Entries Tagged "academic papers"

Page 59 of 86

Risks of Networked Systems

Interesting research:

Helbing’s publication illustrates how cascade effects and complex dynamics amplify the vulnerability of networked systems. For example, just a few long-distance connections can largely decrease our ability to mitigate the threats posed by global pandemics. Initially beneficial trends, such as globalization, increasing network densities, higher complexity, and an acceleration of institutional decision processes may ultimately push human-made or human-influenced systems towards systemic instability, Helbing finds. Systemic instability refers to a system, which will get out of control sooner or later, even if everybody involved is well skilled, highly motivated and behaving properly. Crowd disasters are shocking examples illustrating that many deaths may occur even when everybody tries hard not to hurt anyone.

Posted on May 2, 2013 at 1:09 PM • View Comments

The Dangers of Surveillance

Interesting article, “The Dangers of Surveillance,” by Neil M. Richards, Harvard Law Review, 2013. From the abstract:

….We need a better account of the dangers of surveillance.

This article offers such an account. Drawing on law, history, literature, and the work of scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of “surveillance studies,” I explain what those harms are and why they matter. At the level of theory, I explain when surveillance is particularly dangerous, and when it is not. Surveillance is harmful because it can chill the exercise of our civil liberties, especially our intellectual privacy. It is also gives the watcher power over the watched, creating the the risk of a variety of other harms, such as discrimination, coercion, and the threat of selective enforcement, where critics of the government can be prosecuted or blackmailed for wrongdoing unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance.

At a practical level, I propose a set of four principles that should guide the future development of surveillance law, allowing for a more appropriate balance between the costs and benefits of government surveillance. First, we must recognize that surveillance transcends the public-private divide. Even if we are ultimately more concerned with government surveillance, any solution must grapple with the complex relationships between government and corporate watchers. Second, we must recognize that secret surveillance is illegitimate, and prohibit the creation of any domestic surveillance programs whose existence is secret. Third, we should recognize that total surveillance is illegitimate and reject the idea that it is acceptable for the government to record all Internet activity without authorization. Fourth, we must recognize that surveillance is harmful. Surveillance menaces intellectual privacy and increases the risk of blackmail, coercion, and discrimination; accordingly, we must recognize surveillance as a harm in constitutional standing doctrine.

EDITED TO ADD (4/12): Reply to the article.

Posted on March 29, 2013 at 12:25 PM • View Comments

On Secrecy

Interesting law paper: “The Implausibility of Secrecy,” by Mark Fenster.

Abstract: Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branch’s obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events ­ among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administration’s celebrated leak prosecutions, and the widespread disclosure by high-level officials of flattering confidential information to sympathetic reporters ­ undercut the image of a state that can classify and control its information. The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, open sources ­ each of these constitutes a path out of the government’s informational clutches. As a result, permanent, long-lasting secrecy of any sort and to any degree is costly and difficult to accomplish.

This article argues that information control is an implausible goal. It critiques some of the foundational assumptions of constitutional and statutory laws that seek to regulate information flows, in the process countering and complicating the extensive literature on secrecy, transparency, and leaks that rest on those assumptions. By focusing on the functional issues relating to government information and broadening its study beyond the much-examined phenomenon of leaks, the article catalogs and then illustrates in a series of case studies the formal and informal means by which information flows out of the state. These informal means play an especially important role in limiting both the ability of state actors to keep secrets and the extent to which formal legal doctrines can control the flow of government information. The same bureaucracy and legal regime that keep open government laws from creating a transparent state also keep the executive branch from creating a perfect informational dam. The article draws several implications from this descriptive, functional argument for legal reform and for the study of administrative and constitutional law.

Posted on March 14, 2013 at 12:19 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.

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

Guessing Smart Phone PINs by Monitoring the Accelerometer

“Practicality of Accelerometer Side Channels on Smartphones,” by Adam J. Aviv. Benjamin Sapp, Matt Blaze, and Jonathan M. Smith.

Abstract: Modern smartphones are equipped with a plethora of sensors that enable a wide range of interactions, but some of these sensors can be employed as a side channel to surreptitiously learn about user input. In this paper, we show that the accelerometer sensor can also be employed as a high-bandwidth side channel; particularly, we demonstrate how to use the accelerometer sensor to learn user tap and gesture-based input as required to unlock smartphones using a PIN/password or Android’s graphical password pattern. Using data collected from a diverse group of 24 users in controlled (while sitting) and uncontrolled (while walking) settings, we develop sample rate independent features for accelerometer readings based on signal processing and polynomial fitting techniques. In controlled settings, our prediction model can on average classify the PIN entered 43% of the time and pattern 73% of the time within 5 attempts when selecting from a test set of 50 PINs and 50 patterns. In uncontrolled settings, while users are walking, our model can still classify 20% of the PINs and 40% of the patterns within 5 attempts. We additionally explore the possibility of constructing an accelerometer-reading-to-input dictionary and find that such dictionaries would be greatly challenged by movement-noise and cross-user training.

