Entries Tagged "academic papers"

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Paradoxes of Big Data

Interesting paper: “Three Paradoxes of Big Data,” by Neil M. Richards and Jonathan H. King, Stanford Law Review Online, 2013.

Abstract: Big data is all the rage. Its proponents tout the use of sophisticated analytics to mine large data sets for insight as the solution to many of our society’s problems. These big data evangelists insist that data-driven decisionmaking can now give us better predictions in areas ranging from college admissions to dating to hiring to medicine to national security and crime prevention. But much of the rhetoric of big data contains no meaningful analysis of its potential perils, only the promise. We don’t deny that big data holds substantial potential for the future, and that large dataset analysis has important uses today. But we would like to sound a cautionary note and pause to consider big data’s potential more critically. In particular, we want to highlight three paradoxes in the current rhetoric about big data to help move us toward a more complete understanding of the big data picture. First, while big data pervasively collects all manner of private information, the operations of big data itself are almost entirely shrouded in legal and commercial secrecy. We call this the Transparency Paradox. Second, though big data evangelists talk in terms of miraculous outcomes, this rhetoric ignores the fact that big data seeks to identify at the expense of individual and collective identity. We call this the Identity Paradox. And third, the rhetoric of big data is characterized by its power to transform society, but big data has power effects of its own, which privilege large government and corporate entities at the expense of ordinary individuals. We call this the Power Paradox. Recognizing the paradoxes of big data, which show its perils alongside its potential, will help us to better understand this revolution. It may also allow us to craft solutions to produce a revolution that will be as good as its evangelists predict.

EDITED TO ADD (10/11): Here’s an HTML version of the paper.

Posted on September 26, 2013 at 6:58 AM • View Comments

Surreptitiously Tampering with Computer Chips

This is really interesting research: “Stealthy Dopant-Level Hardware Trojans.” Basically, you can tamper with a logic gate to be either stuck-on or stuck-off by changing the doping of one transistor. This sort of sabotage is undetectable by functional testing or optical inspection. And it can be done at mask generation—very late in the design process—since it does not require adding circuits, changing the circuit layout, or anything else. All this makes it really hard to detect.

The paper talks about several uses for this type of sabotage, but the most interesting—and devastating—is to modify a chip’s random number generator. This technique could, for example, reduce the amount of entropy in Intel’s hardware random number generator from 128 bits to 32 bits. This could be done without triggering any of the built-in self-tests, without disabling any of the built-in self-tests, and without failing any randomness tests.

I have no idea if the NSA convinced Intel to do this with the hardware random number generator it embedded into its CPU chips, but I do know that it could. And I was always leery of Intel strongly pushing for applications to use the output of its hardware RNG directly and not putting it through some strong software PRNG like Fortuna. And now Theodore Ts’o writes this about Linux: “I am so glad I resisted pressure from Intel engineers to let /dev/random rely only on the RDRAND instruction.”

Yes, this is a conspiracy theory. But I’m not willing to discount such things anymore. That’s the worst thing about the NSA’s actions. We have no idea whom we can trust.

Posted on September 16, 2013 at 1:25 PM • View Comments

Excess Automobile Deaths as a Result of 9/11

People commented about a point I made in a recent essay:

In the months after 9/11, so many people chose to drive instead of fly that the resulting deaths dwarfed the deaths from the terrorist attack itself, because cars are much more dangerous than airplanes.

Yes, that’s wrong. Where I said “months,” I should have said “years.”

I got the sound bite from John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart’s book, Terror, Security, and Money. This is footnote 19 from Chapter 1:

The inconvenience of extra passenger screening and added costs at airports after 9/11 cause many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination instead, and, since airline travel is far safer than car travel, this has led to an increase of 500 U.S. traffic fatalities per year. Using DHS-mandated value of statistical life at $6.5 million, this equates to a loss of $3.2 billion per year, or $32 billion over the period 2002 to 2011 (Blalock et al. 2007).

The authors make the same point in this earlier (and shorter) essay:

Increased delays and added costs at U.S. airports due to new security procedures provide incentive for many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination rather than flying, and, since driving is far riskier than air travel, the extra automobile traffic generated has been estimated in one study to result in 500 or more extra road fatalities per year.

The references are:

  • Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel H. Simon. 2007. “The Impact of Post-9/11 Airport Security Measures on the Demand for Air Travel.” Journal of Law and Economics 50(4) November: 731­–755.
  • Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel H. Simon. 2009. “Driving Fatalities after 9/11: A Hidden Cost of Terrorism.” Applied Economics 41(14): 1717­–1729.

Business Week makes the same point here.

