Entries Tagged "China"

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Building in Surveillance

China is the world’s most successful Internet censor. While the Great Firewall of China isn’t perfect, it effectively limits information flowing in and out of the country. But now the Chinese government is taking things one step further.

Under a requirement taking effect soon, every computer sold in China will have to contain the Green Dam Youth Escort software package. Ostensibly a pornography filter, it is government spyware that will watch every citizen on the Internet.

Green Dam has many uses. It can police a list of forbidden Web sites. It can monitor a user’s reading habits. It can even enlist the computer in some massive botnet attack, as part of a hypothetical future cyberwar.

China’s actions may be extreme, but they’re not unique. Democratic governments around the world—Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom, for example—are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

Many are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to keep information on their customers. Just recently, the German government proposed giving itself the power to censor the Internet.

The United States is no exception. The 1994 CALEA law required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the NSA has built substantial eavesdropping systems in the United States. The government has repeatedly proposed Internet data retention laws, allowing surveillance into past activities as well as present.

Systems like this invite criminal appropriation and government abuse. New police powers, enacted to fight terrorism, are already used in situations of normal crime. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.

Official misuses are bad enough, but the unofficial uses worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don’t.

China’s government designed Green Dam for its own use, but it’s been subverted. Why does anyone think that criminals won’t be able to use it to steal bank account and credit card information, use it to launch other attacks, or turn it into a massive spam-sending botnet?

Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement will mine collected Internet data or eavesdrop on phone and IM conversations?

These risks are not theoretical. After 9/11, the National Security Agency built a surveillance infrastructure to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mails within the United States.

Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn’t always match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to, and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends, and famous people such as President Clinton.

But that’s not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government—the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice.

Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone’s products, and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn’t one of those governments, but someone still unknown—a rival political party? organized crime?—figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.

Researchers have already found security flaws in Green Dam that would allow hackers to take over the computers. Of course there are additional flaws, and criminals are looking for them.

Surveillance infrastructure can be exported, which also aids totalitarianism around the world. Western companies like Siemens, Nokia, and Secure Computing built Iran’s surveillance infrastructure. U.S. companies helped build China’s electronic police state. Twitter’s anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents—anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.

Every year brings more Internet censorship and control—not just in countries like China and Iran, but in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and other free countries.

The control movement is egged on by both law enforcement, trying to catch terrorists, child pornographers and other criminals, and by media companies, trying to stop file sharers.

It’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers and censors say, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.

This essay previously appeared—albeit with fewer links—on the Minnesota Public Radio website.

Posted on August 3, 2009 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

Second SHB Workshop Liveblogging (8)

The penultimate session of the conference was “Privacy,” moderated by Tyler Moore.

Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University (suggested reading: What Can Behavioral Economics Teach Us About Privacy?; Privacy in Electronic Commerce and the Economics of Immediate Gratification), presented research on how people value their privacy. He started by listing a variety of cognitive biases that affect privacy decisions: illusion of control, overconfidence, optimism bias, endowment effect, and so on. He discussed two experiments. The first demonstrated a “herding effect”: if a subject believes that others reveal sensitive behavior, the subject is more likely to also reveal sensitive behavior. The second examined the “frog effect”: do privacy intrusions alert or desensitize people to revealing personal information? What he found is that people tend to set their privacy level at the beginning of a survey, and don’t respond well to being asked easy questions at first and then sensitive questions at the end. In the discussion, Joe Bonneau asked him about the notion that people’s privacy protections tend to ratchet up over time; he didn’t have conclusive evidence, but gave several possible explanations for the phenomenon.

Adam Joinson, University of Bath (suggested reading: Privacy, Trust and Self-Disclosure Online; Privacy concerns and privacy actions), also studies how people value their privacy. He talked about expressive privacy—privacy that allows people to express themselves and form interpersonal relationships. His research showed that differences between how people use Facebook in different countries depend on how much people trust Facebook as a company, rather than how much people trust other Facebook users. Another study looked at posts from Secret Tweet and Twitter. He found 16 markers that allowed him to automatically determine which tweets contain sensitive personal information and which do not, with high probability. Then he tried to determine if people with large Twitter followings post fewer secrets than people who are only twittering to a few people. He found absolutely no difference.