Article.

Posted on February 15, 2013 at 6:48 AM • View Comments

The Eavesdropping System in Your Computer

Dan Farmer has an interesting paper (long version here; short version here) discussing the Baseboard Management Controller on your computer’s motherboard:

The BMC is an embedded computer found on most server motherboards made in the last 10 or 15 years. Often running Linux, the BMC’s CPU, memory, storage, and network run independently. It runs Intel’s IPMI out-of-band systems management protocol alongside network services (web, telnet, VNC, SMTP, etc.) to help manage, debug, monitor, reboot, and roll out servers, virtual systems, and supercomputers. Vendors frequently add features and rebrand OEM’d BMCs: Dell has iDRAC, Hewlett Packard iLO, IBM calls theirs IMM2, etc. It is popular because it helps raise efficiency and lower costs associated with availability, personnel, scaling, power, cooling, and more.

To do its magic, the BMC has near complete control over the server’s hardware: the IPMI specification says that it can have “full access to system memory and I/O space.” Designed to operate when the bits hit the fan, it continues to run even if the server is powered down. Activity on the BMC is essentially invisible unless you have a good hardware hacker on your side or have cracked root on the embedded operating system.

What’s the problem?

Servers are usually managed in large groups, which may have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of computers. Each group typically has one or two reusable and closely guarded passwords; if you know the password, you control all the servers in the group. Passwords can remain unchanged for a long time—often years—not only because it is very difficult to manage or modify, but also due to the near impossibility of auditing or verifying change. And due to the spec, the password is stored in clear text on the BMC.

IPMI network traffic is usually restricted to a VLAN or management network, but if an attacker has management access to a server she’ll be able to communicate to its BMC and possibly unprotected private networks. If the BMC itself is compromised, it is possible to recover the IPMI password as well. In that bleak event all bets and gloves are off.

BMC vulnerabilities are difficult to manage since they are so low level and vendor pervasive. At times, problems originate in the OEM firmware, not the server vendor, adding uncertainty as to what is actually at risk. You can’t apply fixes yourself since BMCs will only run signed and proprietary flash images. I found an undocumented way of gaining root shell access on a major vendor’s BMC and another giving out-of-the box root shell via SSH. Who knows what’s on other BMCs, and who is putting what where? I’ll note that most BMCs are designed or manufactured in China.

Basically, it’s a perfect spying platform. You can’t control it. You can’t patch it. It can completely control your computer’s hardware and software. And its purpose is remote monitoring.

At the very least, we need to be able to look into these devices and see what’s running on them.

I’m amazed we haven’t seen any talk about this before now.

EDITED TO ADD (1/31): Correction—these chips are on server motherboards, not on PCs or other consumer devices.

Posted on January 31, 2013 at 1:28 PM • View Comments

Violence as a Contagious Disease

This is fascinating:

Intuitively we understand that people surrounded by violence are more likely to be violent themselves. This isn’t just some nebulous phenomenon, argue Slutkin and his colleagues, but a dynamic that can be rigorously quantified and understood.

According to their theory, exposure to violence is conceptually similar to exposure to, say, cholera or tuberculosis. Acts of violence are the germs. Instead of wracking intestines or lungs, they lodge in the brain. When people, in particular children and young adults whose brains are extremely plastic, repeatedly experience or witness violence, their neurological function is altered.

Cognitive pathways involving anger are more easily activated. Victimized people also interpret reality through perceptual filters in which violence seems normal and threats are enhanced. People in this state of mind are more likely to behave violently. Instead of through a cough, the disease spreads through fights, rapes, killings, suicides, perhaps even media, the researchers argue.

[…]

Not everybody becomes infected, of course. As with an infectious disease, circumstance is key. Social circumstance, especially individual or community isolation ­—people who feel there’s no way out for them, or disconnected from social norms ­—is what ultimately allows violence to spread readily, just as water sources fouled by sewage exacerbate cholera outbreaks.

At a macroscopic population level, these interactions produce geographic patterns of violence that sometimes resemble maps of disease epidemics. There are clusters, hotspots, epicenters. Isolated acts of violence are followed by others, which are followed by still more, and so on.

There are telltale incidence patterns formed as an initial wave of cases recedes, then is followed by successive waves that result from infected individuals reaching new, susceptible populations. “The epidemiology of this is very clear when you look at the math,” said Slutkin. “The density maps of shootings in Kansas City or New York or Detroit look like cholera case maps from Bangladesh.”

I am reminded of this paper on the effects of bystanders on escalating and de-escalating potentially violent situations.

Posted on January 28, 2013 at 6:07 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.