http://www.secuobs.com Observatoire de la securite Internet fr webmaster@secuobs.com 2013-05-01 00:04:32 - No Tricks : Over the years I have developed many mind maps when writing articles, and I have also used them as a way of collecting information and organising it I was a fan of Freemind, and with effort, I uploaded some maps to the Freemind gallery Later I switched to Freeplane but it still did not give me a simple way to share maps I have now taken out a membership at MindMeister as the site can read and publish mind maps in a collection of formats You can find about 20 or so maps here, mainly from past articles, with new ones to follow There is a large map on Trends Analysis from 2008, giving you some idea how complex and from which sources you need to collect information to get a handle on IT Security http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/442816.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/442816.shtml Secuobs.com : 2013-04-22 11:34:45 - No Tricks - I am on a mailing list from Business Insider and against my better judgement which often comes out when the internet is involved I followed a link to an article on The Sexiest Scientists Alive There are 50 scientists listed, and scientist number 43 is Clio Cresswell, a mathematician at the University of Sydney, who is the author of Mathematics and Sex IMAGE The book gained some notoriety for propounding the 12-bonk rule Bonking is a term in Australia for having sex usually casual sex as I recall , and Dr Cresswell has stated that the best strategy for finding a good sexual partner is to bonk with 12 twelve different partners, note the best one, then keep bonking until you find someone who is better, then settle on that partner You benchmark on a sample of 12 partners, discard them, then take the next best that comes along Cresswell reports that this strategy gives you a 75pourcents chance of finding a good mate So it's not foolproof, but with the confidence of mathematics, it proclaims to be better than any other trial-and-error approach that leaves behind a trail of discarded lovers Of course there is more at play in finding a mate than bonkability , as opined in the Ask Sam column of the Sydney Morning Herald for example The result caught my eye as I was recently reviewing some statistical problems and I surmised that the 12-bonk rule had a similar sounding result to the secretary problem, a classic problem in probability The secretary problem which by now should be at least upgraded to the executive assistant problem, or simply just the candidate problem asks for the best strategy to select a secretary for a position where there is a collection of candidates and you get to have one interview, upon which you must either hire the candidate or move onto the next one It is assumed that the market is competitive and that you will not be able to return to a rejected candidate as they have found employment elsewhere The optimal strategy here is to interview 37pourcents of the possible candidates, make a note of the best one, and then keep interviewing until you a find an additional candidate that is better than you previous best, and then choose the new best candidate as the one to employ So if you have 100 candidates, interview the first 37, note the best, and then keep interviewing until you find someone better and then hire them The graph below plots the probability of finding the best candidate using this strategy, as the percentage k of candidates interviewed and refused increases IMAGE Here 37 is the double winner in that the point marked by the dashed lines indicates that the optimal approach is to reject the first 37pourcents and then you will find the best candidate as the next best choice 37pourcents of the time This magic 37pourcents is derived from 1 e 037, where e is the base of the natural logarithms I just downloaded the e-book version of Mathematics and Sex and took a quick look at the 12-bonk section, and it seems that Cresswell's discussion is based on the work of Peter Todd in his paper Searching for the Next Best Mate Todd looks at simpler heuristics to find a mate than applying the 37pourcents rule, which he notes has the following drawbacks in practice If we assume a sample of 100 people where they can be rated uniquely on a scale from 1 to 100, then when applying the 37pourcents rule 1 On average, 37 additional people need to be interviewed or bonked to find the next best beyond the best found in the initial 37 people, for an average total of 74 people being considered from the 100 2 On average, the best person found has rank 82, where 100 is the best on the scale The 37pourcents rule finds the best person 37pourcents of the time, but averaging the success out over the remaining 67pourcents of choices, lowers the result by about 20pourcents Todd decided to explore other decision rules that performed better than the 37pourcents rule on some criteria, and more closely match with our observed behaviours for finding a mate It is unlikely that anyone will have the time and emotional energy to engage with 37pourcents of all their potential mates, which could easily run into the thousands Todd's computer models found that if you engaged 12 people from a mating population of 1000, then took the next best, you are highly likely to end up with someone in the top 25pourcents of the population I cannot quite tell from Todd's graph referring to this result as to how many people must be engaged in total, but seemingly around 30 or so 50 at the outside So this was the genesis of the 12-bonk rule, and I will read Crisswell's book a bit closer to see if she has teased out any further details or conclusions A very quick search of the internet on the topic of the number of sexual partners seemed to indicate that for Western men and women 12 sexual partners is on the high side for most of them - actually more like half of that, after discarding outliers A further potential glitch in the 12-bonk rule is that it assumes when you have found your post-12-bonk lover that he or she will accept your overtures, and of course you cannot be certain of that I am sure that someone is working on the mathematics of unrequited love http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/440937.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/440937.shtml Secuobs.com : 2012-05-28 15:34:36 - No Tricks - Back in 2009 I posted on the risk of GPS satellite positioning system degrading over the next few years, both in terms of coverage and accuracy, due a decrease in the number of operational satellites This risk was the main finding of an audit performed by the Government Accountability Office GAO , where Monte Carlo simulations predicted that the number of operational satellites would fall below the threshold required to provide positioning at agreed service levels In short, too many satellites that were approaching, or had passed, their expected operational life were being relied on to continue functioning in the absence of replacements Engineers know that satellites have very finite operational lifetimes, and at some point will simply stop working and start drifting And one significant satellite did just that last month, as reported by the Economist for example The satellite in question was Envisat, one without GPS responsibilities thankfully, launched in 2002 to provide a wide range of environmental data which it has delivered handsomely in the terabyte range It is a critical primary source of data for scientists, providing continuous observations until contact was lost last month The European Space Agency has formally announced that the mission of Envisat has been completed, and successfully so, after celebrating it s tenth year of operation when only five were expected both from an engineering and funding perspective So Envisat was living on borrowed time, five years of it or 100pourcents additional mission time, as the GAO report on the GPS satellite constellation was asserting The Economist article goes on to name some culprits in the case of Envisat, with governments being allocated the lion s share due to lack of funding Both NASA and ESA are unwilling to sure up their Earth-observation programs without additional government guarantees There is another risk beyond the loss of service provided by Envisat or GPS satellites, and that is additional space debris created by these satellites once they stop functioning It is estimated that Envisat will orbit the Earth for the next 150 years before being drawn down into its atmosphere During this time it will be at risk from colliding with other existing space debris, breaking into smaller pieces upon impact, producing even finer debris This is known as the Kessler Syndrome, proposed by NASA scientist Donald J Kessler in 1978, who commented on the Envisat demise as follows It seems ironic that a satellite intended to monitor the Earth s environment is at risk from the space environment and is likely to become a major contributor to the debris environment Orbital debris and the collisions that may result from its presence, are a significant risk for NASA There is a 180-page report on this topic which, apart from the specific subject matter, contains many useful risk principles and guidelines http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/378064.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/378064.shtml Secuobs.com : 2012-05-22 17:01:25 - No Tricks - The New Scientist has reported on recently declassified letters that were exchanged between John Nash and the NSA in the mid 50 s pertaining to his ideas of building cryptosystems that are essentially unbreakable in practice At that time the one time pad of Shannon was well-known but Nash, like Shannon himself, hit upon the idea that the inconvenience of managing keys in a perfectly secure cryptosystem could be traded for one where the key space is so large that it cannot be searched in a feasible amount of time Nash quotes the unicity distance as a measure of how much ciphertext is required to determine the key uniquely, which is infinite for the one time pad but small for a cipher with a fixed key Even so, quickly obtaining the small amount of ciphertext to uniquely determine the key in principle does not mean that the task of recovering that unique key is computationally easy Nash outlined his ideas for building a computationally secure cipher to the NSA in a handwritten letter, and proposed a cipher to meet these criteria, a snippet of which is shown below he would not be winning any awards for his cursive image Nash made the prophetic remark that substitutions ciphers can be broken piecemeal with partial information accumulating, and that the game of cipher breaking by skilled teams is essentially a thing of the past In short, and with hindsight then, people that could break the Enigma would not be prepared to break RSA, or other cryptosystems based on computationally difficult problems from number theory The scale had changed It seems that the NSA broke the cipher that was proposed by Nash, or did not think it interesting or practical In any case, they did not wish to pursue the ideas expressed by Nash, and told him as much Nash s letter was written about 20 years before the ideas of pubic key cryptography became mainstream in the mid 70 s The New Scientist article related Nash s proposal for an effectively unbreakable cipher to one of the The Millennium Problems, proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute Each problem or challenge if you prefer carries a prize of 1 million dollars for a solution, and a cipher that would require exponential work to solve implies a solution for the P vs NP problem http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/376960.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/376960.shtml Secuobs.com : 2012-05-22 11:03:16 - No Tricks - Business Insider recently reported that Chrome is now the number 1, or near number one browser of choice, and its popularity has come as the expense of IE as shown in the chart below image The data set is based on statistics collected by StatCounter, and is probably not reliable for specific figures but sufficiently reliable for showing trends in this case, that Chrome is stealing market share mainly from IE and somewhat from Firefox In any case, a significant amount of internet traffic is now being funneled through the Chrome security model The previous browser prediction that I posted on, that Firefox would overtake IE by Christmas 2012, agrees quite well with the data set above http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/376887.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/376887.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-10-07 21:35:15 - No Tricks - You can now order the new Block Cipher Companion book from Tesco s, just published this month I have seen an earlier draft and the text is very detailed and comprehensive, as you would expect from authors of this caliber http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/333418.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/333418.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-10-04 17:46:25 - No Tricks - I recently posted about the reads on my Scribd collection, and one of the most frequently read is the master s thesis by the founder of Xobni inbox spelt backwards called How to Organize Email There is a new version of this software called Smartr for Gmail and you can watch a video on its features http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/332617.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/332617.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-10-03 00:54:53 - No Tricks - Love it, from Flowing Data image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/332227.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/332227.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-10-02 18:23:24 - No Tricks - I have uploaded about 200 documents to Scribd over the last few years and the number of reads has just passed 150,000 You can see the categories here The top 5 documents, each with over 3000 reads each are A Data Centric Security Model The Core Components of the Entrust PKI v5 BA IT Security Awareness presentation How to Organize Email How much is enough A Risk Management Approach to Computer Security http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/332207.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/332207.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-27 01:24:08 - No Tricks - Don t ask me why but a lot of SPAM has accrued, and keeps accruing, at this May 2009 post on SHA-1 Apart from the common penis enlargement references, some of the other SPAM is quite long and seems to be playing on some quirk of SEO Fine http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/331179.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/331179.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-25 18:23:37 - No Tricks - This just made me laugh image 7275 http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/330953.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/330953.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-22 18:09:07 - No Tricks - This is a nice presentation on enterprise key management issues from Anthony Stieber given at the 2nd IEEE KMS 2010 Key Management Summit The main message is that KMS is tricky and don t roll your own By the way if you are looking for examples of Powerpoint that breaks all the rules for good presentations, then you will find them here image Also there is a very polished and informative presentation from from Chris Kostick of E Y on an enterprise key management maturity model, and below is a comprehensive diagram on the life-cycle management of keys image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/330407.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/330407.