Entries Tagged "identification"

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Data Mining Software from IBM

In the long term, corporate data mining efforts are more of a privacy risk than government data mining efforts. And here’s an off-the-shelf product from IBM:

IBM Entity Analytic Solutions (EAS) is unique identity disambiguation software that provides public sector organizations or commercial enterprises with the ability to recognize and mitigate the incidence of fraud, threat and risk. This IBM EAS offering provides insight on demand, and in context, on “who is who,” “who knows who,” and “anonymously.”

This industry-leading, patented technology enables enterprise-wide identity insight, full attribution and self-correction in real time, and scales to process hundreds of millions of entities—all while accumulating context about those identities. It is the only software in the market that provides in-context information regarding non-obvious and obvious relationships that may exist between identities and can do it anonymously to enhance privacy of information.

For most businesses and government agencies, it is important to figure out when a person is using more than one identity Package (that is, name, address, phone number, social insurance number and other such personal attributes) intentionally or unintentionally. Identity resolution software can help determine when two or more different looking identity packages are describing the same person, even if the data is inconsistent. For example, by comparing names, addresses, phone numbers, social insurance numbers and other personal information across different records, this software might reveal that three customers calling themselves Tom R., Thomas Rogers, and T. Rogers are really just the same person.

It may also be useful for organizations to know with whom such a person associates. Relationship resolution software can process resolved identity data to find out whether people have worked for some of the same companies, for example. This would be useful to an organization that tracks down terrorists, but it can also help businesses such as banks, for example, to see whether the Hope Smith who just applied for a loan is related to Rock Smith, the account holder with a sterling credit rating.

Posted on May 31, 2006 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

RFID Cards and Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

Recent articles about a proposed US-Canada and US-Mexico travel document (kind of like a passport, but less useful), with an embedded RFID chip that can be read up to 25 feet away, have once again made RFID security newsworthy.

My views have not changed. The most secure solution is a smart card that only works in contact with a reader; RFID is much more risky. But if we’re stuck with RFID, the combination of shielding for the chip, basic access control security measures, and some positive action by the user to get the chip to operate is a good one. The devil is in the details, of course, but those are good starting points.

And when you start proposing chips with a 25-foot read range, you need to worry about man-in-the-middle attacks. An attacker could potentially impersonate the card of a nearby person to an official reader, just by relaying messages to and from that nearby person’s card.

Here’s how the attack would work. In this scenario, customs Agent Alice has the official card reader. Bob is the innocent traveler, in line at some border crossing. Mallory is the malicious attacker, ahead of Bob in line at the same border crossing, who is going to impersonate Bob to Alice. Mallory’s equipment includes an RFID reader and transmitter.

Assume that the card has to be activated in some way. Maybe the cover has to be opened, or the card taken out of a sleeve. Maybe the card has a button to push in order to activate it. Also assume the card has come challenge-reply security protocol and an encrypted key exchange protocol of some sort.

  1. Alice’s reader sends a message to Mallory’s RFID chip.
  2. Mallory’s reader/transmitter receives the message, and rebroadcasts it to Bob’s chip.
  3. Bob’s chip responds normally to a valid message from Alice’s reader. He has no way of knowing that Mallory relayed the message.
  4. Mallory’s reader transmitter receives Bob’s message and rebroadcasts it to Alice. Alice has no way of knowing that the message was relayed.
  5. Mallory continues to relay messages back and forth between Alice and Bob.

Defending against this attack is hard. (I talk more about the attack in Applied Cryptography, Second Edition, page 109.) Time stamps don’t help. Encryption doesn’t help. It works because Mallory is simply acting as an amplifier. Mallory might not be able to read the messages. He might not even know who Bob is. But he doesn’t care. All he knows is that Alice thinks he’s Bob.

Precise timing can catch this attack, because of the extra delay that Mallory’s relay introduces. But I don’t think this is part of the spec.

The attack can be easily countered if Alice looks at Mallory’s card and compares the information printed on it with what she’s receiving over the RFID link. But near as I can tell, the point of the 25-foot read distance is so cards can be authenticated in bulk, from a distance.

From the News.com article:

Homeland Security has said, in a government procurement notice posted in September, that “read ranges shall extend to a minimum of 25 feet” in RFID-equipped identification cards used for border crossings. For people crossing on a bus, the proposal says, “the solution must sense up to 55 tokens.”

If Mallory is on that bus, he can impersonate any nearby Bob who activates his RFID card early. And at a crowded border crossing, the odds of some Bob doing that are pretty good.

More detail here:

If that were done, the PASS system would automatically screen the cardbearers against criminal watch lists and put the information on the border guard’s screen by the time the vehicle got to the station, Williams said.

And would predispose the guard to think that everything’s okay, even if it isn’t.

I don’t think people are thinking this one through.

Posted on April 25, 2006 at 7:32 AM • View Comments

The "I'm Not the Criminal You're Looking For" Card

This is a great idea:

Lawmakers in Iowa are proposing a special “passport” meant to protect victims of identity theft against false criminal action and credit charges.

The “Identity Theft Passport” will be a card or certificate that victims of identity fraud can show to police or creditors to help demonstrate their innocence, Tom Sands, a state representative of the Iowa House and supporter of the proposal, said in an e-mail interview Tuesday.

