Entries Tagged "air travel"

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TSA's Secure Flight

As I wrote previously, I am participating in a working group to study the security and privacy of Secure Flight, the U.S. government’s program to match airline passengers with a terrorist watch list. In the end, I signed the NDA allowing me access to SSI (Sensitive Security Information) documents, but managed to avoid filling out the paperwork for a SECRET security clearance.

Last week the group had its second meeting.

So far, I have four general conclusions. One, assuming that we need to implement a program of matching airline passengers with names on terrorism watch lists, Secure Flight is a major improvement—in almost every way—over what is currently in place. (And by this I mean the matching program, not any potential uses of commercial or other third-party data.)

Two, the security system surrounding Secure Flight is riddled with security holes. There are security problems with false IDs, ID verification, the ability to fly on someone else’s ticket, airline procedures, etc.

Three, the urge to use this system for other things will be irresistible. It’s just too easy to say: “As long as you’ve got this system that watches out for terrorists, how about also looking for this list of drug dealers…and by the way, we’ve got the Super Bowl to worry about too.” Once Secure Flight gets built, all it’ll take is a new law and we’ll have a nationwide security checkpoint system.

And four, a program of matching airline passengers with names on terrorism watch lists is not making us appreciably safer, and is a lousy way to spend our security dollars.

Unfortunately, Congress has mandated that Secure Flight be implemented, so it is unlikely that the program will be killed. And analyzing the effectiveness of the program in general, potential mission creep, and whether the general idea is a worthwhile one, is beyond the scope of our little group. In other words, my first conclusion is basically all that they’re interested in hearing.

But that means I can write about everything else.

To speak to my fourth conclusion: Imagine for a minute that Secure Flight is perfect. That is, we can ensure that no one can fly under a false identity, that the watch lists have perfect identity information, and that Secure Flight can perfectly determine if a passenger is on the watch list: no false positives and no false negatives. Even if we could do all that, Secure Flight wouldn’t be worth it.

Secure Flight is a passive system. It waits for the bad guys to buy an airplane ticket and try to board. If the bad guys don’t fly, it’s a waste of money. If the bad guys try to blow up shopping malls instead of airplanes, it’s a waste of money.

If I had some millions of dollars to spend on terrorism security, and I had a watch list of potential terrorists, I would spend that money investigating those people. I would try to determine whether or not they were a terrorism threat before they got to the airport, or even if they had no intention of visiting an airport. I would try to prevent their plot regardless of whether it involved airplanes. I would clear the innocent people, and I would go after the guilty. I wouldn’t build a complex computerized infrastructure and wait until one of them happened to wander into an airport. It just doesn’t make security sense.

That’s my usual metric when I think about a terrorism security measure: Would it be more effective than taking that money and funding intelligence, investigation, or emergency response—things that protect us regardless of what the terrorists are planning next. Money spent on security measures that only work against a particular terrorist tactic, forgetting that terrorists are adaptable, is largely wasted.

Posted on January 31, 2005 at 9:26 AM • View Comments

Airplane Defense Security Trade-Off

It’s nice to see the government actually making security trade-offs. From the Associated Press:

Outfitting every U.S. commercial passenger plane with anti-missile systems would be a costly and impractical defense against terrorists armed with shoulder-fired rockets, according to a study released Tuesday.

Researchers said it could cost nearly $40 billion over 20 years to deploy defense technology on the country’s 6,800 passengers jets. By comparison, the federal government currently spends roughly $4.4 billion a year on all transportation security.

The Rand study also cited the unreliability of the system, and the problems of false alarms.

Identifying terrorism security countermeasures that aren’t worth it…maybe it’s the start of a trend.

Posted on January 26, 2005 at 8:42 AM • View Comments

American Airlines Data Collection

From BoingBoing:

Last week on a trip from London to the US, American Airlines demanded that I write out a list of the names and addresses of all the friends I would be staying with in the USA. They claimed that this was due to a TSA regulation, but refused to state which regulation required them to gather this information, nor what they would do with it once they’d gathered it. I raised a stink, and was eventually told that I wouldn’t have to give them the requested dossier because I was a Platinum AAdvantage Card holder (i.e., because I fly frequently with AA).

The whole story is worth reading. It’s hard to know what’s really going on, because there’s so much information I don’t have. But it’s chilling nonetheless.

Posted on January 20, 2005 at 9:28 AM • View Comments

Altimeter Watches Now a Terrorism Threat

This story is so idiotic that I have trouble believing it’s true. According to MSNBC:

An advisory issued Monday by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI urges the Transportation Security Administration to have airport screeners keep an eye out for wristwatches containing cigarette lighters or altimeters.