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-22 17:12:01 - No Tricks - imageI am currently in-between positions, somewhat happily, and are casting my net of interest a bit wider than my traditional roles in IT Security and Risk One position that caught my eye from a global reinsurer in town was the role of Earthquake Expert within their Natural Catastrophe department or Nat Cat in insurance lingo I really don t have any specific background in this area but I sometimes entertain the idea that I can transfer hard-learnt crypto math skills into a numerate role like this one which calls for extensive modeling and prediction You also think that this might be a nice and cozy niche area to ply your trade as a specialist, holding something of a privileged position Well I was disabused of any such notion this week when I read this week of six Italian scientists and a former government official are being put on trial for the alleged manslaughter of the 309 people who died in the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake in Italy The seven defendants were members of a government panel, called the Serious Risks Commission seriously , who were asked to give an opinion or risk statement on the likelihood that L'Aquila would be struck by a major earthquake, based on an analysis of the smaller tremors that the city was experiencing over the previous few months The panel verdict delivered in March stated that there was no reason to believe that a series of low-level tremors was a precursor to a larger event A week later the city suffered an earthquake of magnitude 63 on the Richter Scale, denoting a strong quake The crux of the case against the scientists is that they did not predict the strong quake coming to L'Aquila to allow a proper evacuation of its inhabitants The defense rebuttal is simply that such a prediction is impossible, and they cannot be held accountable for this unreasonable expectation The scientists cannot be expected to function as a reliable advanced warning system The international scientific community has weighed in to support the defendants with a one-page letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which supported the scientists by saying that there is no reliable scientific process for earthquake prediction, and they should not be treated as criminals for adhering to the accepted practices of their field Recently people were evacuated from New York City as precaution to the impact of Hurricane Irene The hurricane passed by New York causing far less extensive damage than expected, and yet there were still complaints from residents about being asked to leave their homes unnecessarily It seems that authorities cannot win in these matters unless they can predict the future accurately http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/330393.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/330393.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-15 04:37:04 - No Tricks - image Every now and again I run this blog through the free Website Grader tool which measures your site on a variety of criteria, hoping to lure you for a more thorough paid analysis The tool used to report a PageRank value, and No Tricks seemed to be stuck at 3 for quite a few years The site now uses there own page ranking metric, which reported a value higher than 3 I was overjoyed and eagerly confirmed that the true PageRank metric had in fact increased from 3 to 4, representing some form of exponential improvement since the scale is logarithmic What I can surmise from a quick look at some articles on PageRank interpretations some of which are conflicting , is that the most accurate generality I can claim is that the No Tricks site has gone from being of low importance to being of medium importance Fine, I ll take it Incidentally, I wrote a short introduction to the mathematics of PageRank a few years back, with a security spin http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328964.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328964.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-14 16:20:17 - No Tricks - Amit Agarwal at Digital Inspiration has put together some information on just how big the number one trillion actually is, in human-sized terms We have heard a lot about trillions of dollars in the context of credit crisis and, more recently, in the debate over the US budget deficit So he reports the following Biblical analogy If you start spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spent a trillion dollars by today And in terms of a diagram, Agarwal starts with a single 100 dollar US bill, and represents larger values as image Extending further, a trillion dollars then requires a football field of space, as shown below, with our human-sized man dwarfed in the bottom left corner image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328818.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328818.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-14 12:13:37 - No Tricks - Last year I posted on The Fabled 25 Sigma Event, referring to a quote from David Viniar, then CFO of Goldman Sachs, who was attempting to describe the magnitude of the movements in the financial markets Mr Viniar was likely not understanding the implications of what he was saying since a 25 sigma event translates into a phenomenon occurring once every 10 135 years, a period of time that we have yet to see even a fraction of Several researchers at the business school of the University College Dublin gave another interpretation of how unlikely this event was by stating that it equates to winning the UK lottery more than 20 times in a row Winning the lottery 20 times does seem unlikely, and recently a woman who has won the Texas lottery just 4 times in the last 10 years or so accumulating prize money just over 20 million USD, is being scrutinized for potential fraud, at least in the press Nathaniel Rich ran an interesting 4-page story in the August issue of Harper s magazine, where he visits the small Texas town of Bishop to look at the lone store in town where three of the winning tickets were purchased Rich spoke to enough mathematics professors beforehand to determine that the odds of an individual winning four times by pure luck are very low The alternate scenarios are 1 an inside job potentially amongst the state lotteries and there suppliers 2 Cracking the parameters of the psuedo-random number generator for selecting the winners, and 3 Dumb luck, or increasing your odds of winning by buying many tickets Clearly the local town people are going with scenario 3 or just ascribing it to pure luck outright, as there is a strong belief that everyone can be a winner There is a lot of suspicion about the luck of Joan Ginther below and her winning streak Googling on 4 time lottery winner produces pages of articles on Ginther s supposed luck It seems then that no one would actually be able to win the UK lottery over 20 times as they would be arrested way before that many wins image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328776.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328776.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-13 14:24:10 - No Tricks - Rovio, the company that developed Angry Birds, recently announced at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference that they are now selling more than one million Angry Birds T-shirts and toys each month That s after 350 million free downloads of the game What a business model, if they were intending it, and a movie deal is apparently in the works as well Oh yes, and a theme park http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328532.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328532.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-13 10:43:43 - No Tricks - A recent social media report from Nielsen s shows, amongst other things, that Facebook dominates our attention on the Internet, larger in terms of minutes of face time than the four next most popular social media sites Business Insider produced the following chart based on Nielsen s data image It was recently and widely reported that the number of page views on Facebook passed the 1 trillion mark, but that figure has been disputed In any case, all internet path seems to lead to Facebook one way or the other http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328494.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328494.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-11 14:29:32 - No Tricks - I am stepping out more of late, meeting new people and doing new things, which has seen more doing far less blogging over the last year One of the site I use to find things to do is Meetup in the Zurich locality I received the following email from the founder today who relates how the origin of the service was 9 11, and his intention was to use the internet to get people off the internet , Fellow Meetuppers, I don't write to our whole community often, but this week is special because it's the 10th anniversary of 9 11 and many people don't know that Meetup is a 9 11 baby Let me tell you the Meetup story I was living a couple miles from the Twin Towers, and I was the kind of person who thought local community doesn't matter much if we've got the internet and tv The only time I thought about my neighbors was when I hoped they wouldn't bother me When the towers fell, I found myself talking to more neighbors in the days after 9 11 than ever before People said hello to neighbors next-door and across the city who they'd normally ignore People were looking after each other, helping each other, and meeting up with each other You know, being neighborly A lot of people were thinking that maybe 9 11 could bring people together in a lasting way So the idea for Meetup was born Could we use the internet to get off the internet -- and grow local communities We didn't know if it would work Most people thought it was a crazy idea -- especially because terrorism is designed to make people distrust one another A small team came together, and we launched Meetup 9 months after 9 11 Today, almost 10 years and 10 million Meetuppers later, it's working Every day, thousands of Meetups happen Moms Meetups, Small Business Meetups, Fitness Meetups a wild variety of 100,000 Meetup Groups with not much in common -- except one thing Every Meetup starts with people simply saying hello to neighbors And what often happens next is still amazing to me They grow businesses and bands together, they teach and motivate each other, they babysit each other's kids and find other ways to work together They have fun and find solace together They make friends and form powerful community It's powerful stuff It's a wonderful revolution in local community, and it's thanks to everyone who shows up Meetups aren't about 9 11, but they may not be happening if it weren't for 9 11 9 11 didn't make us too scared to go outside or talk to strangers 9 11 didn't rip us apart No, we're building new community together The towers fell, but we rise up And we're just getting started with these Meetups Scott Heiferman on behalf of 80 people at Meetup HQ Co-Founder CEO, Meetup New York City September 2011 http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328232.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328232.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-10 23:00:11 - No Tricks - Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at bitly, a large link shortening service, has done an analysis on some of their link data they to get an idea of how long links remain alive or popular The measure was to look at 1,000 links and graph the number of hits that a link receives over 80,000 seconds almost a day , and then determine the point over that period where half of the total number of hits were received From the post So we looked at the half life of 1,000 popular bitly links and the results were surprisingly similar The mean half life of a link on twitter is 28 hours, on facebook it s 32 hours and via direct sources like email or IM clients it s 34 hours So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on facebook than if you post on twitter Which yielded the following graph, showing a strong power law for Facebook, Twitter direct links links shared via email, instant messengers etc , but a delayed curve for YouTube image What Mason computed would more accurately be called the median rather than the half-life, since she is interested in the first point in time that divides the total number of hits for the period into two roughly equal sets More discussion on this point is given in the comments to the post The conclusion from the post In general, the half life of a bitly link is about 3 hours, unless you publish your links on youtube, where you can expect about 7 hours worth of attention Many links last a lot less than 2 hours other more sticky links last longer than 11 hours over all the referrers This leads us to believe that the lifespan of your link is connected more to what content it points to than on where you post it on the social web it s all about what you share, not where you share it http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328190.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328190.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-09-09 19:53:14 - No Tricks - I recently came across two smallish examples of where randomness was the solution to two perplexing problems That is, rolling the dice seems to help you out of a situation where a planned method was not given you what you wanted The first issue is the problem of how to board passengers on a plane Finding the best way to board people is actually a well-studied problem, both theoretically and in practice, and you can see some of the work here At the top of the same page there is a nice simulation program which shows you how different boarding strategies play out, and random boarding just calling out people to board at random is better than the usual front-to-back boarding that most of us are familiar with image The reason is that random boarding gives a better utilization of the space in the plane whereas front-to-back boarding piles people into one part of the plane eventually causing jams in the aisles The full set of strategies examined are Back-to-front Rotating-zone Random Block Outisde-in Reverse-pyramid On another topic, a Freakonomics blog post describes how researchers in South Africa are using a randomness trick to get truthful answers from farmers who are suspected of illegally killing leopards and hyenas The method is called randomized response surveying, where when the farmers are asked potentially incriminating questions they first flip a coin, and based on the result give a yes or no answer to either the incriminating question if it was heads, or a harmless question do you think the Springboks will win the RWC if it was tails The farmers actually used a die, taking specific actions on which value from 1 to 6 was thrown, but the principle is the same as I have described it The trick here is that the person asking the question cannot tell which question the farmer is answering, but the farmer s answer can be recorded Statistical methods can then be used to determine the distribution of answers for the two questions, and actually make inferences about the incriminating question This method was devised in the 60 s, and by the early 80 s it was being taught at my undergraduate university as part of a first year course http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328064.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/328064.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-08-08 00:03:25 - No Tricks - Here is a short presentation on a relatively new data center in the west of Zurich that is designed to green and secure More information at greench, and the language can be changed to English in the upper right corner http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321622.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321622.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-08-07 22:15:30 - No Tricks - Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have recently published research into social networks which indicates that when just 10 percent of a network steadfastly holds a given belief, then that belief will eventually be adopted by the majority of the society These group of 10pourcents believers are referred to as a committed minority Even though the research has produced quite a bit of press see here and here for example it is a little difficult to say how the result was arrived at The abstract of the paper states that We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value pc 10pourcents, there is a dramatic decrease in the time Tc taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion In particular, for complete graphs we show that when ppc, Tc lnN We conclude with simulation results for Erdős-Rényi random graphs and scale-free networks which show qualitatively similar behavior It seems that they are using a model for the spread of opinion overlayed on various network topologies, starting with the complete graph everyone knows everyone , then scale free, and a simulation of a random graph process The results are strengthened by finding the 10pourcents threshold present in each topology Even so, the following graph was not that informative for me image I think I will have to wait get a copy of the paper to make full sense of the result Reported in Freakanomics http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321612.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321612.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-08-07 22:15:30 - No Tricks - A recent study has examined the prevalence of grade inflation at US universities over the last 100 years or so, and has found some identifiable patterns The chart below shows the increase in grades between various types of schools in the primary colors, with the grey representing unnamed individual schools image What is clear is that there was a huge increase in grade in crease in the 60 s and then a steady increase over the last 30 years of so From the study The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement Students entrance test scores have not increased College Board, 2007 , students are increasingly disengaged from their studies Saenz et al, 2007 , and the literacy of graduates has declined Kutner et al, 2006 A likely influence is the emergence of the now common practice of requiring student-based evaluations of college teachers Whatever the cause, colleges and universities are on average grading easier than ever before Further science and engineering students are graded more harshly than their fellow students in liberal arts degrees http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321611.