Entries Tagged "redaction"

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Major Vulnerability Found in Diebold Election Machines

This is a big deal:

Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a “dangerous” security hole found in Diebold Election Systems Inc.’s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines.

The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide.

Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways.

“This one is worse than any of the others I’ve seen. It’s more fundamental,” said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting-system examiner for the state of Iowa.

“In the other ones, we’ve been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door,” Jones said. “Now we find that there’s no back door. This is the kind of thing where if the states don’t get out in front of the hackers, there’s a real threat.”

This newspaper is withholding some details of the vulnerability at the request of several elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.

[…]

Scientists said Diebold appeared to have opened the hole by making it as easy as possible to upgrade the software inside its machines. The result, said Iowa’s Jones, is a violation of federal voting system rules.

“All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design,” he said.

The immediate solution to this problem isn’t a patch. What that article refers to is election officials ensuring that they are running the “trusted” build of the software done at the federal labs and stored at the NSRL, just in case someone installed something bad in the meantime.

This article compares the security of electronic voting machines with the security of electronic slot machines. (My essay on the security of elections and voting machines.)

EDITED TO ADD (5/11): The redacted report is available.

Posted on May 11, 2006 at 1:08 PM • View Comments

The NSA on How to Redact

Interesting paper.

Both the Microsoft Word document format (MS Word) and Adobe Portable Document (PDF) are complex, sophisticated computer data formats. They can contain many kinds of information such as text, graphics, tables, images, meta-data, and more all mixed together. The complexity makes them potential vehicles for exposing information unintentionally, especially when downgrading or sanitizing classified materials. Although the focus is on MS Word, the general guidance applies to other word processors and office tools, such as WordPerfect, PowerPoint, Excel, Star Office, etc.

This document does not address all the issues that can arise when distributing or downgrading original document formats such as MS Word or MS PowerPoint. Using original source formats, such as MS Word, for downgrading can entail exceptional risks; the lengthy and complicated procedures for mitigating such risks are outside the scope of this note.

EDITED TO ADD (2/1): The NSA page for the redaction document, and other “Security Configuration Guides,” is here.

Posted on February 1, 2006 at 1:09 PM • View Comments

The Onion on Security

“CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years“:

A report released Tuesday by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General revealed that the CIA has mistakenly obscured hundreds of thousands of pages of critical intelligence information with black highlighters.

According to the report, sections of the documents—”almost invariably the most crucial passages”—are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy that began at the agency’s inception in 1947.

“Terrorist Has No Idea What To Do With All This Plutonium“:

Yaquub Akhtar, the leader of an eight-man cell linked to a terrorist organization known as the Army Of Martyrs, admitted Tuesday that he “doesn’t have the slightest clue” what to do with the quarter-kilogram of plutonium he recently acquired.

And “RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs.”

Posted on December 3, 2005 at 9:26 AM • View Comments

PDF Redacting Failure

I wasn’t going to even bother writing about this, but I got too many e-mails from people.

We all know that masking over the text of a PDF document doesn’t actually erase the underlying text, right?

Don’t we?

Seems like we don’t.

Italian media have published classified sections of an official US military inquiry into the accidental killing of an Italian agent in Baghdad.

A Greek medical student at Bologna University who was surfing the web early on Sunday found that with two simple clicks of his computer mouse he could restore censored portions of the report.

Posted on May 3, 2005 at 9:11 AM • View Comments

The Silliness of Secrecy

This is a great article on some of the ridiculous effects of government secrecy. (Unfortunately, you have to register to read it.)

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government has advised airplane pilots against flying near 100 nuclear power plants around the country or they will be forced down by fighter jets. But pilots say there’s a hitch in the instructions: aviation security officials refuse to disclose the precise location of the plants because they
consider that “SSI”—Sensitive Security Information.

“The message is; ‘please don’t fly there, but we can’t tell you where there is,'” says Melissa Rudinger of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a trade group representing 60% of American pilots.

Determined to find a way out of the Catch-22, the pilots’ group sat down with a commercial mapping company, and in a matter of days plotted the exact geographical locations of the plants from data found on the Internet and in libraries. It made the information available to its 400,000 members on its Web site—until officials from the Transportation Security Administration asked them to take the information down. “Their concern was that [terrorists] mining the Internet could use it,” Ms. Rudinger says.

And:

For example, when a top Federal Aviation Administration official testified last year before the 9/11 commission, his remarks were
broadcast live nationally. But when the administration included a transcript in a recent report on threats to commercial airliners, the testimony was heavily edited. “How do you redact something that
is part of the public record?” asked Rep. Carolyn Maloney, (D., N.Y.) at a recent hearing on the problems of government
overclassification. Among the specific words blacked out were the seemingly innocuous phrase: “we are hearing this, this, this, this
and this.”

Government officials could not explain why the words were withheld, other than to note that they were designated SSI.

Posted on March 24, 2005 at 9:48 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.