Essays: 2016 Archives
Class Breaks
This essay appeared as a response to Edge’s annual question, “what scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?”
There’s a concept from computer security known as a class break. It’s a particular security vulnerability that breaks not just one system, but an entire class of systems. Examples might be a vulnerability in a particular operating system that allows an attacker to take remote control of every computer that runs on that system’s software. Or a vulnerability in Internet-enabled digital video recorders and webcams that allow an attacker to recruit those devices into a massive botnet…
U.S. Elections Are a Mess, Even Though There’s No Evidence This One Was Hacked
Unproven reports of possible discrepancies in the Rust Belt just show how untrustworthy the system is.
Was the 2016 presidential election hacked? It’s hard to tell. There were no obvious hacks on Election Day, but new reports have raised the question of whether voting machines were tampered with in three states that Donald Trump won this month: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The researchers behind these reports include voting rights lawyer John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, both respected in the community. They have been talking with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but their analysis is not yet public…
Testimony at the U.S. House of Representatives Joint Hearing “Understanding the Role of Connected Devices in Recent Cyber Attacks”
Testimony of Bruce Schneier
Fellow, Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard University
Lecturer and Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Special Advisor to IBM Security and CTO of Resilient: An IBM Company
Before the
U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on Energy and Commerce
Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, and the
Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade
Joint Hearing Entitled
“Understanding the Role of Connected Devices in Recent Cyber Attacks”
November 16, 2016
10:00 AM
Good morning. Chairmen Walden and Burgess, Ranking Members Eshoo and Schakowsky, members of the committee: thank you for the opportunity to testify on this matter. Although I have an affiliation with both Harvard University and IBM, I am testifying in my personal capacity as a cybersecurity expert and nothing I say should be construed as the official position of either of those organizations…
American Elections Will Be Hacked
It’s over. The voting went smoothly. As of the time of writing, there are no serious fraud allegations, nor credible evidence that anyone tampered with voting rolls or voting machines. And most important, the results are not in doubt.
While we may breathe a collective sigh of relief about that, we can’t ignore the issue until the next election. The risks remain.
As computer security experts have been saying for years, our newly computerized voting systems are vulnerable to attack by both individual hackers and government-sponsored cyberwarriors. It is only a matter of time before such an attack happens…
Your WiFi-Connected Thermostat Can Take Down the Whole Internet. We Need New Regulations.
Late last month, popular websites like Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and PayPal went down for most of a day. The distributed denial-of-service attack that caused the outages, and the vulnerabilities that made the attack possible, was as much a failure of market and policy as it was of technology. If we want to secure our increasingly computerized and connected world, we need more government involvement in the security of the “Internet of Things” and increased regulation of what are now critical and life-threatening technologies. It’s no longer a question of if, it’s a question of when…
Cybersecurity Issues for the Next Administration
Solutions require both corporate regulation and international cooperation
This essay appeared on Time.com as part of a special section called Let’s Talk About the Issues.
On today’s Internet, too much power is concentrated in too few hands. In the early days of the Internet, individuals were empowered. Now governments and corporations hold the balance of power. If we are to leave a better Internet for the next generations, governments need to rebalance Internet power more towards the individual. This means several things.
First, less surveillance. Surveillance has become the business model of the Internet, and an aspect that is appealing to governments worldwide. While computers make it easier to collect data, and networks to aggregate it, governments should do more to ensure that any surveillance is exceptional, transparent, regulated and targeted. It’s a tall order; governments such as that of the U.S. need to overcome their own mass-surveillance desires, and at the same time implement regulations to fetter the ability of Internet companies to do the same…
We Need to Save the Internet from the Internet of Things
Brian Krebs is a popular reporter on the cybersecurity beat. He regularly exposes cybercriminals and their tactics, and consequently is regularly a target of their ire. Last month, he wrote about an online attack-for-hire service that resulted in the arrest of the two proprietors. In the aftermath, his site was taken down by a massive DDoS attack.