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321611.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-08-06 01:53:11 - No Tricks - An informal study from collecting just over 204,000 iPhone passcodes, produced the graphic below on the top ten most common passcodes image The author concludes that Formulaic passwords are never a good idea, yet 15pourcents of all passcode sets were represented by only 10 different passcodes out of a possible 10,000 The implication A thief or just a prankster could safely try 10 different passcodes on your iPhone without initiating the data wipe With a 15pourcents success rate, about 1 in 7 iPhones would easily unlock--even more if the intruder knows the users years of birth, relationship status, etc http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321422.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321422.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-08-06 00:55:09 - No Tricks - From Flowing Data Mark Johnstone uses a cake metaphor to represent data, presentation, and what you gain Don t like the last shot for knowledge Perhaps lots of smaller cakes image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321416.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/321416.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-06-06 18:30:56 - No Tricks - There is a new and authoritative block cipher book soon to be published, by my good friend Lars Knudsen and my respected colleague Matt Robshaw These are two of the top experts in the field both veterans of the AES selection process and long time contributors to understanding why and what makes a good - or simply not a bad - block cipher The book will be available this year and you can pre-order from Amazon right now image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/309403.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/309403.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-06-06 16:02:24 - No Tricks - The graph below from Google Analytics shows the reading humps of my blog with unusual clarity Typically readership tapers off on the weekend and picks up as the work week commences You can see the peaks and valleys for the weekends quite clearly below, and it reminded my of those famous Loch Ness humps Thanks to the 2000 visitors in May, even when I am struggling to find the time for meaningful posts image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/309367.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/309367.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-05-02 17:49:51 - No Tricks - I uploaded a 15 page guideline from ISACA for audit risk assessments to my Scribd collections The document gives a reasonable overview of how a standard IT audit assessment can be enhanced from a risk perspective, taking into account additional factors beyond controls and their gaps http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/302030.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/302030.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-04-15 08:59:55 - No Tricks - Just a short note to say that the number of visitors to the No Tricks blog recently passed the 50,000 mark, which was very satisfying for me The blog has been running since September 2008, starting out with just a few posts but then building open slowly to around 250 now You can see the monthly increase in visitors below, and some other statistics from Google Analytics image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/298649.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/298649.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-04-05 15:26:46 - No Tricks - A nice power law looking graph from Business Insider on the properties of Twitter users, and about 175 million Twitter accounts have been registered to date But how many of those accounts are actually active and being used Hard to say it seems The article reports on digging into the Twitter API and finding that Using data that is now just one month old, he found out that There were 119 million Twitter accounts following one or more other accounts There were 85 million accounts with one ore more followers With these figures, and Twitter's claim of 175 million accounts, a little subtraction shows us that there are 56 million Twitter accounts following zero other accounts, and 90 million Twitter accounts with zero followers image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/296321.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/296321.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-03-26 14:02:42 - No Tricks - The Register has published a new 16-page whitepaper on trust and security in cloud computing, with the key findings being Many companies could do much better when it comes to in-house security SaaS adoption is limited currently, but there is increasing interest from the business The biggest impediment to SaaS adoption is a perception of security issues Companies with experience of SaaS are positive about provider security SaaS is likely to help with shortcomings of on-premise security capabilities The whitepaper was written from data gathered in an online survey with over 500 participants Amongst the many tabulated responses to the survey there is an interesting list of the ways data can exit from corporate boundaries image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/294329.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/294329.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-03-26 14:02:42 - No Tricks - I have not looked at the Freehaven site for some time, but just a reminder that there is a huge collection of research papers sourced, tracing the history of anonymity systems, MIXES and other PETs The collection was well-attended to up till the end of last year but is missing updates for 2011 so far I am sure that they will come BibTeX references for the papers as well http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/294328.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/294328.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-03-12 15:29:49 - No Tricks - Business Insider recently reported that the iPad is outselling the competition about 4-to-1 So as security professionals the iPad is the platform to focus on for risk assessments image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/291229.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/291229.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-03-12 14:43:56 - No Tricks - After apologizing too often for my bad typing, my sister-in-law sent me the following text to demonstrate that our brain can understand words even only the first and last letters of the words are correct Yet aoccdrnig to a sudty at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe Apparently this text is well-known to language people http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/291225.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/291225.shtml Secuobs.com : 2011-01-30 01:37:12 - No Tricks - In April last year Bill Gates addressed a collection of students at Harvard for 24 minutes on the topic of where to devote your talents It is well-known that Gates dropped out of Harvard in the mid 70 s to develop his fledgling software company He was returning as a philanthropist on this occasion, armed with the following question Are the brightest minds working on the most important problems And clearly he does not think so, as it appears many of top minds in the US are going into sports, entertainment or finance In fact, The allocation of IQ to Wall Street is higher than it should be You can find the video of the talk here http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/281678.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/281678.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-12-24 01:56:30 - No Tricks - I am trying out listening to podcasts on my yes iPod, during what was figuratively described to me as my downtime In Zurich for me this means being on trams and trains, and walking between them or to them So I went looking for captivating podcasts and of course ended up at the TED site, where you can download any number of interesting speakers and topics I came across a short and poignant talk by mathematician Arthur Benjamin's on his formula for changing math education image His simple approach is to switch from calculus being the pinnacle of math education to actually probability and statistics, because while the former is beautiful yet little used, the latter two topics are in fact very practical and in high demand In short we need to better understand risk Below is the full text of his short talk, where I have highlighted a few phrases in bold Now, if President Obama invited me to be the next Czar of Mathematics, then I would have a suggestion The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on foundation of arithmetic and algebra And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject And at top of that pyramid, it's calculus And I'm here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid that the correct summit -- that all of our students, every high school graduate should know -- should be statistics probability and statistics Applause I mean, don't get me wrong Calculus is an important subject It's one of the great products of the human mind The laws of nature are written in the language of calculus And every student who studies math, science, engineering, economics, they should definitely learn calculus by the end of their freshman year of college But I'm here to say, as a professor of mathematics, that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious, meaningful way, in their day to day lives On the other hand, statistics -- that's a subject that you could, and should, use on daily basis Right It's risk It's reward It's randomness It's understanding data I think if our students, if our high school students -- if all of the American citizens -- knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn't be in the economic mess that we're in today Not only -- thank you -- not only that but if it's taught properly, it can be a lot of fun I mean, probability and statistics, it's the mathematics of games and gambling It's analyzing trends It's predicting the future Look, the world has changed from analog to digital And it's time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital From the more classical, continuous mathematics, to the more modern, discrete mathematics The mathematics of uncertainty, of randomness, of data -- and that being probability and statistics In summary, instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus, I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what two standard deviations from the mean means And I mean it Thank you very much Applause I could not agree more The world is discrete for me, and very few of the problems that I encounter succumb to integration http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/273988.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/273988.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-12-23 18:33:10 - No Tricks - Just a note to say that my Are AES 256-bit keys too large post from July 2008 has been visited over 1,000 times this month For the last few years it has been my most popular post by far, and I once referred to it as one of my Pareto posts Probably what happened this month is a link to the post found its way onto some social channel, like Twitter, and just mushroomed from there It just shows that content really has no use-by date in Web 20 http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/273920.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/273920.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-12-23 18:33:10 - No Tricks - Its not only the season of giving and but forecasting as well, and I recently received the following Information Security Predictions from Zscaler Labs Flash mob hacktivism we ll see more attacks similar to Operation Payback, where like-minded strangers quickly organize and attack corporations or government entities in the name of a cause Niche malware designed to harvest confidential information from IP-connected devices such as printers and SCADA systems will grow Cloud-hosted botnets will grow We ll hear about more indirect data breaches, where not it s the company affected that was breached, but rather a third-party vendor or organization Social networks will become the main communication medium for attackers The Information security market will continue to shrink An interesting list - more about trends than fundamentals - and you can find more details on the Zscaler blog http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/273919.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/273919.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-12-23 18:33:10 - No Tricks - This is the title of a webcast invitation that I recently received from Symantec The Wikileaks saga is quickly impacting the infosec landscape, probably because the issue is so visible to all levels of senior management The webcast is described as follows In the wake of the intense media attention around the WikiLeaks disclosures, you may be asking yourself, What steps can I take to help my company avoid this same fate Symantec has been working with customers who are concerned about preventing these same issues and we ve developed a set of best practices that can help defend against these types of breaches We d like to share with you some of the techniques that might be useful to help you uncover similar activity on your own systems In this live webcast we ll Discuss the threat agents and modes of data loss you should be most concerned about Recommend counter-measures to protect your critical information against these risks To learn more about how your organisation may be at risk and steps you can take to defend your information, register today http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/273918.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/273918.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-12-14 19:01:49 - No Tricks - Nice tutorial on this perenial security problem from Patrick Schaller of ETH, Zurich http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/271603.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/271603.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-12-07 22:41:56 - No Tricks - From Flowing Data image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/270058.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/270058.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-12-07 00:43:32 - No Tricks - A telling presentation from Holly Andrews at a recent IRM meeting on dealing with psychopaths in the workplace and boardroom, derived from the 2006 book Snakes in Suits When Psychopaths Go to Work The presentation describes how workplace psychopaths burrow into positions of power, and amongst other things, assume more risk than is sensible There is a wonderful process chart which shows how such people operate image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/269819.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/269819.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-10-28 19:40:08 - No Tricks - Just a note to say that the total number of read of my documents on Scribd just passed 100,000 The categories are given below, mostly PDFs and a few PowerPoint presentations Cryptography Data Breach General Risk IT Risk Malware Passwords Privacy and Anonymity Quant Reasoning Security Whitelisting Written By Me http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/260712.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/260712.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Just a note to say that over the last few days there has been a jump in reads on a few of my AES posts, in particular for Are AES 256-bit keys too large and AES-256 and Reputational Risk I can't find any obvious reason why, however these posts do appear amongst the top google search results for aes 256 or aes-256 http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248498.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248498.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Here is a short cryptography lecture from Scott Aaronson, delivered as part of his Quantum Computing Since Democritus course given at the University of Waterloo, Fall 2006 The lecture gives a short text-based overview of crypto from mainly a complexity point of view, and discusses some of the implications of the P NP question for crypto image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248497.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248497.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Imperva recently announced an update to their analysis of the 32 million passwords that were exposed by the RockYou site earlier this year The update is concerned with a specific analysis of the spanish passwords included in the breach, of which there were just over 2 million Imperva together with Spanish marketing firm Agua Marketing found the following breakdown of password preferences note that almost half of the passwords are based on personal names imageThe full report in Spanish is here http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248496.