physical Agency” that is going to cause major longterm damage. I won’t go into ICS, SCADA, and RTU systems but they are not the “bread and butter” of cyber attacks. Also with a little thought and planning secondary monitoring systems can be put in place.

For instance Stuxnet a decade ago did damage because there were no secondary monitoring systems in place, so the repeated run-up / run-down by the centrifuge controlers necessary to cause the damage went unnoticed…

Anyone these days with any sense and high value systems to run, would you have hoped, taken that on board and put the required secondary systems in place.

However recent events by certain states presumably under “shareholder originated preasure” suggests very strongly that certain infrastructure managment realy are lacking in the sense department… However the court cases are double edged, they now will find it extreamly difficult to claim they were “not negligent” if things do go pear-shaped.

Over all that means that the 66-90% US fatality rate is now likely to be actually somewhat lower than it was a decade or more ago when first indicated.

But one word of advice, don’t go out and by a generator. Firstly because very very few know how to “wire them in” safely, not just for the home occupants but their neighbours and for the power company employees as well.

Also some generators run on “petrochem fuels” one result of which is significant carbon monoxide and other very life shortening emmissions, they are also not just a fire risk, but because they are noisy and left mostly unatended a theft risk with the attendent risk of violence.

However there are known ways to connect “Solar Generators” into the equivalent of UPSs very safely and these will keep small fridges running for meds and the like, and for “knowledge workers” a reasonable chance to keep your job going especially if you use satellite rather than mobile or land line communications, but… it also needs your employer to be suitably set up, which is probably unlikely.

But natural electromagnetic events like CME’s and Carrington Events are quite survivable, as humans have happily lived through them before any number of times. But the world was barely electrically sophisticated 164 years ago, back in 1859 when the telegraph was still magically impresive, though it only ran on batteries and the only power coming into homes was biological on two or for legs or coal gas for lighting, and in factories steam driven shafts. It was a decade or so later that electric arc lamps were to appear with a harshness few found appealing. So the impact was more awe than life altering,

https://earthsky.org/human-world/carrington-event-1859-solar-storm-effects-today/

Not so today, we are slave to the movment of charge in so many ways that few realise even when they go camping, what it’s loss actually would mean.

But I actually doubt it would be even close to existential for mankind as much of the world still does not depend on electricity.

As for the West, again many parts are not as dependent on electricity as we are in high population density places like London, New York, Paris or Brussels…