Entries Tagged "intelligence"

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Eavesdropping on Dot-Matrix Printers by Listening to Them

Interesting research.

First, we develop a novel feature design that borrows from commonly used techniques for feature extraction in speech recognition and music processing. These techniques are geared towards the human ear, which is limited to approx. 20 kHz and whose sensitivity is logarithmic in the frequency; for printers, our experiments show that most interesting features occur above 20 kHz, and a logarithmic scale cannot be assumed. Our feature design reflects these observations by employing a sub-band decomposition that places emphasis on the high frequencies, and spreading filter frequencies linearly over the frequency range. We further add suitable smoothing to make the recognition robust against measurement variations and environmental noise.

Second, we deal with the decay time and the induced blurring by resorting to a word-based approach instead of decoding individual letters. A word-based approach requires additional upfront effort such as an extended training phase as the dictionary grows larger, and it does not permit us to increase recognition rates by using, e.g., spell-checking. Recognition of words based on training the sound of individual letters (or pairs/triples of letters), however, is infeasible because the sound emitted by printers blurs so strongly over adjacent letters.

Third, we employ speech recognition techniques to increase the recognition rate: we use Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) that rely on the statistical frequency of sequences of words in text in order to rule out incorrect word combinations. The presence of strong blurring, however, requires to use at least 3-grams on the words of the dictionary to be effective, causing existing implementations for this task to fail because of memory exhaustion. To tame memory consumption, we implemented a delayed computation of the transition matrix that underlies HMMs, and in each step of the search procedure, we adaptively removed the words with only weakly matching features from the search space.

We built a prototypical implementation that can bootstrap the recognition routine from a database of featured words that have been trained using supervised learning. Afterwards, the prototype automatically recognizes text with recognition rates of up to 72 %.

Researchers have done lots of work on eavesdropping on remote devices. (One example.) And we know the various intelligence organizations of the world have been doing this sort of thing for decades.

Posted on June 23, 2009 at 6:16 AM • View Comments

Second SHB Workshop Liveblogging (9)

The eighth, and final, session of the SHB09 was optimistically titled “How Do We Fix the World?” I moderated, which meant that my liveblogging was more spotty, especially in the discussion section.

David Mandel, Defense Research and Development Canada (suggested reading: Applied Behavioral Science in Support of Intelligence Analysis, Radicalization: What does it mean?; The Role of Instigators in Radicalization to Violent Extremism), is part of the Thinking, Risk, and Intelligence Group at DRDC Toronto. His first observation: “Be wary of purported world-fixers.” His second observation: when you claim that something is broken, it is important to specify the respects in which it’s broken and what fixed looks like. His third observation: it is also important to analyze the consequences of any potential fix. An analysis of the way things are is perceptually based, but an analysis of the way things should be is value-based. He also presented data showing that predictions made by intelligence analysts (at least in one Canadian organization) were pretty good.

Ross Anderson, Cambridge University (suggested reading: Database State; book chapters on psychology and terror), asked “Where’s the equilibrium?” Both privacy and security are moving targets, but he expects that someday soon there will be a societal equilibrium. Incentives to price discriminate go up, and the cost to do so goes down. He gave several examples of database systems that reached very different equilibrium points, depending on corporate lobbying, political realities, public outrage, etc. He believes that privacy will be regulated, the only question being when and how. “Where will the privacy boundary end up, and why? How can we nudge it one way or another?”

Alma Whitten, Google (suggested reading: Why Johnny can’t encrypt: A usability evaluation of PGP 5.0), presented a set of ideals about privacy (very European like) and some of the engineering challenges they present. “Engineering challenge #1: How to support access and control to personal data that isn’t authenticated? Engineering challenge #2: How to inform users about both authenticated and unauthenticated data? Engineering challenge #3: How to balance giving users control over data collection versus detecting and stopping abuse? Engineering challenge #4: How to give users fine-grained control over their data without overwhelming them with options? Engineering challenge #5: How to link sequential actions while preventing them from being linkable to a person? Engineering challenge #6: How to make the benefits of aggregate data analysis apparent to users? Engineering challenge #7: How to avoid or detect inadvertent recording of data that can be linked to an individual?” (Note that Alma requested not to be recorded.)

