Entries Tagged "Schneier news"

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Movie Plot Threat Contest: Status Report

On the first of this month, I announced my (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest.

Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with.

Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better.

Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.

As of this morning, the blog post has 580 comments. I expected a lot of submissions, but the response has blown me away.

Looking over the different terrorist plots, they seem to fall into several broad categories. The first category consists of attacks against our infrastructure: the food supply, the water supply, the power infrastructure, the telephone system, etc. The idea is to cripple the country by targeting one of the basic systems that make it work.

The second category consists of big-ticket plots. Either they have very public targets—blowing up the Super Bowl, the Oscars, etc.—or they have high-tech components: nuclear waste, anthrax, chlorine gas, a full oil tanker, etc. And they are often complex and hard to pull off. This is the 9/11 idea: a single huge event that affects the entire nation.

The third category consists of low-tech attacks that go on and on. Several people imagined a version of the DC sniper scenario, but with multiple teams. The teams would slowly move around the country, perhaps each team starting up after the previous one was captured or killed. Other people suggested a variant of this with small bombs in random public locations around the country.

(There’s a fourth category: actual movie plots. Some entries are comical, unrealistic, have science fiction premises, etc. I’m not even considering those.)

The better ideas tap directly into public fears. In my book, Beyond Fear, I discusse five different tendencies people have to exaggerate risks: to believe that something is more risky than it actually is.

  1. People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks.
  2. People have trouble estimating risks for anything not exactly like their normal situation.
  3. Personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks.
  4. People underestimate risks they willingly take and overestimate risks in situations they can’t control.
  5. People overestimate risks that are being talked about and remain an object of public scrutiny.

The best plot ideas leverage one or more of those tendencies. Big-ticket attacks leverage the first. Infrastructure and low-tech attacks leverage the fourth. And every attack tries to leverage the fifth, especially those attacks that go on and on. I’m willing to bet that when I find a winner, it will be the plot that leverages the greatest number of those tendencies to the best possible advantage.

I also got a bunch of e-mails from people with ideas they thought too terrifying to post publicly. Some of them wouldn’t even tell them to me. I also received e-mails from people accusing me of helping the terrorists by giving them ideas.

But if there’s one thing this contest demonstrates, it’s that good terrorist ideas are a dime a dozen. Anyone can figure out how to cause terror. The hard part is execution.

Some of the submitted plots require minimal skill and equipment. Twenty guys with cars and guns—that sort of thing. Reading through them, you have to wonder why there have been no terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11. I don’t believe the “flypaper theory,” that the terrorists are all in Iraq instead of in the U.S. And despite all the ineffectual security we’ve put in place since 9/11, I’m sure we have had some successes in intelligence and investigation—and have made it harder for terrorists to operate both in the U.S. and abroad.

But mostly, I think terrorist attacks are much harder than most of us think. It’s harder to find willing recruits than we think. It’s harder to coordinate plans. It’s harder to execute those plans. Terrorism is rare, and for all we’ve heard about 9/11 changing the world, it’s still rare.

The submission deadline is the end of this month, so there’s still time to submit your entry. And please read through some of the others and comment on them; I’m curious as to what other people think are the most interesting, compelling, realistic, or effective scenarios.

EDITED TO ADD (4/23): The contest made The New York Times.

Posted on April 22, 2006 at 10:14 AM • View Comments

RSA Conference

Next week is the RSA Conference in San Jose, CA. I will speak on “The Economics of Security” at 4:30 PM on the 14th, and again on “Why Security Has So Little to Do with Security” at 2:00 PM on the 15th. I will also participate in a main-stage panel on ID cards at 8:00 AM on the 16th.

Also, my wife and I have written a 110-page restaurant guidebook for the downtown San Jose area. It’s a fun read, even if you aren’t looking for a San Jose restaurant. (Do people know that I write restaurant reviews for the Minneapolis Star Tribune?)

The restaurant guide will be available at the conference—and of course you can download it—but I have a few hundred to give away here. I’ll send a copy to anyone who wants one, in exchange for postage. (It’s not about the money, but I need some sort of gating function so that only those actually interested get a copy.)

