Entries Tagged "EFF"

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Carrier IQ Spyware

Spyware on many smart phones monitors your every action, including collecting individual keystrokes. The company that makes and runs this software on behalf of different carriers, Carrier IQ, freaked when a security researcher outed them. It initially claimed it didn’t monitor keystrokes—an easily refuted lie—and threatened to sue the researcher. It took EFF getting involved to get the company to back down. (A good summary of the details is here. This is pretty good, too.)

Carrier IQ is reacting really badly here. Threatening the researcher was a panic reaction, but I think it’s still clinging to the notion that it can keep the details of what it does secret, or hide behind such statements such as:

Our customers select which metrics they need to gather based on their business need—such as network planning, customer care, device performance—within the bounds of the agreement they form with their end users.

Or hair-splitting denials it’s been giving to the press.

In response to some questions from PCMag, a Carrier IQ spokeswoman said “we count and summarize performance; we do not record keystrokes, capture screen shots, SMS, email, or record conversations.”

“Our software does not collect the content of messages,” she said.

How then does Carrier IQ explain the video posted by Trevor Eckhart, which showed an Android-based phone running Carrier IQ in the background and grabbing data like encrypted Google searches?

“While ‘security researchers’ have identified that we examine many aspects of a device, our software does not store or transmit what consumers view on their screen or type,” the spokeswoman said. “Just because every application on your phone reads the keyboard does not make every application a key-logging application. Our software measures specific performance metrics that help operators improve the customer experience.”

The spokeswoman said Carrier IQ would record the fact that a text message was sent correctly, for example, but the company “cannot record what the content of the SMS was.” Similarly, Carrier IQ records where you were when a call dropped, but cannot record the conversation, and can determine which applications drain battery life but cannot capture screen shots, she said.

Several things matter here: 1) what data the CarrerIQ app collects on the handset, 2) what data the CarrerIQ app routinely transmits to the carriers, and 3) what data can the CarrierIQ app transmit to the carrier if asked. Can the carrier enable the logging of everything in response to a request from the FBI? We have no idea.

Expect this story to unfold considerably in the coming weeks. Everyone is pointing fingers of blame at everyone else, and Sen. Franken has asked the various companies involved for details.

One more detail is worth mentioning. Apple announced it no longer uses CarrierIQ in iOS5. I’m sure this means that they have their own surveillance software running, not that they’re no longer conducting surveillance on their users.

EDITED TO ADD (12/14): This is an excellent round-up of everything known about CarrierIQ.

Posted on December 5, 2011 at 6:05 AM • View Comments

The Security of SSL

EFF reports on the security of SSL:

The most interesting entry in that table is the “CA compromise” one, because those are incidents that could affect any or every secure web or email server on the Internet. In at least 248 cases, a CA chose to indicate that it had been compromised as a reason for revoking a cert. Such statements have been issued by 15 distinct CA organizations.

Posted on October 27, 2011 at 6:45 AM • View Comments

Hijacking the Coreflood Botnet

Earlier this month, the FBI seized control of the Coreflood botnet and shut it down:

According to the filing, ISC, under law enforcement supervision, planned to replace the servers with servers that it controlled, then collect the IP addresses of all infected machines communicating with the criminal servers, and send a remote “stop” command to infected machines to disable the Coreflood malware operating on them.

This is a big deal; it’s the first time the FBI has done something like this. My guess is that we’re going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future; it’s the obvious solution for botnets.

Not that the approach is without risks:

“Even if we could absolutely be sure that all of the infected Coreflood botnet machines were running the exact code that we reverse-engineered and convinced ourselves that we understood,” said Chris Palmer, technology director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “this would still be an extremely sketchy action to take. It’s other people’s computers and you don’t know what’s going to happen for sure. You might blow up some important machine.”

I just don’t see this argument convincing very many people. Leaving Coreflood in place could blow up some important machine. And leaving Coreflood in place not only puts the infected computers at risk; it puts the whole Internet at risk. Minimizing the collateral damage is important, but this feels like a place where the interest of the Internet as a whole trumps the interest of those affected by shutting down Coreflood.

The problem as I see it is the slippery slope. Because next, the RIAA is going to want to remotely disable computers they feel are engaged in illegal file sharing. And the FBI is going to want to remotely disable computers they feel are encouraging terrorism. And so on. It’s important to have serious legal controls on this counterattack sort of defense.

Some more commentary.

Posted on May 2, 2011 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

Security Risks of Running an Open WiFi Network

As I’ve written before, I run an open WiFi network. It’s stories like these that may make me rethink that.

The three stories all fall along the same theme: a Buffalo man, Sarasota man, and Syracuse man all found themselves being raided by the FBI or police after their wireless networks were allegedly used to download child pornography. “You’re a creep… just admit it,” one FBI agent was quoted saying to the accused party. In all three cases, the accused ended up getting off the hook after their files were examined and neighbors were found to be responsible for downloading child porn via unsecured WiFi networks.

