Entries Tagged "risk assessment"

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Hacking Medical Devices

Okay, so this could be big news:

But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal—if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

The researchers said they had also been able to glean personal patient data by eavesdropping on signals from the tiny wireless radio that Medtronic, the device’s maker, had embedded in the implant as a way to let doctors monitor and adjust it without surgery.

There’s only a little bit of hyperbole in the New York Times article. The research is being conducted by the Medical Device Security Center, with researchers from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of Washington. They have two published papers:

This is from the FAQ for the second paper (an ICD is a implantable cardiac defibrillator):

As part of our research we evaluated the security and privacy properties of a common ICD. We investigate whether a malicious party could create his or her own equipment capable of wirelessly communicating with this ICD.

Using our own equipment (an antenna, radio hardware, and a PC), we found that someone could violate the privacy of patient information and medical telemetry. The ICD wirelessly transmits patient information and telemetry without observable encryption. The adversary’s computer could intercept wireless signals from the ICD and learn information including: the patient’s name, the patient’s medical history, the patient’s date of birth, and so on.

Using our own equipment (an antenna, radio hardware, and a PC), we found that someone could also turn off or modify therapy settings stored on the ICD. Such a person could render the ICD incapable of responding to dangerous cardiac events. A malicious person could also make the ICD deliver a shock that could induce ventricular fibrillation, a potentially lethal arrhythmia.

Of course, we all know how this happened. It’s a story we’ve seen a zillion times before: the designers didn’t think about security, so the design wasn’t secure.

The researchers are making it very clear that this doesn’t mean people shouldn’t get pacemakers and ICDs. Again, from the FAQ:

We strongly believe that nothing in our report should deter patients from receiving these devices if recommended by their physician. The implantable cardiac defibrillator is a proven, life-saving technology. We believe that the risk to patients is low and that patients should not be alarmed. We do not know of a single case where an IMD patient has ever been harmed by a malicious security attack. To carry out the attacks we discuss in our paper would require: malicious intent, technical sophistication, and the ability to place electronic equipment close to the patient. Our goal in performing this study is to improve the security, privacy, safety, and effectiveness of future IMDs.

For all our experiments our antenna, radio hardware, and PC were near the ICD. Our experiments were conducted in a computer laboratory and utilized simulated patient data. We did not experiment with extending the distance between the antenna and the ICD.

I agree with this answer. The risks are there, but the benefits of these devices are much greater. The point of this research isn’t to help people hack into pacemakers and commit murder, but to enable medical device companies to design better implantable equipment in the future. I think it’s great work.

Of course, that will only happen if the medical device companies don’t react like idiots:

Medtronic, the industry leader in cardiac regulating implants, said Tuesday that it welcomed the chance to look at security issues with doctors, regulators and researchers, adding that it had never encountered illegal or unauthorized hacking of its devices that have telemetry, or wireless control, capabilities.

“To our knowledge there has not been a single reported incident of such an event in more than 30 years of device telemetry use, which includes millions of implants worldwide,” a Medtronic spokesman, Robert Clark, said. Mr. Clark added that newer implants with longer transmission ranges than Maximo also had enhanced security.

[…]

St. Jude Medical, the third major defibrillator company, said it used “proprietary techniques” to protect the security of its implants and had not heard of any unauthorized or illegal manipulation of them.

Just because you have no knowledge of something happening does not mean it’s not a risk.

Another article.

The general moral here: more and more, computer technology is becoming intimately embedded into our lives. And with each new application comes new security risks. And we have to take those risks seriously.

Posted on March 12, 2008 at 10:39 AM • View Comments

Risk of Knowing Too Much About Risk

Interesting:

Dread is a powerful force. The problem with dread is that it leads to terrible decision-making.

Slovic says all of this results from how our brains process risk, which is in two ways. The first is intuitive, emotional and experience based. Not only do we fear more what we can’t control, but we also fear more what we can imagine or what we experience. This seems to be an evolutionary survival mechanism. In the presence of uncertainty, fear is a valuable defense. Our brains react emotionally, generate anxiety and tell us, “Remember the news report that showed what happened when those other kids took the bus? Don’t put your kids on the bus.”