Cost is $2.50 if you live in the U.S., $3.00 for Canada/Mexico, and $6.00 elsewhere. I’ll accept PayPal to my e-mail address—schneier@counterpane.com—or a check to Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., 1090A La Avenida, Mountain View, CA 94043. Sorry, but I can’t accept credit cards directly.

Posted on February 10, 2006 at 12:30 PM • View Comments

Passlogix Misquotes Me in Their PR Material

I recently received a PR e-mail from a company called Passlogix:

Password security is still a very prevalent threat, 2005 had security gurus like Bruce Schneier publicly suggest that you actually write them down on sticky-notes. A recent survey stated 78% of employees use passwords as their primary forms of security, 52% use the same password for their accounts—yet 77% struggle to remember their passwords.

Actually, I don’t. I recommend writing your passwords down and keeping them in your wallet.

I know nothing about this company, but I am unhappy at their misrepresentation of what I said.

Posted on February 7, 2006 at 7:23 AM • View Comments

Twofish Cryptanalysis Rumors

Recently I have been hearing some odd “Twofish has been broken” rumors. I thought I’d quell them once and for all.

Rumors of the death of Twofish has been greatly exaggerated.

The analysis in question is by Shiho Moriai and Yiqun Lisa Yin, who published their results in Japan in 2000. Recently, someone either got a copy of the paper or heard about the results, and rumors started spreading.

Here’s the actual paper. It presents no cryptanalytic attacks, only some hypothesized differential characteristics. Moriai and Yin discovered byte-sized truncated differentials for 12- and 16-round Twofish (the full cipher has 16 rounds), but were unable to use them in any sort of attack. They also discovered a larger, 5-round truncated differential. No one has been able to convert these differentials into an attack, and Twofish is nowhere near broken. On the other hand, they are excellent and interesting results—and it’s a really good paper.

In more detail, here are the paper’s three results:

  1. The authors show a 12-round truncated differential characteristic that predicts that the 2nd byte of the ciphertext difference will be 0 when the plaintext difference is all-zeros except for its last byte. They say the characteristic holds with probability 2-40.9. Note that for an ideal cipher, we expect the 2nd byte of ciphertext to be 0 with probability 2-8, just by chance. Of course, 2-8 is much, much larger than 2-40.9. Therefore, this is not particularly useful in a distinguishing attack.

    One possible interpretation of their result would be to conjecture that the 2nd byte of ciphertext difference will be 0 with probability 2-8 + 2-40.9 for Twofish, but only 2-8 for an ideal cipher. Their characteristic is just one path. If one is lucky, perhaps all other paths behave randomly and contribute an additional 2-8 factor to the total probability of getting a 0 in the 2nd byte of ciphertext difference. Perhaps. One might conjecture that, anyway.

    It is not at all clear whether this conjecture is true, and the authors are careful not to claim it. If it were true, it might lead to a theoretical distinguishing attack using 275 chosen plaintexts or so (very rough estimate). But I’m not at all sure that the conjecture is true.

  2. They show a 16-round truncated differential that predicts that the 2nd byte of the ciphertext difference will be 0 (under the same input difference). Their characteristic holds with probability 2-57.3 (they say). Again, this is not very useful.

    Analogously to the first result, one might conjecture that the 2nd byte of the ciphertext difference will be 0 with probability 2-8 + 2-57.3 for Twofish, but probability 2-8 for an ideal cipher. If this were true, one might be able to mount a distinguishing attack with 2100 chosen plaintexts or so (another very rough estimate). But I have no idea whether the conjecture is true.

  3. They also show a 5-round truncated differential characteristic that predicts that the input difference that is non-zero everywhere except in its 9th byte will lead to an output difference of the same form. This characteristic has probability 2-119.988896, they say (but they also say that they have made some approximations, and the actual probabilities can be a little smaller or a little larger). Compared to an ideal cipher, where one would expect this to happen by chance with probability 2-120, this isn’t very interesting. It’s hard to imagine how this could be useful in a distinguishing attack.

