Podcast Interview with Me
RSA interviewed me about my talk at the RSA Conference in London earlier this week.
Entries Tagged "security conferences"
Page 8 of 11
Designing a Malicious Processor
From the LEET ’08 conference: “Designing and implementing malicious hardware,” by Samuel T. King, Joseph Tucek, Anthony Cozzie, Chris Grier, Weihang Jiang, and Yuanyuan Zhou.
Abstract:
Hidden malicious circuits provide an attacker with a stealthy attack vector. As they occupy a layer below the entire software stack, malicious circuits can bypass traditional defensive techniques. Yet current work on trojan circuits considers only simple attacks against the hardware itself, and straightforward defenses. More complex designs that attack the software are unexplored, as are the countermeasures an attacker may take to bypass proposed defenses.
We present the design and implementation of Illinois Malicious Processors (IMPs). There is a substantial design space in malicious circuitry; we show that an attacker,
rather than designing one specific attack, can instead design hardware to support attacks. Such flexible hardware allows powerful, general purpose attacks, while remaining surprisingly low in the amount of additional hardware. We show two such hardware designs, and implement them in a real system. Further, we show three powerful attacks using this hardware, including login backdoor that gives an attacker complete and highlevel access to the machine. This login attack requires only 1341 additional gates: gates that can be used for other attacks as well. Malicious processors are more practical, more flexible, and harder to detect than an initial analysis would suggest.
Adi Shamir's Cube Attacks
At this moment, Adi Shamir is giving an invited talk at the Crypto 2008 conference about a new type of cryptanalytic attack called “cube attacks.” He claims very broad applicability to stream and block ciphers.
My personal joke—at least I hope it’s a joke—is that he’s going to break every NIST hash submission without ever seeing any of them. (Note: The attack, at least at this point, doesn’t apply to hash functions.)
More later.
EDITED TO ADD (8/19): AES is immune to this attack—the degree of the algebraic polynomial is too high—and all the block ciphers we use have a higher degree. But, in general, anything that can be described with a low-degree polynomial equation is vulnerable: that’s pretty much every LFSR scheme.
EDITED TO ADD (8/19): The typo that amused you all below has been fixed. And this attack doesn’t apply to any block cipher—DES, AES, Blowfish, Twofish, anything else—in common use; their degree is much too high. It doesn’t apply to hash functions at all, at least not yet—but again, the degree of all the common ones is much too high. I will post a link to the paper when it becomes available; I assume Adi will post it soon. (The paper was rejected from Asiacrypt, demonstrating yet again that the conference review process is broken.)
EDITED TO ADD (8/19): Adi’s coauthor is Itai Dinur. Their plan is to submit the paper to Eurocrypt 2009. They will publish it as soon as they can, depending on the Eurocrypt rules about prepublication.
EDITED TO ADD (8/26): Two news articles with not a lot of information.
EDITED TO ADD (9/4): Some more details.
EDITED TO ADD (9/14): The paper is online.
Schneier on Security and Privacy at Supernova
Here’s the video of a panel I was on at Supernova; the topic was security and privacy.
Security and Human Behavior
I’m writing from the First Interdisciplinary Workshop on Security and Human Behavior (SHB 08).
Security is both a feeling and a reality, and they’re different. There are several different research communities: technologists who study security systems, and psychologists who study people, not to mention economists, anthropologists and others. Increasingly these worlds are colliding.
- Security design is by nature psychological, yet many systems ignore this, and cognitive biases lead people to misjudge risk. For example, a key in the corner of a web browser makes people feel more secure than they actually are, while people feel far less secure flying than they actually are. These biases are exploited by various attackers.
- Security problems relate to risk and uncertainty, and the way we react to them. Cognitive and perception biases affect the way we deal with risk, and therefore the way we understand security—whether that is the security of a nation, of an information system, or of one’s personal information.
- Many real attacks on information systems exploit psychology more than technology. Phishing attacks trick people into logging on to websites that appear genuine but actually steal passwords. Technical measures can stop some phishing tactics, but stopping users from making bad decisions is much harder. Deception-based attacks are now the greatest threat to online
security.- In order to be effective, security must be usable—not just by geeks, but by ordinary people. Research into usable security invariably has a psychological component.
