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More on Chinese Cyberattacks

Wow, is this a crazy media frenzy. We should know better. These attacks happen all the time, and just because the media is reporting about them with greater frequency doesn’t mean that they’re happening with greater frequency.

Hype aside, the Mandiant report on the hackers is very good, especially the part where the Chinese hackers outted themselves through poor opsec: they logged into Facebook from their work computers.

But this is not cyberwar. This is not war of any kind. This is espionage, and the difference is important. Calling it war just feeds our fears and fuels the cyberwar arms race.

In a private e-mail, Gary McGraw made an important point about attribution that matters a lot in this debate.

Because espionage unfolds over months or years in realtime, we can triangulate the origin of an exfiltration attack with some certainty. During the fog of a real cyber war attack, which is more likely to happen in milliseconds, the kind of forensic work that Mandiant did would not be possible. (In fact, we might just well be “Gandalfed” and pin the attack on the wrong enemy.)

Sadly, policymakers seem to think we have completely solved the attribution problem. We have not. This article published in Computerworld does an adequate job of stating my position.

Those of us who work on security engineering and software security can help educate policymakers and others so that we don’t end up pursuing the folly of active defense.

I agree.

This media frenzy is going to be used by the U.S. military to grab more power in cyberspace. They’re already ramping up the U.S. Cyber Command. President Obama is issuing vague executive orders that will result in we-don’t-know what. I don’t see any good coming of this.

EDITED TO ADD (3/13): Critical commentary on the Mandiant report.

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Posted on February 21, 2013 at 12:54 PM • View Comments

Age Biases in Perceptions of Trust

Interesting research (full article):

Abstract: Older adults are disproportionately vulnerable to fraud, and federal agencies have speculated that excessive trust explains their greater vulnerability. Two studies, one behavioral and one using neuroimaging methodology, identified age differences in trust and their neural underpinnings. Older and younger adults rated faces high in trust cues similarly, but older adults perceived faces with cues to untrustworthiness to be significantly more trustworthy and approachable than younger adults. This age-related pattern was mirrored in neural activation to cues of trustworthiness. Whereas younger adults showed greater anterior insula activation to untrustworthy versus trustworthy faces, older adults showed muted activation of the anterior insula to untrustworthy faces. The insula has been shown to support interoceptive awareness that forms the basis of “gut feelings,” which represent expected risk and predict risk-avoidant behavior. Thus, a diminished “gut” response to cues of untrustworthiness may partially underlie older adults’ vulnerability to fraud.

EDITED TO ADD (3/12): I think this result reflects the fact that older people discount the future more than young ones, and therefore are more willing to gamble on a good outcome. It makes sense biologically; they have less future ahead of them. We see the same thing in pregnancy; older mothers have a higher threshold for spontaneous abortion of a risky embryo than younger mothers.

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Posted on February 21, 2013 at 7:24 AM • View Comments

Fixing Soccer Matches

How international soccer matches are fixed.

Right now, Dan Tan’s programmers are busy reverse-engineering the safeguards of online betting houses. About $3 billion is wagered on sports every day, most of it on soccer, most of it in Asia. That’s a lot of noise on the big exchanges. We can exploit the fluctuations, rig the bets in a way that won’t trip the houses’ alarms. And there are so many moments in a soccer game that could swing either way. All you have to do is see an Ilves tackle in the box where maybe the Viikingit forward took a dive. It happens all the time. It would happen anyway. So while you’re running around the pitch in Finland, the syndicate will have computers placing high-volume max bets on whatever outcome the bosses decided on, using markets in Manila that take bets during games, timing the surges so the security bots don’t spot anything suspicious. The exchanges don’t care, not really. They get a cut of all the action anyway. The system is stacked so it’s gamblers further down the chain who bear all the risks.

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Posted on February 20, 2013 at 7:29 AM • View Comments

19th-Century Traffic Analysis

There’s a nice example of traffic analysis in the book No Name, by Wilkie Collins (1862). The attacker, Captain Wragge, needs to know whether a letter has been placed in the mail. He knows who it will have been addressed to if it has been mailed, and with that information, is able to convince the postmaster to tell him that it has, in fact, been mailed:

If she had gone to the admiral’s, no choice would be left him but to follow the coach, to catch the train by which she traveled, and to outstrip her afterward on the drive from the station in Essex to St. Crux. If, on the contrary, she had been contented with writing to her master, it would only be necessary to devise measures for intercepting the letter. The captain decided on going to the post-office, in the first place. Assuming that the housekeeper had written, she would not have left the letter at the mercy of the servant—she would have seen it safely in the letter-box before leaving Aldborough.

