Essays: 2008 Archives
How to Prevent Digital Snooping
As the first digital president, Barack Obama is learning the hard way how difficult it can be to maintain privacy in the information age. Earlier this year, his passport file was snooped by contract workers in the State Department. In October, someone at Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaked information about his aunt’s immigration status. And in November, Verizon employees peeked at his cellphone records.
What these three incidents illustrate is not that computerized databases are vulnerable to hacking – we already knew that, and anyway the perpetrators all had legitimate access to the systems they used – but how important audit is as a security measure…
When You Lose a Piece of Kit, the Real Loss Is The Data It Contains
These days, losing electronic devices is less about the hardware and more about the data. Hardly a week goes by without another newsworthy data loss. People leave thumb drives, memory sticks, mobile phones and even computers everywhere. And some of that data isn’t easily replaceable. Sure, you can blame it on personal or organisational sloppiness, but part of the problem is that more and more information fits on smaller and smaller devices.
My primary computer is an ultraportable laptop. It contains every email I’ve sent and received over the past 12 years – I think of it as my backup brain – as well as an enormous amount of personal and work-related documents…
Why Obama Should Keep His BlackBerry—But Won't
When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country’s historical record.
This reality of the information age might be particularly stark for the president, but it’s no less true for all of us. Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed…
America's Next Top Hash Function Begins
You might not have realized it, but the next great battle of cryptography began this month. It’s not a political battle over export laws or key escrow or NSA eavesdropping, but an academic battle over who gets to be the creator of the next hash standard.
Hash functions are the most commonly used cryptographic primitive, and the most poorly understood. You can think of them as fingerprint functions: They take an arbitrary long data stream and return a fixed length, and effectively unique, string. The security comes from the fact that while it’s easy to generate the fingerprint from a file, it’s infeasible to go the other way and generate a file given a fingerprint…
Passwords Are Not Broken, but How We Choose them Sure Is
This essay also appeared in The Hindu.
I’ve been reading a lot about how passwords are no longer good security. The reality is more complicated. Passwords are still secure enough for many applications, but you have to choose a good one. And that’s hard. The best way to explain how to choose a good password is to describe how they’re broken. The most serious attack is called offline password guessing. There are commercial programs that do this, sold primarily to police departments. There are also hacker tools that do the same thing.
As computers have become faster, the guessers have got better, sometimes being able to test hundreds of thousands of passwords per second. These guessers might run for months on many machines simultaneously…
CRB Checking
Since the UK’s Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) was established in 2002, an ever-increasing number of people are required to undergo a “CRB check” before they can interact with children. It’s not only teachers and daycare providers, but football coaches, scoutmasters and Guiders, church volunteers, bus drivers, and school janitors—3.4 million checks in 2007, 15 million since 2002. In 2009, it will include anyone who works or volunteers in a position where he or she comes into contact with children: 11.3 million people, or a quarter of the adult population…
Time to Show Bottle and Tackle the Real Issues
This essay also appeared in the Taipei Times.
Airport security found a bottle of saline in my luggage at Heathrow Airport last month. It was a 4oz bottle, slightly above the 100 ml limit. Airport security in the United States lets me through with it all the time, but UK security was stricter. The official confiscated it, because allowing it on the airplane with me would have been too dangerous. And to demonstrate how dangerous he really thought that bottle was, he blithely tossed it in a nearby bin of similar liquid bottles and sent me on my way…
Quantum Cryptography: As Awesome As It Is Pointless
Quantum cryptography is back in the news, and the basic idea is still unbelievably cool, in theory, and nearly useless in real life.
The idea behind quantum crypto is that two people communicating using a quantum channel can be absolutely sure no one is eavesdropping. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle requires anyone measuring a quantum system to disturb it, and that disturbance alerts legitimate users as to the eavesdropper’s presence. No disturbance, no eavesdropper—period.
