Entries Tagged "cybersecurity"

Page 16 of 30

On Blockchain Voting

Blockchain voting is a spectacularly dumb idea for a whole bunch of reasons. I have generally quoted Matt Blaze:

Why is blockchain voting a dumb idea? Glad you asked.

For starters:

  • It doesn’t solve any problems civil elections actually have.
  • It’s basically incompatible with “software independence”, considered an essential property.
  • It can make ballot secrecy difficult or impossible.

I’ve also quoted this XKCD cartoon.

But now I have this excellent paper from MIT researchers:

“Going from Bad to Worse: From Internet Voting to Blockchain Voting”
Sunoo Park, Michael Specter, Neha Narula, and Ronald L. Rivest

Abstract: Voters are understandably concerned about election security. News reports of possible election interference by foreign powers, of unauthorized voting, of voter disenfranchisement, and of technological failures call into question the integrity of elections worldwide.This article examines the suggestions that “voting over the Internet” or “voting on the blockchain” would increase election security, and finds such claims to be wanting and misleading. While current election systems are far from perfect, Internet- and blockchain-based voting would greatly increase the risk of undetectable, nation-scale election failures.Online voting may seem appealing: voting from a computer or smart phone may seem convenient and accessible. However, studies have been inconclusive, showing that online voting may have little to no effect on turnout in practice, and it may even increase disenfranchisement. More importantly: given the current state of computer security, any turnout increase derived from with Internet- or blockchain-based voting would come at the cost of losing meaningful assurance that votes have been counted as they were cast, and not undetectably altered or discarded. This state of affairs will continue as long as standard tactics such as malware, zero days, and denial-of-service attacks continue to be effective.This article analyzes and systematizes prior research on the security risks of online and electronic voting, and show that not only do these risks persist in blockchain-based voting systems, but blockchains may introduce additional problems for voting systems. Finally, we suggest questions for critically assessing security risks of new voting system proposals.

You may have heard of Voatz, which uses blockchain for voting. It’s an insecure mess. And this is my general essay on blockchain. Short summary: it’s completely useless.

Posted on November 16, 2020 at 9:55 AM • View Comments

2020 Was a Secure Election

Over at Lawfare: “2020 Is An Election Security Success Story (So Far).”

What’s more, the voting itself was remarkably smooth. It was only a few months ago that professionals and analysts who monitor election administration were alarmed at how badly unprepared the country was for voting during a pandemic. Some of the primaries were disasters. There were not clear rules in many states for voting by mail or sufficient opportunities for voting early. There was an acute shortage of poll workers. Yet the United States saw unprecedented turnout over the last few weeks. Many states handled voting by mail and early voting impressively and huge numbers of volunteers turned up to work the polls. Large amounts of litigation before the election clarified the rules in every state. And for all the president’s griping about the counting of votes, it has been orderly and apparently without significant incident. The result was that, in the midst of a pandemic that has killed 230,000 Americans, record numbers of Americans voted­—and voted by mail—­and those votes are almost all counted at this stage.

On the cybersecurity front, there is even more good news. Most significantly, there was no serious effort to target voting infrastructure. After voting concluded, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Chris Krebs, released a statement, saying that “after millions of Americans voted, we have no evidence any foreign adversary was capable of preventing Americans from voting or changing vote tallies.” Krebs pledged to “remain vigilant for any attempts by foreign actors to target or disrupt the ongoing vote counting and final certification of results,” and no reports have emerged of threats to tabulation and certification processes.

A good summary.

Posted on November 10, 2020 at 6:40 AM • View Comments

Cybersecurity Visuals

The Hewlett Foundation just announced its top five ideas in its Cybersecurity Visuals Challenge. The problem Hewlett is trying to solve is the dearth of good visuals for cybersecurity. A Google Images Search demonstrates the problem: locks, fingerprints, hands on laptops, scary looking hackers in black hoodies. Hewlett wanted to go beyond those tropes.

I really liked the idea, but find the results underwhelming. It’s a hard problem.

Hewlett press release.

Posted on October 20, 2020 at 6:29 AM • View Comments

Swiss-Swedish Diplomatic Row Over Crypto AG

Previously I have written about the Swedish-owned Swiss-based cryptographic hardware company: Crypto AG. It was a CIA-owned Cold War operation for decades. Today it is called Crypto International, still based in Switzerland but owned by a Swedish company.

It’s back in the news:

Late last week, Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde said she had canceled a meeting with her Swiss counterpart Ignazio Cassis slated for this month after Switzerland placed an export ban on Crypto International, a Swiss-based and Swedish-owned cybersecurity company.

The ban was imposed while Swiss authorities examine long-running and explosive claims that a previous incarnation of Crypto International, Crypto AG, was little more than a front for U.S. intelligence-gathering during the Cold War.

Linde said the Swiss ban was stopping “goods”—which experts suggest could include cybersecurity upgrades or other IT support needed by Swedish state agencies—from reaching Sweden.

She told public broadcaster SVT that the meeting with Cassis was “not appropriate right now until we have fully understood the Swiss actions.”

EDITED TO ADD (10/13): Lots of information on Crypto AG.