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248496.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - A paper was posted on the preprint server Physics arXiv showing that the McEliece public key cryptosystem is resistant to efficient quantum algorithms based on the ideas of Shor s algorithm, which famously yielded an efficient method for factoring integers From the abstract Quantum computers can break the RSA and El Gamal public-key cryptosystems, since they can factor integers and extract discrete logarithms If we believe that quantum computers will someday become a reality, we would like to have post-quantum cryptosystems which can be implemented today with classical computers, but which will remain secure even in the presence of quantum attacks In this article we show that the McEliece cryptosystem over rational Goppa codes resists precisely the attacks to which the RSA and El Gamal cryptosystems are vulnerable---namely, those based on generating and measuring coset states Shor s algorithm is a general method for computing the period of certain functions, and it can be applied to computing the orders of elements modulo a composite number for example see my post Quantum Computing are you Shor for some details Shor s algorithm is not directly applicable to the McEliece cryptosystem since it is based on a hard problem from coding theory, and is not obviously solvable by computing periods of functions The new paper seems to demonstrate that no connection will be found However the authors caution that there may be another quantum approach distinct from the principles of Shor s algorithm that efficiently breaks the McEliece cryptosystem On the other hand, there is a growing consensus that NP-complete problems do not have efficient quantum algorithms see the diagram in this post , and the McEliece cryptosystem is based on an NP-hard problem which means it is at least as hard as an NP-complete problem There is also a nice background post on the physics arXiv blog Related articles by Zemanta 1978 Cryptosystem Resists Quantum Attack scienceslashdotorg Thirty-Year-Old Encryption Formula Can Resist Quantum-Computing Attacks That Defeat All Common Codes Encryption gizmodocom Enhanced by Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248495.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248495.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - The 2008 PhD thesis of Domenico Salvati from the Laboratory for Safety Analysis at ETH, Zurich, on the Management of Information System Risks is available online Salvati presents a structured approach to the IT risk management process which has some novel differences as compared to the more familiar frameworks The thesis contains a long examples on computing the risk of a brute force password attack, and the risk of phishing attacks The work has a very practical flavour as Salvati was sponsored by Credit Suisse for the thesis, as part of ZISC image You can find a short bio on Domenico as part of the upcoming hashdays security and risk conference in Zurich http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248494.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248494.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - I have been meaning for some time to post a link to this wonderful paper from late 2007 on the top information security risks for the then coming year The paper was a collaborative work from several groups of security professionals, led by Gary Hinson, keeper of the fantastic NoticeBored site of security awareness material The paper is excellent in that it clearly separates threats, vulnerabilities and impacts, and then creates risks as scenarios from the interplay of these three collections, with controls coming as final recommendations The whole approach just seems so clean and sensible, and demonstrates the distinctions amongst risk terms which sometimes get lost in our daily language Now added to my IT Risk collection on Scribd, thanks to Gary Hinson for removing the copyright protection http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248493.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248493.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - The H has reported that the default WPA key settings for the Speedport W 700V ADSL Wi-Fi routers are weak since at most 4096 guesses are required to recover the key The key is mostly populated with a collection of fixed fields for example keys always begin with the prefix SP- and other public information such as the MAC address of the router The devices are apparently supported by all major German Telecoms, and presumably popular amongst the 26 million or so German households that have wireless Of course the owners of the routers can change the default WPA key, but its a safe bet to assume that most people probably need to be reminded of this precaution Germany's top criminal court recently made it illegal to offer wireless services that are not protected by a password, which is not a good sign that strong passwords are the norm http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248492.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248492.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - I recently uploaded a large FreeMind map that I collected over 2008, in an effort to get a handle on the stream of security articles, reports and incidents taking place back then In short there was a torrent and it remains much the same today I think you might find the ad hoc classification of material useful, as well as the groups of sources image Note that links to items from FIRST Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams are now broken since their once excellent news service has been discontinued All sources for my security and risk FreeMind maps are available here http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248491.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248491.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Here is a Flash rendering of a FreeMind map I made from the excellent post Surviving Cyber War A Primer on DDoS by Richard Stiennon, which appeared last November The post traces the history of DDoS, looks at the people and technologies involved, and tells the story of the unlikely then 25-year-old hero Barrett Lyon http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248490.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248490.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Sean O'Neil, a security developer or at least an amateur one , has posted code that is binary-compatible with an obfuscated version of RC4 that is used to protect Skype control traffic user searches, profiles, contact lists O Neil says that the obfuscated version of RC4 is keyless and serves no useful security purpose, but its presence is intended to render Skype incompatible with other messaging clients, effectively making it a proprietary system Even though Skype was intending to open its APIs to all desktop clients soon enough, O Neil sees himself as buster of Skype s 10 year monopoly The story is being widely reported in the press see links below , and it is easy to assume that the general security of Skype has been compromised, especially when O Neil s own post carried the title Skype s Biggest Secret Revealed But the secret was disentangling the modified version of RC4 from Skype s operation User privacy remains protected since full strength versions of AES-256, RSA-1024 and RSA-2048 are used to encrypt session traffic The code itself is surely obfuscated since the source is over 2800 lines of C, when 50 or so is enough to implement RC4 The full implications of the discovery are still playing out, and whether losing their biggest secret poses a serious issue for Skype O Neil is promising to release more details at the Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin this December Related articles by Zemanta Skype encryption partially cracked voipsaorg Skype's Innermost Security Layers Claimed To Be Reverse-Engineered techcrunchcom Hackers Crack Skype's Proprietary VOIP Protocol techie-buzzcom Encrypted and obfuscated Your P2P protocol can still be IDed arstechnicacom Reverse engineer extracts Skype crypto secret recipe gotheregistercom Enhanced by Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248489.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248489.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Researchers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute have announced that the power of GPU processors now poses a real threat to password security, and by implication, to the security of critical IT infrastructure Top of the line GPU devices now process at the rate of 2 Teraflops second, which is around 30pourcents of the computing power the fastest computing cluster could muster 10 years ago for a price tag of over 100 million Given that the main GPU manufacturers have made their devices programmable through standard C libraries, password cracking has become democratized The researchers state that 7 character passwords are now totally insecure against exhaustive attacks and recommend 12 characters, drawn from the full 94 printable keyboard characters GPU processors can also be used to generate rainbow tables for offline password cracking, which was the approach taken recently by Karsten Knol to building rainbow table using CUDA nodes Of course, applying GPU devices to password creaking is not new, and Elcomsoft has made a name for itself using high-end gaming chips to recover and benchmark passwords I am a little surprised that the researchers did not mention this In any case, Elcomsoft has a great blog and you can find a good presentation on GPU password cracking here From my post The spin on passwords for AES Adding spin to password-based computations is a workaround to the unpleasant fact that human habits and memory are vastly outmoded in today's IT environment Everything is getting faster, better and cheaper - except us Passwords remain the most toxic asset on the security balance sheet, but don't expect a bailout any time soon http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248488.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248488.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Below is part of a graphic which depicts the A5 1 state space generated when checking if the correct key has been determined from a rainbow table lookup Once a key candidate has been found using the rainbow tables, the A5 1 cipher needs to be advanced forward clocked and undone back-clocked to verify that the candidate key is correct image The grey paths represent states that are not accessible through forward clocking, and the green paths have many ancestor states leading to the same key stream Red paths have few ancestor states leading to the same key stream The graphic is from the A5 1 rainbow table generation project led by Karsten Nohl http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248487.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248487.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - There is a new book, published in April, called The Blank Swan The End of Probability This is a clever title and the front photo is wonderful as well image The book seems to be saying that financial market processes simply cannot be captured using the conventional notions of probability The author writes in summary The current crisis has led us to a conceptual impasse regarding the financial market No prediction model can apply to the market Probability has to be discarded and a new category has to emerge instead, which will mediate contingency In fact, the market has nothing to do with Wall Street or with the investment banks Market-making is a creative activity The market is a category of thought that is independent of ideology It replaces probability altogether and discarding the market, like the philosophers of the radical change claim we should do, is like discarding probability Not a very positive review from Reading the Markets, who found the book quite hard to read There is some discussion on a Wilmott mailing list as well http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248486.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248486.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - This is the title of a short talk I gave recently at an OWASP chapter meeting in Zurich The audience was small but engaged, and I went over time by quite a bit I need to develop the talk further but it is a decent v10 image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248485.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248485.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - I just came across HeadHacker, a site devoted to social engineering, run by a former colleague Dale Pearson The site looks great and Dale will be a speaker at the upcoming hashdays conference in Lucerne this November image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248484.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248484.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - A while back I posted on the How to render SSL Useless deck from Ivan Ristic of SSL Labs now with Qualys on common mistakes in the deployment of SSL There is now a video of Ivan presenting this deck at a recent OWASP conference, available at ThreatPost image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248483.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248483.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - George Danezis has put together a great series of lectures on modern anonymous communications, available from his Conspicuous Communication blog here The lectures cover 1 Basic definitions unconditional anonymity with DC-networks 2 Long-term attacks on anonymity systems Statistical Disclosure and their Bayesian formulation 3 Mix networks and anonymity metrics 4 The Bayesian traffic analysis of mix networks 5 Low-latency anonymity with onion routing and crowds About 150 slides of material http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248482.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248482.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Homomorphic encryption is the basis of Craig Gentry s recent breakthrough in encrypted search Helger Lipmaa has a large collection of papers on homomorphic encryption here, as well as other cryptographic topics Knock yourself out http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248481.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248481.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Infographics have become more popular, and BuzzFeed has produced an infographic describing how infographics are used to generate keyword spam The trick to stopping the spam appears to be adding a NO FOLLOW tag in the html code of the embedded infographic image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248480.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248480.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-09-17 02:38:43 - No Tricks - Over at the NSIS, Alex has a post downgraded to a rant which begins with berating Gideon Rasmussen for calling the BP Deepwater incident a Black Swan, and ends up discussing flaws in corporate governance Alex correctly describes the incident as a tail event , both low probability and high impact but still on the curve True Black Swans are events for which prior distributions are completely uninformative , and they belong on a totally different curve to expectations and models Even so, for me a Black Swan aspect of the incident has been the subsequent reputational damage to BP This has not been a trial by public media, but trial by social media and ultimately, trial by PageRank In web 20 there is no such thing as yesterday s news, or yesterday s newspapers wrapping up today s fish and chips Links are just as good today as they were yesterday, and continue to remain search-worthy far into the future as long as PageRank deems them to be so Holding steady at approximately two thirds of the search market, Google via PageRank has become the default arbiter of Internet truth A recent article called What Big Brands are spending on Google from Advertising Age showed that BP s spending on Google Ads increased dramatically, to almost 36 million dollars in June, up from its regular budget of less than 60,000 image That s almost a 6000pourcents increase in spending at the height of the BP counter-PageRank campaign, and such unpredictable jumps are the calling cards of Black Swans From the article Before BP could stem the oil gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, it unleashed 100 million in ad spending, largely on network TV, to stem the damage to its image But it also started spending heavily where it had never spent much before buying ads in Google's search results BP was essentially paying Google AdWords to distract Google PageRank - trial by PageRank and forgiveness by AdWords What s that saying about judges and juries again http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248479.