This month we’ve seen reports on a new working quantum-key distribution …
Why Society Should Pay the True Costs of Security
It’s not true that no one worries about terrorists attacking chemical plants. It’s just that our politics seem to leave us unable to deal with the threat. Toxins such as ammonia, chlorine, propane and flammable mixtures are being produced or stored as a result of legitimate industrial processes. Chlorine gas is particularly toxic; in addition to bombing a plant, someone could hijack a chlorine truck or blow up a railcar. Phosgene is even more dangerous. And many chemical plants are located in places where an act of sabotage – or an accident – could threaten thousands of people…
The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists
Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place. If we’re ever going to defeat terrorism, we need to understand what drives people to become terrorists in the first place.
Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists for political reasons. This is the “strategic” model of terrorism, and it’s basically an economic model. It posits that people resort to terrorism when they believe—rightly or wrongly—that terrorism is worth it; that is, when they believe the political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater than if they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest. It’s assumed, for example, that people join Hamas to achieve a Palestinian state; that people join the PKK to attain a Kurdish national homeland; and that people join al-Qaida to, among other things, get the United States out of the Persian Gulf…
Does Risk Management Make Sense?
This essay appeared as the first half of a point-counterpoint with Marcus Ranum. Marcus’s half is here.
We engage in risk management all the time, but it only makes sense if we do it right.
“Risk management” is just a fancy term for the cost-benefit tradeoff associated with any security decision. It’s what we do when we react to fear, or try to make ourselves feel secure. It’s the fight-or-flight reflex that evolved in primitive fish and remains in all vertebrates. It’s instinctual, intuitive and fundamental to life, and one of the brain’s primary functions…
Airport Pasta-Sauce Interdiction Considered Harmful
Airport security found a jar of pasta sauce in my luggage last month. It was a 6-ounce jar, above the limit; the official confiscated it, because allowing it on the airplane with me would have been too dangerous. And to demonstrate how dangerous he really thought that jar was, he blithely tossed it in a nearby bin of similar liquid bottles and sent me on my way.
There are two classes of contraband at airport security checkpoints: the class that will get you in trouble if you try to bring it on an airplane, and the class that will cheerily be taken away from you if you try to bring it on an airplane. This difference is important: Making security screeners confiscate anything from that second class is a waste of time. All it does is harm innocents; it doesn’t stop terrorists at all…
A Fetishistic Approach to Security Is a Perverse Way to Keep Us Safe
We spend far more effort defending our countries against specific movie-plot threats, rather than the real, broad threats. In the US during the months after the 9/11 attacks, we feared terrorists with scuba gear, terrorists with crop dusters and terrorists contaminating our milk supply. Both the UK and the US fear terrorists with small bottles of liquid. Our imaginations run wild with vivid specific threats. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared.
It’s not just terrorism; it’s any rare risk in the news. The big fear in Canada right now, following a particularly gruesome incident, is random decapitations on intercity buses. In the US, fears of school shootings are much greater than the actual risks. In the UK, it’s child predators. And people all over the world mistakenly fear flying more than driving. But the very definition of news is something that hardly ever happens. If an incident is in the news, we shouldn’t worry about it. It’s when something is so common that its no longer news – car crashes, domestic violence – that we should worry. But that’s not the way people think…
How to Create the Perfect Fake Identity
Let me start off by saying that I’m making this whole thing up.
Imagine you’re in charge of infiltrating sleeper agents into the United States. The year is 1983, and the proliferation of identity databases is making it increasingly difficult to create fake credentials. Ten years ago, someone could have just shown up in the country and gotten a driver’s license, Social Security card and bank account—possibly using the identity of someone roughly the same age who died as a young child—but it’s getting harder. And you know that trend will only continue. So you decide to grow your own identities…
Security ROI: Fact or Fiction?
Bruce Schneier says ROI is a big deal in business, but it's a misnomer in security. Make sure your financial calculations are based on good data and sound methodologies.
Return on investment, or ROI, is a big deal in business. Any business venture needs to demonstrate a positive return on investment, and a good one at that, in order to be viable.
It’s become a big deal in IT security, too. Many corporate customers are demanding ROI models to demonstrate that a particular security investment pays off. And in response, vendors are providing ROI models that demonstrate how their particular security solution provides the best return on investment.
It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s mostly bunk in practice.