“Good-morning,” said the captain, cheerfully addressing the postmaster. “I am Mr. Bygrave of North Shingles. I think you have a letter in the box, addressed to Mr.—?”

The postmaster was a short man, and consequently a man with a proper idea of his own importance. He solemnly checked Captain Wragge in full career.

“When a letter is once posted, sir,” he said, “nobody out of the office has any business with it until it reaches its address.”

The captain was not a man to be daunted, even by a postmaster. A bright idea struck him. He took out his pocketbook, in which Admiral Bartram’s address was written, and returned to the charge.

“Suppose a letter has been wrongly directed by mistake?” he began. “And suppose the writer wants to correct the error after the letter is put into the box?”

“When a letter is once posted, sir,” reiterated the impenetrable local authority, “nobody out of the office touches it on any pretense whatever.”

“Granted, with all my heart,” persisted the captain. “I don’t want to touch it—I only want to explain myself. A lady has posted a letter here, addressed to ‘Noel Vanstone, Esq., Admiral Bartram’s, St. Crux-in-the-Marsh, Essex.’ She wrote in a great hurry, and she is not quite certain whether she added the name of the post-town, ‘Ossory.’ It is of the last importance that the delivery of the letter should not be delayed. What is to hinder your facilitating the post-office work, and obliging a lady, by adding the name of the post-town (if it happens to be left out), with your own hand? I put it to you as a zealous officer, what possible objection can there be to granting my request?”

The postmaster was compelled to acknowledge that there could be no objection, provided nothing but a necessary line was added to the address, provided nobody touched the letter but himself, and provided the precious time of the post-office was not suffered to run to waste. As there happened to be nothing particular to do at that moment, he would readily oblige the lady at Mr. Bygrave’s request.

Captain Wragge watched the postmaster’s hands, as they sorted the letters in the box, with breathless eagerness. Was the letter there? Would the hands of the zealous public servant suddenly stop? Yes! They stopped, and picked out a letter from the rest.

“‘Noel Vanstone, Esquire,’ did you say?” asked the postmaster, keeping the letter in his own hand.

“‘Noel Vanstone, Esquire,'” replied the captain, “‘Admiral Bartram’s, St. Crux-in-the-Marsh.'”

“Ossory, Essex,” chimed in the postmaster, throwing the letter back into the box. “The lady has made no mistake, sir. The address is quite right.”

Nothing but a timely consideration of the heavy debt he owed to appearances prevented Captain Wragge from throwing his tall white hat up in the air as soon as he found the street once more. All further doubt was now at an end. Mrs. Lecount had written to her master—therefore Mrs. Lecount was on her way to Zurich!

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Posted on February 19, 2013 at 12:52 PM • View Comments

Automobile Data Surveillance and the Future of Black Boxes

Tesla Motors gave one of its electric cars to John Broder, a very outspoken electric-car skeptic from the New York Times, for a test drive. After a negative review, Tesla revealed that it logged a dizzying amount of data from that test drive. The company then matched the reporter’s claims against its logs and published a rebuttal. Broder rebutted the rebuttal, and others have tried to figure out who is lying and who is not.

What’s interesting to me is the sheer amount of data Tesla Motors automatically collected about the test drive. From the rebuttal:

After a negative experience several years ago with Top Gear, a popular automotive show, where they pretended that our car ran out of energy and had to be pushed back to the garage, we always carefully data log media drives.

Read the article to see what they logged: power consumption, speed, ambient temperature, control settings, location, and so on.

The stakes are high here. Broder and the New York Times are concerned about their journalistic integrity, which affects their brand. And Tesla Motors wants to sell cars.

The implication is that Tesla Motors only does this for media test drives, but it gives you an idea of the sort of things that will be collected once automobile black boxes become the norm. We’re used to airplane black boxes, which only collected a small amount of data from the minutes just before an incident. But that was back when data was expensive. Now that it’s cheap, expect black boxes to collect everything all the time. And once it’s collected, it’ll be used. By auto manufacturers, by insurance companies, by car rental companies, by marketers. The list will be long.

But as we’re learning from this particular back-and-forth between Broder and Tesla Motors, even intense electronic surveillance of the actions of a person in an enclosed space did not succeed in providing an unambiguous record of what happened. To know that, the car company would have had to have someone in the car with the journalist.

This will increasingly be a problem as we are judged by our data. And in most cases, neither side will spend this sort of effort trying to figure out what really happened.

EDITED TO ADD (2/21): CNN weighs in.

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Posted on February 18, 2013 at 6:14 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.