I wrote about something similar in Beyond Fear:

In Singapore, some names are so common that the police issue He’s-not-the-guy-we’re-looking-for documents exonerating innocent people with the same names as wanted criminals.

EDITED TO ADD (4/7): Of course it will be forged; all documents are forged. And yes, I’ve recently written that documents are hard to verify. This is a still good idea, even though it’s not perfect.

Posted on April 6, 2006 at 1:13 PM • View Comments

Bypassing the Airport Identity Check

Here’s an article about how you can modify, and then print, you own boarding pass and get on an airplane even if you’re on the no-fly list. This isn’t news; I wrote about it in 2003.

I don’t worry about it now any more than I worried about it then:

In terms of security, this is no big deal; the photo-ID requirement doesn’t provide much security. Identification of passengers doesn’t increase security very much. All of the 9/11 terrorists presented photo-IDs, many in their real names. Others had legitimate driver’s licenses in fake names that they bought from unscrupulous people working in motor vehicle offices.

The photo-ID requirement is presented as a security measure, but business is the real reason. Airlines didn’t resist it, even though they resisted every other security measure of the past few decades, because it solved a business problem: the reselling of nonrefundable tickets. Such tickets used to be advertised regularly in newspaper classifieds. An ad might read: “Round trip, Boston to Chicago, 11/22-11/30, female, $50.” Since the airlines didn’t check IDs and could observe gender, any female could buy the ticket and fly the route. Now that won’t work. Under the guise of helping prevent terrorism, the airlines solved a business problem of their own and passed the blame for the solution on to FAA security requirements.

But the system fails. I can fly on your ticket. You can fly on my ticket. We don’t even have to be the same gender.

Posted on March 14, 2006 at 7:58 AM • View Comments

Flying Without ID

According to the TSA, in the 9th Circuit Case of John Gilmore, you are allowed to fly without showing ID—you’ll just have to submit yourself to secondary screening.

The Identity Project wants you to try it out. If you have time, try to fly without showing ID.

Mr. Gilmore recommends that every traveler who is concerned with privacy or anonymity should opt to become a “selectee” rather than show an ID. We are very likely to lose the right to travel anonymously, if citizens do not exercise it. TSA and the airlines will attempt to make it inconvenient for you, by wasting your time and hassling you, but they can’t do much in that regard without compromising their avowed missions, which are to transport paying passengers, and to keep weapons off planes. If you never served in the armed services, this is a much easier way to spend some time keeping your society free. (Bring a copy of the court decision with you and point out some of the numerous places it says you can fly as a selectee rather than show ID. Paper tickets are also helpful, though not required.)

I’m curious what the results are.

EDITED TO ADD (11/25): Here’s someone who tried, and failed.

Posted on March 10, 2006 at 7:20 AM • View Comments

Security, Economics, and Lost Conference Badges

Conference badges are an interesting security token. They can be very valuable—a full conference registration at the RSA Conference this week in San Jose, for example, costs $1,985—but their value decays rapidly with time. By tomorrow afternoon, they’ll be worthless.

Counterfeiting badges is one security concern, but an even bigger concern is people losing their badge or having their badge stolen. It’s way cheaper to find or steal someone else’s badge than it is to buy your own. People could do this sort of thing on purpose, pretending to lose their badge and giving it to someone else.

A few years ago, the RSA Conference charged people $100 for a replacement badge, which is far cheaper than a second membership. So the fraud remained. (At least, I assume it did. I don’t know anything about how prevalent this kind of fraud was at RSA.)

Last year, the RSA Conference tried to further limit these types of fraud by putting people’s photographs on their badges. Clever idea, but difficult to implement.

For this to work, though, guards need to match photographs with faces. This means that either 1) you need a lot more guards at entrance points, or 2) the lines will move a lot slower. Actually, far more likely is 3) no one will check the photographs.

And it was an expensive solution for the RSA Conference. They needed the equipment to put the photos on the badges. Registration was much slower. And pro-privacy people objected to the conference keeping their photographs on file.

This year, the RSA Conference solved the problem through economics:

If you lose your badge and/or badge holder, you will be required to purchase a new one for a fee of $1,895.00.

Look how clever this is. Instead of trying to solve this particular badge fraud problem through security, they simply moved the problem from the conference to the attendee. The badges still have that $1,895 value, but now if it’s stolen and used by someone else, it’s the attendee who’s out the money. As far as the RSA Conference is concerned, the security risk is an externality.

Note that from an outside perspective, this isn’t the most efficient way to deal with the security problem. It’s likely that the cost to the RSA Conference for centralized security is less than the aggregate cost of all the individual security measures. But the RSA Conference gets to make the trade-off, so they chose a solution that was cheaper for them.

Of course, it would have been nice if the conference provided a slightly more secure attachment point for the badge holder than a thin strip of plastic. But why should they? It’s not their problem anymore.

Posted on February 16, 2006 at 7:16 AM • View Comments

Real Fake ID Cards

Or maybe they’re fake real ID cards. This website sells ID cards. They’re not ID cards for anything in particular, but they look official. If you need to fool someone who really doesn’t know what an ID card is supposed to look like, these are likely to work.

Posted on February 15, 2006 at 1:19 PM •

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.