Entries Tagged "trust"

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Status Report: Liars and Outliers

Last weekend, I completely reframed the book. I realized that the book isn’t about security. It’s about trust. I’m writing about how society induces people to behave in the group interest instead of some competing personal interest. It’s obvious that society needs to do this; otherwise, it can never solve collective action problems. And as a social species, we have developed both moral systems and reputational systems that encourage people behave in the group interest. I called these systems “societal security,” along with more recent developments: institutional (read “legal”) systems and technological systems.

That phrasing strained the definition of “security.” Everything, from the Bible to your friends treating you better if you were nice to them, was a security system. In my reframing, those are all trust pressures. It’s a language that’s more intuitive. We already know about moral pressure, peer pressure, and legal pressure. Reputational pressure, institutional pressure, and security pressure is much less of a stretch. And it puts security back in a more sensible place. Security is a mechanism; trust is the goal.

This reframing lets me more easily talk directly about the central issues of the book: how these various pressures scale to larger societies, and how security technologies are necessary for them to scale. Trust changes focus as society scales, too. In smaller societies (a family, for example), trust is more about intention and less about actions. In larger societies, trust is all about actions. It’s more like compliance. And as things scale even further, trust becomes less about people and more about systems. I don’t need to trust any particular banker, as long as I trust the banking system. And as we scale up, security becomes more important.

Possibly the book’s thesis statement: “Security is a set of constructed systems that extend the naturally occurring systems that humans have always used to induce trust and enable society. This extension became necessary when society began to operate at a scale and complexity where the naturally occurring mechanisms started to break down, and is more necessary as society continues to grow in scale.”

So the phrase “societal security” is completely gone from the book. (Like the phrase “dishonest minority,” it only exists in old blog posts.) There’s more talk about the role of trust in society. There’s more talk about how security, real security this time, enables trust. It felt like a major change when I embarked on it, but the fact that I did it in three days says how this framing was always there under the surface. And the fact that the book reads a lot more cleanly now says this framing is the right one.

The title remains the same: Liars and Outliers. The cover remains the same. The table of contents is the same, although some chapters have different names. The subtitle has to change, though. Candidates include:

  1. How Trust Holds Society Together—my publisher probably won’t allow me to write a book without the word “security” somewhere in the title.
  2. Security, Trust, and Society—not punchy enough.
  3. How Security Enables the Trust that Holds Society Together—probably too long.
  4. How Trust and Security Hold Society Together—maybe.

Any other ideas?

The manuscript is still due to the publisher at the end of the month, and publication is still set for mid-February. I am enjoying writing it, but I am also looking forward to it being done.

Posted on October 5, 2011 at 7:38 PM • View Comments

Selling a Good Reputation on eBay

Here’s someone who is selling positive feedback on eBay:

Hello, for sale is a picture of a tree. This tree is an original and was taken by me. I have gotten nothing but 100% feedback from people from this picture. Great Picture! Once payment is made I will send you picture via email. Once payment is made and I send picture through email 100% feedback will be given to the buyer!!!! Once you pay for the item send me a ebay message with your email and I will email you the picture!

Posted on June 24, 2011 at 1:59 PM • View Comments

RAND Corporation on Trusted Traveler

New paper: “Assessing the Security Benefits of a Trusted Traveler Program in the Presence of Attempted Attacker Exploitation and Compromise“:

Current aviation security procedures screen all passengers uniformly. Varying the amount of screening individuals receive based on an assessment of their relative risk has the potential to reduce the security burdens on some travelers, while improving security overall. This paper examines the security costs and benefits of a trusted traveler program, in which individuals who have been identified as posting less risk than others are allowed to pass through security with reduced security screening. This allows security resources to be shifted from travelers who have been identified as low risk, to the remaining unknown-risk population. However, fears that terrorists may exploit trusted traveler programs have dissuaded adoption of such programs. This analysis estimates the security performance of a trusted traveler program in the presence of attacker attempts to compromise it. It finds that, although these attempts would reduce the maximum potential security benefits of a program, they would not eliminate those benefits in all circumstances.