In many ways, this is nothing new. Distributed denial-of-service attacks are a family of attacks that cause websites and other internet-connected systems to crash by overloading them with traffic. The “distributed” part means that other insecure computers on the internet—sometimes in the millions—are recruited to a botnet to unwittingly participate in the attack. The tactics are decades old; DDoS attacks are perpetrated by lone hackers trying to be annoying, criminals trying to extort money, and governments testing their tactics. There are defenses, and there are companies that offer DDoS mitigation services for hire…
How Long Until Hackers Start Faking Leaked Documents?
There’s nothing stopping attackers from manipulating the data they make public.
In the past few years, the devastating effects of hackers breaking into an organization’s network, stealing confidential data, and publishing everything have been made clear. It happened to the Democratic National Committee, to Sony, to the National Security Agency, to the cyber-arms weapons manufacturer Hacking Team, to the online adultery site Ashley Madison, and to the Panamanian tax-evasion law firm Mossack Fonseca.
This style of attack is known as organizational doxing. The hackers, in some cases individuals and in others nation-states, are out to make political points by revealing proprietary, secret, and sometimes incriminating information. And the documents they leak do that, airing the organizations’ embarrassments for everyone to see…
Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet
Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses.
First, a little background. If you want to take a network off the Internet, the easiest way to do it is with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). Like the name says, this is an attack designed to prevent legitimate users from getting to the site. There are subtleties, but basically it means blasting so much data at the site that it’s overwhelmed. These attacks are not new: hackers do this to sites they don’t like, and criminals have done it as a method of extortion. There is an entire industry, with an arsenal of technologies, devoted to DDoS defense. But largely it’s a matter of bandwidth. If the attacker has a bigger fire hose of data than the defender has, the attacker wins…
New Leaks Prove It: The NSA Is Putting Us All at Risk to Be Hacked
The National Security Agency is lying to us. We know that because of data stolen from an NSA server was dumped on the internet. The agency is hoarding information about security vulnerabilities in the products you use, because it wants to use it to hack others’ computers. Those vulnerabilities aren’t being reported, and aren’t getting fixed, making your computers and networks unsafe.
On August 13, a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released 300 megabytes of NSA cyberweapon code on the internet. Near as we experts can tell, the NSA network itself wasn’t hacked; what probably happened was that a “staging server” for NSA cyberweapons—that is, a server the NSA was making use of to mask its surveillance activities—was hacked in 2013…
Hackers Are Putting U.S. Election at Risk
Russia has attacked the U.S. in cyberspace in an attempt to influence our national election, many experts have concluded. We need to take this national security threat seriously and both respond and defend, despite the partisan nature of this particular attack.
There is virtually no debate about that, either from the technical experts who analyzed the attack last month or the FBI which is analyzing it now. The hackers have already released DNC emails and voicemails, and promise more data dumps.
While their motivation remains unclear, they could continue to attack our election from now to November—and beyond…
By November, Russian Hackers Could Target Voting Machines
If Russia really is responsible, there's no reason political interference would end with the DNC emails.
Russia was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded.
The FBI is investigating. WikiLeaks promises there is more data to come. The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November—that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack…
The Internet of Things Will Turn Large-Scale Hacks into Real World Disasters
Disaster stories involving the Internet of Things are all the rage. They feature cars (both driven and driverless), the power grid, dams, and tunnel ventilation systems. A particularly vivid and realistic one, near-future fiction published last month in New York Magazine, described a cyberattack on New York that involved hacking of cars, the water system, hospitals, elevators, and the power grid. In these stories, thousands of people die. Chaos ensues. While some of these scenarios overhype the mass destruction, the individual risks are all real. And traditional computer and network security isn’t prepared to deal with them…
Credential Stealing as Attack Vector
Traditional computer security concerns itself with vulnerabilities. We employ antivirus software to detect malware that exploits vulnerabilities. We have automatic patching systems to fix vulnerabilities. We debate whether the FBI should be permitted to introduce vulnerabilities in our software so it can get access to systems with a warrant. This is all important, but what’s missing is a recognition that software vulnerabilities aren’t the most common attack vector: credential stealing is.