Peter Neumann, SRI (suggested reading: Holistic systems; Risks; Identity and Trust in Context), talked about lack of medical privacy (too many people have access to your data), about voting (the privacy problem makes the voting problem a lot harder, and the end-to-end voting security/privacy problem is much harder than just securing voting machines), and privacy in China (the government is requiring all computers sold in China to be sold with software allowing them to eavesdrop on the users). Any would-be solution needs to reflect the ubiquity of the threat. When we design systems, we need to anticipate what the privacy problems will be. Privacy problems are everywhere you look, and ordinary people have no idea of the depth of the problem.

Eric Johnson, Dartmouth College (suggested reading: Access Flexibility with Escalation and Audit; Security through Information Risk Management), studies the information access problem from a business perspective. He’s been doing field studies in companies like retail banks and investment banks, and found that role-based access control fails because companies can’t determine who has what role. Even worse, roles change quickly, especially in large complex organizations. For example, one business group of 3000 people experiences 1000 role changes within three months. The result is that organizations do access control badly, either over-entitling or under-entitling people. But since getting the job done is the most important thing, organizations tend to over-entitle: give people more access than they need. His current work is to find the right set of incentives and controls to set access more properly. The challege is to do this without making people risk averse. In the discussion, he agreed that a perfect access control system is not possible, and that organizations should probably allow a certain amount of access control violations—similar to the idea of posting a 55 mph speed limit but not ticketing people unless they go over 70 mph.

Christine Jolls, Yale Law School (suggested reading: Rationality and Consent in Privacy Law, Employee Privacy), made the point that people regularly share their most private information with their intimates—so privacy is not about secrecy, it’s more about control. There are moments when people make pretty big privacy decisions. For example, they grant employers the rights to monitor their e-mail, or test their urine without notice. In general, courts hold that blanket signing away of privacy rights—”you can test my urine on any day in the future”—are not valid, but immediate signing away of privacy of privacy rights—”you can test my urine today”—are. Jolls believes that this is reasonable for several reasons, such as optimism bias and an overfocus on the present at the expense of the future. Without realizing it, the courts have implemented the system that behavioral economics would find optimal. During the discussion, she talked about how coercion figures into this; the U.S. legal system tends not to be concerned with it.

Andrew Adams, University of Reading (suggested reading: Regulating CCTV), also looks at attitudes of privacy on social networking services. His results are preliminary, and based on interviews with university students in Canada, Japan, and the UK, and are very concordant with what danah boyd and Joe Bonneau said earlier. From the UK: People join social networking sites to increase their level of interaction with people they already know in real life. Revealing personal information is okay, but revealing too much is bad. Even more interestingly, it’s not okay to reveal more about others than they reveal themselves. From Japan: People are more open to making friends online. There’s more anonymity. It’s not okay to reveal information about others, but “the fault of this lies as much with the person whose data was revealed in not choosing friends wisely.” This victim responsibility is a common theme with other privacy and security elements in Japan. Data from Canada is still being compiled.

Great phrase: the “laundry belt”—close enough for students to go home on weekends with their laundry, but far enough away so they don’t feel as if their parents are looking over their shoulder—typically two hours by public transportation (in the UK).

Adam Shostack’s liveblogging is here. Ross Anderson’s liveblogging is in his blog post’s comments. Matt Blaze’s audio is here.

Posted on June 12, 2009 at 3:01 PM • View Comments

Kylin: New Chinese Operating System

Interesting:

China has developed more secure operating software for its tens of millions of computers and is already installing it on government and military systems, hoping to make Beijing’s networks impenetrable to U.S. military and intelligence agencies.

The secure operating system, known as Kylin, was disclosed to Congress during recent hearings that provided new details on how China’s government is preparing to wage cyberwarfare with the United States.

“We are in the early stages of a cyber arms race and need to respond accordingly,” said Kevin G. Coleman, a private security specialist who advises the government on cybersecurity. He discussed Kylin during a hearing of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission on April 30.

The deployment of Kylin is significant, Mr. Coleman said, because the system has “hardened” key Chinese servers. U.S. offensive cyberwar capabilities have been focused on getting into Chinese government and military computers outfitted with less secure operating systems like those made by Microsoft Corp.

“This action also made our offensive cybercapabilities ineffective against them, given the cyberweapons were designed to be used against Linux, UNIX and Windows,” he said.