Posted on June 20, 2011 at 7:01 AM • View Comments

Medieval Tally Stick Discovered in Germany

Interesting:

The well-preserved tally stick was used in the Middle Ages to count the debts owed by the holder in a time when most people were unable to read or write.

“Debts would have been carved into the stick in the form of small notches. Then the stick would have been split lengthways, with the creditor and the borrower each keeping a half,” explained Hille.

The two halves would then be put together again on the day repayment was due in order to compare them, with both sides hoping that they matched.

Note the security built into this primitive contract system. Neither side can cheat—alter the notches—because if they do, the two sides won’t match. I wonder what the dispute resolution system was: what happened when the two sides didn’t match.

EDITED TO ADD (5/14): In comments, lollardfish answers my question: “One then gets accused of fraud in court. In most circumstances, local power/reputation wins in fraud cases, since it’s not about finding of fact but who do you trust.”

Posted on May 10, 2011 at 1:47 PM • View Comments

Reducing Bribery by Legalizing the Giving of Bribes

Here’s some very clever thinking from India’s chief economic adviser. In order to reduce bribery, he proposes legalizing the giving of bribes:

Under the current law, discussed in some detail in the next section, once a bribe is given, the bribe giver and the bribe taker become partners in crime. It is in their joint interest to keep this fact hidden from the authorities and to be fugitives from the law, because, if caught, both expect to be punished. Under the kind of revised law that I am proposing here, once a bribe is given and the bribe giver collects whatever she is trying to acquire by giving the money, the interests of the bribe taker and bribe giver become completely orthogonal to each other. If caught, the bribe giver will go scot free and will be able to collect his bribe money back. The bribe taker, on the other hand, loses the booty of bribe and faces a hefty punishment.

Hence, in the post-bribe situation it is in the interest of the bribe giver to have the bribe taker caught. Since the bribe giver will cooperate with the law, the chances are much higher of the bribe taker getting caught. In fact, it will be in the interest of the bribe giver to have the taker get caught, since that way the bribe giver can get back the money she gave as bribe. Since the bribe taker knows this, he will be much less inclined to take the bribe in the first place. This establishes that there will be a drop in the incidence of bribery.

He notes that this only works for a certain class of bribes: when you have to bribe officials for something you are already entitled to receive. It won’t work for any long-term bribery relationship, or in any situation where the briber would otherwise not want the bribe to become public.

News article.

Posted on April 5, 2011 at 8:46 AM • View Comments

Ebook Fraud

Interesting post—and discussion—on Making Light about ebook fraud. Currently there are two types of fraud. The first is content farming, discussed in these two interesting blog posts. People are creating automatically generated content, web-collected content, or fake content, turning it into a book, and selling it on an ebook site like Amazon.com. Then they use multiple identities to give it good reviews. (If it gets a bad review, the scammer just relists the same content under a new name.) That second blog post contains a screen shot of something called “Autopilot Kindle Cash,” which promises to teach people how to post dozens of ebooks to Amazon.com per day.

The second type of fraud is stealing a book and selling it as an ebook. So someone could scan a real book and sell it on an ebook site, even though he doesn’t own the copyright. It could be a book that isn’t already available as an ebook, or it could be a “low cost” version of a book that is already available. Amazon doesn’t seem particularly motivated to deal with this sort of fraud. And it too is suitable for automation.

Broadly speaking, there’s nothing new here. All complex ecosystems have parasites, and every open communications system we’ve ever built gets overrun by scammers and spammers. Far from making editors superfluous, systems that democratize publishing have an even greater need for editors. The solutions are not new, either: reputation-based systems, trusted recommenders, white lists, takedown notices. Google has implemented a bunch of security countermeasures against content farming; ebook sellers should implement them as well. It’ll be interesting to see what particular sort of mix works in this case.