The most common way hackers of all stripes, from criminals to hacktivists to foreign governments, break into networks is by stealing and using a valid credential. Basically, they steal passwords, set up man-in-the-middle attacks to piggy-back on legitimate logins, or engage in cleverer attacks to masquerade as authorized users. It’s a more effective avenue of attack in many ways: it doesn’t involve finding a zero-day or unpatched vulnerability, there’s less chance of discovery, and it gives the attacker more flexibility in technique…
The Value of Encryption
In today’s world of ubiquitous computers and networks, it’s hard to overstate the value of encryption. Quite simply, encryption keeps you safe. Encryption protects your financial details and passwords when you bank online. It protects your cell phone conversations from eavesdroppers. If you encrypt your laptop—and I hope you do—it protects your data if your computer is stolen. It protects your money and your privacy.
Encryption protects the identity of dissidents all over the world. It’s a vital tool to allow journalists to communicate securely with their sources, NGOs to protect their work in repressive countries, and attorneys to communicate privately with their clients…
Can You Trust IRS to Keep Your Tax Data Secure?
Monday is Tax Day. Many of us are thinking about our taxes. Are they too high or too low? What’s our money being spent on? Do we have a government worth paying for? I’m not here to answer any of those questions—I’m here to give you something else to think about. In addition to sending the IRS your money, you’re also sending them your data.
It’s a lot of highly personal financial data, so it’s sensitive and important information.
Is that data secure?
The short answer is “no.” Every year, the GAO—Government Accountability Office—reviews IRS security and issues a report. The title of …
Your iPhone Just Got Less Secure. Blame the FBI.
When Johns Hopkins discovered a different security flaw, it notified Apple so the problem could be fixed. The FBI is keeping its newly found breach a secret from everyone.
The FBI’s legal battle with Apple is over, but the way it ended may not be good news for anyone.
Federal agents had been seeking to compel Apple to break the security of an iPhone 5c that had been used by one of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists. Apple had been fighting a court order to cooperate with the FBI, arguing that the authorities’ request was illegal and that creating a tool to break into the phone was itself harmful to the security of every iPhone user worldwide.
Last week, the FBI told the court it had learned of a possible way to break into the phone…
Cryptography Is Harder Than It Looks
View or Download in PDF Format
Writing a magazine column is always an exercise in time travel. I’m writing these words in early December. You’re reading them in February. This means anything that’s news as I write this will be old hat in two months, and anything that’s news to you hasn’t happened yet as I’m writing.
This past November, a group of researchers found some serious vulnerabilities in an encryption protocol that I, and probably most of you, use regularly. The group alerted the vendor, who is currently working to update the protocol and patch the vulnerabilities. The news will probably go public in the middle of February, unless the vendor successfully pleads for more time to finish their security patch. Until then, I’ve agreed not to talk about the specifics…
Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out?
Thefts of personal information aren’t unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it’s information that’s needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS.
Sometimes it’s stolen for purposes of embarrassment or coercion, as in the 2015 cases of Ashley Madison and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The latter exposed highly sensitive personal data that affects security of millions of government employees, probably to the Chinese. Always it’s personal information about us, information that we shared with the expectation that the recipients would keep it secret. And in every case, they did not…
A ‘Key’ for Encryption, Even for Good Reasons, Weakens Security
This essay is part of a debate with Denise Zheng of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Encryption keeps you safe. Encryption protects your financial details and passwords when you bank online. It protects your cell phone conversations from eavesdroppers. If you encrypt your laptop—and I hope you do—it protects your data if your computer is stolen. It protects our money and our privacy.
Encryption protects the identity of dissidents all over the world. It’s a vital tool to allow journalists to communicate securely with their sources, N.G.O.s to protect their work in repressive countries, and lawyers to communicate privately with their clients. It protects our vital infrastructure: our communications network, the power grid and everything else. And as we move to the Internet of Things with its cars and thermostats and medical devices, all of which can …
Why You Should Side With Apple, Not the FBI, in the San Bernardino iPhone Case
Either everyone gets security, or no one does.
Earlier this week, a federal magistrate ordered Apple to assist the FBI in hacking into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple will fight this order in court.
The policy implications are complicated. The FBI wants to set a precedent that tech companies will assist law enforcement in breaking their users’ security, and the technology community is afraid that the precedent will limit what sorts of security features it can offer customers. The FBI sees this as a privacy vs. security debate, while the tech community sees it as a security vs. surveillance debate…
Candidates Won't Hesitate to Use Manipulative Advertising to Score Votes
Advertising in the 2016 election is going to be highly personalized, targeting voters’ personal information to sway their decisions
This presidential election, prepare to be manipulated.
