Entries Tagged "privacy"

Page 92 of 145

Applications Disclosing Required Authority

This is an interesting piece of research evaluating different user interface designs by which applications disclose to users what sort of authority they need to install themselves. Given all the recent concerns about third-party access to user data on social networking sites (particularly Facebook), this is particularly timely research.

We have provided evidence of a growing trend among application platforms to disclose, via application installation consent dialogs, the resources and actions that applications will be authorized to perform if installed. To improve the design of these disclosures, we have have taken an important first step of testing key design elements. We hope these findings will assist future researchers in creating experiences that leave users feeling better informed and more confident in their installation decisions.

Within the admittedly constrained context of our laboratory study, disclosure design had surprisingly little effect on participants’ ability to absorb and search information. However, the great majority of participants preferred designs that used images or icons to represent resources. This great majority of participants also disliked designs that used paragraphs, the central design element of Facebook’s disclosures, and outlines, the central design element of Android’s disclosures.

Posted on May 21, 2010 at 1:17 PM • View Comments

Detecting Browser History

Interesting research.

Main results:

[…]

  • We analyzed the results from over a quarter of a million people who ran our tests in the last few months, and found that we can detect browsing histories for over 76% of them. All major browsers allow their users’ history to be detected, but it seems that users of the more modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome are more affected; we detected visited sites for 82% of Safari users and 94% of Chrome users.

    […]

  • While our tests were quite limited, for our test of 5000 most popular websites, we detected an average of 63 visited locations (13 sites and 50 subpages on those sites); the medians were 8 and 17 respectively.
  • Almost 10% of our visitors had over 30 visited sites and 120 subpages detected—heavy Internet users who don’t protect themselves are more affected than others.

    […]

  • The ability to detect visitors’ browsing history requires just a few lines of code. Armed with a list of websites to check for, a malicious webmaster can scan over 25 thousand links per second (1.5 million links per minute) in almost every recent browser.
  • Most websites and pages you view in your browser can be detected as long as they are kept in your history. Almost every address that was in your browser’s address bar can be detected (this includes most pages, including those retrieved using https and some forms with potentialy private information such as your zipcode or search query). Pages won’t be detected when they expire from your history (usually after a month or two), or if you manually clear it.

For now, the only way to fix the issue is to constantly clear browsing history or use private browsing modes. The first browser to prevent this trick in a default installation (Firefox 4.0) is supposed to come out in October.

Here’s a link to the paper.

Posted on May 20, 2010 at 1:28 PM • View Comments

Nobody Encrypts their Phone Calls

From the Forbes blog:

In an annual report published Friday by the U.S. judicial system on the number of wiretaps it granted over the past year …, the courts revealed that there were 2,376 wiretaps by law enforcement agencies in 2009, up 26% from 1,891 the year before, and up 76% from 1999. (Those numbers, it should be noted, don’t include international wiretaps or those aimed at intelligence purposes rather than law enforcement.)

But in the midst of that wiretapping bonanza, a more surprising figure is the number of cases in which law enforcement encountered encryption as a barrier: one.

According to the courts, only one wiretapping case in the entire country encountered encryption last year, and in that single case, whatever privacy tools were used don’t seemed to have posed much of a hurdle to eavesdroppers. “In 2009, encryption was encountered during one state wiretap, but did not prevent officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications,” reads the report.

Posted on May 6, 2010 at 7:06 AM • View Comments

Young People, Privacy, and the Internet

There’s a lot out there on this topic. I’ve already linked to danah boyd’s excellent SXSW talk (and her work in general), my essay on privacy and control, and my talk—”Security, Privacy, and the Generation Gap“—which I’ve given four times in the past two months.

Last week, two new papers were published on the topic.

“Youth, Privacy, and Reputation” is a literature review published by Harvard’s Berkman Center. It’s long, but an excellent summary of what’s out there on the topic:

Conclusions: The prevailing discourse around youth and privacy assumes that young people don’t care about their privacy because they post so much personal information online. The implication is that posting personal information online puts them at risk from marketers, pedophiles, future employers, and so on. Thus, policy and technical solutions are proposed that presume that young would not put personal information online if they understood the consequences. However, our review of the literature suggests that young people care deeply about privacy, particularly with regard to parents and teachers viewing personal information. Young people are heavily monitored at home, at school, and in public by a variety of surveillance technologies. Children and teenagers want private spaces for socialization, exploration, and experimentation, away from adult eyes. Posting personal information online is a way for youth to express themselves, connect with peers, increase popularity, and bond with friends and members of peer groups. Subsequently, young people want to be able to restrict information provided online in a nuanced and granular way.

Much popular writing (and some research) discusses young people, online technologies, and privacy in ways that do not reflect the realities of most children and teenagers’ lives. However, this provides rich opportunities for future research in this area. For instance, there are no studies of the impact of surveillance on young people—at school, at home, or in public. Although we have cited several qualitative and ethnographic studies of young people’s privacy practices and attitudes, more work in this area is needed to fully understand similarities and differences in this age group, particularly within age cohorts, across socioeconomic classes, between genders, and so forth. Finally, given that the frequently-cited comparative surveys of young people and adult privacy practices and attitudes are quite old, new research would be invaluable. We look forward to new directions in research in this area.

“How Different Are Young Adults from Older Adults When it Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes & Policy?” from the University of California Berkeley, describes the results of a broad survey on privacy attitudes.

Conclusion: In policy circles, it has become almost a cliché to claim that young people do not care about privacy. Certainly there are many troubling anecdotes surrounding young individuals’ use of the internet, and of social networking sites in particular. Nevertheless, we found that in large proportions young adults do care about privacy. The data show that they and older adults are more alike on many privacy topics than they are different. We suggest, then, that young-adult Americans have an aspiration for increased privacy even while they participate in an online reality that is optimized to increase their revelation of personal data.