- Terrorism is perceived to be a major threat to society. Yet the actual damage done by terrorist attacks is dwarfed by the secondary effects as target societies overreact. There are many topics here, from the manipulation of risk perception to the anthropology of religion.
- There are basic research questions; for example, about the extent to which the use and detection of deception in social contexts may have helped drive human evolution.
The dialogue between researchers in security and in psychology is rapidly widening, bringing in more and more disciplines—from security usability engineering, protocol design, privacy, and policy on the one hand, and from social psychology, evolutionary biology, and behavioral economics on the other.
About a year ago Ross Anderson and I conceived this conference as a way to bring together computer security researchers, psychologists, behavioral economists, sociologists, philosophers, and others—all of whom are studying the human side of security. I’ve read a lot—and written some—on psychology and security over the past few years, and have been continually amazed by some of the research that people outside my field have been doing on topics very relevant to my field. Ross and I both thought that bringing these diverse communities together would be fascinating to everyone. So we convinced behavioral economists Alessandro Acquisti and George Loewenstein to help us organize the workshop, invited the people we all have been reading, and also asked them who else to invite. The response was overwhelming. Almost everyone we wanted was able to attend, and the result was a 42-person conference with 35 speakers.
We’re most of the way through the morning, and it’s been even more fascinating than I expected. (Here’s the agenda.) We’ve talked about detecting deception in people, organizational biases in making security decisions, building security “intuition” into Internet browsers, different techniques to prevent crime, complexity and failure, and the modeling of security feeling.
I had high hopes of liveblogging this event, but it’s far too fascinating to spend time writing posts. If you want to read some of the more interesting papers written by the participants, this is a good page to start with.
I’ll write more about the conference later.
EDITED TO ADD (6/30): Ross Anderson has a blog post, where he liveblogs the individual sessions in the comments. And I should add that this was an invitational event—which is why you haven’t heard about it before—and that the room here at MIT is completely full.
EDITED TO ADD (7/1): Matt Blaze has posted audio. And Ross Anderson—link above—is posting paragraph-long summaries for each speaker.
EDITED TO ADD (7/6): Photos of the speakers.
EDITED TO ADD (7/7): MSNBC article on the workshop. And L. Jean Camp’s notes.
Dan Geer on Security, Monoculture, Metrics, Evolution, Etc.
Here is the text and video of Dan Geer’s remarks at Source Boston 2008, basically a L0pht reunion with friends.
At the end of the day, however, we are facing a much bigger, more metaphysical question than the ones I have so far posed. That I can pose many others is of no consequence; either you are sick of them by now or you are scribbling down your own as I speak. The bigger question is this—how much security do we want?
A world without failure is a world without freedom. A world without the possibility of sin is a world without the possibility of righteousness. A world without the possibility of crime is a world where you cannot prove you are not a criminal. A technology that can give you everything you want is a technology that can take away everything that you have. At some point, real soon now, some of us security geeks will have to say that there comes a point at which safety is not safe.
Schneier Talks
Last month I gave a talk at InfoSecurity Europe in London. The title was “Reconceptualizing Security,” or maybe “The Theater of Security,” and it is a follow-on to my work on the psychology of security. I haven’t yet written this work up, but you can listen to or watch my talk.
Designing Processors to Support Hacking
This won best-paper award at the First USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats: “Designing and implementing malicious hardware,” by Samuel T. King, Joseph Tucek, Anthony Cozzie, Chris Grier, Weihang Jiang, and Yuanyuan Zhou.
Hidden malicious circuits provide an attacker with a stealthy attack vector. As they occupy a layer below the entire software stack, malicious circuits can bypass traditional defensive techniques. Yet current work on trojan circuits considers only simple attacks against the hardware itself, and straightforward defenses. More complex designs that attack the software are unexplored, as are the countermeasures an attacker may take to bypass proposed defenses.
We present the design and implementation of Illinois Malicious Processors (IMPs). There is a substantial design space in malicious circuitry; we show that an attacker, rather than designing one speci?c attack, can instead design hardware to support attacks. Such ?exible hardware allows powerful, general purpose attacks, while remaining surprisingly low in the amount of additional hardware. We show two such hardware designs, and implement them in a real system. Further, we show three powerful attacks using this hardware, including a login backdoor that gives an attacker complete and highlevel access to the machine. This login attack requires only 1341 additional gates: gates that can be used for other attacks as well. Malicious processors are more practical, more flexible, and harder to detect than an initial analysis would suggest.