The second way we process risk is analytical: we use probability and statistics to override, or at least prioritize, our dread. That is, our brain plays devil’s advocate with its initial intuitive reaction, and tries to say, “I know it seems scary, but eight times as many people die in cars as they do on buses. In fact, only one person dies on a bus for every 500 million miles buses travel. Buses are safer than cars.”

Unfortunately for us, that’s often not the voice that wins. Intuitive risk processors can easily overwhelm analytical ones, especially in the presence of those etched-in images, sounds and experiences. Intuition is so strong, in fact, that if you presented someone who had experienced a bus accident with factual risk analysis about the relative safety of buses over cars, it’s highly possible that they’d still choose to drive their kids to school, because their brain washes them in those dreadful images and reminds them that they control a car but don’t control a bus. A car just feels safer. “We have to work real hard in the presence of images to get the analytical part of risk response to work in our brains,” says Slovic. “It’s not easy at all.”

And we’re making it harder by disclosing more risks than ever to more people than ever. Not only does all of this disclosure make us feel helpless, but it also gives us ever more of those images and experiences that trigger the intuitive response without analytical rigor to override the fear. Slovic points to several recent cases where reason has lost to fear: The sniper who terrorized Washington D.C.; pathogenic threats like MRSA and brain-eating amoeba. Even the widely publicized drunk-driving death of a baseball player this year led to decisions that, from a risk perspective, were irrational.

Posted on March 6, 2008 at 6:24 AM • View Comments

Fear of Internet Predators Largely Unfounded

Does this really come as a surprise?

“There’s been some overreaction to the new technology, especially when it comes to the danger that strangers represent,” said Janis Wolak, a sociologist at the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

“Actually, Internet-related sex crimes are a pretty small proportion of sex crimes that adolescents suffer,” Wolak added, based on three nationwide surveys conducted by the center.

[…]

In an article titled “Online ‘Predators’ and Their Victims,” which appears Tuesday in American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, Wolak and co-researchers examined several fears that they concluded are myths:

  • Internet predators are driving up child sex crime rates.

    Finding: Sex assaults on teens fell 52 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, the best measure of U.S. crime trends. “The Internet may not be as risky as a lot of other things that parents do without concern, such as driving kids to the mall and leaving them there for two hours,” Wolak said.

  • Internet predators are pedophiles.

    Finding: Internet predators don’t hit on the prepubescent children whom pedophiles target. They target adolescents, who have more access to computers, more privacy and more interest in sex and romance, Wolak’s team determined from interviews with investigators.

  • Internet predators represent a new dimension of child sexual abuse.

    Finding: The means of communication is new, according to Wolak, but most Internet-linked offenses are essentially statutory rape: nonforcible sex crimes against minors too young to consent to sexual relationships with adults.

  • Internet predators trick or abduct their victims.

    Finding: Most victims meet online offenders face-to-face and go to those meetings expecting to engage in sex. Nearly three-quarters have sex with partners they met on the Internet more than once.

  • Internet predators meet their victims by posing online as other teens.

    Finding: Only 5 percent of predators did that, according to the survey of investigators.

  • Online interactions with strangers are risky.

    Finding: Many teens interact online all the time with people they don’t know. What’s risky, according to Wolak, is giving out names, phone numbers and pictures to strangers and talking online with them about sex.

  • Internet predators go after any child.

    Finding: Usually their targets are adolescent girls or adolescent boys of uncertain sexual orientation, according to Wolak. Youths with histories of sexual abuse, sexual orientation concerns and patterns of off- and online risk-taking are especially at risk.

In January, I said this:

…there isn’t really any problem with child predators—just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories—on MySpace. It’s just security theater against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have a well-established cognitive bias that overestimates threats against our children, so it all makes sense.

EDITED TO ADD (3/7): A good essay.

Posted on February 26, 2008 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

Spending Money on the Wrong Security Threats

This story is a year and a half old, but the lessons are still good:

Kim Hyten, emergency management director in Putnam County, said he didn’t realize homeland security grants can now be used to prepare for tornados. As a result, Putnam County is using its grant money to prepare for something else.

“Weapons of mass destruction,” Hyten said.