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/248479.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-06-12 02:17:43 - No Tricks - Back in November I posted on The TLS Renegotiation Attack for the Impatient, which I hoped was a plain English explanation of this new weakness in SSL and TLS at the end of the post you can find less plain explanations and links The weakness was quickly addressed by the IETF a few months later There is new review of the attack from nCirle and also a link to the detailed steps that can be taken to specifically detect servers which still run legacy versions of the protocols susceptible to the attack http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/230900.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/230900.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-29 13:16:45 - No Tricks - A very interesting chart from Business Insider which shows that a YouTube video gets half its views in the first 6 days of it being published, down from 14 days in 2008 image The data is provided by TubeMogul http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/226901.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/226901.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-27 16:46:54 - No Tricks - I recently posted in The Search for Encrypted Search an overview of the breakthrough last year made by Craig Gentry of IBM to search data while it is in encrypted form The breakthrough was largely theoretical since the required computational overhead to support encrypted search is huge, which for example would increase the time for a Google search by roughly a factor of a trillion In such cases, it is always an open question as to whether the breakthrough will stand as an unimprovable milestone, or be the beginning of series of improvements towards a practical solution We now have the first evidence that we are dealing with the latter case for encrypted search A press release from the University of Bristol in the UK reports that Nigel Smart, Professor of Cryptology in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol, will present a paper in Paris this week Friday 28 May , which makes a step towards a fully practical system to compute on encrypted data The work could have wide ranging impact on areas as diverse as database access, electronic auctions and electronic voting Professor Smart said We will present a major improvement on a recent encryption scheme invented by IBM in 2009 Our scheme allows for computations to be performed on encrypted data, so it may eventually allow for the creation of systems in which you can store data remotely in a secure manner and still be able to access it Together with Frederik Vercauteren, from the Katholieke University Leuven in Belgium, Smart has simplifed Gentry s scheme so that it becomes more practical - not totally so, but an improvement More information should be available after the paper is published http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/226280.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/226280.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-26 19:39:45 - No Tricks - This time last year I made some of my favourite posts First I celebrated that I had reached about 1,000 visits and 2,000 page views a month, and now I am about double that Rethinking Thresholds for Account Lockouts was a simple post asking if the 3-strikes-your-out password policy makes sense I posted my second Password Roundup 2, and reviewed from Qualys their study on The Half-life of Vulnerabilities is still 30 Days I also developed some thoughts why web app bugs don t get fixed in The 28,000 Question Project vs Production Risk, after Jeremiah Grossman estimated that 28,000 well-spent dollars could fix the bugs at many sites On the crypto side I broke some news about The cost of SHA-1 collisions reduced to 2 52 , and took a look at AES-256 and Reputational Risk The AES post is now on the first page of a Google search for aes 256 and has brought a steady flow of visits since last May, 1346 in total I also asked if anyone could verify that the Total Internet computational power 2 85 operations, a statement I read in ECRYPT report I ended up contacting the authors and nope, no one knows where is came from Sounds possible though I also posted The Sub-Time Crisis in Web 20, my thoughts on information overload in Web 20 I only used half the text I typed in from my written notes http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225927.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225927.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-26 18:05:15 - No Tricks - I have been making daily posts this month, partly too see what people read on a given day, and what they keep on reading Quite a few of the posts turn out to have a hit graph that looks like a shark fin Here is the one for What is the LINPACK rating of Conficker image What the graph shows is that there are no hits before the post is published of course , then a spike when it first appears and for a few days after, ending in just a few hits by a week later or so After that it s up to Google, industrious visitors or self-referential posting to raise the hits again http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225884.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225884.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-26 18:05:15 - No Tricks - This is just great image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225883.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225883.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-26 18:05:15 - No Tricks - A nice how-to article on protecting USB drives with a password and encryption using Windows Vista or 7 and Bitlocker Do you carry sensitive data in your pen drive Then you should carefully keep your pen drive Oh You mean you are not that careful too Then I would suggest that you should password protect your pen drive Yes folks, you can do this by a simple method This is an added advantage to Windows Vista and Windows 7 users that they can easily password protect their pen drives with the help of BitLocker Drive Encryption Its an inbuilt feature of both of these operating systems image Related articles by Zemanta ZoneAlarm's DataLock BitLocker for the Rest of Us technologizercom BitLocker, USB drives not at fault - it's BIOS seattletimesnwsourcecom Reblog this post with Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225882.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225882.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-25 00:58:29 - No Tricks - Just got this from Lijit, the hosting firm for SBN image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225191.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/225191.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-24 11:25:57 - No Tricks - The All Facebook site has observed that, based on linear projections of current sign-up rates, Facebook will pass the 500 million user milestone by the end of June Based on data published by the CIA, it follows that only China and India as countries will remain with larger populations 133 and 156 billion respectively Projecting further, Facebook will have twice as many people as the US by year end around 600 million , and approximately a billion dollars in revenue as well It remains to be seen whether the current privacy backlash against Facebook introduces unpleasant non-linearities into these projections A recent informal poll taken by Graham Cluley of Sophos, found that almost two thirds of the 1588 repondents are considering leaving leaving Facebook Privacy may yet be the Black Swan of Facebook http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/224970.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/224970.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-23 10:49:25 - No Tricks - Interesting password graphic from CXO I am not quite sure what the people axis is meant to show, or exactly what social class is represented by a Douche In any case, the examples were verified by Google s password strength meter, and give a good visual the password spectrum click to enlarge image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/224824.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/224824.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-22 10:57:27 - No Tricks - This is an quite interesting post which the author describes as a stream of consciousness about equal parts nuptial rights and Structured Query Language The author is actually taking a serious look at how to redesign your database to accommodate gay same sex marriages, with quite a few amusing digressions After outlining 14 detailed steps to follow for the transformation, the conclusion is that Perhaps the simplest solution would be to ban marriage outright Or, better yet, to declare everybody as married to everybody else But then what would the database engineers do all day There are 145 comments as well http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/224680.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/224680.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-21 10:46:52 - No Tricks - The Freakanomics blog reports that Foreign Policy magazine has responded to concerns that we are living in particularly harrowing times, experiencing more than our share of natural disasters But FP reports that we are not What we actually have is a heightened awareness that these events are occurring thanks rapid and prolonged media coverage Based on US Geological Survey records dating back to 1900, the Earth experiences 16 major earthquakes per year on average, where a major quake is one whose magnitude is 70 or more There were only 6 major quakes in 1986 but 32 in 1943 And this year 6 so far, so we might be headed for an above average year, but not an extreme year However there is an increase in the loss of life from earthquakes 650,000 people last decade due to the expansion of urban sites into fault zones This is another factor which increases media coverage of these tragedies http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/224350.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/224350.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-20 11:36:28 - No Tricks - I was reading the excellent paper An Analysis of Conficker's Logic and Rendezvous Points from SRI and was surprised to learn that Conficker botnet updates are distributed at its rendezvous points as encrypted and signed binaries using RC4 and RSA the R in both cases here stands for Ron Rivest Both the A and B variants of Conficker use these checks to ensure that the updates have been created by the Conficker authors just like any other software vendor issuing updates and patches The paper depicts the update process as follows image So each Conficker client carries an RSA public key E for signature verification A Windows binary file F is encrypted and signed as follows Hash F to produce a 512-bit hash M Encrypt F with RC4 using M as the key Sign M using private key D A Conficker client authenticates the encrypted binary as follows Using the embedded public key E, compute the signature verification to recover M Decrypt the encrypted binary using RC4 and M as the key Verify that the hash of F is in fact M For Conficker A, the RSA key is 1024-bits and 2048-bits for Conficker B, both of which are listed in the paper That s a large public key for Conficker B but it is dwarfed by the 512-bit symmetric key used in RC4 Yes RC4 can support such huge key sizes, and I will explain in a future post how this is possible http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/223940.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/223940.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-19 12:01:27 - No Tricks - Earlier this month was the historic event of non-Latin domain names being introduced on the Internet by ICANN While half the global internet population does not have a Latin language as their mother tongue, sites can now have Arabic names for example and eventually Chinese, Thai and Tamil At the blog of security company Sûnnet Beskerming they have a post which points out some security risks associated with the new non-Latin names A risk, which isn't immediately obvious, is that this opens up a new world of opportunity for scammers and phishers to register domains that will visually appear very similar to legitimate sites in the address bar, but which will have a base address significantly different, thanks to being registered in a non-Latin script By relying on alternate character rendering, this could cause problems for users who may not be able to determine the slight differences between otherwise similar looking characters It also means that software and tools designed to help detect phishing or XSS attacks will have to expand their repertoire significantly to interpret and assess a much broader range of character and rendering sets The opportunities for typosquatting will probably multiply, and the Register recently reported this market to be worth almost half a billion dollars annually now You can read more about this market in Measuring Typosquatting Perpetrators and Funders by Tyler Moore from Cambridge University http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/223539.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/223539.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-18 12:12:37 - No Tricks - The University of California at Davis UCD and Yale University were considering moving their email systems onto Gmail, but both have put those plans on hold for the moment The CIO of UCD, Peter Siegel, said that he was not prepared to risk the security or privacy of the school s 30,000 faculty and staff Yale has delayed a more general migration to Google apps, including Gmail, citing security and privacy concerns over cloud-based management of their data Michael Fischer, a computing professor, said that Google stores every piece of data in three centers randomly chosen from the many it operates worldwide in order to guard the company s ability to recover lost information but that also makes the data subject to the vagaries of foreign laws and governments, Fischer said He added that Google was not willing to provide ITS with a list of countries to which the University s data could be sent, but only a list of about 15 countries to which the data would not be sent So there is a concern that the personal data of students and faculty is being stored outside US jurisdictions However neither UCD or Yale ruled out migrating to Google cloud applications once there was adequate transparency for the protection of data http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/223092.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/223092.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-17 11:10:28 - No Tricks - It has been widely reported recently that Microsoft s share of the global browser market has fallen below 60pourcents for the first time If this trends continues then Firefox is forecasted to overtake IE by Christmas 2012 Don Resinger at eWeek has given his reasons why IE is losing market share and also mind share as follows 1 The European Union 2 Microsoft's complacency 3 Internet Explorer's security 4 Rebounding from IE 6 5 The features aren't there 6 The Google conundrum 7 The united fight against Microsoft 8 The educated user 9 No-names are actually doing well 10 Microsoft is still lost on the Web http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/222745.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/222745.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-16 11:21:07 - No Tricks - Someone at work put up the following pattern on a whiteboard 1 x 1 1 11 x 11 121 111 x 111 12321 1111 x 1111 1234321 11111 x 11111 123454321 111111 x 111111 12345654321 1111111 x 1111111 1234567654321 11111111 x 11111111 123456787654321 111111111 x 111111111 12345678987654321 So squaring a number that is all 1 s gives a numerical palindrome Why Well there is a nice simple visual answerimageMore on such patterns here http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/222598.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/222598.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-14 23:57:54 - No Tricks - The EFF has an article on the changes to the privacy policy at Facebook over the last few years noting five significant changes downgrades since 2005 In short Facebook has flipped from a private social network to one where your data is largely public by default, mainly since Facebook can profit by selling this information to advertisers and business partners Here is the 2005 privacy language No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings and the April 2010 version When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you The term General Information includes your and your friends names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to everyone Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing or not making the connection Quite a change Matt McKeon has produced an interesting interactive infographic to depict privacy erosion on Facebook over the last 5 years image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/222361.