Is this real, or yet more cybersecurity hype pushed by agencies looking for funding and power? My guess is the latter. Anyone know?

Posted on May 18, 2009 at 6:06 AM • View Comments

U.S. Power Grid Hacked, Everyone Panic!

Yesterday I talked to at least a dozen reporters about this breathless Wall Street Journal story:

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”

[…]

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”

Officials said water, sewage and other infrastructure systems also were at risk.

“Over the past several years, we have seen cyberattacks against critical infrastructures abroad, and many of our own infrastructures are as vulnerable as their foreign counterparts,” Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair recently told lawmakers. “A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.”

Read the whole story; there aren’t really any facts in it. I don’t know what’s going on; maybe it’s just budget season and someone is jockeying for a bigger slice.

Honestly, I am much more worried about random errors and undirected worms in the computers running our infrastructure than I am about the Chinese military. I am much more worried about criminal hackers than I am about government hackers. I wrote about the risks to our infrastructure here, and about Chinese hacking here.

And I wrote about last year’s reports of international hacking of our SCADA control systems here.

Posted on April 9, 2009 at 12:02 PM • View Comments

Massive Chinese Espionage Network

The story broke in The New York Times yesterday:

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

[…]

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

The Chinese government denies involvement. It’s probably true; these networks tend to be run by amateur hackers with the tacit approval of the government, not the government itself. I wrote this on the topic last year.

It’s only circumstantial evidence that the hackers are Chinese:

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

And here’s the report, from the University of Toronto.

Good commentary by James Fallows:

My guess is that the “convenient instruments” hypothesis will eventually prove to be true (versus the “centrally controlled plot” scenario), if the “truth” of the case is ever fully determined. For reasons the Toronto report lays out, the episode looks more like the effort of groups of clever young hackers than a concentrated project of the People Liberation Army cyberwar division. But no one knows for certain, and further information about the case is definitely worth following.

An excellent article on Wired.com, and another on ArsTechnica.

There’s another paper, released at the same time on the same topic, from Cambridge University. It makes more pointed claims about the attackers and their origins, claims I’m not sure can be supported from the evidence.

In this note we described how agents of the Chinese government compromised the computing infrastructure of the Office of His His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

EDITED TO ADD (3/30): More information on the tools the hackers used.

EDITED TO ADD (3/30): An interview with the University of Toronto researchers.

EDITED TO ADD (4/1): The Chinese government denies involvement.

EDITD TO ADD (4/1): My essay from last year on Chinese hacking.

Posted on March 30, 2009 at 12:43 PM • View Comments

The NSA Teams Up with the Chinese Government to Limit Internet Anonymity

Definitely strange bedfellows:

A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.

The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.

[…]

A second, apparently leaked ITU document offers surveillance and monitoring justifications that seem well-suited to repressive regimes:

A political opponent to a government publishes articles putting the government in an unfavorable light. The government, having a law against any opposition, tries to identify the source of the negative articles but the articles having been published via a proxy server, is unable to do so protecting the anonymity of the author.

This is being sold as a way to go after the bad guys, but it won’t help. Here’s Steve Bellovin on that issue:

First, very few attacks these days use spoofed source addresses; the real IP address already tells you where the attack is coming from. Second, in case of a DDoS attack, there are too many sources; you can’t do anything with the information. Third, the machine attacking you is almost certainly someone else’s hacked machine and tracking them down (and getting them to clean it up) is itself time-consuming.

TraceBack is most useful in monitoring the activities of large masses of people. But of course, that’s why the Chinese and the NSA are so interested in this proposal in the first place.

It’s hard to figure out what the endgame is; the U.N. doesn’t have the authority to impose Internet standards on anyone. In any case, this idea is counter to the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” In the U.S., it’s counter to the First Amendment, which has long permitted anonymous speech. On the other hand, basic human and constitutional rights have been jettisoned left and right in the years after 9/11; why should this be any different?

But when the Chinese government and the NSA get together to enhance their ability to spy on us all, you have to wonder what’s gone wrong with the world.

