Entries Tagged "national security policy"

Page 22 of 61

Classifying Elections as "Critical Infrastructure"

I am co-author on a paper discussing whether elections be classified as “critical infrastructure” in the US, based on experiences in other countries:

Abstract: With the Russian government hack of the Democratic National Convention email servers, and further leaks expected over the coming months that could influence an election, the drama of the 2016 U.S. presidential race highlights an important point: Nefarious hackers do not just pose a risk to vulnerable companies, cyber attacks can potentially impact the trajectory of democracies. Yet, to date, a consensus has not been reached as to the desirability and feasibility of reclassifying elections, in particular voting machines, as critical infrastructure due in part to the long history of local and state control of voting procedures. This Article takes on the debate in the U.S. using the 2016 elections as a case study but puts the issue in a global context with in-depth case studies from South Africa, Estonia, Brazil, Germany, and India. Governance best practices are analyzed by reviewing these differing approaches to securing elections, including the extent to which trend lines are converging or diverging. This investigation will, in turn, help inform ongoing minilateral efforts at cybersecurity norm building in the critical infrastructure context, which are considered here for the first time in the literature through the lens of polycentric governance.

The paper was speculative, but now it’s official. The U.S. election has been classified as critical infrastructure. I am tentatively in favor of this, but what really matter is what happens now. What does this mean? What sorts of increased security will election systems get? Will we finally get rid of computerized touch-screen voting?

EDITED TO ADD (1/16): This is a good article.

Posted on January 10, 2017 at 6:02 AM • View Comments

Encryption Working Group Annual Report from the US House of Representatives

The Encryption Working Group of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee has released its annual report.

Observation #1: Any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest.

Observation #2: Encryption technology is a global technology that is widely and increasingly available around the world.

Observation #3: The variety of stakeholders, technologies, and other factors create different and divergent challenges with respect to encryption and the “going dark” phenomenon, and therefore there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the encryption challenge.

Observation #4: Congress should foster cooperation between the law enforcement community and technology companies.

Posted on December 21, 2016 at 9:25 AM • View Comments

My Priorities for the Next Four Years

Like many, I was surprised and shocked by the election of Donald Trump as president. I believe his ideas, temperament, and inexperience represent a grave threat to our country and world. Suddenly, all the things I had planned to work on seemed trivial in comparison. Although Internet security and privacy are not the most important policy areas at risk, I believe he—and, more importantly, his cabinet, administration, and Congress—will have devastating effects in that area, both in the US and around the world.

The election was so close that I’ve come to see the result as a bad roll of the dice. A few minor tweaks here and there—a more enthusiastic Sanders endorsement, one fewer of Comey’s announcements, slightly less Russian involvement—and the country would be preparing for a Clinton presidency and discussing a very different social narrative. That alternative narrative would stress business as usual, and continue to obscure the deep social problems in our society. Those problems won’t go away on their own, and in this alternative future they would continue to fester under the surface, getting steadily worse. This election exposed those problems for everyone to see.

I spent the last month both coming to terms with this reality, and thinking about the future. Here is my new agenda for the next four years:

One, fight the fights. There will be more government surveillance and more corporate surveillance. I expect legislative and judicial battles along several lines: a renewed call from the FBI for backdoors into encryption, more leeway for government hacking without a warrant, no controls on corporate surveillance, and more secret government demands for that corporate data. I expect other countries to follow our lead. (The UK is already more extreme than us.) And if there’s a major terrorist attack under Trump’s watch, it’ll be open season on our liberties. We may lose a lot of these battles, but we need to lose as few as possible and as little of our existing liberties as possible.

Two, prepare for those fights. Much of the next four years will be reactive, but we can prepare somewhat. The more we can convince corporate America to delete their saved archives of surveillance data and to store only what they need for as long as they need it, the safer we’ll all be. We need to convince Internet giants like Google and Facebook to change their business models away from surveillance capitalism. It’s a hard sell, but maybe we can nibble around the edges. Similarly, we need to keep pushing the truism that privacy and security are not antagonistic, but rather are essential for each other.