There’s also this reference:

  • Michael Sivak and Michael J. Flannagan. 2004. “Consequences for road traffic fatalities of the reduction in flying following September 11, 2001.” Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behavior 7 (4).

Abstract: Gigerenzer (Gigerenzer, G. (2004). Dread risk, September 11, and fatal traffic accidents. Psychological Science, 15 , 286­287) argued that the increased fear of flying in the U.S. after September 11 resulted in a partial shift from flying to driving on rural interstate highways, with a consequent increase of 353 road traffic fatalities for October through December 2001. We reevaluated the consequences of September 11 by utilizing the trends in road traffic fatalities from 2000 to 2001 for January through August. We also examined which road types and traffic participants contributed most to the increased road fatalities. We conclude that (1) the partial modal shift after September 11 resulted in 1018 additional road fatalities for the three months in question, which is substantially more than estimated by Gigerenzer, (2) the major part of the increased toll occurred on local roads, arguing against a simple modal shift from flying to driving to the same destinations, (3) driver fatalities did not increase more than in proportion to passenger fatalities, and (4) pedestrians and bicyclists bore a disproportionate share of the increased fatalities.

This is another analysis.

Posted on September 9, 2013 at 6:20 AM • View Comments

The Federal Trade Commission and Privacy

New paper on the FTC and its actions to protect privacy:

Abstract: One of the great ironies about information privacy law is that the primary regulation of privacy in the United States has barely been studied in a scholarly way. Since the late 1990s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been enforcing companies’ privacy policies through its authority to police unfair and deceptive trade practices. Despite more than fifteen years of FTC enforcement, there is no meaningful body of judicial decisions to show for it. The cases have nearly all resulted in settlement agreements. Nevertheless, companies look to these agreements to guide their privacy practices. Thus, in practice, FTC privacy jurisprudence has become the broadest and most influential regulating force on information privacy in the United States—more so than nearly any privacy statute and any common law tort.

In this article, we contend that the FTC’s privacy jurisprudence is the functional equivalent to a body of common law, and we examine it as such. We explore how and why the FTC, and not contract law, came to dominate the enforcement of privacy policies. A common view of the FTC’s privacy jurisprudence is that it is thin, merely focusing on enforcing privacy promises. In contrast, a deeper look at the principles that emerge from FTC privacy “common law” demonstrates that the FTC’s privacy jurisprudence is quite thick. The FTC has codified certain norms and best practices and has developed some baseline privacy protections. Standards have become so specific they resemble rules. We contend that the foundations exist to develop this “common law” into a robust privacy regulatory regime, one that focuses on consumer expectations of privacy, that extends far beyond privacy policies, and that involves a full suite of substantive rules that exist independently from a company’s privacy representations.

Posted on August 29, 2013 at 12:28 PM • View Comments

Evading Internet Censorship

This research project by Brandon Wiley—the tool is called “Dust”—looks really interesting. Here’s the description of his Defcon talk:

Abstract: The greatest danger to free speech on the Internet today is filtering of traffic using protocol fingerprinting. Protocols such as SSL, Tor, BitTorrent, and VPNs are being summarily blocked, regardless of their legal and ethical uses. Fortunately, it is possible to bypass this filtering by reencoding traffic into a form which cannot be correctly fingerprinted by the filtering hardware. I will be presenting a tool called Dust which provides an engine for reencoding traffic into a variety of forms. By developing a good model of how filtering hardware differentiates traffic into different protocols, a profile can be created which allows Dust to reencode arbitrary traffic to bypass the filters.

Dust is different than other approaches because it is not simply another obfuscated protocol. It is an engine which can encode traffic according to the given specifications. As the filters change their algorithms for protocol detection, rather than developing a new protocol, Dust can just be reconfigured to use different parameters. In fact, Dust can be automatically reconfigured using examples of what traffic is blocked and what traffic gets through. Using machine learning a new profile is created which will reencode traffic so that it resembles that which gets through and not that which is blocked. Dust has been created with the goal of defeating real filtering hardware currently deployed for the purpose of censoring free speech on the Internet. In this talk I will discuss how the real filtering hardware work and how to effectively defeat it.

EDITED TO ADD (9/11): Papers about Dust. Dust source code.

Posted on August 28, 2013 at 7:07 AM • View Comments

"The Next Generation Communications Privacy Act"

Orin Kerr envisions what the ECPA should look like today:

Abstract: In 1986, Congress enacted the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to regulate government access to Internet communications and records. ECPA is widely seen as outdated, and ECPA reform is now on the Congressional agenda. At the same time, existing reform proposals retain the structure of the 1986 Act and merely tinker with a few small aspects of the statute. This Article offers a thought experiment about what might happen if Congress repealed ECPA and enacted a new privacy statute to replace it.

