Entries Tagged "keys"

Page 11 of 15

Car-Key Copier

This is neat:

The Impressioner consists of a sensor that goes into the lock and sends information back to a computer via USB about the location of the lock’s tumblers—a corresponding computer program comes up with the code, depending on the make of car you’ve entered beforehand. Once you know the code, a key-cutting machine can use it to carve up a key.

Right now, it’s a prototype that only works on Ford car locks. The article points out that both locksmiths and thieves can use this device.

Another article.

EDITED TO ADD (2/16): How it likely works.

Posted on February 12, 2010 at 6:23 AM • View Comments

Reproducing Keys from Photographs

Reproducing keys from distant and angled photographs:

Abstract:
The access control provided by a physical lock is based on the assumption that the information content of the corresponding key is private—that duplication should require either possession of the key or a priori knowledge of how it was cut. However, the ever-increasing capabilities and prevalence of digital imaging technologies present a fundamental challenge to this privacy assumption. Using modest imaging equipment and standard computer vision algorithms, we demonstrate the effectiveness of physical key teleduplication—extracting a key’s complete and precise bitting code at a distance via optical decoding and then cutting precise duplicates. We describe our prototype system, Sneakey, and evaluate its effectiveness, in both laboratory and real-world settings, using the most popular residential key types in the U.S.

Those of you who carry your keys on a ring dangling from a belt loop, take note.

Posted on October 1, 2009 at 2:09 PM • View Comments

Texas Instruments Signing Keys Broken

Texas Instruments’ calculators use RSA digital signatures to authenticate any updates to their operating system. Unfortunately, their signing keys are too short: 512-bits. Earlier this month, a collaborative effort factored the moduli and published the private keys. Texas Instruments responded by threatening websites that published the keys with the DMCA, but it’s too late.

So far, we have the operating-system signing keys for the TI-92+, TI-73, TI-89, TI-83+/TI-83+ Silver Edition, Voyage 200, TI-89 Titanium, and the TI-84+/TI-84 Silver Edition, and the date-stamp signing key for the TI-73, Explorer, TI-83 Plus, TI-83 Silver Edition, TI-84 Plus, TI-84 Silver Edition, TI-89, TI-89 Titanium, TI-92 Plus, and the Voyage 200.

Moral: Don’t assume that if your application is obscure, or if there’s no obvious financial incentive for doing so, that your cryptography won’t be broken if you use too-short keys.

Posted on September 25, 2009 at 6:17 AM • View Comments

Laptop Security while Crossing Borders

Last year, I wrote about the increasing propensity for governments, including the U.S. and Great Britain, to search the contents of people’s laptops at customs. What we know is still based on anecdote, as no country has clarified the rules about what their customs officers are and are not allowed to do, and what rights people have.

Companies and individuals have dealt with this problem in several ways, from keeping sensitive data off laptops traveling internationally, to storing the data—encrypted, of course—on websites and then downloading it at the destination. I have never liked either solution. I do a lot of work on the road, and need to carry all sorts of data with me all the time. It’s a lot of data, and downloading it can take a long time. Also, I like to work on long international flights.

There’s another solution, one that works with whole-disk encryption products like PGP Disk (I’m on PGP’s advisory board), TrueCrypt, and BitLocker: Encrypt the data to a key you don’t know.

It sounds crazy, but stay with me. Caveat: Don’t try this at home if you’re not very familiar with whatever encryption product you’re using. Failure results in a bricked computer. Don’t blame me.

Step One: Before you board your plane, add another key to your whole-disk encryption (it’ll probably mean adding another “user”)—and make it random. By “random,” I mean really random: Pound the keyboard for a while, like a monkey trying to write Shakespeare. Don’t make it memorable. Don’t even try to memorize it.

Technically, this key doesn’t directly encrypt your hard drive. Instead, it encrypts the key that is used to encrypt your hard drive—that’s how the software allows multiple users.

So now there are two different users named with two different keys: the one you normally use, and some random one you just invented.