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/222361.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-14 03:43:09 - No Tricks - cirtnet has made 1733 default passwords for almost 400 vendors available online as a searchable database, complete with a FireFox plugin Changing default passwords is security basics but its not always followed Last year an Australian student wrote a worm which compromised jailbroken iphones with SSH installed where the default password had not been changed http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/222048.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/222048.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-13 10:43:36 - No Tricks - About two months ago Mark Curphey Security Buddha , in a confessional post, informed us all of his intentions to move on from IT Security, and reinvent himself 20-style into web technology, agile development, social software and user experience He gave his reasons for moving on as follows For the last few years I have grown increasing disillusioned with the security industry to the point where after nearly two years of thinking and talking about it I have decided that it s time for me to move on There is a long list of frustrations and I have seriously thought about a last detailed shot over the bow with some home truths as I see them The reality is it will probably not be productive I had commentary about the security circus and the clowns, ring masters and performance artists that play in the big top commentary about the lack of genuine computer science that finds its way into security commentary about the lack of business science that is being adopted why aren t security people obsessed by Freakonomics commentary about the sad fact that for the most part we are still doing the same old shit 15 years after I first started the definition of insanity is to do the same thing twice and expect a different result commentary about the farce of PCI and related standards and people caring about trivial issues easy to understand and sensationalist in nature when looming holes that could have major impacts go unnoticed I could go on People thinking they need purple dinosaur features in their security software because some marketing spin says so and commentary about the sheer FUD being pumped out by the marketeers I have watched an industry spin out of control largely paying lip service to the term risk and watched sectors of it become largely irrelevant outside of their own self-fulfilling set of prophesies When things go right no one notices at least outside of security and when things go wrong everyone points fingers That s a tough place to be impactful and remain positive A tough place to be impactful and remain positive Mark s new blog is here, and he still seems to have a few comments to make on security yet http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/221770.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/221770.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-09 19:34:51 - No Tricks - Matthew Hackling, provider of outlandish security punditry from an Australian perspective, has posted a suggested list of artefacts that a CISO should have to act as the conduct of the information security symphony in an organisation, 1 Audit issue register lead violin, sometimes a bit too screechy 2 Enterprise risk register 3 Significant business unit risk registers 4 Compliance requirement register the timpani 5 Mapping of compliance requirements to your Information Security Management System ISMS 6 Control testing management reports and database 7 Management reporting template 8 Existing enterprise security plan and perhaps security plans of significant business units 9 List of business units by criticality 10 List of business processes by criticality within business units 11 List of business applications by criticality with function descriptions 12 Current security budget 13 Business case template and submission procedures 14 Document map of ISMS with status of documents within it approved, under review, drafted, not started 15 Organisation chart 16 List of security projects with budget and status 17 List of business projects by criticality to business success 18 Enterprise security architecture well at least the zone model with zones mapped to examples in the existing environment 19 Data classification scheme Reblog this post with Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/220361.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/220361.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-09 01:45:20 - No Tricks - I, like quite a few other people, posted on the recent NYT article which showed a horrendously complex PowerPoint slide created to depict the situation in Afghanistan, and the challenges facing US military decision makers Another more informative view of the Afghan predicament can be found at a German site called The Afghan Conflict, which appears to be the result of collaboration between Marc Tiedemann and several colleagues to produce a visual map of possible scenarios in the conflict From the site When we started researching this topic we very quickly saw, that the debate whether to pull out the troops, staying or even enforcing is not too much about arguments, it s a battle of possible scenarios Every side seems to have their own positive and negative visions of how things will happen in the future if certain steps are done The resulting map The Afghan Conflict - A Map of Possible Scenarios is the attempt of a summary of the most popular possible scenarios around the afghan conflict, according to a pullout or stay of the Allied troops And is based on interviews with journalists, politicians and political foundations The resulting scenario map is quite large and the authors have not tried to compress it onto a single PowerPoint slide for convenience of presentation double click the image below to see a larger version image The scenario map is available as a poster but also as a Prezi animation which allows you to navigate across the scenarios and zoom in and out of detail I cannot find a way to link to the Prezi animation directly so you will have to view it from the The Afghan Conflict site I will have more to say about Prezi in future posts, and it appears to be a good navigation tool for complex infoscapes like the Afghan situation In the meantime please take a look at the showcase presentations at the Prezi site http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/220294.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/220294.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-08 10:54:13 - No Tricks - OWASP has a project called OpenSAMM, or the Open Software Assurance Maturity Model SAMM There is an audit framework for OpenSAMM, implemented as a spreadsheet with about 80 questions, grouped into collection of business functions and security practices You can get the spreadsheet here image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/220204.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/220204.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-07 13:54:24 - No Tricks - image source http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/219895.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/219895.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-07 11:23:34 - No Tricks - It has been widely reported that the global market share for Microsoft s Internet Explorer has fallen below 60pourcents While pundits, commentators and technologists discuss the future of IE, Zack Whitaker at ZDNet has done a bit of maths and produced the following extrapolation, showing FireFox passing IE market share around December 2012image Assuming Zack has done his maths correctly, the prediction is still pure data extrapolation The last year has been extremely unfavourable for IE with its security flaws and the playing out of the European anti-trust case against Microsoft Redmond may still be able to turn the prediction around http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/219856.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/219856.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-06 10:56:31 - No Tricks - The title is a comment reported in the NYT by Gen Stanley A McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, when shown the PowerPoint slide below see a larger version here image The slide was meant to depict the complexity of American military strategy in Afghanistan, and it seems to have over-succeeded Apparently PowerPoint is not just an obsession with business managers but also with senior military commanders as well But behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program PowerPoint stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making The following observation is quite insightful PowerPoint slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs But even with mounting reservations over the ability of PowerPoint to usefully represent military situations, no one is forecasting any change it is just too embedded in the military, as it is elsewhere And while no one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars , it takes a great deal of time with PowerPoint to keep a war going, let alone end it http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/219400.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/219400.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-04 11:21:38 - No Tricks - image A USB stick inserted into a terminal in one of its car parks is being blamed for a massive Conficker infection of Waikato hospital in New Zealand that broke out last December Over a 3 day period this incident infected 3,000 computer on the hospital computer network, impacting around 5,000 hospital staff A full report on the incident is still forthcoming, but a USB-borne strain of Conficker is expected to be named as the culprit A similar incident occurred in the server of the NHS in Leeds earlier in the year http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/218580.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/218580.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-03 11:42:18 - No Tricks - As April has just passed by, let s take a quick review of what I was blogging about in that month last year There were a couple of posts on entropy, the first NIST, Passwords and Entropy a review of NIST s approach to specifying password policies based on entropy and the second On the Entropy of Fingerprints, which found some research to indicate that password entropy is much lower than fingerprint entropy I also had a bit to say about a rant in Marcus Ranum and the Points of No Return where Ranum stated that the cumulative effect of many business-driven IT decisions taken over the last three decades have rendered a grand IT failure all but inevitable I followed that post up with The Relegation of Security to NFR Status which examined the weakened position of security, and IT in general, in decision-making processes There was a wonderful post by Julian Sanchez on his Climate Change and Argumentative Fallacies blog where he coins the term one way hash arguments, by which he means the asymmetric amount of effort required to pose a plausible argument as opposed to the effort required to debunk it I think we face the same problem in IT risk and security as I said in One Way Hash Arguments I also reposted The Data Centric Security Model DCSM with a link to the full document on Scribd, as the old link stopped working The document remains very well read with about 3,000 views in total today Some security documents on Scribd gave links to other documents I uploaded, and you can see all the categories here called collections by Scribd I announced in ENISA and Security Awareness that I would be speaking at an upcoming ENISA conference, which was a very successful get together My slides can be found here and let me point you to a great awareness presentation from Robert Hadfield of British Airways, which has just over 1700 views on Scribd Zero Knowledge Proofs was a longish non-technical introduction to this complex topic, and it has remained one of my posts that has a steady number of readers I also started Password Roundup 1, with my intention to create a series of posts on password issues, which always figure regularly in security news I got around to a second round-up about a month later but have stalled since then not due to lack of material Instead of waiting for me, please take a look at the Reusable Security blog by Matt Weir which is devoted to password issues and analysis Finally, I started to post some of the FreeMind maps I create to gather my thought son more detailed posts in Three Security maps in FreeMind and Flash Since then I have published all my FreeMind maps, including some that don t relate directly to articles http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/218164.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/218164.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-02 02:41:53 - No Tricks - The NYT has reported on the practice of outsourcing the breaking of captchas to people in Bangladesh, India and China The work is neither glamorous nor well-paid at 80 cents to 120 per 1,000 solved captchas, however there seem to be enough takers nonetheless The work is farmed through online exchanges like Freelancercom, where for example an in operator in Bangladesh with the alias Workcaptcha runs an operation turning out captcha solutions 24 hours a day, seven days a week Macduff Hughes, an engineering director at Google says that Our goal is to make mass account creation less attractive to spammers, and the fact that spammers have to pay people to solve captchas proves that the tool is working So we should see captchas as a deterrent rather than a foolproof way of distinguishing people from malware In fact if people are being employed to break these little authentication puzzles then they are working as intended to make sure that a person is behind the answer there is just malware in between hiding a mechanical turk The inventors of captchas probably did not expect that solving these puzzles could be farmed out so easily using Web 20 technology The bigger threat probably comes from the direct computer solution to captchas, which can be scaled and provide solutions in real time The very thorough analysis of the Koobface botnet at abusech included a section on its captcha breaking network, shown below image The captchas are broken in at most 3 minutes, and in many cases just a few seconds There is also evidence presented by Webroot that audio captchas are also being broken in real time by automated means Reblog this post with Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/218014.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/218014.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-02 00:07:08 - No Tricks - There are several reports stating that one and half million Facebook accounts are for sale on an underground forum by a hacker calling himself Kirllos, which equates to about 1 account in 300 being up for grabs VeriSign's iDefense group estimates that almost half of the accounts have been sold alreadyKirllos' is asking 25 for 1,000 users with less than 10 friends or 45 for those with eleven or more This is quite cheap given that e-mail IDs and passwords typically go for between US 1 and US 20 per account, and credit card and bank account credentials can go up to US 30 for credit cards and US 850 for bank accountsAs usual, Facebook users should check their passwords http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/218003.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/218003.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-05-01 18:11:27 - No Tricks - Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at the infrastructure services firm Neustar, gave a keynote presentation on Cloud Computing for Criminals at the recent Cloud Connect conference Joffe presents some figures which show that the computational size of the Conficker botnet dwarfs the current commercial offerings, based on measuring the number of systems, the number of CPUs and available bandwidth For Conficker these values are given estimated as 6,400,000 systems 18,000,000 CPUs 28 Terabits of bandwidth These corresponding measures for Google are 500,000 systems, 1,500,000 CPUs and 1,500 Gbps of bandwidth, with Amazon and Rackspace providing significantly less resources So Conficker is a massive ad hoc computational structure But is Conficker really like a cloud service Joffe says yes because It s available for rent Choose your geographies Choose your networks Choose your bandwidth Choose your OS Version Choose your specialty DDoS, Spam, Data Exfiltration and further the vendor has good qualifications Much more experience 1998 Larger footprint Millions of systems Unlimited new resources New malware No costs No moral, ethical, or legal constraints This all reminds me of a mail post by Peter Gutmann from 2007 called, World's most powerful supercomputer goes online, referring to the Storm botnet This doesn't seem to have received much attention, but the world's most powerful supercomputer entered operation recently Comprising between 1 and 10 million CPUs depending on whose estimates you believe , the Storm botnet easily outperforms the currently top-ranked system, BlueGene L, with a mere 128K CPU cores Using the figures from Valve's online survey http wwwsteampoweredcom status surveyhtml for which the typical machine has a 23 - 33 GHz single core CPU with about 1GB of RAM, the Storm cluster has the equivalent of 1-10M approximately 28 GHz P4s with 1-10 petabytes of RAM BlueGene L has a paltry 32 terabytes In fact this composite system has better hardware resources than what's listed at http wwwtop500org This may be the first time that a top 10 supercomputer has been controlled not by a government or megacorporation but by criminals The question remains, now that they have the world's most powerful supercomputer system at their disposal, what are they going to do with it And I wonder what the LINPACK rating for Storm is And I wonder what the LINPACK rating is for Conficker Related articles by Zemanta 1-in-10 Windows PCs still vulnerable to Conficker worm infoworldcom Quote of the Day Conficker Still a Loaded Gun, Waiting to be Fired techrightsorg Downadup Conficker One Year Later viewfromthebunkercom Reblog this post with Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/217975.