Entries Tagged "academic papers"

Page 24 of 87

On Cybersecurity Insurance

Good paper on cybersecurity insurance: both the history and the promise for the future. From the conclusion:

Policy makers have long held high hopes for cyber insurance as a tool for improving security. Unfortunately, the available evidence so far should give policymakers pause. Cyber insurance appears to be a weak form of governance at present. Insurers writing cyber insurance focus more on organisational procedures than technical controls, rarely include basic security procedures in contracts, and offer discounts that only offer a marginal incentive to invest in security. However, the cost of external response services is covered, which suggests insurers believe ex-post responses to be more effective than ex-ante mitigation. (Alternatively, they can more easily translate the costs associated with ex-post responses into manageable claims.)

The private governance role of cyber insurance is limited by market dynamics. Competitive pressures drive a race-to-the-bottom in risk assessment standards and prevent insurers including security procedures in contracts. Policy interventions, such as minimum risk assessment standards, could solve this collective action problem. Policy-holders and brokers could also drive this change by looking to insurers who conduct rigorous assessments. Doing otherwise ensures adverse selection and moral hazard will increase costs for firms with responsible security postures. Moving toward standardised risk assessment via proposal forms or external scans supports the actuarial base in the long-term. But there is a danger policyholders will succumb to Goodhart’s law by internalising these metrics and optimising the metric rather than minimising risk. This is particularly likely given these assessments are constructed by private actors with their own incentives. Search-light effects may drive the scores towards being based on what can be measured, not what is important.

EDITED TO ADD (9/11): Boing Boing post.

Posted on September 10, 2019 at 6:23 AM • View Comments

Attacking the Intel Secure Enclave

Interesting paper by Michael Schwarz, Samuel Weiser, Daniel Gruss. The upshot is that both Intel and AMD have assumed that trusted enclaves will run only trustworthy code. Of course, that’s not true. And there are no security mechanisms that can deal with malicious enclaves, because the designers couldn’t imagine that they would be necessary. The results are predictable.

The paper: “Practical Enclave Malware with Intel SGX.”

Abstract: Modern CPU architectures offer strong isolation guarantees towards user applications in the form of enclaves. For instance, Intel’s threat model for SGX assumes fully trusted enclaves, yet there is an ongoing debate on whether this threat model is realistic. In particular, it is unclear to what extent enclave malware could harm a system. In this work, we practically demonstrate the first enclave malware which fully and stealthily impersonates its host application. Together with poorly-deployed application isolation on personal computers, such malware can not only steal or encrypt documents for extortion, but also act on the user’s behalf, e.g., sending phishing emails or mounting denial-of-service attacks. Our SGX-ROP attack uses new TSX-based memory-disclosure primitive and a write-anything-anywhere primitive to construct a code-reuse attack from within an enclave which is then inadvertently executed by the host application. With SGX-ROP, we bypass ASLR, stack canaries, and address sanitizer. We demonstrate that instead of protecting users from harm, SGX currently poses a security threat, facilitating so-called super-malware with ready-to-hit exploits. With our results, we seek to demystify the enclave malware threat and lay solid ground for future research on and defense against enclave malware.

Posted on August 30, 2019 at 6:18 AM • View Comments

AI Emotion-Detection Arms Race

Voice systems are increasingly using AI techniques to determine emotion. A new paper describes an AI-based countermeasure to mask emotion in spoken words.

Their method for masking emotion involves collecting speech, analyzing it, and extracting emotional features from the raw signal. Next, an AI program trains on this signal and replaces the emotional indicators in speech, flattening them. Finally, a voice synthesizer re-generates the normalized speech using the AIs outputs, which gets sent to the cloud. The researchers say that this method reduced emotional identification by 96 percent in an experiment, although speech recognition accuracy decreased, with a word error rate of 35 percent.

Academic paper.

Posted on August 29, 2019 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

Evaluating the NSA's Telephony Metadata Program

Interesting analysis: “Examining the Anomalies, Explaining the Value: Should the USA FREEDOM Act’s Metadata Program be Extended?” by Susan Landau and Asaf Lubin.

Abstract: The telephony metadata program which was authorized under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, remains one of the most controversial programs launched by the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Under the program major U.S. carriers were ordered to provide NSA with daily Call Detail Records (CDRs) for all communications to, from, or within the United States. The Snowden disclosures and the public controversy that followed led Congress in 2015 to end bulk collection and amend the CDR authorities with the adoption of the USA FREEDOM Act (UFA).