Public policy agendas should therefore not start with the proposition that young adults do not care about privacy and thus do not need regulations and other safeguards. Rather, policy discussions should acknowledge that the current business environment along with other factors sometimes encourages young adults to release personal data in order to enjoy social inclusion even while in their most rational moments they may espouse more conservative norms. Education may be useful. Although many young adults are exposed to educational programs about the internet, the focus of these programs is on personal safety from online predators and cyberbullying with little emphasis on information security and privacy. Young adults certainly are different from older adults when it comes to knowledge of privacy law. They are more likely to believe that the law protects them both online and off. This lack of knowledge in a tempting environment, rather than a cavalier lack of concern regarding privacy, may be an important reason large numbers of them engage with the digital world in a seemingly unconcerned manner.

But education alone is probably not enough for young adults to reach aspirational levels of privacy. They likely need multiple forms of help from various quarters of society, including perhaps the regulatory arena, to cope with the complex online currents that aim to contradict their best privacy instincts.

They’re both worth reading for anyone interested in this topic.

Posted on April 20, 2010 at 1:50 PM • View Comments

Life Recorder

In 2006, writing about future threats on privacy, I described a life recorder:

A “life recorder” you can wear on your lapel that constantly records is still a few generations off: 200 gigabytes/year for audio and 700 gigabytes/year for video. It’ll be sold as a security device, so that no one can attack you without being recorded.

I can’t find a quote right now, but in talks I would say that this kind of technology would first be used by groups of people with diminished rights: children, soldiers, prisoners, and the non-lucid elderly.

It’s been proposed:

With GPS capabilities built into phones that can be made ever smaller, and the ability for these phones to transmit both sound and audio, isn’t it time to think about a wearable device that could be used to call for help and accurately report what was happening?

[…]

The device could contain cameras and microphones that activate if the device was triggered to create evidence that could locate an attacker and cause them to flee, an alarm sound that could help locate the victim and also help scare off an attacker, and a set of sensors that could detect everything from sudden deceleration to an irregular heartbeat or compromised breathing.

Just one sentence on the security and privacy issues:

Indeed, privacy concerns need to be addressed so that stalkers and predators couldn’t compromise the device.

Indeed.

Posted on April 19, 2010 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

Man-in-the-Middle Attacks Against SSL

Says Matt Blaze:

A decade ago, I observed that commercial certificate authorities protect you from anyone from whom they are unwilling to take money. That turns out to be wrong; they don’t even do that much.

Scary research by Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm:

Abstract: This paper introduces a new attack, the compelled certificate creation attack, in which government agencies compel a certificate authority to issue false SSL certificates that are then used by intelligence agencies to covertly intercept and hijack individuals’ secure Web-based communications. We reveal alarming evidence that suggests that this attack is in active use. Finally, we introduce a lightweight browser add-on that detects and thwarts such attacks.

Even more scary, Soghoian and Stamm found that hardware to perform this attack is being produced and sold:

At a recent wiretapping convention, however, security researcher Chris Soghoian discovered that a small company was marketing internet spying boxes to the feds. The boxes were designed to intercept those communications—without breaking the encryption—by using forged security certificates, instead of the real ones that websites use to verify secure connections. To use the appliance, the government would need to acquire a forged certificate from any one of more than 100 trusted Certificate Authorities.

[…]

The company in question is known as Packet Forensics…. According to the flyer: “Users have the ability to import a copy of any legitimate key they obtain (potentially by court order) or they can generate ‘look-alike’ keys designed to give the subject a false sense of confidence in its authenticity.” The product is recommended to government investigators, saying “IP communication dictates the need to examine encrypted traffic at will.” And, “Your investigative staff will collect its best evidence while users are lulled into a false sense of security afforded by web, e-mail or VOIP encryption.”

Matt Blaze has the best analysis. Read his whole commentary; this is just the ending:

It’s worth pointing out that, from the perspective of a law enforcement or intelligence agency, this sort of surveillance is far from ideal. A central requirement for most government wiretapping (mandated, for example, in the CALEA standards for telephone interception) is that surveillance be undetectable. But issuing a bogus web certificate carries with it the risk of detection by the target, either in real-time or after the fact, especially if it’s for a web site already visited. Although current browsers don’t ordinarily detect unusual or suspiciously changed certificates, there’s no fundamental reason they couldn’t (and the Soghoian/Stamm paper proposes a Firefox plugin to do just that). In any case, there’s no reliable way for the wiretapper to know in advance whether the target will be alerted by a browser that scrutinizes new certificates.

Also, it’s not clear how web interception would be particularly useful for many of the most common law enforcement investigative scenarios. If a suspect is buying books or making hotel reservations online, it’s usually a simple (and legally relatively uncomplicated) matter to just ask the vendor about the transaction, no wiretapping required. This suggests that these products may be aimed less at law enforcement than at national intelligence agencies, who might be reluctant (or unable) to obtain overt cooperation from web site operators (who may be located abroad).

Posted on April 12, 2010 at 1:32 PM • View Comments

Schneier on "Security, Privacy, and the Generation Gap"

Last month at the RSA Conference, I gave a talk titled “Security, Privacy, and the Generation Gap.” It was pretty good, but it was the first time I gave that talk in front of a large audience—and its newness showed.

Last week, I gave the same talk again, at the CACR Higher Education Security Summit at Indiana University. It was much, much better the second time around, and there’s a video available.

Posted on April 9, 2010 at 12:55 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.