Step Two: Send that new random key to someone you trust. Make sure the trusted recipient has it, and make sure it works. You won’t be able to recover your hard drive without it.

Step Three: Burn, shred, delete or otherwise destroy all copies of that new random key. Forget it. If it was sufficiently random and non-memorable, this should be easy.

Step Four: Board your plane normally and use your computer for the whole flight.

Step Five: Before you land, delete the key you normally use.

At this point, you will not be able to boot your computer. The only key remaining is the one you forgot in Step Three. There’s no need to lie to the customs official; you can even show him a copy of this article if he doesn’t believe you.

Step Six: When you’re safely through customs, get that random key back from your confidant, boot your computer and re-add the key you normally use to access your hard drive.

And that’s it.

This is by no means a magic get-through-customs-easily card. Your computer might be impounded, and you might be taken to court and compelled to reveal who has the random key.

But the purpose of this protocol isn’t to prevent all that; it’s just to deny any possible access to your computer to customs. You might be delayed. You might have your computer seized. (This will cost you any work you did on the flight, but—honestly—at that point that’s the least of your troubles.) You might be turned back or sent home. But when you’re back home, you have access to your corporate management, your personal attorneys, your wits after a good night’s sleep, and all the rights you normally have in whatever country you’re now in.

This procedure not only protects you against the warrantless search of your data at the border, it also allows you to deny a customs official your data without having to lie or pretend—which itself is often a crime.

Now the big question: Who should you send that random key to?

Certainly it should be someone you trust, but—more importantly—it should be someone with whom you have a privileged relationship. Depending on the laws in your country, this could be your spouse, your attorney, your business partner or your priest. In a larger company, the IT department could institutionalize this as a policy, with the help desk acting as the key holder.

You could also send it to yourself, but be careful. You don’t want to e-mail it to your webmail account, because then you’d be lying when you tell the customs official that there is no possible way you can decrypt the drive.

You could put the key on a USB drive and send it to your destination, but there are potential failure modes. It could fail to get there in time to be waiting for your arrival, or it might not get there at all. You could airmail the drive with the key on it to yourself a couple of times, in a couple of different ways, and also fax the key to yourself … but that’s more work than I want to do when I’m traveling.

If you only care about the return trip, you can set it up before you return. Or you can set up an elaborate one-time pad system, with identical lists of keys with you and at home: Destroy each key on the list you have with you as you use it.

Remember that you’ll need to have full-disk encryption, using a product such as PGP Disk, TrueCrypt or BitLocker, already installed and enabled to make this work.

I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where our computer data is safe when crossing an international border. Even if countries like the U.S. and Britain clarify their rules and institute privacy protections, there will always be other countries that will exercise greater latitude with their authority. And sometimes protecting your data means protecting your data from yourself.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

Posted on July 15, 2009 at 12:10 PM • View Comments

Giving Out Replacement Hotel Keys

It’s a tough security trade-off. Guests lose their hotel room keys, and the hotel staff needs to be accommodating. But at the same time, they can’t be giving out hotel room keys to anyone claiming to have lost one. Generally, hotels ask to see some ID before giving out a replacement key and, if the guest doesn’t have his wallet with him, have someone walk to the room with the key and check their ID.

This normally works pretty well, but there’s a court case in Brisbane right now about a hotel giving a room key to someone who ended up sexually attacking the woman who had rented the room.

In civil action launched yesterday, the woman alleges the man was given the spare access key to her room by a hotel staffer.

The article doesn’t say what kind of authentication the hotel requested or received.

Posted on November 13, 2008 at 12:12 PM • View Comments

Man-in-the-Middle Attacks

Last week’s dramatic rescue of 15 hostages held by the guerrilla organization FARC was the result of months of intricate deception on the part of the Colombian government. At the center was a classic man-in-the-middle attack.

In a man-in-the-middle attack, the attacker inserts himself between two communicating parties. Both believe they’re talking to each other, and the attacker can delete or modify the communications at will.