Before I get into the details, there’s one point I have to make. “ROI” as used in a security context is inaccurate. Security is not an investment that provides a return, like a new factory or a financial instrument. It’s an expense that, hopefully, pays for itself in cost savings. Security is about loss prevention, not about earnings. The term just doesn’t make sense in this context…
Here Comes Here Comes Everybody
Book Review of <cite>Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations</cite><br />
In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don’t people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market’s transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people…
The TSA's Useless Photo ID Rules
No-fly lists and photo IDs are supposed to help protect the flying public from terrorists. Except that they don't work.
The TSA is tightening its photo ID rules at airport security. Previously, people with expired IDs or who claimed to have lost their IDs were subjected to secondary screening. Then the Transportation Security Administration realized that meant someone on the government’s no-fly list—the list that is supposed to keep our planes safe from terrorists—could just fly with no ID.
Now, people without ID must also answer personal questions from their credit history to ascertain their identity. The TSA will keep records of who those ID-less people are, too, in case they’re trying to probe the system…
Boston Court's Meddling With "Full Disclosure" Is Unwelcome
In eerily similar cases in the Netherlands and the United States, courts have recently grappled with the computer-security norm of “full disclosure,” asking whether researchers should be permitted to disclose details of a fare-card vulnerability that allows people to ride the subway for free.
The “Oyster card” used on the London Tube was at issue in the Dutch case, and a similar fare card used on the Boston “T” was the center of the U.S. case. The Dutch court got it right, and the American court, in Boston, got it wrong from the start—despite facing an open-and-shut case of First Amendment prior restraint…
The Problem Is Information Insecurity
Information insecurity is costing us billions. We pay for it in theft: information theft, financial theft. We pay for it in productivity loss, both when networks stop working and in the dozens of minor security inconveniences we all have to endure. We pay for it when we have to buy security products and services to reduce those other two losses. We pay for security, year after year.
The problem is that all the money we spend isn’t fixing the problem. We’re paying, but we still end up with insecurities.
The problem is insecure software. It’s bad design, poorly implemented features, inadequate testing and security vulnerabilities from software bugs. The money we spend on security is to deal with the effects of insecure software…
Memo to Next President: How to Get Cybersecurity Right
Obama has a cybersecurity plan.
It’s basically what you would expect: Appoint a national cybersecurity adviser, invest in math and science education, establish standards for critical infrastructure, spend money on enforcement, establish national standards for securing personal data and data-breach disclosure, and work with industry and academia to develop a bunch of needed technologies.
I could comment on the plan, but with security, the devil is always in the details—and, of course, at this point there are few details. But since he brought up the topic—McCain supposedly is “…
Why Being Open about Security Makes Us All Safer in the Long Run
London’s Oyster card has been cracked, and the final details will become public in October. NXP Semiconductors, the Philips spin-off that makes the system, lost a court battle to prevent the researchers from publishing. People might be able to use this information to ride for free, but the sky won’t be falling. And the publication of this serious vulnerability actually makes us all safer in the long run.
Here’s the story. Every Oyster card has a radio-frequency identification chip that communicates with readers mounted on the ticket barrier. That chip, the “Mifare Classic” chip, is used in hundreds of other transport systems as well—Boston, Los Angeles, Brisbane, Amsterdam, Taipei, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro—and as an access pass in thousands of companies, schools, hospitals, and government buildings around Britain and the rest of the world…
Lesson From the DNS Bug: Patching Isn't Enough
Despite the best efforts of the security community, the details of a critical internet vulnerability discovered by Dan Kaminsky about six months ago have leaked. Hackers are racing to produce exploit code, and network operators who haven’t already patched the hole are scrambling to catch up. The whole mess is a good illustration of the problems with researching and disclosing flaws like this.
The details of the vulnerability aren’t important, but basically it’s a form of DNS cache poisoning. The DNS system is what translates domain names people understand, like www.schneier.com, to IP addresses computers understand: 204.11.246.1. There is a whole family of vulnerabilities where the DNS system on your computer is fooled into thinking that the IP address for www.badsite.com is really the IP address for www.goodsite.com—there’s no way for you to tell the difference—and that allows the criminals at www.badsite.com to trick you into doing all sorts of things, like giving up your bank account details. Kaminsky discovered a particularly nasty variant of this cache-poisoning attack…
Software Makers Should Take Responsibility
A recent study of Internet browsers worldwide discovered that over half – 52% – of Internet Explorer users weren’t using the current version of the software. For other browsers the numbers were better, but not much: 17% of Firefox users, 35% of Safari users, and 44% of Opera users were using an old version.