The notice says “recent intelligence suggests al-Qaida has expressed interest in obtaining wristwatches with a hidden butane-lighter function and Casio watches with an altimeter function. Casio watches have been extensively used by al-Qaida and associated organizations as timers for improvised explosive devices. The Casio brand is likely chosen due to its worldwide availability and inexpensive price.”

Clocks and watches definitely make good device timers for remotely triggered bombs. In this scenario, the person carrying the watch is an innocent. (Otherwise he wouldn’t need a remote triggering device; he could set the bomb off himself.) This implies that the bomb is stuffed inside the functional watch. But if you assume a bomb as small as the non-functioning space in a wristwatch can blow up an airplane, you’ve got problems far bigger than one particular brand of wristwatch. This story simply makes no sense.

And, like most of the random “alerts” from the DHS, it’s not based on any real facts:

The advisory notes that there is no specific information indicating any terrorist plans to use the devices, but it urges screeners to watch for them.

I wish the DHS were half as good at keeping people safe as they are at scaring people. (I’ve written more about that here.)

Posted on January 5, 2005 at 12:34 PM • View Comments

Canadian Airport Security Loses Uniforms

From CBC News:

1,127 uniform items belonging to Canadian airport screeners were lost or stolen in a nine-month period.

I’m not sure if this is an interesting story or not. We know that a uniform isn’t necessarily a reliable authentication tool, yet we use them anyway.

Losing 1,127 uniforms is bad, because they can be used to impersonate officials. But even if the 1,127 uniforms are found, they can be faked. Can you tell the difference between a legitimate uniform and a decent fake? I can’t.

The real story is the informal nature of most of our real-world authentication systems, and how they can be exploited.

I wrote about this in Beyond Fear (page 199):

Many authentication systems are even more informal. When someone knocks on your door wearing an electric company uniform, you assume she’s there to read the meter. Similarly with deliverymen, service workers, and parking lot attendants. When I return my rental car, I don’t think twice about giving the keys to someone wearing the correct color uniform. And how often do people inspect a police officer’s badge? The potential for intimidation makes this security system even less effective.

Uniforms are easy to fake. In the wee hours of the morning on 18 March 1990, two men entered the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston disguised as policemen. They duped the guards, tied them up, and proceeded to steal a dozen paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Manet, and Degas, valued at $300 million. (Thirteen years later, the crime is still unsolved and the art is still missing.) During the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, groups of German commandos operated behind American lines. Dressed as American troops, they tried to deliver false orders to units in an effort to disrupt American plans. Hannibal used the same trick—to greater success—dressing up soldiers who were fluent in Latin in the uniforms of Roman officials and using them to open city gates.

Spies actually take advantage of this authentication problem when recruiting agents. They sometimes recruit a spy by pretending to be working for some third country. For example, a Russian agent working in the U.S. might not be able to convince an American to spy for Russia, but he can pretend to be working for France and might be able to convince the person to spy for that country. This is called “false flag recruitment.” How’s the recruit going to authenticate the nationality of the person he’s spying for?

There’s some fascinating psychology involved in this story. We all authenticate using visual cues, and official uniforms are a big part of that. (When a policeman, or an employee from the local electric company, comes to your door and asks to come in, how to you authenticate him? His uniform and his badge or ID.)

Posted on December 29, 2004 at 8:37 AM • View Comments

Bad Quote

In a story on a computer glitch that forced Comair to cancel 1,100 flighs on Christmas Day, I was quoted in an AP story as saying:

“If this kind of thing could happen by accident, what would happen if the bad guys did this on purpose?” he said.

I’m sure I said that, but I wish the reporter hadn’t used it. It’s just the sort of fear-mongering that I object to when others do it.

Posted on December 28, 2004 at 8:58 AM • View Comments

Airline Passenger Profiling

From an anonymous reader who works for the airline industry in the United States:

There are two initiatives in the works, neither of which leaves me feeling very good about privacy rights.

The first is being put together by the TSA and is called the “Secure Flight Initiative.” An initial test of this program was performed recently and involved each airline listed in the document having to send in passenger information (aka PNR data) for every passenger that “completed a successful domestic trip” during June 2004. A sample of some of the fields that were required to be sent: name, address, phone (if available), itinerary, any comments in the PNR record made by airline personnel, credit card number and expiration date, and any changes made to the booking before the actual flight.