John Mueller, Ohio State University (suggested reading: Reacting to Terrorism: Probabilities, Consequences, and the Persistence of Fear; Evaluating Measures to Protect the Homeland from Terrorism; Terrorphobia: Our False Sense of Insecurity), talked about terrorism and the Department of Homeland Security. Terrorism isn’t a threat; it’s a problem and a concern, certainly, but the word “threat” is still extreme. Al Qaeda isn’t a threat, and they’re the most serious potential attacker against the U.S. and Western Europe. And terrorists are overwhelmingly stupid. Meanwhile, the terrorism issue “has become a self-licking ice cream cone.” In other words, it’s now an ever-perpetuating government bureaucracy. There are virtually an infinite number of targets; the odds of any one target being targeted is effectively zero; terrorists pick targets largely at random; if you protect target, it makes other targets less safe; most targets are vulnerable in the physical sense, but invulnerable in the sense that they can be rebuilt relatively cheaply (even something like the Pentagon); some targets simply can’t be protected; if you’re going to protect some targets, you need to determine if they should really be protected. (I recommend his book, Overblown.)

Adam Shostack, Microsoft (his blog), pointed out that even the problem of figuring out what part of the problem to work on first is difficult. One of the issues is shame. We don’t want to talk about what’s wrong, so we can’t use that information to determine where we want to go. We make excuses—customers will flee, people will sue, stock prices will go down—even though we know that those excuses have been demonstrated to be false.

During the discussion, there was a lot of talk about the choice between informing users and bombarding them with information they can’t understand. And lots more that I couldn’t transcribe.

And that’s it. SHB09 was a fantastic workshop, filled with interesting people and interesting discussion. Next year in the other Cambridge.

Adam Shostack’s liveblogging is here. Ross Anderson’s liveblogging is in his blog post’s comments. Matt Blaze’s audio is here.

Posted on June 12, 2009 at 4:55 PM • View Comments

Secret Government Communications Cables Buried Around Washington, DC

Interesting:

This part happens all the time: A construction crew putting up an office building in the heart of Tysons Corner a few years ago hit a fiber optic cable no one knew was there.

This part doesn’t: Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, “You just hit our line.”

Whose line, you may ask? The guys in suits didn’t say, recalled Aaron Georgelas, whose company, the Georgelas Group, was developing the Greensboro Corporate Center on Spring Hill Road. But Georgelas assumed that he was dealing with the federal government and that the cable in question was “black” wire—a secure communications line used for some of the nation’s most secretive intelligence-gathering operations.

Black wire is one of the looming perils of the massive construction that has come to Tysons, where miles and miles of secure lines are thought to serve such nearby agencies as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center and, a few miles away in McLean, the Central Intelligence Agency. After decades spent cutting through red tape to begin work on a Metrorail extension and the widening of the Capital Beltway, crews are now stirring up tons of dirt where the black lines are located.

“Yeah, we heard about the black SUVs,” said Paul Goguen, the engineer in charge of relocating electric, gas, water, sewer, cable, telephone and other communications lines to make way for Metro through Tysons. “We were warned that if they were hit, the company responsible would show up before you even had a chance to make a phone call.”

EDITED TO ADD (6/4): In comments, Angel one gives a great demonstration of the security mindset:

So if I want to stop a construction project in the DC area, all I need to do is drive up in a black SUV, wear a suit and sunglasses, and refuse to identify myself.

Posted on June 4, 2009 at 1:07 PM • View Comments

This Week's Terrorism Arrests

Four points. One: There was little danger of an actual terrorist attack:

Authorities said the four men have long been under investigation and there was little danger they could actually have carried out their plan, NBC News’ Pete Williams reported.

[…]

In their efforts to acquire weapons, the defendants dealt with an informant acting under law enforcement supervision, authorities said. The FBI and other agencies monitored the men and provided an inactive missile and inert C-4 to the informant for the defendants, a federal complaint said.