This is particularly important because browsers are an increasingly common vector for internet attacks, and old versions of browsers don’t have all their security patches up to date. They’re open to attack through vulnerabilities the vendors have already fixed…
How a Classic Man-in-the-Middle Attack Saved Colombian Hostages
Last week’s dramatic rescue of 15 hostages held by the guerrilla organization FARC was the result of months of intricate deception on the part of the Colombian government. At the center was a classic man-in-the-middle attack.
In a man-in-the-middle attack, the attacker inserts himself between two communicating parties. Both believe they’re talking to each other, and the attacker can delete or modify the communications at will.
The Wall Street Journal reported how this gambit played out in Colombia: “The plan had a chance of working because, for months, in an operation one army officer likened to a ‘broken telephone,’ military intelligence had been able to convince Ms. Betancourt’s captor, Gerardo Aguilar, a guerrilla known as ‘Cesar,’ that he was communicating with his top bosses in the guerrillas’ seven-man secretariat. Army intelligence convinced top guerrilla leaders that they were talking to Cesar. In reality, both were talking to army intelligence.”…
How the Human Brain Buys Security
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People tend to be risk-averse when it comes to gains, and risk-seeking when it comes to losses. If you give people a choice between a $500 sure gain and a coin-flip chance of a $1,000 gain, about 75 percent will pick the sure gain. But give people a choice between a $500 sure loss and a coin-flip chance of a $1,000 loss, about 75 percent will pick the coin flip.
People don’t have a standard mathematical model of risk in their heads. Their trade-offs are more subtle, and result from our brains have developed. A computer might not see the difference between the two choices—it’s simply a measure of how risk-averse you are—but humans do…
Chinese Cyberattacks: Myth or Menace?
This essay appeared as the second half of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum. Marcus’s half is here.
The popular media narrative is that there is a coordinated attempt by the Chinese government to hack into U.S. computers—military, government, corporate—and steal secrets. The truth is a lot more complicated.
There certainly is a lot of hacking coming out of China. Any company that does security monitoring sees it all the time. Of course, they can’t prove that it comes out of China. But the majority of servers used in the attacks are located in China, using DNS bouncers that can only be registered by people literate in Chinese. The hacker websites where different hackers and hacker groups brag about their exploits and sell hacker tools and how-to videos are written in Chinese. Technically, it’s possible all the attackers are from, say, Canada and trying to disguise themselves, but it seems pretty unlikely…
CCTV Doesn't Keep Us Safe, Yet the Cameras Are Everywhere
Pervasive security cameras don’t substantially reduce crime. There are exceptions, of course, and that’s what gets the press. Most famously, CCTV cameras helped catch James Bulger’s murderers in 1993. And earlier this year, they helped convict Steve Wright of murdering five women in the Ipswich area. But these are the well-publicised exceptions. Overall, CCTV cameras aren’t very effective.
This fact has been demonstrated again and again: by a comprehensive study for the Home Office in 2005, by several studies in the US, and again with new data …
I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch
It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers—and televisions and iPods and everything else—to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear.
OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment…
The Truth About Chinese Hackers
The scoop: Last week, Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, said four of his government computers had been hacked by sources working out of China. Bruce Schneier, an internationally renowned security technologist, gives us his take on what went down.
The popular media concept is that there is a coordinated attempt by the Chinese government to hack into U.S. computers—military, government corporate—and steal secrets. The truth is a lot more complicated.
There certainly is a lot of hacking coming out of China. Any company that does security monitoring sees it all the time…
The Pros and Cons of LifeLock
LifeLock, one of the companies that offers identity-theft protection in the United States, has been taking quite a beating recently. They’re being sued by credit bureaus, competitors and lawyers in several states that are launching class action lawsuits. And the stories in the media … it’s like a piranha feeding frenzy.