For a time, the new program seemed to be functioning well. Nonetheless, three issues emerged around the program. The first concern was over high numbers: in both 2016 and 2017, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued 40 orders for collection, but the NSA collected hundreds of millions of CDRs, and the agency provided little clarification for the high numbers. The second emerged in June 2018 when the NSA announced the purging of three years’ worth of CDR records for “technical irregularities.” Finally, in March 2019 it was reported that the NSA had decided to completely abandon the program and not seek its renewal as it is due to sunset in late 2019.

This paper sheds significant light on all three of these concerns. First, we carefully analyze the numbers, showing how forty orders might lead to the collection of several million CDRs, thus offering a model to assist in understanding Intelligence Community transparency reporting across its surveillance programs. Second, we show how the architecture of modern telephone communications might cause collection errors that fit the reported reasons for the 2018 purge. Finally, we show how changes in the terrorist threat environment as well as in the technology and communication methods they employ ­ in particular the deployment of asynchronous encrypted IP-based communications ­ has made the telephony metadata program far less beneficial over time. We further provide policy recommendations for Congress to increase effective intelligence oversight.

Posted on August 12, 2019 at 6:14 AM • View Comments

How Privacy Laws Hurt Defendants

Rebecca Wexler has an interesting op-ed about an inadvertent harm that privacy laws can cause: while law enforcement can often access third-party data to aid in prosecution, the accused don’t have the same level of access to aid in their defense:

The proposed privacy laws would make this situation worse. Lawmakers may not have set out to make the criminal process even more unfair, but the unjust result is not surprising. When lawmakers propose privacy bills to protect sensitive information, law enforcement agencies lobby for exceptions so they can continue to access the information. Few lobby for the accused to have similar rights. Just as the privacy interests of poor, minority and heavily policed communities are often ignored in the lawmaking process, so too are the interests of criminal defendants, many from those same communities.

In criminal cases, both the prosecution and the accused have a right to subpoena evidence so that juries can hear both sides of the case. The new privacy bills need to ensure that law enforcement and defense investigators operate under the same rules when they subpoena digital data. If lawmakers believe otherwise, they should have to explain and justify that view.

For more detail, see her paper.

Posted on August 2, 2019 at 6:04 AM • View Comments

Research on Human Honesty

New research from Science: “Civic honesty around the globe“:

Abstract: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions, and measured whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets. In virtually all countries citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Both non-experts and professional economists were unable to predict this result. Additional data suggest our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.

I am surprised, too.

Posted on July 5, 2019 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

Hacking Hardware Security Modules

Security researchers Gabriel Campana and Jean-Baptiste Bédrune are giving a hardware security module (HSM) talk at BlackHat in August:

This highly technical presentation targets an HSM manufactured by a vendor whose solutions are usually found in major banks and large cloud service providers. It will demonstrate several attack paths, some of them allowing unauthenticated attackers to take full control of the HSM. The presented attacks allow retrieving all HSM secrets remotely, including cryptographic keys and administrator credentials. Finally, we exploit a cryptographic bug in the firmware signature verification to upload a modified firmware to the HSM. This firmware includes a persistent backdoor that survives a firmware update.

They have an academic paper in French, and a presentation of the work. Here’s a summary in English.

There were plenty of technical challenges to solve along the way, in what was clearly a thorough and professional piece of vulnerability research:

  1. They started by using legitimate SDK access to their test HSM to upload a firmware module that would give them a shell inside the HSM. Note that this SDK access was used to discover the attacks, but is not necessary to exploit them.
  2. They then used the shell to run a fuzzer on the internal implementation of PKCS#11 commands to find reliable, exploitable buffer overflows.
  3. They checked they could exploit these buffer overflows from outside the HSM, i.e. by just calling the PKCS#11 driver from the host machine
  4. They then wrote a payload that would override access control and, via another issue in the HSM, allow them to upload arbitrary (unsigned) firmware. It’s important to note that this backdoor is persistent ­ a subsequent update will not fix it.
  5. They then wrote a module that would dump all the HSM secrets, and uploaded it to the HSM.