In politics, as in the marketplace, you are the consumer. But you only have one vote to “spend” per election, and in November you’ll almost always only have two possible candidates on which to spend it.
In every election, both of those candidates are going to pull every trick in the surveillance-driven, highly personalized internet advertising world to get you to vote for them. Or, if they think you’ll vote for the other candidate, to stay home and not vote.
In 2012, Barack Obama deftly used both social media and his own database of supporters to outmaneuver Mitt Romney, …
The Internet of Things Will Be the World's Biggest Robot
The Internet of Things is the name given to the computerization of everything in our lives. Already you can buy Internet-enabled thermostats, light bulbs, refrigerators, and cars. Soon everything will be on the Internet: the things we own, the things we interact with in public, autonomous things that interact with each other.
These “things” will have two separate parts. One part will be sensors that collect data about us and our environment. Already our smartphones know our location and, with their onboard accelerometers, track our movements. Things like our thermostats and light bulbs will know who is in the room. Internet-enabled street and highway sensors will know how many people are out and about—and eventually who they are. Sensors will collect environmental data from all over the world…
Security vs. Surveillance
Both the “going dark” metaphor of FBI Director James Comey and the contrasting “golden age of surveillance” metaphor of privacy law professor Peter Swire focus on the value of data to law enforcement. As framed in the media, encryption debates are about whether law enforcement should have surreptitious access to data, or whether companies should be allowed to provide strong encryption to their customers.
It’s a myopic framing that focuses only on one threat—criminals, including domestic terrorists—and the demands of law enforcement and national intelligence. This obscures the most important aspects of the encryption issue: the security it provides against a much wider variety of threats…
When Hacking Could Enable Murder
Cyberthreats are changing. We’re worried about hackers crashing airplanes by hacking into computer networks. We’re worried about hackers remotely disabling cars. We’re worried about manipulated counts from electronic voting booths, remote murder through hacked medical devices and someone hacking an Internet thermostat to turn off the heat and freeze the pipes.
The traditional academic way of thinking about information security is as a triad: confidentiality, integrity and availability. For years, the security industry has been trying to prevent data theft. Stolen data is used for identity theft and other frauds. It can be embarrassing, as in the Ashley Madison breach. It can be damaging, as in the Sony data theft. It can even be a national security threat, as in the case of the Office of Personal Management data breach. These are all breaches of privacy and confidentiality…
How an Overreaction to Terrorism Can Hurt Cybersecurity
Many technological security failures of today can be traced to failures of encryption. In 2014 and 2015, unnamed hackers—probably the Chinese government—stole 21.5 million personal files of U.S. government employees and others. They wouldn’t have obtained this data if it had been encrypted.
Many large-scale criminal data thefts were made either easier or more damaging because data wasn’t encrypted: Target, T.J. Maxx, Heartland Payment Systems, and so on. Many countries are eavesdropping on the unencrypted communications of their own citizens, looking for dissidents and other voices they want to silence…
The Internet of Things That Talk About You Behind Your Back
SilverPush is an Indian startup that’s trying to figure out all the different computing devices you own. It embeds inaudible sounds into the webpages you read and the television commercials you watch. Software secretly embedded in your computers, tablets, and smartphones picks up the signals, and then use scookies to transmit that information back to SilverPush. The result is that the company can track you across your different devices. It can correlate the television commercials you watch with the web searches you make. It can link the things you do on your tablet with the things you do on your work computer…
The Risks—and Benefits—of Letting Algorithms Judge Us
China is considering a new “social credit” system, designed to rate everyone’s trustworthiness. Many fear that it will become a tool of social control—but in reality it has a lot in common with the algorithms and systems that score and classify us all every day.
Human judgment is being replaced by automatic algorithms, and that brings with it both enormous benefits and risks. The technology is enabling a new form of social control, sometimes deliberately and sometimes as a side effect. And as the Internet of Things ushers in an era of more sensors and more data—and more algorithms—we need to ensure that we reap the benefits while avoiding the harms…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.