There are also a lot of errors and misconceptions. With its aggressive advertising campaign and a CEO who publishes his Social Security number and dares people to steal his identity—Todd Davis, 457-55-5462—LifeLock is a company that’s easy to hate. But the company’s story has some interesting security lessons, and it’s worth understanding in some detail…
Are Photographers Really a Threat?
What is it with photographers these days? Are they really all terrorists, or does everyone just think they are?
Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.
Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those …
Why Do We Accept Signatures by Fax?
Aren’t fax signatures the weirdest thing? It’s trivial to cut and paste—with real scissors and glue—anyone’s signature onto a document so that it’ll look real when faxed. There is so little security in fax signatures that it’s mind-boggling that anyone accepts them.
Yet people do, all the time. I’ve signed book contracts, credit card authorizations, nondisclosure agreements and all sorts of financial documents—all by fax. I even have a scanned file of my signature on my computer, so I can virtually cut and paste it into documents and fax them directly from my computer without ever having to print them out. What in the world is going on here?…
How to Sell Security
It’s a truism in sales that it’s easier to sell someone something he wants than a defense against something he wants to avoid. People are reluctant to buy insurance, or home security devices, or computer security anything. It’s not they don’t ever buy these things, but it’s an uphill struggle.
The reason is psychological. And it’s the same dynamic when it’s a security vendor trying to sell its products or services, a CIO trying to convince senior management to invest in security or a security officer trying to implement a security policy with her company’s employees…
Our Data, Ourselves
Dutch version by Jeroen van der Ham
In the information age, we all have a data shadow.
We leave data everywhere we go. It’s not just our bank accounts and stock portfolios, or our itemized bills, listing every credit card purchase and telephone call we make. It’s automatic road-toll collection systems, supermarket affinity cards, ATMs and so on.
It’s also our lives. Our love letters and friendly chat. Our personal e-mails and SMS messages. Our business plans, strategies and offhand conversations. Our political leanings and positions. And this is just the data we interact with. We all have shadow selves living in the data banks of hundreds of corporations’ information brokers—information about us that is both surprisingly personal and uncannily complete—except for the errors that you can neither see nor correct…
Crossing Borders with Laptops and PDAs
Last month a US court ruled that border agents can search your laptop, or any other electronic device, when you’re entering the country. They can take your computer and download its entire contents, or keep it for several days. Customs and Border Patrol has not published any rules regarding this practice, and I and others have written a letter to Congress urging it to investigate and regulate this practice.
But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too. You might not like it, but it’s a fact. So how do you protect yourself?…
America's Dilemma: Close Security Holes, or Exploit Them Ourselves
On April 27, 2007, Estonia was attacked in cyberspace. Following a diplomatic incident with Russia about the relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial, the networks of many Estonian organizations, including the Estonian parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters, were attacked and—in many cases—shut down. Estonia was quick to blame Russia, which was equally quick to deny any involvement.
It was hyped as the first cyberwar: Russia attacking Estonia in cyberspace. But nearly a year later, evidence that the Russian government was involved in the denial-of-service attacks still hasn’t emerged. Though Russian hackers were indisputably the major instigators of the attack, the only individuals …
The Ethics of Vulnerability Research
The standard way to take control of someone else’s computer is by exploiting a vulnerability in a software program on it. This was true in the 1960s when buffer overflows were first exploited to attack computers. It was true in 1988 when the Morris worm exploited a Unix vulnerability to attack computers on the Internet, and it’s still how most modern malware works.
Vulnerabilities are software mistakes—mistakes in specification and design, but mostly mistakes in programming. Any large software package will have thousands of mistakes. These vulnerabilities lie dormant in our software systems, waiting to be discovered. Once discovered, they can be used to attack systems. This is the point of security patching: eliminating known vulnerabilities. But many systems don’t get patched, so the Internet is filled with known, exploitable vulnerabilities…
Prediction: RSA Conference Will Shrink Like a Punctured Balloon
Last week was the RSA Conference, easily the largest information security conference in the world. More than 17,000 people descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center to hear some of the more than 250 talks, attend I-didn’t-try-to-count parties, and try to evade over 350 exhibitors vying to sell them stuff.
