Entries Tagged "history of security"
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U.S. COMSEC History from 1973
Just declassified, this document—A History of U.S. Communications Security (Volumes I and II); the David G. Boak Lectures, National Security Agency (NSA), 1973—is definitely worth reading. The first sections are highly redacted, but the remainder is fascinating.
James Bamford Interview on the NSA
Worth reading. One excerpt:
The problem is that NSA was never designed for what it’s doing. It was designed after World War II to prevent another surprise attack from another nation-state, particularly the Soviet Union. And from 1945 or ’46 until 1990 or ’91, that’s what its mission was. That’s what every piece of equipment, that’s what every person recruited to the agency, was supposed to do, practically—find out when and where and if the Russians were about to launch a nuclear attack. That’s what it spent 50 years being built for. And then all of a sudden the Soviet Union is not around anymore, and NSA’s got a new mission, and part of that is going after terrorists. And it’s just not a good fit. They missed the first World Trade Center bombing, they missed the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, they missed the attack on the U.S. embassies in Africa, they missed 9/11. There’s this string of failures because this agency was not really designed to do this. In the movies, they’d be catching terrorists all the time. But this isn’t the movies, this is reality.
The big difference here is that when they were focused on the Soviet Union, the Soviets communicated over dedicated lines. The army communicated over army channels, the navy communicated over navy channels, the diplomats communicated over foreign-office channels. These were all particular channels, particular frequencies, you knew where they were; the main problem was breaking encrypted communications. [The NSA] had listening posts ringing the Soviet Union, they had Russian linguists that were being pumped out from all these schools around the U.S.
Then the Cold War ends and everything changes. Now instead of a huge country that communicated all the time, you have individuals who hop from Kuala Lampur to Nairobi or whatever, from continent to continent, from day to day. They don’t communicate [electronically] all the time—they communicate by meetings. [The NSA was] tapping Bin Laden’s phone for three years and never picked up on any of these terrorist incidents. And the [electronic] communications you do have are not on dedicated channels, they’re mixed in with the world communication network. First you’ve got to find out how to extract that from it, then you’ve got to find people who can understand the language, and then you’ve got to figure out the word code. You can’t use a Cray supercomputer to figure out if somebody’s saying they’re going to have a wedding next week whether it’s really going to be a wedding or a bombing.
So that’s the challenge facing the people there. So even though I’m critical about them for missing these things, I also try in the book to give an explanation as to why this is. It’s certainly not because the people are incompetent. It’s because the world has changed.
I think the problem is more serious than people realize. I talked to the people at Fort Gordon [in Georgia], which is the main listening post for the Middle East and North Africa. What was shocking to me was the people who were there were saying they didn’t have anybody [at the time] who spoke Pashtun. We’re at war in Afghanistan and the main language of the Taliban is Pashtun.
The answer here is to change our foreign policy so that we don’t have to depend on agencies like NSA to try to protect the country. You try to protect the country by having reasonable policies so that we won’t have to worry about terrorism so much. It’s just getting harder and harder to find them.
Also worth reading is his new book.
Aspidistra
Aspidistra was a World War II man-in-the-middle attack. The vulnerability that made it possible was that German broadcast stations were mostly broadcasting the same content from a central source; but during air raids, transmitters in the target area were switched off to prevent them being used for radio direction-finding of the target.
The exploit involved the very powerful (500KW) Aspidistra transmitter, coupled to a directional antenna farm. With that power, they could make it sound like a local station in the target area.
With a staff of fake announcers, a fake German band, and recordings of recent speeches from high-ranking Nazis, they would smoothly switch from merely relaying the German network to emulating it with their own staff. They could then make modifications to news broadcasts, occasionally creating panic and confusion.
German transmitters were switched off during air raids, to prevent them from being used as navigational aids for bombers. But many were connected into a network and broadcast the same content. When a targeted transmitter switched off, Aspidistra began transmitting on their original frequency, initially retransmitting the German network broadcast as received from a still-active station. As a deception, false content and pro-Allied propaganda would be inserted into the broadcast. The first such “intrusion” was carried out on March 25, 1945, as shown in the operations order at the right.
On March 30, 1945, “Aspidistra” intruded into the Berlin and Hamburg frequencies warning that the Allies were trying to spread confusion by sending false telephone messages from occupied towns to unoccupied towns. On April 8, 1945, “Aspidistra” intruded into the Hamburg and Leipzig channels to warn of forged banknotes in circulation. On April 9, 1945, there were announcements encouraging people to evacuate to seven bomb-free zones in central and southern Germany. All these announcements were false.
The German radio network tried announcing “The enemy is broadcasting counterfeit instructions on our frequencies. Do not be misled by them. Here is an official announcement of the Reich authority.” The Aspidistra station made similar announcements, to cause confusion and make the official messages ineffective.
EDITED TO ADD (11/13): Photos here.
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
Guess the year:
Murderous organizations have increased in size and scope; they are more daring, they are served by the most terrible weapons offered by modern science, and the world is nowadays threatened by new forces which, if recklessly unchained, may some day wreck universal destruction. The Orsini bombs were mere children’s toys compared with the later developments of infernal machines. Between 1858 and 1898 the dastardly science of destruction had made rapid and alarming strides…
No, that wasn’t a typo. “Between 1858 and 1898….” This quote is from Major Arthur Griffith, Mysteries of Police and Crime, London, 1898, II, p. 469. It’s quoted in: Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism, New Brunswick/London, Transaction Publishers, 2002.