Three, lay the groundwork for a better future. No matter how bad the next four years get, I don’t believe that a Trump administration will permanently end privacy, freedom, and liberty in the US. I don’t believe that it portends a radical change in our democracy. (Or if it does, we have bigger problems than a free and secure Internet.) It’s true that some of Trump’s institutional changes might take decades to undo. Even so, I am confident—optimistic even—that the US will eventually come around; and when that time comes, we need good ideas in place for people to come around to. This means proposals for non-surveillance-based Internet business models, research into effective law enforcement that preserves privacy, intelligent limits on how corporations can collect and exploit our data, and so on.

And four, continue to solve the actual problems. The serious security issues around cybercrime, cyber-espionage, cyberwar, the Internet of Things, algorithmic decision making, foreign interference in our elections, and so on aren’t going to disappear for four years while we’re busy fighting the excesses of Trump. We need to continue to work towards a more secure digital future. And to the extent that cybersecurity for our military networks and critical infrastructure allies with cybersecurity for everyone, we’ll probably have an ally in Trump.

Those are my four areas. Under a Clinton administration, my list would have looked much the same. Trump’s election just means the threats will be much greater, and the battles a lot harder to win. It’s more than I can possibly do on my own, and I am therefore substantially increasing my annual philanthropy to support organizations like EPIC, EFF, ACLU, and Access Now in continuing their work in these areas.

My agenda is necessarily focused entirely on my particular areas of concern. The risks of a Trump presidency are far more pernicious, but this is where I have expertise and influence.

Right now, we have a defeated majority. Many are scared, and many are motivated—and few of those are applying their motivation constructively. We need to harness that fear and energy to start fixing our society now, instead of waiting four or even eight years, at which point the problems would be worse and the solutions more extreme. I am choosing to proceed as if this were cowpox, not smallpox: fighting the more benign disease today will be much easier than subjecting ourselves to its more virulent form in the future. It’s going to be hard keeping the intensity up for the next four years, but we need to get to work. Let’s use Trump’s victory as the wake-up call and opportunity that it is.

Posted on December 15, 2016 at 3:50 AM •

Auditing Elections for Signs of Hacking

Excellent essay pointing out that election security is a national security issue, and that we need to perform random ballot audits on every future election:

The good news is that we know how to solve this problem. We need to audit computers by manually examining randomly selected paper ballots and comparing the results to machine results. Audits require a voter-verified paper ballot, which the voter inspects to confirm that his or her selections have been correctly and indelibly recorded. Since 2003, an active community of academics, lawyers, election officials and activists has urged states to adopt paper ballots and robust audit procedures. This campaign has had significant, but slow, success. As of now, about three quarters of U.S. voters vote on paper ballots. Twenty-six states do some type of manual audit, but none of their procedures are adequate. Auditing methods have recently been devised that are much more efficient than those used in any state. It is important that audits be performed on every contest in every election, so that citizens do not have to request manual recounts to feel confident about election results. With high-quality audits, it is very unlikely that election fraud will go undetected whether perpetrated by another country or a political party.

Another essay along similar lines.

Related: there is some information about Russian political hacking this election cycle that is classified. My guess is that it has nothing to do with hacking the voting machines—the NSA was on high alert for anything, and I have it on good authority that they found nothing—but something related to either the political-organization hacking, the propaganda machines, or something else before Election Day.

Posted on December 2, 2016 at 6:39 AM • View Comments

Hacking and the 2016 Presidential Election

Was the 2016 presidential election hacked? It’s hard to tell. There were no obvious hacks on Election Day, but new reports have raised the question of whether voting machines were tampered with in three states that Donald Trump won this month: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The researchers behind these reports include voting rights lawyer John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, both respected in the community. They have been talking with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but their analysis is not yet public.

According to a report in New York magazine, the share of votes received by Clinton was significantly lower in precincts that used a particular type of voting machine: The magazine story suggested that Clinton had received 7 percent fewer votes in Wisconsin counties that used electronic machines, which could be hacked, than in counties that used paper ballots. That is exactly the sort of result we would expect to see if there had been some sort of voting machine hack. There are many different types of voting machines, and attacks against one type would not work against the others. So a voting anomaly correlated to machine type could be a red flag, although Trump did better across the entire Midwest than pre-election polls expected, and there are also some correlations between voting machine type and the demographics of the various precincts. Even Halderman wrote early Wednesday morning that “the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked.”