Talk to the exhibitors, though, and the most common complaint is that the attendees aren’t buying.
It’s not the quality of the wares. The show floor is filled with new security products, new technologies, and new ideas. Many of these are products that will make the attendees’ companies more secure in all sorts of different ways. The problem is that most of the people attending the RSA Conference can’t understand what the products do or why they should buy them. So they don’t…
Secret Questions Blow a Hole in Security
It’s a mystery to me why websites think “secret questions” are a good idea. We sign up for an online service, choose a hard-to-guess (and equally hard-to-remember) password, and are then presented with a “secret question” to answer.
Twenty years ago, there was just one secret question: what’s your mother’s maiden name? Today, there are several: what street did you grow up on? what’s the name of your favorite teacher? what’s your favorite colour? Often, you get to choose.
The idea is to give customers a backup password. If you forget your password, then the secret question is a way to verify your identity. It’s a great idea from a customer service perspective – users are less likely to forget their first pet’s name than some random password – but terrible for security…
The Difference Between Feeling and Reality in Security
Security is both a feeling and a reality, and they’re different. You can feel secure even though you’re not, and you can be secure even though you don’t feel it. There are two different concepts mapped onto the same word—the English language isn’t working very well for us here—and it can be hard to know which one we’re talking about when we use the word.
There is considerable value in separating out the two concepts: in explaining how the two are different, and understanding when we’re referring to one and when the other. There is value as well in recognizing when the two converge, understanding why they diverge, and knowing how they can be made to converge again…
Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional
Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.
I replied: “What’s really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to.”
Security requires a particular mindset. Security professionals—at least the good ones—see the world differently. They can’t walk into a store without noticing how they might shoplift. They can’t use a computer without wondering about the security vulnerabilities. They can’t vote without trying to figure out how to vote twice. They just can’t help it…
Census of Cyberspace Censoring
Book Review of <i>Access Denied</i><br />
China restricts Internet access by keyword.
In 1993, Internet pioneer John Gilmore said “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”, and we believed him. In 1996, cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow issued his ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, and online. He told governments: “You have no moral right to rule us, nor do you possess any methods of enforcement that we have true reason to fear.”
At the time, many shared Barlow’s sentiments. The Internet empowered people. It gave them access to information and couldn’t be stopped, blocked or filtered. Give someone access to the Internet, and they have access to everything. Governments that relied on censorship to control their citizens were doomed…
The Myth of the "Transparent Society"
When I write and speak about privacy, I am regularly confronted with the mutual disclosure argument. Explained in books like David Brin’s The Transparent Society, the argument goes something like this: In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you’ll know all about me, but I will also know all about you. The government will be watching us, but we’ll also be watching the government. This is different than before, but it’s not automatically worse. And because I know your secrets, you can’t use my secrets as a weapon against me.
This might not be everybody’s idea of utopia—and it certainly doesn’t address the …
Consolidation: Plague or Progress
This essay appeared as the second half of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum. Marcus’s half is here.
We know what we don’t like about buying consolidated product suites: one great product and a bunch of mediocre ones. And we know what we don’t like about buying best-of-breed: multiple vendors, multiple interfaces, and multiple products that don’t work well together. The security industry has gone back and forth between the two, as a new generation of IT security professionals rediscovers the downsides of each solution.
The real problem is that neither solution really works, and we continually fool ourselves into believing whatever we don’t have is better than what we have at the time. And the real solution is to buy results, not products…
Bruce Schneier: Security at What Cost?
National ID System Is Not Worth The $23 Billion Price Tag
The argument was so obvious it hardly needed repeating: We would all be safer if we had a better ID card. A good, hard-to-forge national ID is a no-brainer (or so the argument goes), and it’s ridiculous that a modern country such as the United States doesn’t have one. One result of this line of thinking is the planned Real ID Act, which forces all states to conform to common and more stringent rules for issuing driver’s licenses.
