Entries Tagged "Google"

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The Commercial Speech Arms Race

A few years ago, a company began to sell a liquid with identification codes suspended in it. The idea was that you would paint it on your stuff as proof of ownership. I commented that I would paint it on someone else’s stuff, then call the police.

I was reminded of this recently when a group of Israeli scientists demonstrated that it’s possible to fabricate DNA evidence. So now, instead of leaving your own DNA at a crime scene, you can leave fabricated DNA. And it isn’t even necessary to fabricate. In Charlie Stross’s novel Halting State, the bad guys foul a crime scene by blowing around the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag, containing the DNA of dozens, if not hundreds, of people.

This kind of thing has been going on for ever. It’s an arms race, and when technology changes, the balance between attacker and defender changes. But when automated systems do the detecting, the results are different. Face recognition software can be fooled by cosmetic surgery, or sometimes even just a photograph. And when fooling them becomes harder, the bad guys fool them on a different level. Computer-based detection gives the defender economies of scale, but the attacker can use those same economies of scale to defeat the detection system.

Google, for example, has anti-fraud systems that detect ­ and shut down ­ advertisers who try to inflate their revenue by repeatedly clicking on their own AdSense ads. So people built bots to repeatedly click on the AdSense ads of their competitors, trying to convince Google to kick them out of the system.

Similarly, when Google started penalizing a site’s search engine rankings for having “bad neighbors”—backlinks from link farms, adult or gambling sites, or blog spam—people engaged in sabotage: they built link farms and left blog comment spam linking to their competitors’ sites.

The same sort of thing is happening on Yahoo Answers. Initially, companies would leave answers pushing their products, but Yahoo started policing this. So people have written bots to report abuse on all their competitors. There are Facebook bots doing the same sort of thing.

Last month, Google introduced Sidewiki, a browser feature that lets you read and post comments on virtually any webpage. People and industries are already worried about the effects unrestrained commentary might have on their businesses, and how they might control the comments. I’m sure Google has sophisticated systems ready to detect commercial interests that try to take advantage of the system, but are they ready to deal with commercial interests that try to frame their competitors? And do we want to give one company the power to decide which comments should rise to the top and which get deleted?

Whenever you build a security system that relies on detection and identification, you invite the bad guys to subvert the system so it detects and identifies someone else. Sometimes this is hard ­—leaving someone else’s fingerprints on a crime scene is hard, as is using a mask of someone else’s face to fool a guard watching a security camera ­—and sometimes it’s easy. But when automated systems are involved, it’s often very easy. It’s not just hardened criminals that try to frame each other, it’s mainstream commercial interests.

With systems that police internet comments and links, there’s money involved in commercial messages ­—so you can be sure some will take advantage of it. This is the arms race. Build a detection system, and the bad guys try to frame someone else. Build a detection system to detect framing, and the bad guys try to frame someone else framing someone else. Build a detection system to detect framing of framing, and well, there’s no end, really. Commercial speech is on the internet to stay; we can only hope that they don’t pollute the social systems we use so badly that they’re no longer useful.

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

Posted on October 16, 2009 at 8:56 AM • View Comments

File Deletion

File deletion is all about control. This used to not be an issue. Your data was on your computer, and you decided when and how to delete a file. You could use the delete function if you didn’t care about whether the file could be recovered or not, and a file erase program—I use BCWipe for Windows—if you wanted to ensure no one could ever recover the file.

As we move more of our data onto cloud computing platforms such as Gmail and Facebook, and closed proprietary platforms such as the Kindle and the iPhone, deleting data is much harder.

You have to trust that these companies will delete your data when you ask them to, but they’re generally not interested in doing so. Sites like these are more likely to make your data inaccessible than they are to physically delete it. Facebook is a known culprit: actually deleting your data from its servers requires a complicated procedure that may or may not work. And even if you do manage to delete your data, copies are certain to remain in the companies’ backup systems. Gmail explicitly says this in its privacy notice.

Online backups, SMS messages, photos on photo sharing sites, smartphone applications that store your data in the network: you have no idea what really happens when you delete pieces of data or your entire account, because you’re not in control of the computers that are storing the data.

This notion of control also explains how Amazon was able to delete a book that people had previously purchased on their Kindle e-book readers. The legalities are debatable, but Amazon had the technical ability to delete the file because it controls all Kindles. It has designed the Kindle so that it determines when to update the software, whether people are allowed to buy Kindle books, and when to turn off people’s Kindles entirely.

Vanish is a research project by Roxana Geambasu and colleagues at the University of Washington. They designed a prototype system that automatically deletes data after a set time interval. So you can send an email, create a Google Doc, post an update to Facebook, or upload a photo to Flickr, all designed to disappear after a set period of time. And after it disappears, no one—not anyone who downloaded the data, not the site that hosted the data, not anyone who intercepted the data in transit, not even you—will be able to read it. If the police arrive at Facebook or Google or Flickr with a warrant, they won’t be able to read it.