The paper theorizes that all of these characteristics might be useful in an attack, but I would be very careful about drawing any conclusions. It can be very tricky to go from single-path characteristics whose probability is much smaller than the chances of it happening by chance in an ideal cipher, to a real attack. The problem is in the part where you say “let’s just assume all other paths behave randomly.” Often the other paths do not behave randomly, and attacks that look promising fall flat on their faces.

We simply don’t know whether these truncated differentials would be useful in a distinguishing attack. But what we do know is that even if everything works out perfectly to the cryptanalyst’s benefit, and if an attack is possible, then such an attack is likely to require a totally unrealistic number of chosen plaintexts. 2100 plaintexts is something like a billion billion DVDs’ worth of data, or a T1 line running for a million times the age of the universe. (Note that these numbers might be off by a factor of 1,000 or so. But honestly, who cares? The numbers are so huge as to be irrelevent.) And even with all that data, a distinguishing attack is not the same as a key recovery attack.

Again, I am not trying to belittle the results. Moriai and Yin did some great work here, and they deserve all kinds of credit for it. But even from a theoretical perspective, Twofish isn’t even remotely broken. There have been no extensions to these results since they were published five years ago. The best Twofish cryptanalysis is still the work we did during the design process: available on the Twofish home page.

Posted on November 23, 2005 at 12:15 PM • View Comments

E-Mail Interception Decision Reversed

Is e-mail in transit communications or data in storage? Seems like a basic question, but the answer matters a lot to the police. A U.S. federal Appeals Court has ruled that the interception of e-mail in temporary storage violates the federal wiretap act, reversing an earlier court opinion.

The case and associated privacy issues are summarized here. Basically, different privacy laws protect electronic communications in transit and data in storage; the former is protected much more than the latter. E-mail stored by the sender or the recipient is obviously data in storage. But what about e-mail on its way from the sender to the receiver? On the one hand, it’s obviously communications on transit. But the other side argued that it’s actually stored on various computers as it wends its way through the Internet; hence it’s data in storage.

The initial court decision in this case held that e-mail in transit is just data in storage. Judge Lipez wrote an inspired dissent in the original opinion. In the rehearing en banc (more judges), he wrote the opinion for the majority which overturned the earlier opinion.

The opinion itself is long, but well worth reading. It’s well reasoned, and reflects extraordinary understanding and attention to detail. And a great last line:

If the issue presented be “garden-variety”… this is a garden in need of a weed killer.

I participated in an Amicus Curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in the case. Here’s another amicus brief by six civil liberties organizations.

There’s a larger issue here, and it’s the same one that the entertainment industry used to greatly expand copyright law in cyberspace. They argued that every time a copyrighted work is moved from computer to computer, or CD-ROM to RAM, or server to client, or disk drive to video card, a “copy” is being made. This ridiculous definition of “copy” has allowed them to exert far greater legal control over how people use copyrighted works.

Posted on August 15, 2005 at 7:59 AM • View Comments

The Devil's Infosec Dictionary

I want “The Devil’s Infosec Dictionary” to be funnier. And I wish the entry that mentions me—”Cryptography: The science of applying a complex set of mathematical algorithms to sensitive data with the aim of making Bruce Schneier exceedingly rich”—were more true.

In any case, I’ll bet the assembled here can come up with funnier infosec dictionary definitions. Post them as comments here, and—if there are enough good ones—I’ll collect them up on a single page.

Posted on August 13, 2005 at 10:48 AM • View Comments

Secure Flight

Last Friday the GAO issued a new report on Secure Flight. It’s couched in friendly language, but it’s not good:

During the course of our ongoing review of the Secure Flight program, we found that TSA did not fully disclose to the public its use of personal information in its fall 2004 privacy notices as required by the Privacy Act. In particular, the public was not made fully aware of, nor had the opportunity to comment on, TSA’s use of personal information drawn from commercial sources to test aspects of the Secure Flight program. In September 2004 and November 2004, TSA issued privacy notices in the Federal Register that included descriptions of how such information would be used. However, these notices did not fully inform the public before testing began about the procedures that TSA and its contractors would follow for collecting, using, and storing commercial data. In addition, the scope of the data used during commercial data testing was not fully disclosed in the notices. Specifically, a TSA contractor, acting on behalf of the agency, collected more than 100 million commercial data records containing personal information such as name, date of birth, and telephone number without informing the public. As a result of TSA’s actions, the public did not receive the full protections of the Privacy Act.