Taleb on the Limitations of Risk Management
Nice paragraph on the limitations of risk management in this occasionally interesting interview with Nicholas Taleb:
Because then you get a Maginot Line problem. [After World War I, the French erected concrete fortifications to prevent Germany from invading again—a response to the previous war, which proved ineffective for the next one.] You know, they make sure they solve that particular problem, the Germans will not invade from here. The thing you have to be aware of most obviously is scenario planning, because typically if you talk about scenarios, you’ll overestimate the probability of these scenarios. If you examine them at the expense of those you don’t examine, sometimes it has left a lot of people worse off, so scenario planning can be bad. I’ll just take my track record. Those who did scenario planning have not fared better than those who did not do scenario planning. A lot of people have done some kind of “make-sense” type measures, and that has made them more vulnerable because they give the illusion of having done your job. This is the problem with risk management. I always come back to a classical question. Don’t give a fool the illusion of risk management. Don’t ask someone to guess the number of dentists in Manhattan after asking him the last four digits of his Social Security number. The numbers will always be correlated. I actually did some work on risk management, to show how stupid we are when it comes to risk.
A Security Assessment of the Internet Protocol
Preface
The TCP/IP protocols were conceived during a time that was quite different from the hostile environment they operate in now. Yet a direct result of their effectiveness and widespread early adoption is that much of today’s global economy remains dependent upon them.
While many textbooks and articles have created the myth that the Internet Protocols (IP) were designed for warfare environments, the top level goal for the DARPA Internet Program was the sharing of large service machines on the ARPANET. As a result, many protocol specifications focus only on the operational aspects of the protocols they specify and overlook their security implications.
Though Internet technology has evolved, the building blocks are basically the same core protocols adopted by the ARPANET more than two decades ago. During the last twenty years many vulnerabilities have been identified in the TCP/IP stacks of a number of systems. Some were flaws in protocol implementations which affect only a reduced number of systems. Others were flaws in the protocols themselves affecting virtually every existing implementation. Even in the last couple of years researchers were still working on security problems in the core protocols.
The discovery of vulnerabilities in the TCP/IP protocols led to reports being published by a number of CSIRTs (Computer Security Incident Response Teams) and vendors, which helped to raise awareness about the threats as well as the best mitigations known at the time the reports were published.
Much of the effort of the security community on the Internet protocols did not result in official documents (RFCs) being issued by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) leading to a situation in which “known” security problems have not always been addressed by all vendors. In many cases vendors have implemented quick “fixes” to protocol flaws without a careful analysis of their effectiveness and their impact on interoperability.
As a result, any system built in the future according to the official TCP/IP specifications might reincarnate security flaws that have already hit our communication systems in the past.
Producing a secure TCP/IP implementation nowadays is a very difficult task partly because of no single document that can serve as a security roadmap for the protocols.
There is clearly a need for a companion document to the IETF specifications that discusses the security aspects and implications of the protocols, identifies the possible threats, proposes possible counter-measures, and analyses their respective effectiveness.
This document is the result of an assessment of the IETF specifications of the Internet Protocol from a security point of view. Possible threats were identified and, where possible, counter-measures were proposed. Additionally, many implementation flaws that have led to security vulnerabilities have been referenced in the hope that future implementations will not incur the same problems. This document does not limit itself to performing a security assessment of the relevant IETF specification but also offers an assessment of common implementation strategies.
Whilst not aiming to be the final word on the security of the IP, this document aims to raise awareness about the many security threats based on the IP protocol that have been faced in the past, those that we are currently facing, and those we may still have to deal with in the future. It provides advice for the secure implementation of the IP, and also insights about the security aspects of the IP that may be of help to the Internet operations community.
Feedback from the community is more than encouraged to help this document be as accurate as possible and to keep it updated as new threats are discovered.
World War II Deception Story
Great security story from an obituary of former OSS agent Roger Hall:
One of his favorite OSS stories involved a colleague sent to occupied France to destroy a seemingly impenetrable German tank at a key crossroads. The French resistance found that grenades were no use.
The OSS man, fluent in German and dressed like a French peasant, walked up to the tank and yelled, “Mail!”
The lid opened, and in went two grenades.
Hall’s book about his OSS days, You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger, is a must-read.
Comparing Cybersecurity to Early 1800s Security on the High Seas
This article in CSO compares modern cybersecurity to open seas piracy in the early 1800s. After a bit of history, the article talks about current events:
In modern times, the nearly ubiquitous availability of powerful computing systems, along with the proliferation of high-speed networks, have converged to create a new version of the high seas—the cyber seas. The Internet has the potential to significantly impact the United States’ position as a world leader. Nevertheless, for the last decade, U.S. cybersecurity policy has been inconsistent and reactionary. The private sector has often been left to fend for itself, and sporadic policy statements have left U.S. government organizations, private enterprises and allies uncertain of which tack the nation will take to secure the cyber frontier.
This should be a surprise to no one.
What to do?
With that goal in mind, let us consider how the United States could take a Jeffersonian approach to the cyber threats faced by our economy. The first step would be for the United States to develop a consistent policy that articulates America’s commitment to assuring the free navigation of the “cyber seas.” Perhaps most critical to the success of that policy will be a future president’s support for efforts that translate rhetoric to actions—developing initiatives to thwart cyber criminals, protecting U.S. technological sovereignty, and balancing any defensive actions to avoid violating U.S. citizens’ constitutional rights. Clearly articulated policy and consistent actions will assure a stable and predictable environment where electronic commerce can thrive, continuing to drive U.S. economic growth and avoiding the possibility of the U.S. becoming a cyber-colony subject to the whims of organized criminal efforts on the Internet.
I am reminded of comments comparing modern terrorism with piracy on the high seas.
1967 Article on Data Privacy and Security
An eerily prescient article from The Atlantic in 1967 about the future of data privacy. It presents all of the basic arguments for strict controls on data collection of personal information, and it’s remarkably accurate in it’s predictions of the future development and importance of computers as well all of all of the ways the government would abuse them.
Well worth reading.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.