Entries Tagged "physical security"

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1933 Anti-Spam Doorbell

Here’s a great description of an anti-spam doorbell from 1933. A visitor had to deposit a dime into a slot to make the doorbell ring. If the homeowner appreciated the visit, he would return the dime. Otherwise, the dime became the cost of disturbing the homeowner.

This kind of system has been proposed for e-mail as well: the sender has to pay the receiver—or someone else in the system—a nominal amount for each e-mail sent. This money is returned if the e-mail is wanted, and forfeited if it is spam. The result would be to raise the cost of sending spam to the point where it is uneconomical.

I think it’s worth comparing the two systems—the doorbell system and the e-mail system—to demonstrate why it won’t work for spam.

The doorbell system fails for three reasons: the percentage of annoying visitors is small enough to make the system largely unnecessary, visitors don’t generally have dimes on them (presumably fixable if the system becomes ubiquitous), and it’s too easy to successfully bypass the system by knocking (not true for an apartment building).

The anti-spam system doesn’t suffer from the first two problems: spam is an enormous percentage of total e-mail, and an automated accounting system makes the financial mechanics easy. But the anti-spam system is too easy to bypass, and it’s too easy to hack. And once you set up a financial system, you’re simply inviting hacks.

The anti-spam system fails because spammers don’t have to send e-mail directly—they can take over innocent computers and send it from them. So it’s the people whose computers have been hacked into, victims in their own right, who will end up paying for spam. This risk can be limited by letting people put an upper limit on the money in their accounts, but it is still serious.

And criminals can exploit the system in the other direction, too. They could hack into innocent computers and have them send “spam” to their email addresses, collecting money in the process.

Trying to impose some sort of economic penalty on unwanted e-mail is a good idea, but it won’t work unless the endpoints are trusted. And we’re nowhere near that trust today.

Posted on May 10, 2007 at 5:57 AM • View Comments

Security Arms Races in Duck Oviducts and Phalluses

Interesting research at Yale:

Dr. Brennan argues that elaborate female duck anatomy evolves as a countermeasure against aggressive males. “Once they choose a male, they’re making the best possible choice, and that’s the male they want siring their offspring,” she said. “They don’t want the guy flying in from who knows where. It makes sense that they would develop a defense.”

Female ducks seem to be equipped to block the sperm of unwanted males. Their lower oviduct is spiraled like the male phallus, for example, but it turns in the opposite direction. Dr. Brennan suspects that the female ducks can force sperm into one of the pockets and then expel it. “It only makes sense as a barrier,” she said.

To support her argument, Dr. Brennan notes studies on some species that have found that forced matings make up about a third of all matings. Yet only 3 percent of the offspring are the result of forced matings. “To me, it means these females are successful with this strategy,” she said.

Dr. Brennan suspects that when the females of a species evolved better defenses, they drove the evolution of male phalluses. “The males have to step up to produce a longer or more flexible phallus,” she said.

Posted on May 3, 2007 at 7:45 AM • View Comments

Social Engineering Notes

This is a fantastic story of a major prank pulled off at the Super Bowl this year. Basically, five people smuggled more than a quarter of a ton of material into Dolphin Stadium in order to display their secret message on TV. A summary:

Just days after the Boston bomb scare, another team of Boston-based pranksters smuggled and distributed 2,350 suspicious light-up devices into the Super Bowl. Due to its attractiveness as a terrorist target, Dolphin Stadium was on a Level One security alert, a level usually reserved for Presidential inaugurations. By posing as media reporters, the pranksters were able to navigate 95 boxes through federal marshals, Homeland Security agents, bomb squads, police dogs, and a five-ton X-ray crane.

Given all the security, it’s amazing how easy it was for them to become part of the security perimeter with all that random stuff. But to those of us who follow this thing, it shouldn’t be. His observations are spot on:

1. Wear a suit.
2. Wear a Bluetooth headset.
3. Pretend to be talking loudly to someone on the other line.
4. Carry a clipboard.
5. Be white.

Again, no surprise here. But it makes you wonder what’s the point of annoying the hell out of ordinary citizens with security measures (like pat down searches) when the emperor has no clothes.

Someone who crashed the Oscars last year gave similar advice:

Show up at the theater, dressed as a chef carrying a live lobster, looking really concerned.

On a much smaller scale, here’s someone’s story of social engineering a bank branch:

I enter the first branch at approximately 9:00AM. Dressed in Dickies coveralls, a baseball cap, work boots and sunglasses I approach the young lady at the front desk.

“Hello,” I say. “John Doe with XYZ Pest Control, here to perform your pest inspection.?? I flash her the smile followed by the credentials. She looks at me for a moment, goes “Uhm… okay… let me check with the branch manager…” and picks up the phone. I stand around twiddling my thumbs and wait while the manager is contacted and confirmation is made. If all goes according to plan, the fake emails I sent out last week notifying branch managers of our inspection will allow me access.

It does.

Social engineering is surprisingly easy. As I said in Beyond Fear (page 144):

Social engineering will probably always work, because so many people are by nature helpful and so many corporate employees are naturally cheerful and accommodating. Attacks are rare, and most people asking for information or help are legitimate. By appealing to the victim’s natural tendencies, the attacker will usually be able to cozen what she wants.

All it takes is a good cover story.

EDITED TO ADD (4/20): The first commenter suggested that the Zug story is a hoax. I think he makes a good argument, and I have no evidence to refute it. Does anyone know for sure?

EDITED TO ADD (4/21): Wired concludes that the Super Bowl stunt happened, but that no one noticed. Engaget is leaning toward hoax.