What the allegations, and the ripples they’re causing on social media, really show is how fundamentally untrustworthy our hodgepodge election system is.

Accountability is a major problem for US elections. The candidates are the ones required to petition for recounts, and we throw the matter into the courts when we can’t figure it out. This all happens after an election, and because the battle lines have already been drawn, the process is intensely political. Unlike many other countries, we don’t have an independent body empowered to investigate these matters. There is no government agency empowered to verify these researchers’ claims, even if it would be merely to reassure voters that the election count was accurate.

Instead, we have a patchwork of voting systems: different rules, different machines, different standards. I’ve seen arguments that there is security in this setup ­ an attacker can’t broadly attack the entire country ­ but the downsides of this system are much more critical. National standards would significantly improve our voting process.

Further investigation of the claims raised by the researchers would help settle this particular question. Unfortunately, time is of the essence ­ underscoring another problem with how we conduct elections. For anything to happen, Clinton has to call for a recount and investigation. She has until Friday to do it in Wisconsin, until Monday in Pennsylvania and until next Wednesday in Michigan. I don’t expect the research team to have any better data before then. Without changes to the system, we’re telling future hackers that they can be successful as long as they’re able to hide their attacks for a few weeks until after the recount deadlines pass.

Computer forensics investigations are not easy, and they’re not quick. They require access to the machines. They involve analysis of Internet traffic. If we suspect a foreign country like Russia, the National Security Agency will analyze what they’ve intercepted from that country. This could easily take weeks, perhaps even months. And in the end, we might not even get a definitive answer. And even if we do end up with evidence that the voting machines were hacked, we don’t have rules about what to do next.

Although winning those three states would flip the election, I predict Clinton will do nothing (her campaign, after all, has reportedly been aware of the researchers’ work for nearly a week). Not because she does not believe the researchers ­- although she might not -­ but because she doesn’t want to throw the post-election process into turmoil by starting a highly politicized process whose eventual outcome will have little to do with computer forensics and a lot to do with which party has more power in the three states.

But we only have two years until the next national elections, and it’s time to start fixing things if we don’t want to be wondering the same things about hackers in 2018. The risks are real: Electronic voting machines that don’t use a paper ballot are vulnerable to hacking.

Clinton supporters are seizing on this story as their last lifeline of hope. I sympathize with them. When I wrote about vote-hacking the day after the election, I said: “Elections serve two purposes. First, and most obvious, they are how we choose a winner. But second, and equally important, they convince the loser ­- and all the supporters ­- that he or she lost.” If the election system fails to do the second, we risk undermining the legitimacy of our democratic process. Clinton’s supporters deserve to know whether this apparent statistical anomaly is the result of a hack against our election system or a spurious correlation. They deserve an election that is demonstrably fair and accurate. Our patchwork, ad hoc system means they may never feel confident in the outcome. And that will further erode the trust we have in our election systems.

This essay previously appeared in the Washington Post.

EDITED TO ADD: Green Party candidate Jill Stein is calling for a recount in the three states. I have no idea if a recount includes forensic analysis to ensure that the machines were not hacked, but I doubt it. It would be funny if it wasn’t all so horrible.

Also, here’s an article from 538.com arguing that demographics explains all the discrepancies.

Posted on November 25, 2016 at 10:00 AM • View Comments

Securing Communications in a Trump Administration

Susan Landau has an excellent essay on why it’s more important than ever to have backdoor-free encryption on our computer and communications systems.

Protecting the privacy of speech is crucial for preserving our democracy. We live at a time when tracking an individual—­a journalist, a member of the political opposition, a citizen engaged in peaceful protest­—or listening to their communications is far easier than at any time in human history. Political leaders on both sides now have a responsibility to work for securing communications and devices. This means supporting not only the laws protecting free speech and the accompanying communications, but also the technologies to do so: end-to-end encryption and secured devices; it also means soundly rejecting all proposals for front-door exceptional access. Prior to the election there were strong, sound security arguments for rejecting such proposals. The privacy arguments have now, suddenly, become critically important as well. Threatened authoritarianism means that we need technological protections for our private communications every bit as much as we need the legal ones we presently have.