The investigation had been under way for about a year.

“They never got anywhere close to being able to do anything,” one official told NBC News. “Still, it’s good to have guys like this off the street.”

Of course, politicians are using this incident to peddle more fear:

“This was a very serious threat that could have cost many, many lives if it had gone through,” Representative Peter T. King, Republican from Long Island, said in an interview with WPIX-TV. “It would have been a horrible, damaging tragedy. There’s a real threat from homegrown terrorists and also from jailhouse converts.”

Two, they were caught by traditional investigation and intelligence. Not airport security. Not warrantless eavesdropping. But old fashioned investigation and intelligence. This is what works. This is what keeps us safe. Here’s an essay I wrote in 2004 that says exactly that.

The only effective way to deal with terrorists is through old-fashioned police and intelligence work—discovering plans before they’re implemented and then going after the plotters themselves.

Three, they were idiots:

The ringleader of the four-man homegrown terror cell accused of plotting to blow up synagogues in the Bronx and military planes in Newburgh admitted to a judge today that he had smoked pot before his bust last night.

When U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa M. Smith asked James Cromitie if his judgment was impaired during his appearance in federal court in White Plains, the 55-year-old confessed: “No. I smoke it regularly. I understand everything you are saying.”

Four, an “informant” helped this group a lot:

In April, Mr. Cromitie and the three other men selected the synagogues as their targets, the statement said. The informant soon helped them get the weapons, which were incapable of being fired or detonated, according to the authorities.

The warning the warning I wrote in “Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot” is timely again:

Despite the initial press frenzies, the actual details of the cases frequently turn out to be far less damning. Too often it’s unclear whether the defendants are actually guilty, or if the police created a crime where none existed before.

The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn’t have ordinarily done. The Miami gang’s Sears Tower plot was suggested by an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated the group. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist. Entrapment is a very real possibility in all of these cases.

Actually, that whole 2007 essay is timely again. Some things never change.

Posted on May 22, 2009 at 6:11 AM • View Comments

Me on Full-Body Scanners in Airports

I’m very happy with this quote in a CNN.com story on “whole-body imaging” at airports:

Bruce Schneier, an internationally recognized security technologist, said whole-body imaging technology “works pretty well,” privacy rights aside. But he thinks the financial investment was a mistake. In a post-9/11 world, he said, he knows his position isn’t “politically tenable,” but he believes money would be better spent on intelligence-gathering and investigations.

“It’s stupid to spend money so terrorists can change plans,” he said by phone from Poland, where he was speaking at a conference. If terrorists are swayed from going through airports, they’ll just target other locations, such as a hotel in Mumbai, India, he said.

“We’d be much better off going after bad guys … and back to pre-9/11 levels of airport security,” he said. “There’s a huge ‘cover your ass’ factor in politics, but unfortunately, it doesn’t make us safer.”

I’ve written about “cover your ass” security in the past, but it’s nice to see it in the press.

Posted on May 20, 2009 at 2:34 PM • View Comments

Preparing for Cyberwar

Interesting article from The New York Times.

Because so many aspects of the American effort to develop cyberweapons and define their proper use remain classified, many of those officials declined to speak on the record. The White House declined several requests for interviews or to say whether Mr. Obama as a matter of policy supports or opposes the use of American cyberweapons.

The most exotic innovations under consideration would enable a Pentagon programmer to surreptitiously enter a computer server in Russia or China, for example, and destroy a “botnet”—a potentially destructive program that commandeers infected machines into a vast network that can be clandestinely controlled—before it could be unleashed in the United States.

Or American intelligence agencies could activate malicious code that is secretly embedded on computer chips when they are manufactured, enabling the United States to take command of an enemy’s computers by remote control over the Internet. That, of course, is exactly the kind of attack officials fear could be launched on American targets, often through Chinese-made chips or computer servers.

So far, however, there are no broad authorizations for American forces to engage in cyberwar. The invasion of the Qaeda computer in Iraq several years ago and the covert activity in Iran were each individually authorized by Mr. Bush. When he issued a set of classified presidential orders in January 2008 to organize and improve America’s online defenses, the administration could not agree on how to write the authorization.