The details are complicated, but Vanish breaks the data’s decryption key into a bunch of pieces and scatters them around the web using a peer-to-peer network. Then it uses the natural turnover in these networks—machines constantly join and leave—to make the data disappear. Unlike previous programs that supported file deletion, this one doesn’t require you to trust any company, organisation, or website. It just happens.

Of course, Vanish doesn’t prevent the recipient of an email or the reader of a Facebook page from copying the data and pasting it into another file, just as Kindle’s deletion feature doesn’t prevent people from copying a book’s files and saving them on their computers. Vanish is just a prototype at this point, and it only works if all the people who read your Facebook entries or view your Flickr pictures have it installed on their computers as well; but it’s a good demonstration of how control affects file deletion. And while it’s a step in the right direction, it’s also new and therefore deserves further security analysis before being adopted on a wide scale.

We’ve lost the control of data on some of the computers we own, and we’ve lost control of our data in the cloud. We’re not going to stop using Facebook and Twitter just because they’re not going to delete our data when we ask them to, and we’re not going to stop using Kindles and iPhones because they may delete our data when we don’t want them to. But we need to take back control of data in the cloud, and projects like Vanish show us how we can.

Now we need something that will protect our data when a large corporation decides to delete it.

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

EDITED TO ADD (9/30): Vanish has been broken, paper here.

Posted on September 10, 2009 at 6:08 AM • View Comments

Making an Operating System Virus Free

Commenting on Google’s claim that Chrome was designed to be virus-free, I said:

Bruce Schneier, the chief security technology officer at BT, scoffed at Google’s promise. “It’s an idiotic claim,” Schneier wrote in an e-mail. “It was mathematically proved decades ago that it is impossible—not an engineering impossibility, not technologically impossible, but the 2+2=3 kind of impossible—to create an operating system that is immune to viruses.”

What I was referring to, although I couldn’t think of his name at the time, was Fred Cohen’s 1986 Ph.D. thesis where he proved that it was impossible to create a virus-checking program that was perfect. That is, it is always possible to write a virus that any virus-checking program will not detect.

This reaction to my comment is accurate:

That seems to us like he’s picking on the semantics of Google’s statement just a bit. Google says that users “won’t have to deal with viruses,” and Schneier is noting that it’s simply not possible to create an OS that can’t be taken down by malware. While that may be the case, it’s likely that Chrome OS is going to be arguably more secure than the other consumer operating systems currently in use today. In fact, we didn’t take Google’s statement to mean that Chrome OS couldn’t get a virus EVER; we just figured they meant it was a lot harder to get one on their new OS – didn’t you?

When I said that I had not seen Google’s statement. I was responding to what the reporter was telling me on the phone. So yes, I jumped on the reporter’s claim about Google’s claim. I did try to temper my comment:

Redesigning an operating system from scratch, “[taking] security into account all the way up and down,” could make for a more secure OS than ones that have been developed so far, Schneier said. But that’s different from Google’s promise that users won’t have to deal with viruses or malware, he added.

To summarize, there is a lot that can be done in an OS to reduce the threat of viruses and other malware. If the Chrome team started from scratch and took security seriously all through the design and development process, they have to potential to develop something really secure. But I don’t know if they did.

Posted on July 10, 2009 at 9:44 AM • View Comments

Unfair and Deceptive Data Trade Practices

Do you know what your data did last night? Almost none of the more than 27 million people who took the RealAge quiz realized that their personal health data was being used by drug companies to develop targeted e-mail marketing campaigns.

There’s a basic consumer protection principle at work here, and it’s the concept of “unfair and deceptive” trade practices. Basically, a company shouldn’t be able to say one thing and do another: sell used goods as new, lie on ingredients lists, advertise prices that aren’t generally available, claim features that don’t exist, and so on.

Buried in RealAge’s 2,400-word privacy policy is this disclosure: “If you elect to say yes to becoming a free RealAge Member, we will periodically send you free newsletters and e-mails that directly promote the use of our site(s) or the purchase of our products or services and may contain, in whole or in part, advertisements for third parties which relate to marketed products of selected RealAge partners.”

They maintain that when you join the website, you consent to receiving pharmaceutical company spam. But since that isn’t spelled out, it’s not really informed consent. That’s deceptive.

Cloud computing is another technology where users entrust their data to service providers. Salesforce.com, Gmail, and Google Docs are examples; your data isn’t on your computer—it’s out in the “cloud” somewhere—and you access it from your web browser. Cloud computing has significant benefits for customers and huge profit potential for providers. It’s one of the fastest growing IT market segments—69% of Americans now use some sort of cloud computing services—but the business is rife with shady, if not outright deceptive, advertising.

Take Google, for example. Last month, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (I’m on its board of directors) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission concerning Google’s cloud computing services. On its website, Google repeatedly assures customers that their data is secure and private, while published vulnerabilities demonstrate that it is not. Google’s not foolish, though; its Terms of Service explicitly disavow any warranty or any liability for harm that might result from Google’s negligence, recklessness, malevolent intent, or even purposeful disregard of existing legal obligations to protect the privacy and security of user data. EPIC claims that’s deceptive.