Posted on September 18, 2008 at 6:34 AM • View Comments

The Case of the Stolen BlackBerry and the Awesome Chinese Hacking Skills

A high-level British government employee had his BlackBerry stolen by Chinese intelligence:

The aide, a senior Downing Street adviser who was with the prime minister on a trip to China earlier this year, had his BlackBerry phone stolen after being picked up by a Chinese woman who had approached him in a Shanghai hotel disco.

The aide agreed to return to his hotel with the woman. He reported the BlackBerry missing the next morning.

That can’t look good on your annual employee review.

But it’s this part of the article that has me confused:

Experts say that even if the aide’s device did not contain anything top secret, it might enable a hostile intelligence service to hack into the Downing Street server, potentially gaining access to No 10’s e-mail traffic and text messages.

Um, what? I assume the IT department just turned off the guy’s password. Was this nonsense peddled to the press by the UK government, or is some “expert” trying to sell us something? The article doesn’t say.

EDITED TO ADD (7/22): The first commenter makes a good point, which I didn’t think of. The article says that it’s Chinese intelligence:

A senior official said yesterday that the incident had all the hallmarks of a suspected honeytrap by Chinese intelligence.

But Chinese intelligence would be far more likely to clone the BlackBerry and then return it. Much better information that way. This is much more likely to be petty theft.

EDITED TO ADD (7/23): The more I think about this story, the less sense it makes. If you’re a Chinese intelligence officer and you manage to get an aide to the British Prime Minister to have sex with one of your agents, you’re not going to immediately burn him by stealing his BlackBerry. That’s just stupid.

Posted on July 22, 2008 at 10:05 AM • View Comments

Chinese Cyber Attacks

The popular media conception is that there is a coordinated attempt by the Chinese government to hack into U.S. computers—military, government corporate—and steal secrets. The truth is a lot more complicated.

There certainly is a lot of hacking coming out of China. Any company that does security monitoring sees it all the time.

These hacker groups seem not to be working for the Chinese government. They don’t seem to be coordinated by the Chinese military. They’re basically young, male, patriotic Chinese citizens, trying to demonstrate that they’re just as good as everyone else. As well as the American networks the media likes to talk about, their targets also include pro-Tibet, pro-Taiwan, Falun Gong and pro-Uyghur sites.

The hackers are in this for two reasons: fame and glory, and an attempt to make a living. The fame and glory comes from their nationalistic goals. Some of these hackers are heroes in China. They’re upholding the country’s honor against both anti-Chinese forces like the pro-Tibet movement and larger forces like the United States.

And the money comes from several sources. The groups sell owned computers, malware services, and data they steal on the black market. They sell hacker tools and videos to others wanting to play. They even sell T-shirts, hats and other merchandise on their Web sites.

This is not to say that the Chinese military ignores the hacker groups within their country. Certainly the Chinese government knows the leaders of the hacker movement and chooses to look the other way. They probably buy stolen intelligence from these hackers. They probably recruit for their own organizations from this self-selecting pool of experienced hacking experts. They certainly learn from the hackers.

And some of the hackers are good. Over the years, they have become more sophisticated in both tools and techniques. They’re stealthy. They do good network reconnaissance. My guess is what the Pentagon thinks is the problem is only a small percentage of the actual problem.

And they discover their own vulnerabilities. Earlier this year, one security company noticed a unique attack against a pro-Tibet organization. That same attack was also used two weeks earlier against a large multinational defense contractor.

They also hoard vulnerabilities. During the 1999 conflict over the two-states theory conflict, in a heated exchange with a group of Taiwanese hackers, one Chinese group threatened to unleash multiple stockpiled worms at once. There was no reason to disbelieve this threat.

If anything, the fact that these groups aren’t being run by the Chinese government makes the problem worse. Without central political coordination, they’re likely to take more risks, do more stupid things and generally ignore the political fallout of their actions.

In this regard, they’re more like a non-state actor.

So while I’m perfectly happy that the U.S. government is using the threat of Chinese hacking as an impetus to get their own cybersecurity in order, and I hope they succeed, I also hope that the U.S. government recognizes that these groups are not acting under the direction of the Chinese military and doesn’t treat their actions as officially approved by the Chinese government.

This essay originally appeared on the Discovery Channel website.

EDITED TO ADD (7/18): A slightly longer version of this essay appeared in Information Security magazine as part of a point/counterpoint with Marcus Ranum. His half is here.

Posted on July 14, 2008 at 7:08 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.