Get that? The TSA violated federal law when it secretly expanded Secure Flight’s use of commercial data about passengers. It also lied to Congress and the public about it.

Much of this isn’t new. Last month we learned that:

The federal agency in charge of aviation security revealed that it bought and is storing commercial data about some passengers—even though officials said they wouldn’t do it and Congress told them not to.

Secure Flight is a disaster in every way. The TSA has been operating with complete disregard for the law or Congress. It has lied to pretty much everyone. And it is turning Secure Flight from a simple program to match airline passengers against terrorist watch lists into a complex program that compiles dossiers on passengers in order to give them some kind of score indicating the likelihood that they are a terrorist.

Which is exactly what it was not supposed to do in the first place.

Let’s review:

For those who have not been following along, Secure Flight is the follow-on to CAPPS-I. (CAPPS stands for Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening.) CAPPS-I has been in place since 1997, and is a simple system to match airplane passengers to a terrorist watch list. A follow-on system, CAPPS-II, was proposed last year. That complicated system would have given every traveler a risk score based on information in government and commercial databases. There was a huge public outcry over the invasiveness of the system, and it was cancelled over the summer. Secure Flight is the new follow-on system to CAPPS-I.

EPIC has more background information.

Back in January, Secure Flight was intended to just be a more efficient system of matching airline passengers with terrorist watch lists.

I am on a working group that is looking at the security and privacy implications of Secure Flight. Before joining the group I signed an NDA agreeing not to disclose any information learned within the group, and to not talk about deliberations within the group. But there’s no reason to believe that the TSA is lying to us any less than they’re lying to Congress, and there’s nothing I learned within the working group that I wish I could talk about. Everything I say here comes from public documents.

In January I gave some general conclusions about Secure Flight. These have not changed.

One, assuming that we need to implement a program of matching airline passengers with names on terrorism watch lists, Secure Flight is a major improvement—in almost every way—over what is currently in place. (And by this I mean the matching program, not any potential uses of commercial or other third-party data.)

Two, the security system surrounding Secure Flight is riddled with security holes. There are security problems with false IDs, ID verification, the ability to fly on someone else’s ticket, airline procedures, etc.

Three, the urge to use this system for other things will be irresistible. It’s just too easy to say: “As long as you’ve got this system that watches out for terrorists, how about also looking for this list of drug dealers…and by the way, we’ve got the Super Bowl to worry about too.” Once Secure Flight gets built, all it’ll take is a new law and we’ll have a nationwide security checkpoint system.

And four, a program of matching airline passengers with names on terrorism watch lists is not making us appreciably safer, and is a lousy way to spend our security dollars.

What has changed is the scope of Secure Flight. First, it started using data from commercial sources, like Acxiom. (The details are even worse.) Technically, they’re testing the use of commercial data, but it’s still a violation. Even the DHS started investigating:

The Department of Homeland Security’s top privacy official said Wednesday that she is investigating whether the agency’s airline passenger screening program has violated federal privacy laws by failing to properly disclose its mission.

The privacy officer, Nuala O’Connor Kelly, said the review will focus on whether the program’s use of commercial databases and other details were properly disclosed to the public.

The TSA’s response to being caught violating their own Privacy Act statements? Revise them:

According to previous official notices, TSA had said it would not store commercial data about airline passengers.

The Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the government from keeping a secret database. It also requires agencies to make official statements on the impact of their record keeping on privacy.

The TSA revealed its use of commercial data in a revised Privacy Act statement to be published in the Federal Register on Wednesday.

TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield said the program was being developed with a commitment to privacy, and that it was routine to change Privacy Act statements during testing.