That’s right—weapons of mass destruction. This year, Putnam County spent most of its $58,000 homeland security grant to buy dozens of gas masks, boxes full of chemical suits, a plutonium-detecting gamma and neutron ray radiological monitor and, for good measure, this rural county about fifty miles west of Indianapolis also ordered plenty of weapons of mass destruction test strips.

But asked whether weapons of mass destruction are a concern, Hyten replied: “The weapons of mass destruction—I don’t believe this county has ever, when we did our terrorism protection plan, ever looked at that we’d be a targeted site.”

Posted on February 19, 2008 at 7:18 AM • View Comments

Psychology Today on Risk Assessment

Yet another article on the topic. An excerpt:

We substitute one risk for another.

Insurers in the United Kingdom used to offer discounts to drivers who purchased cars with safer brakes. “They don’t anymore,” says John Adams, a risk analyst and emeritus professor of geography at University College. “There weren’t fewer accidents, just different accidents.”

Why? For the same reason that the vehicles most likely to go out of control in snowy conditions are those with four-wheel drive. Buoyed by a false sense of safety that comes with the increased control, drivers of four-wheel-drive vehicles take more risks. “These vehicles are bigger and heavier, which should keep them on the road,” says Ropeik. “But police report that these drivers go faster, even when roads are slippery.”

Both are cases of risk compensation: People have a preferred level of risk, and they modulate their behavior to keep risk at that constant level. Features designed to increase safety—four-wheel drive, Seat belts, or air bags—wind up making people drive faster. The safety features may reduce risks associated with weather, but they don’t cut overall risk. “If I drink a diet soda with dinner,” quips Slovic, “I have ice cream for dessert.”

Posted on January 31, 2008 at 11:45 AM • View Comments

My Open Wireless Network

Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people—and attracts the most criticism—is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There’s no password. There’s no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet.

To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea. But to some observers, it’s both wrong and dangerous.

I’m told that uninvited strangers may sit in their cars in front of my house, and use my network to send spam, eavesdrop on my passwords, and upload and download everything from pirated movies to child pornography. As a result, I risk all sorts of bad things happening to me, from seeing my IP address blacklisted to having the police crash through my door.

While this is technically true, I don’t think it’s much of a risk. I can count five open wireless networks in coffee shops within a mile of my house, and any potential spammer is far more likely to sit in a warm room with a cup of coffee and a scone than in a cold car outside my house. And yes, if someone did commit a crime using my network the police might visit, but what better defense is there than the fact that I have an open wireless network? If I enabled wireless security on my network and someone hacked it, I would have a far harder time proving my innocence.

This is not to say that the new wireless security protocol, WPA, isn’t very good. It is. But there are going to be security flaws in it; there always are.

I spoke to several lawyers about this, and in their lawyerly way they outlined several other risks with leaving your network open.

While none thought you could be successfully prosecuted just because someone else used your network to commit a crime, any investigation could be time-consuming and expensive. You might have your computer equipment seized, and if you have any contraband of your own on your machine, it could be a delicate situation. Also, prosecutors aren’t always the most technically savvy bunch, and you might end up being charged despite your innocence. The lawyers I spoke with say most defense attorneys will advise you to reach a plea agreement rather than risk going to trial on child-pornography charges.

In a less far-fetched scenario, the Recording Industry Association of America is known to sue copyright infringers based on nothing more than an IP address. The accuser’s chance of winning is higher than in a criminal case, because in civil litigation the burden of proof is lower. And again, lawyers argue that even if you win it’s not worth the risk or expense, and that you should settle and pay a few thousand dollars.

I remain unconvinced of this threat, though. The RIAA has conducted about 26,000 lawsuits, and there are more than 15 million music downloaders. Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research said it best: “If you’re a file sharer, you know that the likelihood of you being caught is very similar to that of being hit by an asteroid.”

I’m also unmoved by those who say I’m putting my own data at risk, because hackers might park in front of my house, log on to my open network and eavesdrop on my internet traffic or break into my computers. This is true, but my computers are much more at risk when I use them on wireless networks in airports, coffee shops and other public places. If I configure my computer to be secure regardless of the network it’s on, then it simply doesn’t matter. And if my computer isn’t secure on a public network, securing my own network isn’t going to reduce my risk very much.