But security is always a tradeoff; it must be balanced with the cost. We all do this intuitively. Few of us walk around wearing bulletproof vests. It’s not because they’re ineffective, it’s because for most of us, the tradeoff isn’t worth it. It’s not worth the cost, the inconvenience, or the loss of fashion sense…
When the Internet Is My Hard Drive, Should I Trust Third Parties?
Wine Therapy is a web bulletin board for serious wine geeks. It’s been active since 2000, and its database of back posts and comments is a wealth of information: tasting notes, restaurant recommendations, stories and so on. Late last year someone hacked the board software, got administrative privileges and deleted the database. There was no backup.
Of course the board’s owner should have been making backups all along, but he has been very sick for the past year and wasn’t able to. And the Internet Archive has been only somewhat helpful.
More and more, information we rely on—either created by us or by others—is out of our control. It’s out there on the internet, on someone else’s website and being cared for by someone else. We use those websites, sometimes daily, and don’t even think about their reliability…
Driver's Licenses for Immigrants: Denying Licenses Makes Us Less Safe
Many people say that allowing illegal aliens to obtain state driver’s licenses helps them and encourages them to remain illegally in this country. Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox late last year issued an opinion that licenses could be issued only to legal state residents, calling it “one more tool in our initiative to bolster Michigan’s border and document security.”
In reality, we are a much more secure nation if we do issue driver’s licenses and/or state IDs to every resident who applies, regardless of immigration status. Issuing them doesn’t make us any less secure, and refusing puts us at risk…
With iPhone, 'Security' Is Code for 'Control'
Buying an iPhone isn’t the same as buying a car or a toaster. Your iPhone comes with a complicated list of rules about what you can and can’t do with it. You can’t install unapproved third-party applications on it. You can’t unlock it and use it with the cellphone carrier of your choice. And Apple is serious about these rules: A software update released in September 2007 erased unauthorized software and—in some cases—rendered unlocked phones unusable.
“Bricked” is the term, and Apple isn’t the least bit apologetic about it.
Computer companies want more control over the products they sell you, and they’re resorting to increasingly draconian security measures to get that control. The reasons are economic…
What Our Top Spy Doesn't Get: Security and Privacy Aren't Opposites
If there’s a debate that sums up post-9/11 politics, it’s security versus privacy. Which is more important? How much privacy are you willing to give up for security? Can we even afford privacy in this age of insecurity? Security versus privacy: It’s the battle of the century, or at least its first decade.
In a Jan. 21 New Yorker article, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell discusses a proposed plan to monitor all—that’s right, all—internet communications for security purposes, an idea so extreme that the word “Orwellian” feels too mild…
The Psychology of Security (Part 2)
The Availability Heuristic
The “availability heuristic” is very broad, and goes a long way toward explaining how people deal with risk and trade-offs. Basically, the availability heuristic means that people “assess the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind.”28 In other words, in any decision-making process, easily remembered (available) data are given greater weight than hard-to-remember data.
In general, the availability heuristic is a good mental shortcut. All things being equal, common events are easier to remember than uncommon ones. So it makes sense to use availability to estimate frequency and probability. But like all heuristics, there are areas where the heuristic breaks down and leads to biases. There are reasons other than occurrence that make some things more available. Events that have taken place recently are more available than others. Events that are more emotional are more available than others. Events that are more vivid are more available than others. And so on…
The Psychology of Security (Part 1)
Introduction
Security is both a feeling and a reality. And they’re not the same.
The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different countermeasures. We can calculate how secure your home is from burglary, based on such factors as the crime rate in the neighborhood you live in and your door-locking habits. We can calculate how likely it is for you to be murdered, either on the streets by a stranger or in your home by a family member. Or how likely you are to be the victim of identity theft. Given a large enough set of statistics on criminal acts, it’s not even hard; insurance companies do it all the time…
Steal This Wi-Fi
Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people—and attracts the most criticism—is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There’s no password. There’s no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet.
To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea. But to some observers, it’s both wrong and dangerous.
I’m told that uninvited strangers may sit in their cars in front of my house, and use my network to send spam, eavesdrop on my passwords, and upload and download everything from pirated movies to child pornography. As a result, I risk all sorts of bad things happening to me, from seeing my IP address blacklisted to having the police crash through my door…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.