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In 2009, the Australian government released the Protocol for Lightweight Authentication of Identity (PLAID) protocol. It was recently analyzed (original paper is from 2014, but was just updated), and it’s a security disaster. Matt Green wrote a good blog post back in 2014 that explains the problems.
In August, I wrote about the NSA’s plans to move to quantum-resistant algorithms for its own cryptographic needs.
Cryptographers Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes just published a long paper speculating as to the government’s real motives for doing this. They range from some new cryptanalysis of ECC to a political need after the DUAL_EC_PRNG disaster—to the stated reason of quantum computing fears.
Read the whole paper. (Feel free to skip over the math if it gets too hard, but keep going until the end.)
EDITED TO ADD (11/15): A commentary and critique of the paper by Matthew Green.
In Data and Goliath, I talk about the need for transparency, oversight, and accountability as the mechanism to allow surveillance when it is necessary, while preserving our security against excessive surveillance and surveillance abuse.
James Losey has a new paper that discusses the need for transparency in surveillance. His conclusion:
Available transparency reports from ICT companies demonstrate the rise in government requests to obtain user communications data. However, revelations on the surveillance capabilities of the United States, Sweden, the UK, and other countries demonstrate that the available data is insufficient and falls short of supporting rational debate. Companies can contribute by increasing granularity, particularly on the legal processes through which they are required to reveal user data. However, the greatest gaps remain in the information provided directly from governments. Current understanding of the scope of surveillance can be credited to whistleblowers risking prosecution in order to publicize illegitimate government activity. The lack of transparency on government access to communications data and the legal processes used undermines the legitimacy of the practices.
Transparency alone will not eliminate barriers to freedom of expression or harm to privacy resulting from overly broad surveillance. Transparency provides a window into the scope of current practices and additional measures are needed such as oversight and mechanisms for redress in cases of unlawful surveillance. Furthermore, international data collection results in the surveillance of individuals and communities beyond the scope of a national debate. Transparency offers a necessary first step, a foundation on which to examine current practices and contribute to a debate on human security and freedom. Transparency is not the sole responsibility of any one country, and governments, in addition to companies, are well positioned to provide accurate and timely data to support critical debate on policies and laws that result in censorship and surveillance. Supporting an informed debate should be the goal of all democratic nations.
This paper describes what is almost certainly the most sophisticated chip-and-pin credit card fraud to date.
The Internet is abuzz with this blog post and paper, speculating that the NSA is breaking the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol in the wild through massive precomputation.
I wrote about this at length in May when this paper was first made public. (The reason it’s news again is that the paper was just presented at the ACM Computer and Communications Security conference.)
What’s newly being talked about his how this works inside the NSA surveillance architecture. Nicholas Weaver explains:
To decrypt IPsec, a large number of wiretaps monitor for IKE (Internet Key Exchange) handshakes, the protocol that sets up a new IPsec encrypted connection. The handshakes are forwarded to a decryption oracle, a black box system that performs the magic. While this happens, the wiretaps also record all traffic in the associated IPsec connections.
After a period of time, this oracle either returns the private keys or says “i give up”. If the oracle provides the keys, the wiretap decrypts all the stored traffic and continues to decrypt the connection going forward.
[…]
This would also better match the security implications: just the fact that the NSA can decrypt a particular flow is a critical secret. Forwarding a small number of potentially-crackable flows to a central point better matches what is needed to maintain such secrecy.
Thus by performing the decryption in bulk at the wiretaps, complete with hardware acceleration to keep up with the number of encrypted streams, this architecture directly implies that the NSA can break a massive amount of IPsec traffic, a degree of success which implies a cryptanalysis breakthrough.
That last paragraph is Weaver explaining how this attack matches the NSA rhetoric about capabilities in some of their secret documents.
Now that this is out, I’m sure there are a lot of really upset people inside the NSA.
EDITED TO ADD (11/15): How to protect yourself.
Interesting research.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Using squid teeth as a model, researchers have created “the first material that heals itself in water.”
Paper from Nature.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Interesting research: “An Analysis of China’s ‘Great Cannon.’”
Abstract: On March 16th, 2015, the Chinese censorship apparatus employed a new tool, the “Great Cannon”, to engineer a denial-of-service attack on GreatFire.org, an organization dedicated to resisting China’s censorship. We present a technical analysis of the attack and what it reveals about the Great Cannon’s working, underscoring that in essence it constitutes a selective nation-state Man-in-the-Middle attack tool. Although sharing some code similarities and network locations with the Great Firewall, the Great Cannon is a distinct tool, designed to compromise foreign visitors to Chinese sites. We identify the Great Cannon’s operational behavior, localize it in the network topology, verify its distinctive side-channel, and attribute the system as likely operated by the Chinese government. We also discuss the substantial policy implications raised by its use, including the potential imposition on any user whose browser might visit (even inadvertently) a Chinese web site.
Marte Løge, a 2015 graduate of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, recently collected and analyzed almost 4,000 ALPs as part of her master’s thesis. She found that a large percentage of them—44 percent—started in the top left-most node of the screen. A full 77 percent of them started in one of the four corners. The average number of nodes was about five, meaning there were fewer than 9,000 possible pattern combinations. A significant percentage of patterns had just four nodes, shrinking the pool of available combinations to 1,624. More often than not, patterns moved from left to right and top to bottom, another factor that makes guessing easier.
EDITED TO ADD (9/10): Similar research on this sort of thing.
This research says that data breaches are not getting larger over time.
“Hype and Heavy Tails: A Closer Look at Data Breaches,” by Benjamin Edwards, Steven Hofmeyr, and Stephanie Forrest:
Abstract: Recent widely publicized data breaches have exposed the
personal information of hundreds of millions of people. Some reports point to alarming increases in both the size and frequency of data breaches, spurring institutions around the world to address what appears to be a worsening situation. But, is the problem actually growing worse? In this paper, we study a popular public dataset and develop Bayesian Generalized Linear Models to investigate trends in data breaches. Analysis of the model shows that neither size nor frequency of data breaches has increased over the past decade. We find that the increases that have attracted attention can be explained by the heavy-tailed statistical distributions underlying the dataset. Specifically, we find that data breach size is log-normally distributed and that the daily frequency of breaches is described by a negative binomial distribution. These distributions may provide clues to the generative mechanisms that are responsible for the breaches. Additionally, our model predicts the likelihood of breaches of a particular size in the future. For example, we find that in the next year there is only a 31% chance of a breach of 10 million records or more in the US. Regardless of any trend, data breaches are costly, and we combine the model with two different cost models to project that in the next three years breaches could cost up to $55 billion.
The paper was presented at WEIS 2015.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.