The Wall Street Journal reported how this gambit played out in Colombia:

“The plan had a chance of working because, for months, in an operation one army officer likened to a ‘broken telephone,’ military intelligence had been able to convince Ms. Betancourt’s captor, Gerardo Aguilar, a guerrilla known as ‘Cesar,’ that he was communicating with his top bosses in the guerrillas’ seven-man secretariat. Army intelligence convinced top guerrilla leaders that they were talking to Cesar. In reality, both were talking to army intelligence.”

This ploy worked because Cesar and his guerrilla bosses didn’t know one another well. They didn’t recognize one anothers’ voices, and didn’t have a friendship or shared history that could have tipped them off about the ruse. Man-in-the-middle is defeated by context, and the FARC guerrillas didn’t have any.

And that’s why man-in-the-middle, abbreviated MITM in the computer-security community, is such a problem online: Internet communication is often stripped of any context. There’s no way to recognize someone’s face. There’s no way to recognize someone’s voice. When you receive an e-mail purporting to come from a person or organization, you have no idea who actually sent it. When you visit a website, you have no idea if you’re really visiting that website. We all like to pretend that we know who we’re communicating with—and for the most part, of course, there isn’t any attacker inserting himself into our communications—but in reality, we don’t. And there are lots of hacker tools that exploit this unjustified trust, and implement MITM attacks.

Even with context, it’s still possible for MITM to fool both sides—because electronic communications are often intermittent. Imagine that one of the FARC guerrillas became suspicious about who he was talking to. So he asks a question about their shared history as a test: “What did we have for dinner that time last year?” or something like that. On the telephone, the attacker wouldn’t be able to answer quickly, so his ruse would be discovered. But e-mail conversation isn’t synchronous. The attacker could simply pass that question through to the other end of the communications, and when he got the answer back, he would be able to reply.

This is the way MITM attacks work against web-based financial systems. A bank demands authentication from the user: a password, a one-time code from a token or whatever. The attacker sitting in the middle receives the request from the bank and passes it to the user. The user responds to the attacker, who passes that response to the bank. Now the bank assumes it is talking to the legitimate user, and the attacker is free to send transactions directly to the bank. This kind of attack completely bypasses any two-factor authentication mechanisms, and is becoming a more popular identity-theft tactic.

There are cryptographic solutions to MITM attacks, and there are secure web protocols that implement them. Many of them require shared secrets, though, making them useful only in situations where people already know and trust one another.

The NSA-designed STU-III and STE secure telephones solve the MITM problem by embedding the identity of each phone together with its key. (The NSA creates all keys and is trusted by everyone, so this works.) When two phones talk to each other securely, they exchange keys and display the other phone’s identity on a screen. Because the phone is in a secure location, the user now knows who he is talking to, and if the phone displays another organization—as it would if there were a MITM attack in progress—he should hang up.

Zfone, a secure VoIP system, protects against MITM attacks with a short authentication string. After two Zfone terminals exchange keys, both computers display a four-character string. The users are supposed to manually verify that both strings are the same—”my screen says 5C19; what does yours say?”—to ensure that the phones are communicating directly with each other and not with an MITM. The AT&T TSD-3600 worked similarly.

This sort of protection is embedded in SSL, although no one uses it. As it is normally used, SSL provides an encrypted communications link to whoever is at the other end: bank and phishing site alike. And the better phishing sites create valid SSL connections, so as to more effectively fool users. But if the user wanted to, he could manually check the SSL certificate to see if it was issued to “National Bank of Trustworthiness” or “Two Guys With a Computer in Nigeria.”

No one does, though, because you have to both remember and be willing to do the work. (The browsers could make this easier if they wanted to, but they don’t seem to want to.) In the real world, you can easily tell a branch of your bank from a money changer on a street corner. But on the internet, a phishing site can be easily made to look like your bank’s legitimate website. Any method of telling the two apart takes work. And that’s the first step to fooling you with a MITM attack.

Man-in-the-middle isn’t new, and it doesn’t have to be technological. But the internet makes the attacks easier and more powerful, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

Posted on July 15, 2008 at 6:47 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.