Entries Tagged "authorization"

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Database Error Causes Unbalanced Budget

This story of a database error cascading into a major failure has some interesting security morals:

A house erroneously valued at $400 million is being blamed for budget shortfalls and possible layoffs in municipalities and school districts in northwest Indiana.

[…]

County Treasurer Jim Murphy said the home usually carried about $1,500 in property taxes; this year, it was billed $8 million.

Most local officials did not learn about the mistake until Tuesday, when 18 government taxing units were asked to return a total of $3.1 million of tax money. The city of Valparaiso and the Valparaiso Community School Corp. were asked to return $2.7 million. As a result, the school system has a $200,000 budget shortfall, and the city loses $900,000.

User error is being blamed for the problem:

An outside user of Porter County’s computer system may have triggered the mess by accidentally changing the value of the Valparaiso house, said Sharon Lippens, director of the county’s information technologies and service department.

[…]

Lippens said the outside user changed the property value, most likely while trying to access another program while using the county’s enhanced access system, which charges users a fee for access to public records that are not otherwise available on the Internet.

Lippens said the user probably tried to access a real estate record display by pressing R-E-D, but accidentally typed R-E-R, which brought up an assessment program written in 1995. The program is no longer in use, and technology officials did not know it could be accessed.

Three things immediately spring to mind:

One, the system did not fail safely. This one error seems to have cascaded into multiple errors, as the new tax total immediately changed budgets of “18 government taxing units.”

Two, there were no sanity checks on the system. “The city of Valparaiso and the Valparaiso Community School Corp. were asked to return $2.7 million.” Didn’t the city wonder where all that extra money came from in the first place?

Three, the access-control mechanisms on the computer system were too broad. When a user is authenticated to use the “R-E-D” program, he shouldn’t automatically have permission to use the “R-E-R” program as well. Authentication isn’t all or nothing; it should be granular to the operation.

Posted on February 17, 2006 at 7:29 AM • View Comments

Security Problems with Controlled Access Systems

There was an interesting security tidbit in this article on last week’s post office shooting:

The shooter’s pass to access the facility had been expired, officials said, but she apparently used her knowledge of how security at the facility worked to gain entrance, following another vehicle in through the outer gate and getting other employees to open security doors.

This is a failure of both technology and procedure. The gate was configured to allow multiple vehicles to enter on only one person’s authorization—that’s a technology failure. And people are programmed to be polite—to hold the door for others.

SIDE NOTE: There is a common myth that workplace homicides are prevalent in the United States Postal Service. (Note the phrase “going postal.”) But not counting this event, there has been less than one shooting fatality per year at Postal Service facilities over the last 20 years. As the USPS has more than 700,000 employees, this is a lower rate than the average workplace.

Posted on February 3, 2006 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

Still More on Sony's DRM Rootkit

This story is just getting weirder and weirder (previous posts here and here).

Sony already said that they’re stopping production of CDs with the embedded rootkit. Now they’re saying that they will pull the infected disks from stores and offer free exchanges to people who inadvertently bought them.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment said Monday it will pull some of its most popular CDs from stores in response to backlash over copy-protection software on the discs.

Sony also said it will offer exchanges for consumers who purchased the discs, which contain hidden files that leave them vulnerable to computer viruses when played on a PC.

That’s good news, but there’s more bad news. The patch Sony is distributing to remove the rootkit opens a huge security hole:

The root of the problem is a serious design flaw in Sony’s web-based uninstaller. When you first fill out Sony’s form to request a copy of the uninstaller, the request form downloads and installs a program – an ActiveX control created by the DRM vendor, First4Internet – called CodeSupport. CodeSupport remains on your system after you leave Sony’s site, and it is marked as safe for scripting, so any web page can ask CodeSupport to do things. One thing CodeSupport can be told to do is download and install code from an Internet site. Unfortunately, CodeSupport doesn’t verify that the downloaded code actually came from Sony or First4Internet. This means any web page can make CodeSupport download and install code from any URL without asking the user’s permission.

Even more interesting is that there may be at least half a million infected computers:

Using statistical sampling methods and a secret feature of XCP that notifies Sony when its CDs are placed in a computer, [security researcher Dan] Kaminsky was able to trace evidence of infections in a sample that points to the probable existence of at least one compromised machine in roughly 568,200 networks worldwide. This does not reflect a tally of actual infections, however, and the real number could be much higher.