Unfortunately, the trend is moving in the other direction. The UK just passed the Investigatory Powers Act, giving police and intelligence agencies incredibly broad surveillance powers with very little oversight. And Bits of Freedom just reported that “Croatia, Italy, Latvia, Poland and Hungary all want an EU law to be created to help their law enforcement authorities access encrypted information and share data with investigators in other countries.”

Posted on November 23, 2016 at 2:01 PM • View Comments

Hacking Password-Protected Computers via the USB Port

PoisonTap is an impressive hacking tool that can compromise computers via the USB port, even when they are password-protected. What’s interesting is the chain of vulnerabilities the tool exploits. No individual vulnerability is a problem, but together they create a big problem.

Kamkar’s trick works by chaining together a long, complex series of seemingly innocuous software security oversights that only together add up to a full-blown threat. When PoisonTap—a tiny $5 Raspberry Pi microcomputer loaded with Kamkar’s code and attached to a USB adapter—is plugged into a computer’s USB drive, it starts impersonating a new ethernet connection. Even if the computer is already connected to Wifi, PoisonTap is programmed to tell the victim’s computer that any IP address accessed through that connection is actually on the computer’s local network rather than the internet, fooling the machine into prioritizing its network connection to PoisonTap over that of the Wifi network.

With that interception point established, the malicious USB device waits for any request from the user’s browser for new web content; if you leave your browser open when you walk away from your machine, chances are there’s at least one tab in your browser that’s still periodically loading new bits of HTTP data like ads or news updates. When PoisonTap sees that request, it spoofs a response and feeds your browser its own payload: a page that contains a collection of iframes—a technique for invisibly loading content from one website inside another­that consist of carefully crafted versions of virtually every popular website address on the internet. (Kamkar pulled his list from web-popularity ranking service Alexa‘s top one million sites.)

As it loads that long list of site addresses, PoisonTap tricks your browser into sharing any cookies it’s stored from visiting them, and writes all of that cookie data to a text file on the USB stick. Sites use cookies to check if a visitor has recently logged into the page, allowing visitors to avoid doing so repeatedly. So that list of cookies allows any hacker who walks away with the PoisonTap and its stored text file to access the user’s accounts on those sites.

There’s more. Here’s another article with more details. Also note that HTTPS is a protection.

Yesterday, I testified about this at a joint hearing of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, and the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade—both part of the Committee on Energy and Commerce of the US House of Representatives. Here’s the video; my testimony starts around 1:10:10.

The topic was the Dyn attacks and the Internet of Things. I talked about different market failures that will affect security on the Internet of Things. One of them was this problem of emergent vulnerabilities. I worry that as we continue to connect things to the Internet, we’re going to be seeing a lot of these sorts of attacks: chains of tiny vulnerabilities that combine into a massive security risk. It’ll be hard to defend against these types of attacks. If no one product or process is to blame, no one has responsibility to fix the problem. So I gave a mostly Republican audience a pro-regulation message. They were surprisingly polite and receptive.

Posted on November 17, 2016 at 8:22 AM • View Comments

Election Security

It’s over. The voting went smoothly. As of the time of writing, there are no serious fraud allegations, nor credible evidence that anyone tampered with voting rolls or voting machines. And most important, the results are not in doubt.

While we may breathe a collective sigh of relief about that, we can’t ignore the issue until the next election. The risks remain.

As computer security experts have been saying for years, our newly computerized voting systems are vulnerable to attack by both individual hackers and government-sponsored cyberwarriors. It is only a matter of time before such an attack happens.

Electronic voting machines can be hacked, and those machines that do not include a paper ballot that can verify each voter’s choice can be hacked undetectably. Voting rolls are also vulnerable; they are all computerized databases whose entries can be deleted or changed to sow chaos on Election Day.

The largely ad hoc system in states for collecting and tabulating individual voting results is vulnerable as well. While the difference between theoretical if demonstrable vulnerabilities and an actual attack on Election Day is considerable, we got lucky this year. Not just presidential elections are at risk, but state and local elections, too.

To be very clear, this is not about voter fraud. The risks of ineligible people voting, or people voting twice, have been repeatedly shown to be virtually nonexistent, and “solutions” to this problem are largely voter-suppression measures. Election fraud, however, is both far more feasible and much more worrisome.