Posted on April 20, 2007 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

Copycats

It’s called “splash-and-grab,” and it’s a new way to rob convenience stores. Two guys walk into a store, and one comes up to the counter with a cup of hot coffee or cocoa. He pays for it, and when the clerk opens the cash drawer, he throws the coffee in the clerk’s face. The other one grabs the cash drawer, and they both run.

Crimes never change, but tactics do. This tactic is new; someone just invented it. But now that it’s in the news, copycats are repeating the trick. There have been at least 19 such robberies in Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. (Some arrests have been made since then.)

Here’s another example: On Nov. 24, 1971, someone with the alias Dan Cooper invented a new way to hijack an aircraft. Claiming he had a bomb, he forced a plane to land and then exchanged the passengers and flight attendants for $200,000 and four parachutes. (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to explain why asking for more than one parachute is critical to the plan’s success.) Taking off again, he told the pilots to fly to 10,000 feet. He then lowered the plane’s back stairs and parachuted away. He was never caught, and the FBI still doesn’t know who he is or whether he survived.

After this story hit the press, there was an epidemic of copycat attacks. In 31 hijackings the following year, half of the hijackers demanded parachutes. It got so bad that the FAA required Boeing to install a special latch—the Cooper Vane—on the back staircases of its 727s so they couldn’t be lowered in the air.

The internet is filled with copycats. Green-card lawyers invented spam; now everyone does it. Other people invented phishing, pharming, spear phishing. The virus, the worm, the Trojan: It’s hard to believe that these ubiquitous internet attack tactics were, until comparatively recently, tactics that no one had thought of.

Most attackers are copycats. They aren’t clever enough to invent a new way to rob a convenience store, use the web to steal money, or hijack an airplane. They try the same attacks again and again, or read about a new attack in the newspaper and decide they can try it, too.

In combating threats, it makes sense to focus on copycats when there is a population of people already willing to commit the crime, who will migrate to a new tactic once it has been demonstrated to be successful. In instances where there aren’t many attacks or attackers, and they’re smarter—al-Qaida-style terrorism comes to mind—focusing on copycats is less effective because the bad guys will respond by modifying their attacks accordingly.

Compare that to suicide bombings in Israel, which are mostly copycat attacks. The authorities basically know what a suicide bombing looks like, and do a pretty good job defending against the particular tactics they tend to see again and again. It’s still an arms race, but there is a lot of security gained by defending against copycats.

But even so, it’s important to understand which aspect of the crime will be adopted by copycats. Splash-and-grab crimes have nothing to do with convenience stores; copycats can target any store where hot coffee is easily available and there is only one clerk on duty. And the tactic doesn’t necessarily need coffee; one copycat used bleach. The new idea is to throw something painful and damaging in a clerk’s face, grab the valuables and run.

Similarly, when a suicide bomber blows up a restaurant in Israel, the authorities don’t automatically assume the copycats will attack other restaurants. They focus on the particulars of the bomb, the triggering mechanism and the way the bomber arrived at his target. Those are the tactics that copycats will repeat. The next target may be a theater or a hotel or any other crowded location.

The lesson for counterterrorism in America: Stay flexible. We’re not threatened by a bunch of copycats, so we’re best off expending effort on security measures that will work regardless of the tactics or the targets: intelligence, investigation and emergency response. By focusing too much on specifics—what the terrorists did last time—we’re wasting valuable resources that could be used to keep us safer.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

Posted on March 8, 2007 at 3:23 PM • View Comments

Corsham Bunker

Fascinating article on the Corsham bunker, the secret underground UK site the government was to retreat to in the event of a nuclear war.

Until two years ago, the existence of this complex, variously codenamed Burlington, Stockwell, Turnstile or 3-Site, was classified. It was a huge yet very secret complex, where the government and 6,000 apparatchiks would have taken refuge for 90 days during all-out thermonuclear war. Solid yet cavernous, surrounded by 100ft-deep reinforced concrete walls within a subterranean 240-acre limestone quarry just outside Corsham, it drives one to imagine the ghosts of people who, thank God, never took refuge here.

Posted on February 7, 2007 at 2:40 PM • View Comments

Sneaking into Airports

The stories keep getting better. Here’s someone who climbs a fence at the Raleigh-Durham Airport, boards a Delta plane, and hangs out for a bunch of hours.

Best line of the article:

“It blows my mind that you can’t get 3.5 ounces of toothpaste on a plane,” he said, “yet somebody can sneak on a plane and take a nap.”

Exactly. We’re spending millions enhancing passenger screening—new backscatter X-ray machines, confiscating liquids—and we ignore the other, less secure, paths onto airplanes. It’s idiotic, that’s what it is.

Posted on December 20, 2006 at 1:17 PM • View Comments

Defeating Motion-Sensor Secured Doors with a Stick

An old trick, but a good story:

Everyone thought the doors were incredibly cool. Oh, and they were. Upon entering a secure area (that is, anywhere except the lobby), one simply waved his RFID-enabled access card across the sensor and the doors slid open almost instantly. When leaving an area, motion detectors automatically opened up the doors. The only thing that was missing was the cool “whoosh” noise and an access panel that could be shot with a phaser to permanently seal or, depending on the plot, automatically open the door. Despite that flaw, the doors just felt secure.

That is, until one of G.R.G.’s colleagues had an idea. He grabbed one of those bank-branded folding yardsticks from the freebie table and headed on over to one of the security doors. He slipped the yardstick right through where the sliding doors met and the motion detector promptly noticed the yardstick and opened the door. He had unfettered access to the entire building thanks to a free folding yardstick.

Posted on December 15, 2006 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.