Actually, it’s not. And it’s better to change the Privacy Act statement before violating the old one. Changing it after the fact just looks bad.

The point of Secure Flight match airline passengers against lists of suspected terrorists. But the vast majority of people flagged by this list simply have the same name, or a similar name, as the suspected terrorist: Ted Kennedy and Cat Stevens are two famous examples. The question is whether combining commercial data with the PNR (Passenger Name Record) supplied by the airline could reduce this false-positive problem. Maybe knowing the passenger’s address, or phone number, or date of birth, could reduce false positives. Or maybe not; it depends what data is on the terrorist lists. In any case, it’s certainly a smart thing to test.

But using commercial data has serious privacy implications, which is why Congress mandated all sorts of rules surrounding the TSA testing of commercial data—and more rules before it could deploy a final system—rules that the TSA has decided it can ignore completely.

Commercial data had another use under CAPPS-II In that now-dead program, every passenger would be subjected to a computerized background check to determine their “risk” to airline safety. The system would assign a risk score based on commercial data: their credit rating, how recently they moved, what kind of job they had, etc. This capability was removed from Secure Flight, but now it’s back:

The government will try to determine whether commercial data can be used to detect terrorist “sleeper cells” when it checks airline passengers against watch lists, the official running the project says….

Justin Oberman, in charge of Secure Flight at TSA, said the agency intends to do more testing of commercial data to see if it will help identify known or suspected terrorists not on the watch lists.

“We are trying to use commercial data to verify the identities of people who fly because we are not going to rely on the watch list,” he said. “If we just rise and fall on the watch list, it’s not adequate.”

Also this Congressional hearing (emphasis mine):

THOMPSON: There are a couple of questions I’d like to get answered in my mind about Secure Flight. Would Secure Flight pick up a person with strong community roots but who is in a terrorist sleeper cell or would a person have to be a known terrorist in order for Secure Flight to pick him up?

OBERMAN: Let me answer that this way: It will identify people who are known or suspected terrorists contained in the terrorist screening database, and it ought to be able to identify people who may not be on the watch list. It ought to be able to do that. We’re not in a position today to say that it does, but we think it’s absolutely critical that it be able to do that.

And so we are conducting this test of commercially available data to get at that exact issue.: Very difficult to do, generally. It’s particularly difficult to do when you have a system that transports 1.8 million people a day on 30,000 flights at 450 airports. That is a very high bar to get over.

It’s also very difficult to do with a threat described just like you described it, which is somebody who has sort of burrowed themselves into society and is not readily apparent to us when they’re walking through the airport. And so I cannot stress enough how important we think it is that it be able to have that functionality. And that’s precisely the reason we have been conducting this ommercial data test, why we’ve extended the testing period and why we’re very hopeful that the results will prove fruitful to us so that we can then come up here, brief them to you and explain to you why we need to include that in the system.

My fear is that TSA has already decided that they’re going to use commercial data, regardless of any test results. And once you have commercial data, why not build a dossier on every passenger and give them a risk score? So we’re back to CAPPS-II, the very system Congress killed last summer. Actually, we’re very close to TIA (Total/Terrorism Information Awareness), that vast spy-on-everyone data-mining program that Congress killed in 2003 because it was just too invasive.

Secure Flight is a mess in lots of other ways, too. A March GAO report said that Secure Flight had not met nine out of the ten conditions mandated by Congress before TSA could spend money on implementing the program. (If you haven’t read this report, it’s pretty scathing.) The redress problem—helping people who cannot fly because they share a name with a terrorist—is not getting any better. And Secure Flight is behind schedule and over budget.

It’s also a rogue program that is operating in flagrant disregard for the law. It can’t be killed completely; the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 mandates that TSA implement a program of passenger prescreening. And until we have Secure Flight, airlines will still be matching passenger names with terrorist watch lists under the CAPPS-I program. But it needs some serious public scrutiny.

EDITED TO ADD: Anita Ramasastry’s commentary is worth reading.

Posted on July 24, 2005 at 9:10 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.