Posted on June 20, 2019 at 6:56 AM • View Comments

The Cost of Cybercrime

Really interesting paper calculating the worldwide cost of cybercrime:

Abstract: In 2012 we presented the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. In this paper, we report what has changed in the seven years since. The period has seen major platform evolution, with the mobile phone replacing the PC and laptop as the consumer terminal of choice, with Android replacing Windows, and with many services moving to the cloud. The use of social networks has become extremely widespread. The executive summary is that about half of all property crime, by volume and by value, is now online. We hypothesised in 2012 that this might be so; it is now established by multiple victimisation studies. Many cybercrime patterns appear to be fairly stable, but there are some interesting changes. Payment fraud, for example, has more than doubled in value but has fallen slightly as a proportion of payment value; the payment system has simply become bigger, and slightly more efficient. Several new cybercrimes are significant enough to mention, including business email compromise and crimes involving cryptocurrencies. The move to the cloud means that system misconfiguration may now be responsible for as many breaches as phishing. Some companies have suffered large losses as a side-effect of denial-of-service worms released by state actors, such as NotPetya; we have to take a view on whether they count as cybercrime. The infrastructure supporting cybercrime, such as botnets, continues to evolve, and specific crimes such as premium-rate phone scams have evolved some interesting variants. The over-all picture is the same as in 2012: traditional offences that are now technically ‘computercrimes’ such as tax and welfare fraud cost the typical citizen in the low hundreds of Euros/dollars a year; payment frauds and similar offences, where the modus operandi has been completely changed by computers, cost in the tens; while the new computer crimes cost in the tens of cents. Defending against the platforms used to support the latter two types of crime cost citizens in the tens of dollars. Our conclusions remain broadly the same as in 2012: it would be economically rational to spend less in anticipation of cybercrime (on antivirus, firewalls, etc.) and more on response. We are particularly bad at prosecuting criminals who operate infrastructure that other wrongdoers exploit. Given the growing realisation among policymakers that crime hasn’t been falling over the past decade, merely moving online, we might reasonably hope for better funded and coordinated law-enforcement action.

Richard Clayton gave a presentation on this yesterday at WEIS. His final slide contained a summary.

  • Payment fraud is up, but credit card sales are up even more—so we’re winning.
  • Cryptocurrencies are enabling new scams, but the big money is still being lost in more traditional investment fraud.
  • Telcom fraud is down, basically because Skype is free.
  • Anti-virus fraud has almost disappeared, but tech support scams are growing very rapidly.
  • The big money is still in tax fraud, welfare fraud, VAT fraud, and so on.
  • We spend more money on cyber defense than we do on the actual losses.
  • Criminals largely act with impunity. They don’t believe they will get caught, and mostly that’s correct.

Bottom line: the technology has changed a lot since 2012, but the economic considerations remain unchanged.

Posted on June 4, 2019 at 6:06 AM • View Comments

Fraudulent Academic Papers

The term “fake news” has lost much of its meaning, but it describes a real and dangerous Internet trend. Because it’s hard for many people to differentiate a real news site from a fraudulent one, they can be hoodwinked by fictitious news stories pretending to be real. The result is that otherwise reasonable people believe lies.

The trends fostering fake news are more general, though, and we need to start thinking about how it could affect different areas of our lives. In particular, I worry about how it will affect academia. In addition to fake news, I worry about fake research.

An example of this seems to have happened recently in the cryptography field. SIMON is a block cipher designed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and made public in 2013. It’s a general design optimized for hardware implementation, with a variety of block sizes and key lengths. Academic cryptanalysts have been trying to break the cipher since then, with some pretty good results, although the NSA’s specified parameters are still immune to attack. Last week, a paper appeared on the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) ePrint archive purporting to demonstrate a much more effective break of SIMON, one that would affect actual implementations. The paper was sufficiently weird, the authors sufficiently unknown and the details of the attack sufficiently absent, that the editors took it down a few days later. No harm done in the end.

In recent years, there has been a push to speed up the process of disseminating research results. Instead of the laborious process of academic publication, researchers have turned to faster online publishing processes, preprint servers, and simply posting research results. The IACR ePrint archive is one of those alternatives. This has all sorts of benefits, but one of the casualties is the process of peer review. As flawed as that process is, it does help ensure the accuracy of results. (Of course, bad papers can still make it through the process. We’re still dealing with the aftermath of a flawed, and now retracted, Lancet paper linking vaccines with autism.)

Like the news business, academic publishing is subject to abuse. We can only speculate about the motivations of the three people who are listed as authors on the SIMON paper, but you can easily imagine better-executed and more nefarious scenarios. In a world of competitive research, one group might publish a fake result to throw other researchers off the trail. It might be a company trying to gain an advantage over a potential competitor, or even a country trying to gain an advantage over another country.

Reverting to a slower and more accurate system isn’t the answer; the world is just moving too fast for that. We need to recognize that fictitious research results can now easily be injected into our academic publication system, and tune our skepticism meters accordingly.

This essay previously appeared on Lawfare.com.

Posted on May 30, 2019 at 9:51 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.