The new statute would look quite different from ECPA because overlooked changes in Internet technology have dramatically altered the assumptions on which the 1986 Act was based. ECPA was designed for a network world with high storage costs and only local network access. Its design reflects the privacy threats of such a network, including high privacy protection for real-time wiretapping, little protection for non-content records, and no attention to particularity or jurisdiction. Today’s Internet reverses all of these assumptions. Storage costs have plummeted, leading to a reality of almost total storage. Even United States-based services now serve a predominantly foreign customer base. A new statute would need to account for these changes.

The Article contends that a next generation privacy act should contain four features. First, it should impose the same requirement on access to all contents. Second, it should impose particularity requirements on the scope of disclosed metadata. Third, it should impose minimization rules on all accessed content. And fourth, it should impose a two-part territoriality regime with a mandatory rule structure for United States-based users and a permissive regime for users located abroad.

Posted on August 26, 2013 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

How Security Becomes Banal

Interesting paper: “The Banality of Security: The Curious Case of Surveillance Cameras,” by Benjamin Goold, Ian Loader, and Angélica Thumala (full paper is behind a paywall).

Abstract: Why do certain security goods become banal (while others do not)? Under what conditions does banality occur and with what effects? In this paper, we answer these questions by examining the story of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) in Britain. We consider the lessons to be learned from CCTV’s rapid—but puzzling—transformation from novelty to ubiquity, and what the banal properties of CCTV tell us about the social meanings of surveillance and security. We begin by revisiting and reinterpreting the historical process through which camera surveillance has diffused across the British landscape, focusing on the key developments that encoded CCTV in certain dominant meanings (around its effectiveness, for example) and pulled the cultural rug out from under alternative or oppositional discourses. Drawing upon interviews with those who produce and consume CCTV, we tease out and discuss the family of meanings that can lead one justifiably to describe CCTV as a banal good. We then examine some frontiers of this process and consider whether novel forms of camera surveillance (such as domestic CCTV systems) may press up against the limits of banality in ways that risk unsettling security practices whose social value and utility have come to be taken for granted. In conclusion, we reflect on some wider implications of banal security and its limits.

Posted on August 23, 2013 at 1:23 PM • View Comments

Measuring Entropy and its Applications to Encryption

There have been a bunch of articles about an information theory paper with vaguely sensational headlines like “Encryption is less secure than we thought” and “Research shakes crypto foundations.” It’s actually not that bad.

Basically, the researchers argue that the traditional measurement of Shannon entropy isn’t the right model to use for cryptography, and that minimum entropy is. This difference may make some ciphertexts easier to decrypt, but not in ways that have practical implications in the general case. It’s the same thinking that leads us to guess passwords from a dictionary rather than randomly—because we know that humans both created the passwords and have to remember them.

This isn’t news—lots of cryptography papers make use of minimum entropy instead of Shannon entropy already—and it’s hard to see what the contribution of this paper is. Note that the paper was presented at an information theory conference, and not a cryptography conference. My guess is that there wasn’t enough crypto expertise on the program committee to reject the paper.

So don’t worry; cryptographic algorithms aren’t going to come crumbling down anytime soon. Well, they might—but not because of this result.

Slashdot thread.

Posted on August 21, 2013 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

Circumventing Communications Blackouts

Rangzen looks like a really interesting ad hoc mesh networking system to circumvent government-imposed communications blackouts. I am particularly interested in how it uses reputation to determine who can be trusted, while maintaining some level of anonymity.

Academic paper:

Abstract: A challenging problem in dissent networking is that of circumventing large-scale communication blackouts imposed by oppressive governments. Although prior work has not focused on the need for user anonymity, we contend that it is essential. Without anonymity, governments can use communication networks to track and persecute users. A key challenge for decentralized networks is that of resource allocation and control. Network resources must be shared in a manner that deprioritizes unwanted traffic and abusive users. This task is typically addressed through reputation systems that conflict with anonymity. Our work addresses this paradox: We prioritize resources in a privacy-preserving manner to create an attack-resilient, anonymity-preserving, mobile ad-hoc network. Our prioritization mechanism exploits the properties of a social trust graph to promote messages relayed via trusted nodes. We present Rangzen, a microblogging solution that uses smartphones to opportunistically relay messages among citizens in a delay-tolerant network (DTN) that is independent of government or corporate-controlled infrastructure.

This is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about in this essay.

Posted on August 14, 2013 at 7:43 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.