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/217975.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-04-14 01:14:30 - No Tricks - Last November I posted about an email response by John Callas, CEO of PGP, trying to dispel the perception that a government agency might have the computing power to break 128-bit keys People seemed concern that while breaking 128-bit keys is beyond the resources of most people or groups, governments agencies still had a good shot He thought this extremely paranoid, using the example of a computing cluster that enveloped the entire earth to a height of one metre high would still require 1,000 years on average to recover a 128-bit key I just put up on Scribd a 2008 whitepaper from Seagate that discusses their reasoning for choosing AES-128 over AES-256 for hard disk encryption The whitepaper states that NIST has concluded and recommended that all three key-lengths 128-bit, 192-bit and 256-bit of AES provide adequate encryption until beyond calendar year 2031 NIST s recommendation above includes the threat model not only of predicting the key, but also of cracking the encryption algorithm The difference between cracking AES-128 algorithm and AES-256 algorithm is considered minimal Whatever breakthrough might crack 128-bit will probably also crack 256-bit Further, Seagate wanted to maximize the success of its solution by considering the additional business-side concerns Must promote compliance with laws controlling export from the US and import to other nations Must be cost-optimized Must be able to meet the needs of ALL target markets AES-128 is sufficient or exceeds all the above criteria They also went on to discuss the computational task of recovering 128-bit keys, where assuming Every person on the planet owns 10 computers There are 7 billion people on the planet Each of these computers can test 1 billion key combinations per second On average, you can crack the key after testing 50 percent of the possibilities it follows that the earth s population can crack one encryption key one drive only in 77,000,000, 00,000,000,000,000,000 years The graphic form the argument looks like image Nonetheless AES-256 is being widely deployed since it conveniently lies at the intersection of good marketing and pragmatic security In upgrading from AES-128 to AES-256 vendors can legitimately claim that their products use maximum strength cryptography, and key lengths can be doubled thus squaring the effort for brute force attacks for a modest 40pourcents performance hit http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/211764.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/211764.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-04-13 00:03:51 - No Tricks - Mike Davey from Wisconsin, who describes himself as someone who always liked to make things , has created a fully functioning Turing machine Many computer scientists such as myself went through at least one class where we had to learn about the theoretical intricacies of Turing s manifestation of a computable mathematical function tape, symbols, reading, writing, erasing, alphabets, halting states and so on Well that all would have been a lot more concrete and interesting with Mr Davey s device at hand, shown below image Please visit his site, the aptly named aturingmachinecom, to see a video of the machine in action The device is driven by a microprocessor but the computations - moving the tape and changing its contents under the head - are quite faithful to Turing s description The tape is not infinite but rather 1000 foot roll of white 35mm film, where binary characters can be read, written and erased Mr Davey says he is not deeply attached to his creation, and may be willing to part with it in a year or so http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/211312.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/211312.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-04-13 00:03:51 - No Tricks - The MIT Technology Review has reported a breakthrough in quantum cryptography from Anthony Laing of the University of Bristol, and several colleagues While quantum cryptography promises to furnish unbreakable key exchange protocols for example, there are many practical problems to be solved before such systems can be considered industrial grade The main drawback is that quantum cryptography can only be used over point-to-point connections and not through networks where data has to be routed That's because the routing process destroys the quantum properties of the photons used to secure messages The relevant properties of the photons are maintaining perfect alignment so that polarisation measurements at the receiver can be done accurately But unfortunately network or satellite routing is not very alignment-friendly Laing and his colleagues have devised a way to circumvent the alignment problem by encoding an additional dimension in the qubits that is independent of space In physics jargon the qubits are reference frame independent , making their encoded information far more robust to transmission This reminded me of asynchronous data communication where timing information is sent as part of the data so that the sender and receiver do not need to maintain common clocking information Full paper here 4 pages Related articles by Zemanta Theoretical Breakthrough For Quantum Cryptography scienceslashdotorg Quantum Cryptography Cracked schneiercom feature A tale of two qubits how quantum computers work arstechnicacom Reblog this post with Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/211311.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/211311.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-04-08 00:17:16 - No Tricks - The Las Vegas Sun has reported that the GPS tracking of drivers is being considered as a technology to support expected shortfalls in taxes on gasoline The Nevada Department of Transportation NDOT revealed at a meeting this week a study which estimates that reduced fuel taxation revenues due to the use of hybrid and gas-free cars could be as high as 6 billion by 2016 Nevada is considering several schemes to support a payment model based on vehicle miles travelled , including voluntary reporting the honour system all the way up to on-board GPS-based devices for wireless tracking of miles driven While this may seem a wonderful opportunity for technologists to rollout a sophisticated system, privacy concerns were raised immediately Scott Rawlins, NDOT deputy director, said privacy is a central issue in the debate Some say we don't want Big Brother following us around, Rawlins said How do we protect the privacy of those vehicle owners and not have that sense out there No simple or complex answers to the privacy issue as yet In June last year I made a long post on the risk of degradation to the GPS service, based on an assessment of the GPS program by the Government Accountability Office GAO , the audit and investigative arm of the US Congress The GPS privacy debate may yet be moot Reblog this post with Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/209931.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/209931.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-04-07 01:21:17 - No Tricks - March was a strong month for visitors over 2,300 and page views over 4,400 I was hoping for my first 222 month where I could claim at least 2,000 visitors, viewing on average 2 pages for 2 minutes Everything was on track until I made a short post on a password joke and well, hundreds of unexpected people visited for a quick read, giving more visitors but driving page views and visit times down Oh well There were a few posts on RSA The first on a service that will recover 512-bit keys in 2 weeks for 5,000, and the next two on the RSA power attack beginning with a summary of the technical details from the original research paper, followed by clarifications on the significance of the attack, mainly from other bloggers There were also several other technical topics I posted on which have been backing up for a while now I made a few remarks on the completion of the rainbow tables for GSM encryption in The Last Days of A5 1, and some background on the encrypted search breakthrough from mid 2009 in In Search of Encrypted Search this post is on the first page returned by Google for encrypted search so I might have to make it a little more comprehensive I also posted on the The Re-Keying Conundrum in light of modern encryption algorithms, prompted by the remarks of Eric Rescorla, who is fresh from completing a proposal for circumventing the well-publicised TLS Renegotiation Attack There was also an improvement to LanMAN hash searching from the inventor of rainbow tables, yielding a 300 billion per second search rate for these weak password hashes In the odds and ends department, I finally found out how likely a 25 sigma event actually is rarer than winning the UK Lottery 22 consecutive times , reported that The ISACA Risk IT Framework is rising on Scribd about 4,500 reads now , remarked on Passwords for USB Keypads, and mentioned a few more giveaways for the Microsoft SDL Also MoMA acquired the symbol, and I looked back at the posts I was making a year ago Finally in the humour department there was that password post and some beautiful observations on a Bruce Schneier Post Template http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/209512.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/209512.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-04-01 00:53:01 - No Tricks - image The MoMA in New York has added acquired in museum-speak the symbol into a collection in its Department of Architecture and Design, as reported in an Inside Out article The article says that was included as part of the original ASCII set defined in 1963 as a shorthand for the common accounting phrase at the rate of Its choice for formatting email addresses was made a few years later In 1967, American electrical engineer Ray Tomlinson joined the technology company of Bolt Beranek and Newman BBN , where he created the world s first e-mail system a few years later, in 1971, using a Model KSR 33 Teletype device BBN had a contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense to help in the development of ARPAnet, an early network from which the Internet later emerged Working with Douglas Engelbart on the whole program, Tomlinson was in particular responsible for the development of the sub-program that can send messages between computers on this network It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to the ARPAnet, while previously mail could be sent only to hosts that used the same computer In January 1971, was an underused jargon symbol lingering on the keyboard and marred by a very limited register By October, Tomlinson had rediscovered and appropriated it, imbuing it with new meaning and elevating it to defining symbol of the computer age He chose the for his first e-mail because of its strong locative sense an individual, identified by a username, is this institution computer server, and also because it was already there, on the keyboard, and nobody ever used it The MoMA collection is attributing as a contemporary work of art by Mr Tomlinson, and the image added to the gallery is displayed in ITC American Typewriter Medium, the closest approximation to the character used by a Model 33 Teletype in the early 1970s Related articles by Zemanta Design Why Is Held in Such High Design Esteem nytimescom New York's MOMA 'Acquires' Symbol Really appscoutcom Reblog this post with Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/207610.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/207610.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-28 20:54:15 - No Tricks - Here is a quick review of my posts from this time last year Some dramatic news that eventually came to my attention was the The Great Laptop Giveaway at US Airports, where a study sponsored by Dell concluded that over 12,000 laptops go missing each week in US airports More big number were reported in The Flap over Twitter where new statistics for Twitter showed that almost every metric was growing exponentially, and the micro-blogging service was dominated by power laws I also posted on Twitter and Extremistan, discussing how Twitter provides the basis for extreme behaviour since we are connecting a viral technology with social media Extremistan is a mythical country introduced in Taleb's Black Swan book to characterize non-Gaussian dynamics I had spent some time tracking down a copy of the paper Randomness Tests for Packed Malware which proposed statistical tests to distinguish packed malware from purely random data The authors found that packed malware does have a distinct statistical signature Sticking with statistical arguments, there was also a New Birthday Attack on DJBDNS, a secure version DNS I had also come across a presentation The Positive Trust Model and Whitelisting discussing the general merits of whitelisting Whitelisting is gaining credence, and while it may not be rapidly replacing blacklisting technologies, several companies are opting for hybrid solutions as the exponential growth of malware variants is simply outstripping the scan-and-detect sometimes called the block-and-tackle paradigm There was also a repost of The Wisdom of a Random Crowd of One describing how Google uses link data to create the PageRank algorithm The post was created in the context of answering the question of how we in IT Security can make better use of data Finally, I uploaded a few more of my FreeMind maps for my posts to the FreeMind Flash server, which provides an online navigation service Now you can get all the FreeMind sources here Related articles by Zemanta More Evidence of Extremistan seekingalphacom 10 Billion Tweets and Counting sitepointcom Study 79pourcents of Twitter Accounts Are Not Actively Used marketingpilgrimcom Reblog this post with Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/206276.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/206276.