Entries Tagged "authentication"

Page 23 of 28

Getting a Personal Unlock Code for Your O2 Cell Phone

O2 is a UK cell phone network. The company gives you the option of setting up a PIN on your phone. The idea is that if someone steals your phone, they can’t make calls. If they type the PIN incorrectly three times, the phone is blocked. To deal with the problems of phone owners mistyping their PIN—or forgetting it—they can contact O2 and get a Personal Unlock Code (PUK). Presumably, the operator goes through some authentication steps to ensure that the person calling is actually the legitimate owner of the phone.

So far, so good.

But O2 has decided to automate the PUK process. Now anyone on the Internet can visit this website, type in a valid mobile telephone number, and get a valid PUK to reset the PIN—without any authentication whatsoever.

Oops.

EDITED TO ADD (7/4): A representitive from O2 sent me the following:

“Yes, it does seem there is a security risk by O2 supplying such a service, but in fact we believe this risk is very small. The risk is when a customer’s phone is lost or stolen. There are two scenarios in that event:

“Scenario 1 – The phone is powered off. A PIN number would be required at next power on. Although the PUK code will indeed allow you to reset the PIN, you need to know the telephone number of the SIM in order to get it – there is no way to determine the telephone number from the SIM or handset itself. Should the telephone number be known the risk is then same as scenario 2.

“Scenario 2 – The phone remains powered on: Here, the thief can use the phone in any case without having to acquire PUK.

“In both scenarios we have taken the view that the principle security measure is for the customer to report the loss/theft as quickly as possible, so that we can remotely disable both the SIM and also the handset (so that it cannot be used with any other SIM).”

Posted on July 3, 2006 at 2:26 PM •

Microsoft Windows Kill Switch

Does Microsoft have the ability to disable Windows remotely? Maybe:

Two weeks ago, I wrote about my serious objections to Microsoft’s latest salvo in the war against unauthorized copies of Windows. Two Windows Genuine Advantage components are being pushed onto users’ machines with insufficient notification and inadequate quality control, and the result is a big mess. (For details, see Microsoft presses the Stupid button.)

Guess what? WGA might be on the verge of getting even messier. In fact, one report claims WGA is about to become a Windows “kill switch” ­ and when I asked Microsoft for an on-the-record response, they refused to deny it.

And this, supposedly from someone at Microsoft Support:

He told me that “in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”

The stupidity of this idea is amazing. Not just the inevitability of false positives, but the potential for a hacker to co-opt the controls. I hope this rumor ends up not being true.

Although if they actually do it, the backlash could do more for non-Windows OSs than anything those OSs could do for themselves.

Posted on June 30, 2006 at 11:51 AM • View Comments

Password-Protected Bullets

New invention, just patented:

Meyerle is patenting a design for a modified cartridge that would be fired by a burst of high-frequency radio energy. But the energy would only ignite the charge if a solid-state switch within the cartridge had been activated. This would only happen if a password entered into the gun using a tiny keypad matched one stored in the cartridge.

When they are sold, cartridges could be programmed with a password that matches the purchaser’s gun. An owner could set the gun to request the password when it is reloaded, or to perform a biometric check before firing. The gun could also automatically lock itself after a pre-set period of time has passed since the password was entered.

Posted on June 30, 2006 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

Priority Cell Phones for First Responders

Verizon has announced that is has activated the Access Overload Control (ACCOLC) system, allowing some cell phones to have priority access to the network, even when the network is overloaded.

If you are a first responder with a Verizon phone, please visit the government’s WPS Requestor to provide the necessary information to have your handset activated.

Sounds like you’re going to have to enter some sort of code into your handset. I wonder how long before someone hacks that system.

Posted on May 1, 2006 at 1:29 PM • View Comments

KittenAuth

You’ve all seen CAPTCHAs. Those are those distorted pictures of letters and numbers you sometimes see on web forms. The idea is that it’s hard for computers to identify the characters, but easy for people to do. The goal of CAPTCHAs is to authenticate that there’s a person sitting in front of the computer.

KittenAuth works with images. The system shows you nine pictures of cute little animals, and the person authenticates himself by clicking on the three kittens. A computer clicking at random has only a 1 in 84 chance of guessing correctly.

Of course you could increase the security by adding more images or requiring the person to choose more images. Another worry—which I didn’t see mentioned—is that the computer could brute-force a static database. If there are only a small fixed number of actual kittens, the computer could be told—by a person—that they’re kittens. Then, the computer would know that whenever it sees that image it’s a kitten.

Still, it’s an interesting idea that warrants more research.

Posted on April 10, 2006 at 1:19 PM • View Comments

The "I'm Not the Criminal You're Looking For" Card

This is a great idea:

Lawmakers in Iowa are proposing a special “passport” meant to protect victims of identity theft against false criminal action and credit charges.

The “Identity Theft Passport” will be a card or certificate that victims of identity fraud can show to police or creditors to help demonstrate their innocence, Tom Sands, a state representative of the Iowa House and supporter of the proposal, said in an e-mail interview Tuesday.

I wrote about something similar in Beyond Fear:

In Singapore, some names are so common that the police issue He’s-not-the-guy-we’re-looking-for documents exonerating innocent people with the same names as wanted criminals.

EDITED TO ADD (4/7): Of course it will be forged; all documents are forged. And yes, I’ve recently written that documents are hard to verify. This is a still good idea, even though it’s not perfect.

Posted on April 6, 2006 at 1:13 PM • View Comments

Document Verification

According to The New York Times:

Undercover Congressional investigators successfully smuggled into the United States enough radioactive material to make two dirty bombs, even after it set off alarms on radiation detectors installed at border checkpoints, a new report says.

The reason is interesting:

The alarms went off in both locations, and the investigators were pulled aside for questioning. In both cases, they showed the agents from the Customs and Border Protection agency forged import licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, based on an image of the real document they found on the Internet.

The problem, the report says, is that the border agents have no routine way to confirm the validity of import licenses.

I’ve written about this problem before, and it’s one I think will get worse in the future. Verification systems are often the weakest link of authentication. Improving authentication tokens won’t improve security unless the verification systems improve as well.

Posted on April 5, 2006 at 8:43 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.