Yes, computer security is hard. But if your computers leave your house, you have to solve it anyway. And any solution will apply to your desktop machines as well.

Finally, critics say someone might steal bandwidth from me. Despite isolated court rulings that this is illegal, my feeling is that they’re welcome to it. I really don’t mind if neighbors use my wireless network when they need it, and I’ve heard several stories of people who have been rescued from connectivity emergencies by open wireless networks in the neighborhood.

Similarly, I appreciate an open network when I am otherwise without bandwidth. If someone were using my network to the point that it affected my own traffic or if some neighbor kid was dinking around, I might want to do something about it; but as long as we’re all polite, why should this concern me? Pay it forward, I say.

Certainly this does concern ISPs. Running an open wireless network will often violate your terms of service. But despite the occasional cease-and-desist letter and providers getting pissy at people who exceed some secret bandwidth limit, this isn’t a big risk either. The worst that will happen to you is that you’ll have to find a new ISP.

A company called Fon has an interesting approach to this problem. Fon wireless access points have two wireless networks: a secure one for you, and an open one for everyone else. You can configure your open network in either “Bill” or “Linus” mode: In the former, people pay you to use your network, and you have to pay to use any other Fon wireless network. In Linus mode, anyone can use your network, and you can use any other Fon wireless network for free. It’s a really clever idea.

Security is always a trade-off. I know people who rarely lock their front door, who drive in the rain (and, while using a cell phone) and who talk to strangers. In my opinion, securing my wireless network isn’t worth it. And I appreciate everyone else who keeps an open wireless network, including all the coffee shops, bars and libraries I have visited in the past, the Dayton International Airport where I started writing this and the Four Points Sheraton where I finished. You all make the world a better place.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com, and has since generated a lot of controversy. There’s a Slashdot thread. And here are three opposing essays and three supporting essays. Presumably there will be a lot of back and forth in the comments section here as well.

EDITED TO ADD (1/15): There has been lots more commentary.

EDITED TO ADD (1/16): Even more commentary. And still more.

EDITED TO ADD (1/17): Two more.

EDITED TO ADD (1/18): Another. In the beginning, comments agreeing with me and disagreeing with me were about tied. By now, those that disagree with me are firmly in the lead.

Posted on January 15, 2008 at 3:33 AM • View Comments

Your Brain on Fear

Interesting article from Newsweek:

The evolutionary primacy of the brain’s fear circuitry makes it more powerful than the brain’s reasoning faculties. The amygdala sprouts a profusion of connections to higher brain regions—neurons that carry one-way traffic from amygdala to neocortex. Few connections run from the cortex to the amygdala, however. That allows the amygdala to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vice versa. So although it is sometimes possible to think yourself out of fear (“I know that dark shape in the alley is just a trash can”), it takes great effort and persistence. Instead, fear tends to overrule reason, as the amygdala hobbles our logic and reasoning circuits. That makes fear “far, far more powerful than reason,” says neurobiologist Michael Fanselow of the University of California, Los Angeles. “It evolved as a mechanism to protect us from life-threatening situations, and from an evolutionary standpoint there’s nothing more important than that.”

I’ve already written about this sort of thing.

Posted on January 9, 2008 at 6:10 AM • View Comments

How Well "See Something, Say Something" Actually Works

I’ve written about the “War on the Unexpected,” and how normal people can’t figure out what’s an actual threat and what isn’t:

All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

[…]

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.

Yesterday The New York Times wrote about New York City’s campaign:

Now, an overview of police data relating to calls to the hot line over the past two years reveals the answer and provides a unique snapshot of post-9/11 New York, part paranoia and part well-founded caution. Indeed, no terrorists were arrested, but a wide spectrum of other activity was reported.

[…]

In all, the hot line received 8,999 calls in 2006, including calls that were transferred from 911 and the 311 help line, Mr. Browne said. They included a significant number of calls about suspicious packages, many in the transit system. Most involved backpacks, briefcases or other items accidentally left behind by their owners. None of them, Mr. Browne said, were bombs.

There were, however, 816 calls to the hot line in 2006 that were deemed serious enough to require investigation by the department’s intelligence division or its joint terrorism task force with the F.B.I. Mr. Browne said that 109 of those calls had a connection to the transit system and included reports of suspicious people in tunnels and yards, and of people taking pictures of the tracks.

