Entries Tagged "privacy"

Page 129 of 147

Security Risks of Airline Passenger Data

Reporter finds an old British Airways boarding pass, and proceeds to use it to find everything else about the person:

We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in Broer’s name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass stub, without typing in a password, were given full access to all his personal details – including his passport number, the date it expired, his nationality (he is Dutch, living in the UK) and his date of birth. The system even allowed us to change the information.

Using this information and surfing publicly available databases, we were able – within 15 minutes – to find out where Broer lived, who lived there with him, where he worked, which universities he had attended and even how much his house was worth when he bought it two years ago. (This was particularly easy given his unusual name, but it would have been possible even if his name had been John Smith. We now had his date of birth and passport number, so we would have known exactly which John Smith.)

Notice the economic pressures:

“The problem here is that a commercial organisation is being given the task of collecting data on behalf of a foreign government, for which it gets no financial reward, and which offers no business benefit in return,” says Laurie. “Naturally, in such a case, they will seek to minimise their costs, which they do by handing the problem off to the passengers themselves. This has the neat side-effect of also handing off liability for data errors.”

Posted on May 9, 2006 at 1:17 PM • View Comments

The DHS Secretly Shares European Passenger Data in Violation of Agreement

From the ACLU:

In 2003, the United States and the European Union reached an agreement under which the EU would share Passenger Name Record (PNR) data with the U.S., despite the lack of privacy laws in the United States adequate to ensure Europeans’ privacy. In return, DHS agreed that the passenger data would not be used for any purpose other than preventing acts of terrorism or other serious crimes. It is now clear that DHS did not abide by that agreement.

Posted on May 8, 2006 at 6:34 AM • View Comments

NSA Warrantless Wiretapping and Total Information Awareness

Technology Review has an interesting article discussing some of the technologies used by the NSA in its warrantless wiretapping program, some of them from the killed Total Information Awareness (TIA) program.

Washington’s lawmakers ostensibly killed the TIA project in Section 8131 of the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for fiscal 2004. But legislators wrote a classified annex to that document which preserved funding for TIA’s component technologies, if they were transferred to other government agencies, say sources who have seen the document, according to reports first published in The National Journal. Congress did stipulate that those technologies should only be used for military or foreign intelligence purposes against non-U.S. citizens. Still, while those component projects’ names were changed, their funding remained intact, sometimes under the same contracts.

Thus, two principal components of the overall TIA project have migrated to the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), which is housed somewhere among the 60-odd buildings of “Crypto City,” as NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, MD, is nicknamed. One of the TIA components that ARDA acquired, the Information Awareness Prototype System, was the core architecture that would have integrated all the information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. According to The National Journal, it was renamed “Basketball.” The other, Genoa II, used information technologies to help analysts and decision makers anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks. It was renamed “Topsail.”

Posted on April 28, 2006 at 8:01 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

DHS Releases RFP for Secure Border Initiative

The Department of Homeland Security has released a Request for Proposal—that’s the document asking industry if anyone can do what it wants—for the Secure Border Initiative. Washington Technology has the story:

The long-awaited request for proposals for Secure Border Initiative-Net was released today by the Homeland Security Department, which is calling the project the “most comprehensive effort in the nation’s history” to gain control of the borders.

The 144-page document outlines the purpose and scope of the border surveillance technology program, which supplements other efforts to control the border and enforce immigration laws.

Posted on April 19, 2006 at 7:12 AM • View Comments

AT&T Assisting NSA Surveillance

Interesting details emerging from EFF’s lawsuit:

According to a statement released by Klein’s attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T’s #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.

“I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room,” Klein wrote. “The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room.”

Klein’s job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.

“While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T’s internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal,” Klein wrote.

The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein’s statement.

The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, “known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets,” according to Klein’s statement.

Narus, whose website touts AT&T as a client, sells software to help internet service providers and telecoms monitor and manage their networks, look for intrusions, and wiretap phone calls as mandated by federal law.

More about what the Narus box can do.

EDITED TO ADD (4/14): More about Narus.

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

Military Secrets for Sale in Afghanistan

Stolen goods are being sold in the markets, including hard drives filled with classified data.

A reporter recently obtained several drives at the bazaar that contained documents marked “Secret.” The contents included documents that were potentially embarrassing to Pakistan, a U.S. ally, presentations that named suspected militants targeted for “kill or capture” and discussions of U.S. efforts to “remove” or “marginalize” Afghan government officials whom the military considered “problem makers.”