Theoretical? Sure. But combine this with stories of counterfeit computer hardware from China, and you’ve got yourself a potentially serious problem.
The RSA Conference
Last week was the RSA Conference, easily the largest information security conference in the world. Over 17,000 people descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center to hear some of the over 250 talks, attend I-didn’t-try-to-count parties, and try to evade over 350 exhibitors vying to sell them stuff.
Talk to the exhibitors, though, and the most common complaint is that the attendees aren’t buying.
It’s not the quality of the wares. The show floor is filled with new security products, new technologies, and new ideas. Many of these are products that will make the attendees’ companies more secure in all sorts of different ways. The problem is that most of the people attending the RSA Conference can’t understand what the products do or why they should buy them. So they don’t.
I spoke with one person whose trip was paid for by a smallish security firm. He was one of the company’s first customers, and the company was proud to parade him in front of the press. I asked him if he walked through the show floor, looking at the company’s competitors to see if there was any benefit to switching.
“I can’t figure out what any of those companies do,” he replied.
I believe him. The booths are filled with broad product claims, meaningless security platitudes, and unintelligible marketing literature. You could walk into a booth, listen to a five-minute sales pitch by a marketing type, and still not know what the company does. Even seasoned security professionals are confused.
Commerce requires a meeting of minds between buyer and seller, and it’s just not happening. The sellers can’t explain what they’re selling to the buyers, and the buyers don’t buy because they don’t understand what the sellers are selling. There’s a mismatch between the two; they’re so far apart that they’re barely speaking the same language.
This is a bad thing in the near term—some good companies will go bankrupt and some good security technologies won’t get deployed—but it’s a good thing in the long run. It demonstrates that the computer industry is maturing: IT is getting complicated and subtle, and users are starting to treat it like infrastructure.
For a while now I have predicted the death of the security industry. Not the death of information security as a vital requirement, of course, but the death of the end-user security industry that gathers at the RSA Conference. When something becomes infrastructure—power, water, cleaning service, tax preparation—customers care less about details and more about results. Technological innovations become something the infrastructure providers pay attention to, and they package it for their customers.
No one wants to buy security. They want to buy something truly useful—database management systems, Web 2.0 collaboration tools, a company-wide network—and they want it to be secure. They don’t want to have to become IT security experts. They don’t want to have to go to the RSA Conference. This is the future of IT security.
You can see it in the large IT outsourcing contracts that companies are signing—not security outsourcing contracts, but more general IT contracts that include security. You can see it in the current wave of industry consolidation: not large security companies buying small security companies, but non-security companies buying security companies. And you can see it in the new popularity of software as a service: Customers want solutions; who cares about the details?
Imagine if the inventor of antilock brakes—or any automobile safety or security feature—had to sell them directly to the consumer. It would be an uphill battle convincing the average driver that he needed to buy them; maybe that technology would have succeeded and maybe it wouldn’t. But that’s not what happens. Antilock brakes, airbags, and that annoying sensor that beeps when you’re backing up too close to another object are sold to automobile companies, and those companies bundle them together into cars that are sold to consumers. This doesn’t mean that automobile safety isn’t important, and often these new features are touted by the car manufacturers.
The RSA Conference won’t die, of course. Security is too important for that. There will still be new technologies, new products, and new start-ups. But it will become inward-facing, slowly turning into an industry conference. It’ll be security companies selling to the companies who sell to corporate and home users—and will no longer be a 17,000-person user conference.
This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
EDITED TO ADD (5/1): Commentary.
Martin Hellman on the Invention of Public-Key Cryptography
At the DISI conference last December, Martin Hellman gave a lecture on the invention of public-key cryptography. A video is online (it’s hard to find, search for his name), along with PowerPoint slides.
(Unfortunately, the video isn’t set up for streaming; in order to view the it, you’ll have to download the ten files, then use a fairly recent version of WinZip to concatenate the files.)
EDITED TO ADD (3/26): Now on Google Video.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.