Posted on April 4, 2011 at 9:18 AM • View Comments

Authenticating the Authenticators

This is an interesting read:

It was a question that changed his life, and changed mine, and may have changed—even saved—all of ours by calling attention to flaws in our nuclear command and control system at the height of the Cold War. It was a question that makes Maj. Hering an unsung hero of the nuclear age. A question that came from inside the system, a question that has no good answer: How can any missile crewman know that an order to twist his launch key in its slot and send a thermonuclear missile rocketing out of its silo­a nuke capable of killing millions of civilians­is lawful, legitimate, and comes from a sane president?

Any chain of authentication ultimately rests on trust; there’s no way around it.

Posted on March 25, 2011 at 12:22 PM • View Comments

Societal Security

Humans have a natural propensity to trust non-kin, even strangers. We do it so often, so naturally, that we don’t even realize how remarkable it is. But except for a few simplistic counterexamples, it’s unique among life on this planet. Because we are intelligently calculating and value reciprocity (that is, fairness), we know that humans will be honest and nice: not for any immediate personal gain, but because that’s how they are. We also know that doesn’t work perfectly; most people will be dishonest some of the time, and some people will be dishonest most of the time. How does society—the honest majority—prevent the dishonest minority from taking over, or ruining society for everyone? How is the dishonest minority kept in check? The answer is security—in particular, something I’m calling societal security.

I want to divide security into two types. The first is individual security. It’s basic. It’s direct. It’s what normally comes to mind when we think of security. It’s cops vs. robbers, terrorists vs. the TSA, Internet worms vs. firewalls. And this sort of security is as old as life itself or—more precisely—as old as predation. And humans have brought an incredible level of sophistication to individual security.

Societal security is different. At the tactical level, it also involves attacks, countermeasures, and entire security systems. But instead of A vs. B, or even Group A vs. Group B, it’s Group A vs. members of Group A. It’s security for individuals within a group from members of that group. It’s how Group A protects itself from the dishonest minority within Group A. And it’s where security really gets interesting.

There are many types—I might try to estimate the number someday—of societal security systems that enforce our trust of non-kin. They’re things like laws prohibiting murder, taxes, traffic laws, pollution control laws, religious intolerance, Mafia codes of silence, and moral codes. They enable us to build a society that the dishonest minority can’t exploit and destroy. Originally, these security systems were informal. But as society got more complex, the systems became more formalized, and eventually were embedded into technologies.

James Madison famously wrote: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Government is just the beginning of what wouldn’t be necessary. Currency, that paper stuff that’s deliberately made hard to counterfeit, wouldn’t be necessary, as people could just keep track of how much money they had. Angels never cheat, so nothing more would be required. Door locks, and any barrier that isn’t designed to protect against accidents, wouldn’t be necessary, since angels never go where they’re not supposed to go. Police forces wouldn’t be necessary. Armies: I suppose that’s debatable. Would angels—not the fallen ones—ever go to war against one another? I’d like to think they would be able to resolve their differences peacefully. If people were angels, every security measure that isn’t designed to be effective against accident, animals, forgetfulness, or legitimate differences between scrupulously honest angels could be dispensed with.

Security isn’t just a tax on the honest; it’s a very expensive tax on the honest. It’s the most expensive tax we pay, regardless of the country we live in. If people were angels, just think of the savings!

It wasn’t always like this. Security—especially societal security—used to be cheap. It used to be an incidental cost of society.

In a primitive society, informal systems are generally good enough. When you’re living in a small community, and objects are both scarce and hard to make, it’s pretty easy to deal with the problem of theft. If Alice loses a bowl, and at the same time, Bob shows up with an identical bowl, everyone knows Bob stole it from Alice, and the community can then punish Bob as it sees fit. But as communities get larger, as social ties weaken and anonymity increases, this informal system of theft prevention—detection and punishment leading to deterrence—fails. As communities get more technological and as the things people might want to steal get more interchangeable and harder to identify, it also fails. In short, as our ancestors made the move from small family groups to larger groups of unrelated families, and then to a modern form of society, the informal societal security systems started failing and more formal systems had to be invented to take their place. We needed to put license plates on cars and audit people’s tax returns.