EDITED TO ADD (4/29): The EFF is calling for an open wireless movement. I approve.

Posted on April 26, 2011 at 6:59 AM • View Comments

UAE Man-in-the-Middle Attack Against SSL

Interesting:

Who are these certificate authorities? At the beginning of Web history, there were only a handful of companies, like Verisign, Equifax, and Thawte, that made near-monopoly profits from being the only providers trusted by Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. But over time, browsers have trusted more and more organizations to verify Web sites. Safari and Firefox now trust more than 60 separate certificate authorities by default. Microsoft’s software trusts more than 100 private and government institutions.

Disturbingly, some of these trusted certificate authorities have decided to delegate their powers to yet more organizations, which aren’t tracked or audited by browser companies. By scouring the Net for certificates, security researchers have uncovered more than 600 groups who, through such delegation, are now also automatically trusted by most browsers, including the Department of Homeland Security, Google, and Ford Motors­and a UAE mobile phone company called Etisalat.

In 2005, a company called CyberTrust­—which has since been purchased by Verizon­—gave Etisalat, the government-connected mobile company in the UAE, the right to verify that a site is valid. Here’s why this is trouble: Since browsers now automatically trust Etisalat to confirm a site’s identity, the company has the potential ability to fake a secure connection to any site Etisalat subscribers might visit using a man-in-the-middle scheme.

EDITED TO ADD (9/14): EFF has gotten involved.

Posted on September 3, 2010 at 6:27 AM • View Comments

Violating Terms of Service Possibly a Crime

From Wired News:

The four Wiseguy defendants, who also operated other ticket-reselling businesses, allegedly used sophisticated programming and inside information to bypass technological measures—including CAPTCHA—at Ticketmaster and other sites that were intended to prevent such bulk automated purchases. This violated the sites’ terms of service, and according to prosecutors constituted unauthorized computer access under the anti-hacking Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA.

But the government’s interpretation of the law goes too far, according to the policy groups, and threatens to turn what is essentially a contractual dispute into a criminal case. As in the Lori Drew prosecution last year, the case marks a dangerous precedent that could make a felon of anyone who violates a site’s terms-of-service agreement, according to the amicus brief filed last week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology and other advocates.

“Under the government’s theory, anyone who disregards—or doesn’t read—the terms of service on any website could face computer crime charges,” said EFF civil liberties director Jennifer Granick in a press release. “Price-comparison services, social network aggregators, and users who skim a few years off their ages could all be criminals if the government prevails.”

Posted on July 19, 2010 at 1:11 PM • View Comments

Tracking your Browser Without Cookies

How unique is your browser? Can you be tracked simply by its characteristics? The EFF is trying to find out. Their site Panopticlick will measure the characteristics of your browser setup and tell you how unique it is.

I just ran the test on myself, and my browser is unique amongst the 120,000 browsers tested so far. It’s my browser plugin details; no one else has the exact configuration I do. My list of system fonts is almost unique; only one other person has the exact configuration I do. (This seems odd to me, I have a week old Sony laptop running Windows 7, and I haven’t done anything with the fonts.)

EFF has some suggestions for self-defense, none of them very satisfactory. And here’s a news story.

EDITED TO ADD (1/29): There’s a lot in the comments leading me to question the accuracy of this test. I’ll post more when I know more.

EDITED TO ADD (2/12): Comments from one of the project developers.

Posted on January 29, 2010 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Inferring Friendship from Location Data

Interesting:

For nine months, Eagle’s team recorded data from the phones of 94 students and staff at MIT. By using blue-tooth technology and phone masts, they could monitor the movements of the participants, as well as their phone calls. Their main goal with this preliminary study was to compare data collected from the phones with subjective self-report data collected through traditional survey methodology.

The participants were asked to estimate their average spatial proximity to the other participants, whether they were close friends, and to indicate how satisfied they were at work.

Some intriguing findings emerged. For example, the researchers could predict with around 95 per cent accuracy who was friends with whom by looking at how much time participants spent with each other during key periods, such as Saturday nights.

According to the abstract:

Data collected from mobile phones have the potential to provide insight into the relational dynamics of individuals. This paper compares observational data from mobile phones with standard self-report survey data. We find that the information from these two data sources is overlapping but distinct. For example, self-reports of physical proximity deviate from mobile phone records depending on the recency and salience of the interactions. We also demonstrate that it is possible to accurately infer 95% of friendships based on the observational data alone, where friend dyads demonstrate distinctive temporal and spatial patterns in their physical proximity and calling patterns. These behavioral patterns, in turn, allow the prediction of individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction.

We all leave data shadows everywhere we go, and maintaining privacy is very hard. Here’s the EFF writing about locational privacy.

EDITED TO ADD (10/12): More information.

Posted on September 21, 2009 at 1:41 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.