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Google’s threat analysts have identified state-level attacks from China.
I hope both campaigns are working under the assumption that everything they say and do will be dumped on the Internet before the election. That feels like the most likely outcome.
National Geographic has a photo of a 7-foot long shark that fought a giant squid and lived to tell the tale. Or, at least, lived to show off the suction marks on his skin.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
I just published a new paper with Karen Levy of Cornell: “Privacy Threats in Intimate Relationships.”
Abstract: This article provides an overview of intimate threats: a class of privacy threats that can arise within our families, romantic partnerships, close friendships, and caregiving relationships. Many common assumptions about privacy are upended in the context of these relationships, and many otherwise effective protective measures fail when applied to intimate threats. Those closest to us know the answers to our secret questions, have access to our devices, and can exercise coercive power over us. We survey a range of intimate relationships and describe their common features. Based on these features, we explore implications for both technical privacy design and policy, and offer design recommendations for ameliorating intimate privacy risks.
This is an important issue that has gotten much too little attention in the cybersecurity community.
Zoom was doing so well…. And now we have this:
Corporate clients will get access to Zoom’s end-to-end encryption service now being developed, but Yuan said free users won’t enjoy that level of privacy, which makes it impossible for third parties to decipher communications.
“Free users for sure we don’t want to give that because we also want to work together with FBI, with local law enforcement in case some people use Zoom for a bad purpose,” Yuan said on the call.
This is just dumb. Imagine the scene in the terrorist/drug kingpin/money launderer hideout: “I’m sorry, boss. We could have have strong encryption to secure our bad intentions from the FBI, but we can’t afford the $20.” This decision will only affect protesters and dissidents and human rights workers and journalists.
Here’s advisor Alex Stamos doing damage control:
Nico, it’s incorrect to say that free calls won’t be encrypted and this turns out to be a really difficult balancing act between different kinds of harms. More details here:
Some facts on Zoom’s current plans for E2E encryption, which are complicated by the product requirements for an enterprise conferencing product and some legitimate safety issues. The E2E design is available here: https://github.com/zoom/zoom-e2e-whitepaper/blob/master/zoom_e2e.pdf
I read that document, and it doesn’t explain why end-to-end encryption is only available to paying customers. And note that Stamos said “encrypted” and not “end-to-end encrypted.” He knows the difference.
Anyway, people were rightly incensed by his remarks. And yesterday, Yuan tried to clarify:
Yuan sought to assuage users’ concerns Wednesday in his weekly webinar, saying the company was striving to “do the right thing” for vulnerable groups, including children and hate-crime victims, whose abuse is sometimes broadcast through Zoom’s platform.
“We plan to provide end-to-end encryption to users for whom we can verify identity, thereby limiting harm to vulnerable groups,” he said. “I wanted to clarify that Zoom does not monitor meeting content. We do not have backdoors where participants, including Zoom employees or law enforcement, can enter meetings without being visible to others. None of this will change.”
Notice that is specifically did not say that he was offering end-to-end encryption to users of the free platform. Only to “users we can verify identity,” which I’m guessing means users that give him a credit card number.
The Twitter feed was similarly sloppily evasive:
We are seeing some misunderstandings on Twitter today around our encryption. We want to provide these facts.
Zoom does not provide information to law enforcement except in circumstances such as child sexual abuse.
Zoom does not proactively monitor meeting content.
Zoom does no have backdoors where Zoom or others can enter meetings without being visible to participants.
AES 256 GCM encryption is turned on for all Zoom users—free and paid.
Those facts have nothing to do with any “misunderstanding.” That was about end-to-end encryption, which the statement very specifically left out of that last sentence. The corporate communications have been clear and consistent.
Come on, Zoom. You were doing so well. Of course you should offer premium features to paying customers, but please don’t include security and privacy in those premium features. They should be available to everyone.
And, hey, this is kind of a dumb time to side with the police over protesters.
I have emailed the CEO, and will report back if I hear back. But for now, assume that the free version of Zoom will not support end-to-end encryption.
EDITED TO ADD (6/4): Another article.
EDITED TO ADD (6/4): I understand that this is complicated, both technically and politically. (Note, though, Jitsi is doing it.) And, yes, lots of people confused end-to-end encryption with link encryption. (My readers tend to be more sophisticated than that.) My worry that the “we’ll offer end-to-end encryption only to paying customers we can verify, even though there’s plenty of evidence that ‘bad purpose’ people will just get paid accounts” story plays into the dangerous narrative that encryption itself is dangerous when widely available. And I disagree with the notion that the possibility of child exploitation is a valid reason to deny security to large groups of people.
Matthew Green on this issue. An excerpt:
Once the precedent is set that E2E encryption is too “dangerous” to hand to the masses, the genie is out of the bottle. And once corporate America accepts that private communications are too politically risky to deploy, it’s going to be hard to put it back.