We had no choice. Anything larger than a very primitive society couldn’t exist without societal security.

I’m writing a book about societal security. I will discuss human psychology: how we make security trade-offs, why we routinely trust non-kin (an evolutionary puzzle, to be sure), how the majority of us are honest, and that a minority of us are dishonest. That dishonest minority are the free riders of societal systems, and security is how we protect society from them. I will model the fundamental trade-off of societal security—individual self-interest vs. societal group interest—as a group prisoner’s dilemma problem, and use that metaphor to examine the basic mechanics of societal security. A lot falls out of this: free riders, the Tragedy of the Commons, the subjectivity of both morals and risk trade-offs.

Using this model, I will explore the security systems that protect—and fail to protect—market economics, corporations and other organizations, and a variety of national systems. I think there’s a lot we can learn about security by applying the prisoner’s dilemma model, and I’ve only recently started. Finally, I want to discuss modern changes to our millennia-old systems of societal security. The Information Age has changed a number of paradigms, and it’s not clear that our old security systems are working properly now or will work in the future. I’ve got a lot of work to do yet, and the final book might look nothing like this short outline. That sort of thing happens.

Tentative title: The Dishonest Minority: Security and its Role in Modern Society. I’ve written several books on the how of security. This book is about the why of security.

I expect to finish my first draft before Summer. Throughout 2011, expect to see bits from the book here. They might not make sense as a coherent whole at first—especially because I don’t write books in strict order—but by the time the book is published, it’ll all be part of a coherent and (hopefully) compelling narrative.

And if I write fewer extended blog posts and essays in the coming year, you’ll know why.

Posted on February 15, 2011 at 5:43 AM • View Comments

$100 to Put a Bomb on an Airplane

An undercover TSA agent successfully bribed JetBlue ticket agent to check a suitcase under a random passenger’s name and put it on an airplane.

As with a lot of these tests, I’m not that worried because it’s not a reliable enough tactic to build a plot around. But untrustworthy airline personnel—or easily bribeable airline personal—could be used in a smarter and less risky plot.

Posted on January 28, 2011 at 1:40 PM • View Comments

The Legality of the Certificate Authority Trust Model

Interesting research:

We looked at the standard legal documents issued by the certificate authorities or “CAs,” including exemplar Subscriber Agreements (agreements between CAs and website operators); “Certification Practice Statements” (statements by CAs outlining their business practices); and Relying Party Agreements (purported agreements between CAs and “relying parties,” such as end-users). What we found was surprising:

  • “Relying Party Agreements” purport to bind end-users to their terms despite the apparent absence of any mechanism to either affirmatively alert the end-user as to the existence of the supposed Agreements or afford the end-user an opportunity to register his or her acceptance or rejection of the Agreements’ terms
  • Certification Practice Statements that suffer from the same problem (i.e. no affirmative notice to the end-user and no meaningful opportunity for acceptance or rejection of terms)

There were other issues as well. For example, the Relying Party Agreements and Certification Practice Statements set forth various obligations on the part of end-users (i.e. “relying parties”) such as: the requirement that end-users make an independent determination of whether it is reasonable to trust a website offering a secure connection (isn’t that the whole point of having a CA, so that the end-user doesn’t have to do that?); the requirement that the end-user be familiar with the crypto software and processes used to carry out the authentication process; and the end-user’s duty to indemnify and hold harmless the CA in the event of legal claims by third parties.

Paper here.

EDITED TO ADD (2/10)> Matt Blaze on CAs.

Posted on January 21, 2011 at 5:31 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.