I’ve written about cyberwar here.

Posted on April 30, 2009 at 2:18 PM • View Comments

Lessons from the Columbine School Shooting

Lots of high-tech gear, but that’s not what makes schools safe:

Some of the noticeable security measures remain, but experts say the country is exploring a new way to protect kids from in-school violence: administrators now want to foster school communities that essentially can protect themselves with or without the high-tech gear.

“The first and best line of defense is always a well-trained, highly alert staff and student body,” said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, an Ohio-based firm specializing in school security.

“The No. 1 way we find out about weapons in schools is not from a piece of equipment [such as a metal detector] but from a kid who comes forward and reports it to an adult that he or she trusts.”

Of course, there never was an epidemic of school shootings—it just seemed that way in the media. And kids are much safer in schools than outside of them.

Posted on April 29, 2009 at 5:57 AM • View Comments

Massive Chinese Espionage Network

The story broke in The New York Times yesterday:

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

[…]

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

The Chinese government denies involvement. It’s probably true; these networks tend to be run by amateur hackers with the tacit approval of the government, not the government itself. I wrote this on the topic last year.

It’s only circumstantial evidence that the hackers are Chinese:

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

And here’s the report, from the University of Toronto.

Good commentary by James Fallows:

My guess is that the “convenient instruments” hypothesis will eventually prove to be true (versus the “centrally controlled plot” scenario), if the “truth” of the case is ever fully determined. For reasons the Toronto report lays out, the episode looks more like the effort of groups of clever young hackers than a concentrated project of the People Liberation Army cyberwar division. But no one knows for certain, and further information about the case is definitely worth following.

An excellent article on Wired.com, and another on ArsTechnica.

There’s another paper, released at the same time on the same topic, from Cambridge University. It makes more pointed claims about the attackers and their origins, claims I’m not sure can be supported from the evidence.

In this note we described how agents of the Chinese government compromised the computing infrastructure of the Office of His His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

EDITED TO ADD (3/30): More information on the tools the hackers used.

EDITED TO ADD (3/30): An interview with the University of Toronto researchers.

EDITED TO ADD (4/1): The Chinese government denies involvement.

EDITD TO ADD (4/1): My essay from last year on Chinese hacking.

Posted on March 30, 2009 at 12:43 PM • View Comments

Commentary on the UK Government National Security Strategy

This is scary:

Sir David Omand, the former Whitehall security and intelligence co-ordinator, sets out a blueprint for the way the state will mine data—including travel information, phone records and emails—held by public and private bodies and admits: “Finding out other people’s secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules.”

In short: it’s immoral, but we’re going to do it anyway.

Posted on March 4, 2009 at 12:32 PM • View Comments

NSA Wants Help Eavesdropping on Skype

At least, according to an anonymous “industry source”:

The spybiz exec, who preferred to remain anonymous, confirmed that Skype continues to be a major problem for government listening agencies, spooks and police. This was already thought to be the case, following requests from German authorities for special intercept/bugging powers to help them deal with Skype-loving malefactors. Britain’s GCHQ has also stated that it has severe problems intercepting VoIP and internet communication in general.

Skype in particular is a serious problem for spooks and cops. Being P2P, the network can’t be accessed by the company providing it and the authorities can’t gain access by that route. The company won’t disclose details of its encryption, either, and isn’t required to as it is Europe based. This lack of openness prompts many security pros to rubbish Skype on “security through obscurity” grounds: but nonetheless it remains a popular choice with those who think they might find themselves under surveillance. Rumour suggests that America’s NSA may be able to break Skype encryption—assuming they have access to a given call or message—but nobody else.

The NSA may be able to do that: but it seems that if so, this uses up too much of the agency’s resources at present.

I’m sure this is a real problem. Here’s an article claiming that Italian criminals are using Skype more than the telephone because of eavesdropping concerns.

Posted on February 23, 2009 at 6:51 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.