The hot line received many more calls in 2007, possibly because of the authority’s advertising campaign, Mr. Browne said. Through early December, the counterterrorism hot line received 13,473 calls, with 644 of those meriting investigation. Of that group, 45 calls were transit related.

Then there were the 11 calls about people counting.

Mr. Browne said several callers reported seeing men clicking hand-held counting devices while riding on subway trains or waiting on platforms.

The callers said that the men appeared to be Muslims and that they seemed to be counting the number of people boarding subway trains or the number of trains passing through a station. They feared the men might be collecting data to maximize the casualties in a terror attack.

But when the police looked into the claims, they determined that the men were counting prayers with the devices, essentially a modern version of rosary beads.

None of those calls led to arrests, but several others did. At least three calls resulted in arrests for trying to sell false identification, including driver’s licenses and Social Security cards. One informer told the police about a Staten Island man who was later found to have a cache of firearms. A Queens man was charged with having an illegal gun and with unlawful dealing in fireworks.

A Brooklyn man was charged with making anti-Semitic threats against his landlord and threatening to use sarin gas on him. At least two men arrested on tips from the hot line were turned over to immigration officials for deportation, Mr. Browne said.

And as long as we’re on the topic, read about the couple branded as terrorists in the UK for taking photographs in a mall. And this about a rail fan being branded a terrorist for trying to film a train. (Note that the member of the train’s crew was trying to incite the other passengers to do something about the filmer.) And about this Icelandic woman’s experience with U.S. customs because she overstayed a visa in 1995.

And lastly, this funny piece of (I trust) fiction.

Remember that every one of these incidents requires police resources to investigate, resources that almost certainly could be better spent keeping us actually safe.

Refuse to be terrorized!

Posted on January 8, 2008 at 7:53 AM • View Comments

"Where Should Airport Security Begin?"

In this essay, Clark Ervin argues that airport security should begin at the front door to the airport:

Like many people, I spend a lot of time in airport terminals, and I often think that they must be an awfully appealing target to terrorists. The largest airports have huge terminals teeming with thousands of passengers on any given day. They serve as conspicuous symbols of American consumerism, with McDonald’s restaurants, Starbucks coffee shops and Disney toy stores. While airport screeners do only a so-so job of checking for guns, knives and bombs at checkpoints, there’s no checking for weapons before checkpoints. So if the intention isn’t to carry out an attack once on board a plane, but instead to carry out an attack on the airport itself by killing people inside it, there’s nothing to stop a terrorist from doing so.

[…]

To prevent smaller attacks—and larger ones that could be catastrophic—what if we moved the screening checkpoints from the interior of airports to the entrance? The sooner we screen passengers’ and visitors’ persons and baggage (both checked and carry-on) for guns, knives and explosives, the sooner we can detect those weapons and prevent them from being used to sow destruction.

This is a silly argument, one that any regular reader of this blog should be able to counter. If you’re worried about explosions on the ground, any place you put security checkpoints is arbitrary. The point of airport security is to prevent terrorism on the airplanes, because airplane terrorism is a more serious problem than conventional bombs blowing up in crowded buildings. (Four reasons. First, airlines are often national symbols. Second, airplanes often fly to dangerous countries. Third, for whatever reason, airplanes are a preferred terrorist target. And fourth, the particular failure mode of airplanes means that even a small bomb can kill everyone on board. That same bomb in an airport means that a few people die and many more get injured.) And most airport security measures aren’t effective.

His bias betrays itself primary through this quote:

Like many people, I spend a lot of time in airport terminals, and I often think that they must be an awfully appealing target to terrorists.

If he spent a lot of time in shopping malls, he would probably think they must be awfully appealing targets as well. They also “serve as conspicuous symbols of American consumerism, with McDonald’s restaurants, Starbucks coffee shops and Disney toy stores.” He sounds like he’s just scared.

Face it, there are far too many targets. Stop trying to defend against the tactic, and instead try to defend against terrorism. Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Real security happens long before anyone gets to an airport, a shopping mall, or wherever.

Posted on December 20, 2007 at 12:28 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.