From Signal:
Want to help us work on end-to-end encrypted group video calling functionality that will be free for everyone? Zoom on over to our careers page….
This is interesting:
The image, a seemingly innocuous sunset (or dawn) sky above placid waters, may be viewed without harm. But if loaded as wallpaper, the phone will crash.
The fault does not appear to have been maliciously created. Rather, according to developers following Ice Universe’s Twitter thread, the problem lies in the way color space is handled by the Android OS.
The image was created using the RGB color space to display image hues, while Android 10 uses the sRGB color space protocol, according to 9to5Google contributor Dylan Roussel. When the Android phone cannot properly convert the Adobe RGB image, it crashes.
Researcher Bhavuk Jain discovered a vulnerability in the “Sign in with Apple” feature, and received a $100,000 bug bounty from Apple. Basically, forged tokens could gain access to pretty much any account.
It is fixed.
EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Another story.
This study shows that most people don’t change their passwords after a breach, and if they do they change it to a weaker password.
Abstract: To protect against misuse of passwords compromised in a breach, consumers should promptly change affected passwords and any similar passwords on other accounts. Ideally, affected companies should strongly encourage this behavior and have mechanisms in place to mitigate harm. In order to make recommendations to companies about how to help their users perform these and other security-enhancing actions after breaches, we must first have some understanding of the current effectiveness of companies’ post-breach practices. To study the effectiveness of password-related breach notifications and practices enforced after a breach, we examine—based on real-world password data from 249 participants—whether and how constructively participants changed their passwords after a breach announcement.
Of the 249 participants, 63 had accounts on breached domains;only 33% of the 63 changed their passwords and only 13% (of 63)did so within three months of the announcement. New passwords were on average 1.3× stronger than old passwords (when comparing log10-transformed strength), though most were weaker or of equal strength. Concerningly, new passwords were overall more similar to participants’ other passwords, and participants rarely changed passwords on other sites even when these were the same or similar to their password on the breached domain.Our results highlight the need for more rigorous password-changing requirements following a breach and more effective breach notifications that deliver comprehensive advice.
News article.
EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Another news aricle. Slashdot thread.
EDITED TO ADD (7/1): This entry has been translated into Spanish.
Humboldt Squid communicate by changing their skin patterns and glowing.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
The 5GBioShield sells for £339.60, and the description sounds like snake oil:
…its website, which describes it as a USB key that “provides protection for your home and family, thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser, which can be worn or placed near to a smartphone or any other electrical, radiation or EMF [electromagnetic field] emitting device”.
“Through a process of quantum oscillation, the 5GBioShield USB key balances and re-harmonises the disturbing frequencies arising from the electric fog induced by devices, such as laptops, cordless phones, wi-fi, tablets, et cetera,” it adds.
Turns out that it’s just a regular USB stick.
Note that this is “announced,” so we don’t know when it’s actually going to be implemented.
Facebook today announced new features for Messenger that will alert you when messages appear to come from financial scammers or potential child abusers, displaying warnings in the Messenger app that provide tips and suggest you block the offenders. The feature, which Facebook started rolling out on Android in March and is now bringing to iOS, uses machine learning analysis of communications across Facebook Messenger’s billion-plus users to identify shady behaviors. But crucially, Facebook says that the detection will occur only based on metadata—not analysis of the content of messages—so that it doesn’t undermine the end-to-end encryption that Messenger offers in its Secret Conversations feature. Facebook has said it will eventually roll out that end-to-end encryption to all Messenger chats by default.
That default Messenger encryption will take years to implement.
More:
Facebook hasn’t revealed many details about how its machine-learning abuse detection tricks will work. But a Facebook spokesperson tells WIRED the detection mechanisms are based on metadata alone: who is talking to whom, when they send messages, with what frequency, and other attributes of the relevant accounts—essentially everything other than the content of communications, which Facebook’s servers can’t access when those messages are encrypted. “We can get pretty good signals that we can develop through machine learning models, which will obviously improve over time,” a Facebook spokesperson told WIRED in a phone call. They declined to share more details in part because the company says it doesn’t want to inadvertently help bad actors circumvent its safeguards.
The company’s blog post offers the example of an adult sending messages or friend requests to a large number of minors as one case where its behavioral detection mechanisms can spot a likely abuser. In other cases, Facebook says, it will weigh a lack of connections between two people’s social graphs—a sign that they don’t know each other—or consider previous instances where users reported or blocked a someone as a clue that they’re up to something shady.
One screenshot from Facebook, for instance, shows an alert that asks if a message recipient knows a potential scammer. If they say no, the alert suggests blocking the sender, and offers tips about never sending money to a stranger. In another example, the app detects that someone is using a name and profile photo to impersonate the recipient’s friend. An alert then shows the impersonator’s and real friend’s profiles side-by-side, suggesting that the user block the fraudster.
Details from Facebook
EDITED TO ADD (7/1): This entry has been translated into Spanish.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.