This test data was transmitted to the TSA via physical CD. The requirement was that we “encrypt” it using pkzip (or equivalent) before putting it on the CD. We were to then e-mail the password to the Secure Flight Initiative e-mail address. Although this is far from ideal, it is in fact a big step up. The original process was going to have people simply e-mail the above data to the TSA. They claim to have a secure facility where the data is stored.

As far as the TSA’s retention of the data, the only information we have been given is that as soon as the test phase is over, they will securely delete the data. We were given no choice but had to simply take their word for it.

Rollout of the Secure Flight initiative is scheduled for “next year” sometime. They’re going to start with larger carriers and work their way down to the smaller carriers. It hasn’t been formalized (as far as I know) yet as to what data will be required to be transmitted when. My suspicion is that upon flight takeoff, all PNR data for all passengers on board will be required to be sent. At this point, I still have not heard as to what method will be used for data transmission.

There is another initiative being implemented by the Customs and Border Protection, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. This (unnamed) initiative is essentially the same thing as the Secure Flight program. That’s right—two government agencies are requiring us to transmit the information separately to each of them. So much for information sharing within the government.

Most larger carriers are complying with this directive by simply allowing the CBP access to their records directly within their
reservation systems (often hosted by folks like Sabre, Worldspan, Galileo, etc). Others (such as the airline I work for) are opting to
only transmit the bare requirements without giving direct access to our system. The data is transmitted over a proprietary data network that is used by the airline industry.

There are a couple of differences between the Secure Flight program and the one being instituted by the CBP. The CBP’s program requires that PNR data for all booked passengers be transmitted:

  • 72 hours before flight time
  • 24 hours before flight time
  • 8 hours before flight time
  • and then again immediately after flight departure

The other major difference is that it looks as though there will be a requirement that we operate in a way that allows them to send a request for data for any flight at any time which we must send back in an automated fashion.

Oh, and just as a kick in the pants, the airlines are expected to pay the costs for all these data transmissions (to the tune of several thousand dollars a month).

Posted on December 22, 2004 at 10:06 AM • View Comments

How Not to Test Airport Security

If this were fiction, no one would believe it. From MSNBC:

Four days after police at Charles de Gaulle Airport slipped some plastic explosives into a random passenger’s bag as part of an exercise for sniffer dogs, it is still missing—and authorities are stumped and embarrassed.

It’s perfectly reasonable to plant an explosive-filled suitcase in an airport in order to test security. It is not okay to plant it in someone’s bag without his knowledge and permission. (The explosive residue could remain on the suitcase long after the test, and might be picked up by one of those trace mass spectrometers that detects the chemical residue associated with bombs.) But if you are going to plant plastic explosives in the suitcase of some innocent passenger, shouldn’t you at least write down which suitcase it was?

Posted on December 20, 2004 at 9:13 AM • View Comments

Security Notes from All Over: Israeli Airport Security Questioning

In both Secrets and Lies and Beyond Fear, I discuss a key difference between attackers and defenders: the ability to concentrate resources. The defender must defend against all possible attacks, while the attacker can concentrate his forces on one particular avenue of attack. This precept is fundamental to a lot of security, and can be seen very clearly in counterterrorism. A country is in the position of the interior; it must defend itself against all possible terrorist attacks: airplane terrorism, chemical bombs, threats at the ports, threats through the mails, lone lunatics with automatic weapons, assassinations, etc, etc, etc. The terrorist just needs to find one weak spot in the defenses, and exploit that. This concentration versus diffusion of resources is one reason why the defender’s job is so much harder than the attackers.

This same principle guides security questioning at the Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. In this example, the attacker is the security screener and the defender is the terrorist. (It’s important to remember that “attacker” and “defender” are not moral labels, but tactical ones. Sometimes the defenders are the good guys and the attackers are the bad guys. In this case, the bad guy is trying to defend his cover story against the good guy who is attacking it.)

Security is impressively tight at the airport, and includes a potentially lengthy interview by a trained security screener. The screener asks each passenger questions, trying to determine if he’s a security risk. But instead of asking different questions—where do you live, what do you do for a living, where were you born—the screener asks questions that follow a storyline: “Where are you going? Who do you know there? How did you meet him? What were you doing there?” And so on.

See the ability to concentrate resources? The defender—the terrorist trying to sneak aboard the airplane—needs a cover story sufficiently broad to be able to respond to any line of questioning. So he might memorize the answers to several hundred questions. The attacker—the security screener—could ask questions scattershot, but instead concentrates his questioning along one particular line. The theory is that eventually the defender will reach the end of his memorized story, and that the attacker will then notice the subtle changes in the defender as he starts to make up answers.

Posted on December 14, 2004 at 9:26 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.