Here’s my worry. On the day after an election, someone claims that a result was hacked. Maybe one of the candidates points to a wide discrepancy between the most recent polls and the actual results. Maybe an anonymous person announces that he hacked a particular brand of voting machine, describing in detail how. Or maybe it’s a system failure during Election Day: voting machines recording significantly fewer votes than there were voters, or zero votes for one candidate or another. (These are not theoretical occurrences; they have both happened in the United States before, though because of error, not malice.)

We have no procedures for how to proceed if any of these things happen. There’s no manual, no national panel of experts, no regulatory body to steer us through this crisis. How do we figure out if someone hacked the vote? Can we recover the true votes, or are they lost? What do we do then?

First, we need to do more to secure our elections system. We should declare our voting systems to be critical national infrastructure. This is largely symbolic, but it demonstrates a commitment to secure elections and makes funding and other resources available to states.

We need national security standards for voting machines, and funding for states to procure machines that comply with those standards. Voting-security experts can deal with the technical details, but such machines must include a paper ballot that provides a record verifiable by voters. The simplest and most reliable way to do that is already practiced in 37 states: optical-scan paper ballots, marked by the voters, counted by computer but recountable by hand. And we need a system of pre-election and postelection security audits to increase confidence in the system.

Second, election tampering, either by a foreign power or by a domestic actor, is inevitable, so we need detailed procedures to follow—both technical procedures to figure out what happened, and legal procedures to figure out what to do—that will efficiently get us to a fair and equitable election resolution. There should be a board of independent computer-security experts to unravel what happened, and a board of independent election officials, either at the Federal Election Commission or elsewhere, empowered to determine and put in place an appropriate response.

In the absence of such impartial measures, people rush to defend their candidate and their party. Florida in 2000 was a perfect example. What could have been a purely technical issue of determining the intent of every voter became a battle for who would win the presidency. The debates about hanging chads and spoiled ballots and how broad the recount should be were contested by people angling for a particular outcome. In the same way, after a hacked election, partisan politics will place tremendous pressure on officials to make decisions that override fairness and accuracy.

That is why we need to agree on policies to deal with future election fraud. We need procedures to evaluate claims of voting-machine hacking. We need a fair and robust vote-auditing process. And we need all of this in place before an election is hacked and battle lines are drawn.

In response to Florida, the Help America Vote Act of 2002 required each state to publish its own guidelines on what constitutes a vote. Some states—Indiana, in particular—set up a “war room” of public and private cybersecurity experts ready to help if anything did occur. While the Department of Homeland Security is assisting some states with election security, and the F.B.I. and the Justice Department made some preparations this year, the approach is too piecemeal.

Elections serve two purposes. First, and most obvious, they are how we choose a winner. But second, and equally important, they convince the loser—and all the supporters—that he or she lost. To achieve the first purpose, the voting system must be fair and accurate. To achieve the second one, it must be shown to be fair and accurate.

We need to have these conversations before something happens, when everyone can be calm and rational about the issues. The integrity of our elections is at stake, which means our democracy is at stake.

This essay previously appeared in the New York Times.

Posted on November 15, 2016 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

Automatically Identifying Government Secrets

Interesting research: “Using Artificial Intelligence to Identify State Secrets,” by Renato Rocha Souza, Flavio Codeco Coelho, Rohan Shah, and Matthew Connelly.

Abstract: Whether officials can be trusted to protect national security information has become a matter of great public controversy, reigniting a long-standing debate about the scope and nature of official secrecy. The declassification of millions of electronic records has made it possible to analyze these issues with greater rigor and precision. Using machine-learning methods, we examined nearly a million State Department cables from the 1970s to identify features of records that are more likely to be classified, such as international negotiations, military operations, and high-level communications. Even with incomplete data, algorithms can use such features to identify 90% of classified cables with <11% false positives. But our results also show that there are longstanding problems in the identification of sensitive information. Error analysis reveals many examples of both overclassification and underclassification. This indicates both the need for research on inter-coder reliability among officials as to what constitutes classified material and the opportunity to develop recommender systems to better manage both classification and declassification.

Posted on November 11, 2016 at 1:18 PM • View Comments

1 … 20 21 22 23 24 … 61

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.