I say “may be at least” because the data doesn’t smell right to me. Look at the list of infected titles, and estimate what percentage of CD buyers will play them on their computers; does that seem like half a million sales to you? It doesn’t to me, although I readily admit that I don’t know the music business. Their methodology seems sound, though:

Kaminsky discovered that each of these requests leaves a trace that he could follow and track through the internet’s domain name system, or DNS. While this couldn’t directly give him the number of computers compromised by Sony, it provided him the number and location (both on the net and in the physical world) of networks that contained compromised computers. That is a number guaranteed to be smaller than the total of machines running XCP.

His research technique is called DNS cache snooping, a method of nondestructively examining patterns of DNS use. Luis Grangeia invented the technique, and Kaminsky became famous in the security community for refining it.

Kaminsky asked more than 3 million DNS servers across the net whether they knew the addresses associated with the Sony rootkit—connected.sonymusic.com, updates.xcp-aurora.com and license.suncom2.com. He uses a “non-recursive DNS query” that allows him to peek into a server’s cache and find out if anyone else has asked that particular machine for those addresses recently.

If the DNS server said yes, it had a cached copy of the address, which means that at least one of its client computers had used it to look up Sony’s digital-rights-management site. If the DNS server said no, then Kaminsky knew for sure that no Sony-compromised machines existed behind it.

The results have surprised Kaminsky himself: 568,200 DNS servers knew about the Sony addresses. With no other reason for people to visit them, that points to one or more computers behind those DNS servers that are Sony-compromised. That’s one in six DNS servers, across a statistical sampling of a third of the 9 million DNS servers Kaminsky estimates are on the net.

In any case, Sony’s rapid fall from grace is a great example of the power of blogs; it’s been fifteen days since Mark Russinovich first posted about the rootkit. In that time the news spread like a firestorm, first through the blogs, then to the tech media, and then into the mainstream media.

Posted on November 15, 2005 at 3:16 PM • View Comments

Real ID and Identity Theft

Reuters on the trade-offs of Real ID:

Nobody yet knows how much the Real ID Act will cost to implement or how much money Congress will provide for it. The state of Washington, which has done the most thorough cost analysis, put the bill in that state alone at $97 million in the first two years and believes it will have to raise the price of a driver’s license to $58 from $25.

On the other hand, a secure ID system could save millions in Medicare and Medicaid fraud and combat identity theft.

Why does Reuters think that a better ID card will protect against identity theft? The problem with identity theft isn’t that ID cards are forgeable, it’s that financial institutions don’t check them before authorizing transactions.

Posted on October 14, 2005 at 11:20 AM • View Comments

The Doghouse: Lexar LockTight

Do you think we should tell these people that SHA-1 is not an encryption algorithm?

Developed by Lexar, the new security solution is based on a 160-bit encryption technology and uses SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm), a standard approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The 160-bit encryption technology is among the most effective and widely accepted security solutions available.

This seems not to be a typo. They explain themselves in more detail here:

Lexar has provided us with the following explanation as to how data is protected on the LockTight cards: (we understand that the encryption is carried out on the communications layer between the card and camera/computer rather than the data itself).

“Lexar employs a unique strategy to protect data on LockTight cards. LockTight cards are always ‘locked.’ In other words no computer or camera can read or write data from/to a LockTight card until a critical authorization process takes place between the LockTight card and the host computer or host camera. This authorization process is where the 160-bit HMAC SHAH-1 encryption algorithm is employed.”

Posted on October 3, 2005 at 8:22 AM • View Comments

Bank Sued for Unauthorized Transaction

This story is interesting:

A Miami businessman is suing Bank of America over $90,000 he says was stolen from his online banking account in a case that highlights the thorny question of who is responsible when a customer’s computer is hacked into.

The typical press coverage of this story is along the lines of “Bank of America sued because customer’s PC was hacked.” But that’s not it. Bank of America is being sued because they allowed an unauthorized transaction to occur, and they’re not making good on that mistake. The transaction happened to occur because the customer’s PC was hacked.

I know nothing about the actual suit and its merits, but this is a problem that is not going away. And while I think that banks should not be held responsible for what’s on their customers’ machines, they should be held responsible for allowing unauthorized transactions to occur. The bank’s internal systems, however set up, for whatever reason, permitted the fraudulent transaction.

There is a simple economic incentive problem here. As long as the banks are not responsible for financial losses from fraudulent transactions over the Internet, banks have no incentive to improve security. But if banks are held responsible for these transactions, you can bet that they won’t allow such shoddy security.

Posted on February 9, 2005 at 8:00 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.