Facebook isn’t much better. Its plainly written (and not legally binding) Statement of Principles contains an admirable set of goals, but its denser and more legalistic Statement of Rights and Responsibilities undermines a lot of it. One research group who studies these documents called it “democracy theater“: Facebook wants the appearance of involving users in governance, without the messiness of actually having to do so. Deceptive.

These issues are not identical. RealAge is hiding what it does with your data. Google is trying to both assure you that your data is safe and duck any responsibility when it’s not. Facebook wants to market a democracy but run a dictatorship. But they all involve trying to deceive the customer.

Cloud computing services like Google Docs, and social networking sites like RealAge and Facebook, bring with them significant privacy and security risks over and above traditional computing models. Unlike data on my own computer, which I can protect to whatever level I believe prudent, I have no control over any of these sites, nor any real knowledge of how these companies protect my privacy and security. I have to trust them.

This may be fine—the advantages might very well outweigh the risks—but users often can’t weigh the trade-offs because these companies are going out of their way to hide the risks.

Of course, companies don’t want people to make informed decisions about where to leave their personal data. RealAge wouldn’t get 27 million members if its webpage clearly stated “you are signing up to receive e-mails containing advertising from pharmaceutical companies,” and Google Docs wouldn’t get five million users if its webpage said “We’ll take some steps to protect your privacy, but you can’t blame us if something goes wrong.”

And of course, trust isn’t black and white. If, for example, Amazon tried to use customer credit card info to buy itself office supplies, we’d all agree that that was wrong. If it used customer names to solicit new business from their friends, most of us would consider this wrong. When it uses buying history to try to sell customers new books, many of us appreciate the targeted marketing. Similarly, no one expects Google’s security to be perfect. But if it didn’t fix known vulnerabilities, most of us would consider that a problem.

This is why understanding is so important. For markets to work, consumers need to be able to make informed buying decisions. They need to understand both the costs and benefits of the products and services they buy. Allowing sellers to manipulate the market by outright lying, or even by hiding vital information, about their products breaks capitalism—and that’s why the government has to step in to ensure markets work smoothly.

Last month, Mary K. Engle, Acting Deputy Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said: “a company’s marketing materials must be consistent with the nature of the product being offered. It’s not enough to disclose the information only in a fine print of a lengthy online user agreement.” She was speaking about Digital Rights Management and, specifically, an incident where Sony used a music copy protection scheme without disclosing that it secretly installed software on customers’ computers. DRM is different from cloud computing or even online surveys and quizzes, but the principle is the same.

Engle again: “if your advertising giveth and your EULA [license agreement] taketh away don’t be surprised if the FTC comes calling.” That’s the right response from government.

A version of this article originally appeared on The Wall Street Journal.

EDITED TO ADD (2/29): Two rebuttals.

Posted on April 27, 2009 at 6:16 AM • View Comments

Privacy in Google Latitude

Good news:

What Loopt—and now Google—are asserting is this: when you tell your friends where you are, you are using a public conveyance to communicate privately. And, just as it would if it wanted to record your phone call or read your e-mail, the government needs to get a wiretap order. That’s even tougher to get than a search warrant.

Posted on March 16, 2009 at 6:36 AM • View Comments

Google Maps Spam

There are zillions of locksmiths in New York City.

Not really; this is the latest attempt by phony locksmiths to steer business to themselves:

This is one of the scary parts they have a near monopoly on the cell phone 411 system. They have filled the data bases with so many phony address listings in most major citys that when you call 411 on your cell phone ( which most people do now) you will get the same counterfiet locksmiths over and over again. you could ask for 10 listings and they will all be one of these scammers or another with some local adress that is phony. they use thousands of different names also. It is always the same 55.00 service qouted for a lockout and after they unlock your stuff the price goes much higher. These companys are really not in the rural areas but the are in just about all major citys from coast to coast and from top to bottom. [sic]

More here:

Google wasn’t their first target. The “blackhats” in the industry have used whatever marketing vehicle was “au courant,” whether it was the phone books, 411 or now Google and Yahoo.

Here is a BBB alert from 2007, BBB Warns Consumers of Nationwide Locksmith Swindle and a recent ABC news article and video. The Associated Locksmiths of America provides a list of over 110 news reports over the past several years from across the nation detailing the abuses. As you can see, consumers have paid the price of these many scams with high prices, rip-off installs and even theft.

Posted on March 11, 2009 at 12:38 PM •

Using Google to Crack Hashed Passwords

Clever:

…I thought it would be interesting to find out the account password. WordPress stores raw MD5 hashes in the user database…. As with any respectable hash function, it is believed to be computationally infeasible to discover the input of MD5 from an output. Instead, someone would have to try out all possible inputs until the correct output is discovered.

[…]

Instead, I asked Google. I found, for example, a genealogy page listing people with the surname “Anthony”, and an advert for a house, signing off “Please Call for showing. Thank you, Anthony”. And indeed, the MD5 hash of “Anthony” was the database entry for the attacker. I had discovered his password.

Posted on November 23, 2007 at 6:07 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.