Posted on October 6, 2020 at 6:11 AM • View Comments

US Space Cybersecurity Directive

The Trump Administration just published “Space Policy Directive – 5“: “Cybersecurity Principles for Space Systems.” It’s pretty general:

Principles. (a) Space systems and their supporting infrastructure, including software, should be developed and operated using risk-based, cybersecurity-informed engineering. Space systems should be developed to continuously monitor, anticipate,and adapt to mitigate evolving malicious cyber activities that could manipulate, deny, degrade, disrupt,destroy, surveil, or eavesdrop on space system operations. Space system configurations should be resourced and actively managed to achieve and maintain an effective and resilient cyber survivability posture throughout the space system lifecycle.

(b) Space system owners and operators should develop and implement cybersecurity plans for their space systems that incorporate capabilities to ensure operators or automated control center systems can retain or recover positive control of space vehicles. These plans should also ensure the ability to verify the integrity, confidentiality,and availability of critical functions and the missions, services,and data they enable and provide.

These unclassified directives are typically so general that it’s hard to tell whether they actually matter.

News article.

Posted on September 9, 2020 at 6:37 AM • View Comments

North Korea ATM Hack

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a long and technical alert describing a North Korea hacking scheme against ATMs in a bunch of countries worldwide:

This joint advisory is the result of analytic efforts among the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of the Treasury (Treasury), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM). Working with U.S. government partners, CISA, Treasury, FBI, and USCYBERCOM identified malware and indicators of compromise (IOCs) used by the North Korean government in an automated teller machine (ATM) cash-out scheme­—referred to by the U.S. Government as “FASTCash 2.0: North Korea’s BeagleBoyz Robbing Banks.”

The level of detail is impressive, as seems to be common in CISA’s alerts and analysis reports.

Posted on September 1, 2020 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

US Postal Service Files Blockchain Voting Patent

The US Postal Service has filed a patent on a blockchain voting method:

Abstract: A voting system can use the security of blockchain and the mail to provide a reliable voting system. A registered voter receives a computer readable code in the mail and confirms identity and confirms correct ballot information in an election. The system separates voter identification and votes to ensure vote anonymity, and stores votes on a distributed ledger in a blockchain

I wasn’t going to bother blogging this, but I’ve received enough emails about it that I should comment.

As is pretty much always the case, blockchain adds nothing. The security of this system has nothing to do with blockchain, and would be better off without it. For voting in particular, blockchain adds to the insecurity. Matt Blaze is most succinct on that point:

Why is blockchain voting a dumb idea?

Glad you asked.

For starters:

  • It doesn’t solve any problems civil elections actually have.
  • It’s basically incompatible with “software independence”, considered an essential property.
  • It can make ballot secrecy difficult or impossible.

Both Ben Adida and Matthew Green have written longer pieces on blockchain and voting.

News articles.

Posted on August 28, 2020 at 6:40 AM • View Comments

Vaccine for Emotet Malware

Interesting story of a vaccine for the Emotet malware:

Through trial and error and thanks to subsequent Emotet updates that refined how the new persistence mechanism worked, Quinn was able to put together a tiny PowerShell script that exploited the registry key mechanism to crash Emotet itself.

The script, cleverly named EmoCrash, effectively scanned a user’s computer and generated a correct—but malformed—Emotet registry key.

When Quinn tried to purposely infect a clean computer with Emotet, the malformed registry key triggered a buffer overflow in Emotet’s code and crashed the malware, effectively preventing users from getting infected.

When Quinn ran EmoCrash on computers already infected with Emotet, the script would replace the good registry key with the malformed one, and when Emotet would re-check the registry key, the malware would crash as well, preventing infected hosts from communicating with the Emotet command-and-control server.

[…]

The Binary Defense team quickly realized that news about this discovery needed to be kept under complete secrecy, to prevent the Emotet gang from fixing its code, but they understood EmoCrash also needed to make its way into the hands of companies across the world.

Compared to many of today’s major cybersecurity firms, all of which have decades of history behind them, Binary Defense was founded in 2014, and despite being one of the industry’s up-and-comers, it doesn’t yet have the influence and connections to get this done without news of its discovery leaking, either by accident or because of a jealous rival.

To get this done, Binary Defense worked with Team CYMRU, a company that has a decades-long history of organizing and participating in botnet takedowns.

Working behind the scenes, Team CYMRU made sure that EmoCrash made its way into the hands of national Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs), which then spread it to the companies in their respective jurisdictions.

According to James Shank, Chief Architect for Team CYMRU, the company has contacts with more than 125 national and regional CERT teams, and also manages a mailing list through which it distributes sensitive information to more than 6,000 members. Furthermore, Team CYMRU also runs a biweekly group dedicated to dealing with Emotet’s latest shenanigans.

This broad and well-orchestrated effort has helped EmoCrash make its way around the globe over the course of the past six months.

[…]

Either by accident or by figuring out there was something wrong in its persistence mechanism, the Emotet gang did, eventually, changed its entire persistence mechanism on Aug. 6—exactly six months after Quinn made his initial discovery.

EmoCrash may not be useful to anyone anymore, but for six months, this tiny PowerShell script helped organizations stay ahead of malware operations—a truly rare sight in today’s cyber-security field.

Posted on August 18, 2020 at 6:03 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.