The drives also included deployment rosters and other documents that identified nearly 700 U.S. service members and their Social Security numbers, information that identity thieves could use to open credit card accounts in soldiers’ names.

EDITED TO ADD (4/12): NPR story.

Posted on April 12, 2006 at 6:25 AM • View Comments

VOIP Encryption

There are basically four ways to eavesdrop on a telephone call.

One, you can listen in on another phone extension. This is the method preferred by siblings everywhere. If you have the right access, it’s the easiest. While it doesn’t work for cell phones, cordless phones are vulnerable to a variant of this attack: A radio receiver set to the right frequency can act as another extension.

Two, you can attach some eavesdropping equipment to the wire with a pair of alligator clips. It takes some expertise, but you can do it anywhere along the phone line’s path—even outside the home. This used to be the way the police eavesdropped on your phone line. These days it’s probably most often used by criminals. This method doesn’t work for cell phones, either.

Three, you can eavesdrop at the telephone switch. Modern phone equipment includes the ability for someone to listen in this way. Currently, this is the preferred police method. It works for both land lines and cell phones. You need the right access, but if you can get it, this is probably the most comfortable way to eavesdrop on a particular person.

Four, you can tap the main trunk lines, eavesdrop on the microwave or satellite phone links, etc. It’s hard to eavesdrop on one particular person this way, but it’s easy to listen in on a large chunk of telephone calls. This is the sort of big-budget surveillance that organizations like the National Security Agency do best. They’ve even been known to use submarines to tap undersea phone cables.

That’s basically the entire threat model for traditional phone calls. And when most people think about IP telephony—voice over internet protocol, or VOIP—that’s the threat model they probably have in their heads.

Unfortunately, phone calls from your computer are fundamentally different from phone calls from your telephone. Internet telephony’s threat model is much closer to the threat model for IP-networked computers than the threat model for telephony.

And we already know the threat model for IP. Data packets can be eavesdropped on anywhere along the transmission path. Data packets can be intercepted in the corporate network, by the internet service provider and along the backbone. They can be eavesdropped on by the people or organizations that own those computers, and they can be eavesdropped on by anyone who has successfully hacked into those computers. They can be vacuumed up by nosy hackers, criminals, competitors and governments.

It’s comparable to threat No. 3 above, but with the scope vastly expanded.

My greatest worry is the criminal attacks. We already have seen how clever criminals have become over the past several years at stealing account information and personal data. I can imagine them eavesdropping on attorneys, looking for information with which to blackmail people. I can imagine them eavesdropping on bankers, looking for inside information with which to make stock purchases. I can imagine them stealing account information, hijacking telephone calls, committing identity theft. On the business side, I can see them engaging in industrial espionage and stealing trade secrets. In short, I can imagine them doing all the things they could never have done with the traditional telephone network.

This is why encryption for VOIP is so important. VOIP calls are vulnerable to a variety of threats that traditional telephone calls are not. Encryption is one of the essential security technologies for computer data, and it will go a long way toward securing VOIP.

The last time this sort of thing came up, the U.S. government tried to sell us something called “key escrow.” Basically, the government likes the idea of everyone using encryption, as long as it has a copy of the key. This is an amazingly insecure idea for a number of reasons, mostly boiling down to the fact that when you provide a means of access into a security system, you greatly weaken its security.

A recent case in Greece demonstrated that perfectly: Criminals used a cell-phone eavesdropping mechanism already in place, designed for the police to listen in on phone calls. Had the call system been designed to be secure in the first place, there never would have been a backdoor for the criminals to exploit.

Fortunately, there are many VOIP-encryption products available. Skype has built-in encryption. Phil Zimmermann is releasing Zfone, an easy-to-use open-source product. There’s even a VOIP Security Alliance.

Encryption for IP telephony is important, but it’s not a panacea. Basically, it takes care of threats No. 2 through No. 4, but not threat No. 1. Unfortunately, that’s the biggest threat: eavesdropping at the end points. No amount of IP telephony encryption can prevent a Trojan or worm on your computer—or just a hacker who managed to get access to your machine—from eavesdropping on your phone calls, just as no amount of SSL or e-mail encryption can prevent a Trojan on your computer from eavesdropping—or even modifying—your data.

So, as always, it boils down to this: We need secure computers and secure operating systems even more than we need secure transmission.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

Posted on April 6, 2006 at 5:09 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.