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-27 23:57:16 - No Tricks - I recently posted on the some new work by researchers at the University of Michigan which showed how an RSA private key can be recovered by sifting through a collection of faulty signatures The faults are created by lowering the power to the chip computing the signature, causing bits to be flipped in the signature multiplication chain I remarked that the coverage from The Register was a bit unfair in its headline of OpenSSL being broken, which was just the cryptographic library used in the proof-of-concept experiment to test the private key recovery procedure But as pointed out by Bradley Kuhn, the researchers seemed to stress the weakness of OpenSSL against the attack by mentioning it both the abstract and the conclusion of their paper But there have been some other posts bordering on the hysterical Techie Buzz, 1024 Bit Cracked, New Milestone, leads the chorus of RSA s demise The RSA encryption was believed to be quite safe and this level of a crack was not achieved, until now The methods used here are pretty low level and have given results in 100 hours The crack which was assumed to take a lifetime with brute force, has taken a mere four days This breaks the very backbone of RSA which believes that as long as the private key is safe, it is impossible to break in, unless guessed The post celebrates the fault-based factoring as an advance on the 768-bit factoring record achieved late last year However the factoring of the RSA 768-bit modulus was unaided by any tricks, and the researchers used modern factoring methods in a distributed computation amounting to over 10 20 operations The results are simply not comparable since the fault-based attack is so advantageous to the attacker A more sober review is presented by Phil Brass, of Accuvant Insight, in his post Recent Encryption Research Demystified, where he describes the publicity of the attack as headline hyperbole You should not be too worried about your online banking service since to carry out this attack on an online banking server, the attacker would need physical access to the online banking server s power supply, which means they would need to be inside the bank s data centre Given the wealth of other targets available to an attacker standing inside of a bank s data centre, theft of the online banking web server private SSL key by a difficult and time-consuming voltage regulation attack seems rather unlikely And as to the key recovery experiment itself The really strange thing about this paper is that while the researchers claim to have implemented the attack on a full-size SPARC Linux OpenSSL workstation, the actual hardware was a Xilinx Virtex2Pro FPGA, which was emulating a SPARC CPU, and which the researchers claim is representative of an off-the-shelf commercial embedded device It seems as if they are trying to have it both ways ie it is an attack against a full-size workstation, and by the way it also is an attack against something you might see in a typical embedded system He provides a good summary of the attack and offers that a better headline would be Obscure bug in OpenSSL library poses little risk to consumers A similar reality check for the hoopla is given by Nate Lawson of Root Labs Rdist, who begins by recalling that the brittleness of the RSA signature operation was identified in 1997 referenced by the Michigan researchers , with the advice to verify all signatures very carefully before returning them Lawson provides some more details on the error checking steps taken for signature computations in OpenSSL and he concludes that a much better job could have been done He is also a bit sceptical of the experimental environment but finally concludes this was a nice attack but nothing earth-shattering Finally, there is another de-hyped review by Luther Martin at Voltage, where he refers to the PBA Attack after the initials of the three Michigan authors He states that Devices that are designed to be secure, like HSMs and smart cards, filter the power so that you can't do attacks like the PBA attack, and with devices that aren't designed to be secure, there's always an easier way to recover a key from them than doing something like the PBA attack This means that we won't be seeing hackers using the PBA attack any time soon, but you'd never think this from seeing the way it was reported by the media Fortunately for this incident Voltage products use DSA rather than RSA for signatures, so advanced debunking for customers will not be required All in all, most everyone agrees, and is happy to say, that the work is clever and worthwhile to undertake, adding to our operational knowledge of cryptography The publicity was a bit overdone, and probably too many hours were needlessly spent by security professionals explaining details to various stakeholders Related articles by Zemanta 1024-bit RSA encryption cracked by carefully starving CPU of electricity engadgetcom RSA 1024-bit Private Key Encryption Cracked q-ontechblogspotcom 'Severe' OpenSSL vuln busts public key crypto gotheregistercom The PBA attack on RSA superconductorvoltagecom Reblog this post with Zemanta http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/206128.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/206128.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-26 22:59:55 - No Tricks - A funny take on the format of some posts from Bruce Schneier Catchy one-liner interesting, with link In this part of the blog post, Bruce quotes something from the article he links to in the catchy phrase It might be the abstract to an academic article, or the key points in a subject he's trying to get across To get the post looking right, you have to include at least a decent sized paragraph from the quoted source or otherwise it just looks like crap So I will continue typing another sentence or two, until I have enough text to make this look like a legitimately quoted paragraph See, now that wasn't so hard after all He might offer a short comment about the article here Finally, he will let you know that he wrote about the exact same subject link to previous Schneier article on the exact same topic and link to another previous Schneier article on the exact same topic I tried it myself recently in this post Interesting Last week I heard Sun Microsystems Cloud CTO Lew Tucker predict that IT expenses would increasingly track to the cost of electricity Lew s Law as described to a room of thought leaders is a brilliant theorem that weaves a microcosm of IT trends and recent reports into a single and powerful concept Lew s Law is a powerful idea whose time has come, with profound and far reaching impacts, including the automation of the network Full story here from Gregory Ness with some additional remarks here It was very liberating http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/205963.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/205963.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-26 01:53:32 - No Tricks - Eric Rescorla recently posted his view on including a re-keying function in security protocols, and he concluded that on cryptographic grounds re-keying is unnecessary Re-keying here means refreshing or renegotiating a session key say an AES key after a certain amount of traffic has been encrypted under the same key, or a given amount of time has elapsed say several weeks or months Rescorla opens his post with the statement that in my opinion, rekeying is massively overrated, but apparently I've never bothered to comprehensively address the usual arguments Re-keying is probably something of a preoccupation for Rescorla at the moment as he is reviewing several IETF proposals that include this functionality, and he is also fresh from completing a proposal for circumventing the well-publicised TLS Renegotiation Attack Regularly changing critical parameters is part of the conventional wisdom of security, based on the general principle that reliance on a given security parameter must decrease over time with its use Extended usage leaks more and more information to an attacker, and security parameters don t improve with age But need we be so cautious with the bulk encryption keys of a modern cipher like AES Do long sessions or large encrypted transfers really give an attacker an advantage that outweighs the additional complexity of including a re-keying sub-protocol The Unicity Distance Let s begin with the observation that only a small amount of data needs to be encrypted under a given key before the key is uniquely determined This threshold measure is called the unicity distance of a cipher, and for symmetric key ciphers it is proportional to the entropy of the key So for example, DES and AES each only require a handful of encryptions to be produced for the corresponding key to be uniquely determined Therefore, given just a few plaintext and ciphertext pairs an attacker has sufficient information in principle to mount a brute force attack In the case of public key systems, the unicity distance is in fact zero since a certificate contains all the information required to determine the corresponding private key More General Attacks One aspect of the re-keying issue is therefore to determine whether attacks more efficient than brute force become available as the amount of data encrypted under a given key is permitted to increase A general upper bound is provided by the birthday paradox which, under the assumption that encryption acts as a random mapping, states that ciphertext blocks will start repeating for purely statistical reasons when the amount of encrypted data is approximately the square root of the number of possible ciphertexts At this point the attacker gains advantages not directly in key breaking , and a basic requirement of the new AES cipher was to have a block size of at least 128 bits On the other hand, linear and differential cryptanalysis are attacks that directly use large amounts of encrypted data to amplify small statistical biases in the structure of a cipher to determine certain key bits In general there is no simple relation between the block size of a cipher and the data requirements of these attacks, since the number of rounds is also important For DES, linear cryptanalysis was the more efficient of the two attacks, and it still required 2 44 ciphertexts, amounting to about 280 terabytes of encrypted data Even under more favourable circumstances, the data requirements for mounting this type of attack on AES-256 are considerably higher Rescorla quotes two IETF submissions where re-keying is justified on the grounds of limiting the time to perform cryptanalysis or the amount of ciphertext that a attacker can collect While such precautions sound prudent, they make little sense with respect to AES with 128- or 256-bit keys since the corresponding key and ciphertext spaces are so vast In short, any attacks based on counting, enumeration, or storing encrypted data are not expected to be feasible The recent so-called Luxembourg Attacks on AES, and their variants, are very data intensive and limiting traffic encrypted under a given key to say, 1 Petabyte, would thwart these attacks But Expect Re-keying Even so, cryptographic arguments are most convincing to cryptographers, and cryptographic protocols are implemented within systems that are not engineered to the same level of security as say AES, and nor can they be The manager responsible for approving the transfer of sensitive financial data across the internet will probably feel better knowing all possible precautions are taken to prevent data loss, and that will include re-keying It is simply viewed as a prudent operational security practice no matter how convincing the cryptographic arguments are to the contrary Perhaps the most convincing argument for re-keying if not the only argument is to limit the consequences of a key compromise The manager mentioned above will probably be reassured to know that an accidentally exposed key only compromises 4 hours worth of transmitted data, and none of the data sent before or after that Of course you need more than just re-keying to guarantee such a property, but no amount of strong cryptography will give it to you either So we may agree with Eric that re-keying is overrated, but it is certainly rated http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/205601.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/205601.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-24 22:37:21 - No Tricks - I have been following the long-predicted public demise of A5 1 for a few years now, first in The Long Tail of Vulnerability for A5 1, and more recently in Another crack at open Rainbow Tables for A5 1, where the task of producing public rainbow tables for A5 1 was taken up in a project led by Karsten Nohl last August Nohl and his team are leveraging previous work done by The Hacker s Choice THC and using the parallel computing architecture of CUDA graphics chips to rapidly compute the rainbow tables They were asking for people to donate computing power and hoping for some results by last Christmas Nohl and colleague Chris Paget gave a project update at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress CCC , held in Berlin last December, and indeed they completed the computations by year end The project recovered from a major bug announced last October, which indicated a fundamental coding error in the linear feedback shift register LFSR components of A5 1 it has three In any case, it seems that the error was corrected, and the required table computations were completed in 3 months using 40 CUDA nodes considerably less than 80-node initial estimate, and the 100,000 year effort required on a single-threaded PC You can read more about the parameters of the rainbow tables on this project page, with some additional background on time-memory trade-off TMTO collected here On the project page the official status is given as A full GSM interceptor to collect GSM data could hypothetically be built from open source components We have not done so as it may be illegal in some countries So it seems that the project may have hit legal complications, in the same manner as previous efforts The last part of the CCC update describes how to intercept GSM traffic from open sources components to be used as input to the table look-up process, but a few important issues remain to be resolved before GSM traffic interception can be automated And as reported in the Tech Herald, the GSM Alliance believes that the channel hopping features of GSM will make the remaining stage difficult to complete, if not a practical impossibility and illegal in Britain and the US to boot Nonetheless, updates indicate that the project is continuing, and A5 1 must surely be entering the last days of its more than 20 year operational life http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/205121.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/205121.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-21 22:53:09 - No Tricks - Last December Moxie Marlinspike announced a cloud service for auditing the strength of WPA passwords for 29 The service tries to reconstruct the password from the user-supplied WPA session material and a hand-crafted dictionary of 135 million passwords Marlinspike's cloud service searches through the optimised dictionary in just 20 minutes, a computation that would otherwise take 5 days or so on a standard desktop Notice then that Moxie learns the password if it is found in his dictionary This might be an example of where customers would prefer Moxie to perform on encrypted search on your behalf the parameters are encrypted and you Moxie just learns a simple yes or no as to whether the corresponding password was found This is a encrypted search problem that could be solved in principle by the fully homomorphic encryption system devised by IBM researcher Craig Gentry in June of last year There was much fanfare around the breakthrough and googling ibm homomorphic encryption returns over 21,000 results today There is a long and informative article in Forbes under the headline IBM's Blindfolded Calculator, and you can also see a lecture by Gentry on his result here, given at the Fields Institute in Toronto last December Homomorphisms in RSA But what is homomorphic encryption Well RSA gives us a nice example, and recall that the textbook RSA encryption of a message M is given as E M M e mod N It is not hard to verify that E M1 E M2 E M1 M2 which in words states that the product of two encryptions is equal to the encryption of their product so RSA is a multiplicative homomorphism In particular, if message M2 is unknown but we have E M2 , we can multiply E M2 by E M1 to produce E M1 M2 So without knowing the value of M2, we can multiply it by M1 without first decrypting In the early days of RSA this homomorphic property was deemed to be undesirable, due to posited scenarios like the following one which in fact seems more likely today than they did 20 years ago Let s say Alice is going to transfer M to the account of Bob and sends an encrypted message E M instructing her bank to perform the transfer But Bob intercepts the message and multiples it by E 2 , the encryption of 2 The new message becomes E 2 E M E 2 M and Bob doubles his money without having to decrypt E M The PKCS 1 format has removed the threat of manipulating messages in this way by adding additional padding and fixed fields to messages which can detect such multiplicative manipulation While RSA is multiplicatively homomorphic it is not additively homomorphic, since in general E M1 E M2 E M1 M2 On the other hand, there are several discrete logarithm based encryption systems which are additively homomorphic but not multiplicatively homomorphic The point is that we need both addition and multiply operations or two other complementary operations if we are to build an encryption system with sufficient power to solve problems such as encrypted search Fully Homomorphic Encryption And this elusive property is what Gentry has created in his fully homomorphic encryption system The underlying computational problem that furnished this property was neither RSA nor discrete logarithm systems but rather a geometric construction referred to as an ideal lattice Lattices are special vector spaces that furnish computationally difficult problems that have been used in several other cryptosystems such as NTRU, and provide an alternative to the standard hard problems used from number theory Using the ideal lattice Gentry was able to show how to compute a circuit for problems such as encrypted search that can be evaluated without decrypting the data to be searched Both the encrypted term and data are used as inputs to the circuit, and the trick is to devise a method for securely and correctly evaluating the gates of the circuit Your computer uses built-in gates and circuits to evaluate computations, such as performing the multiplications and divisions to evaluate an RSA encryption or decryption during an SSL session for example And as such the computations are small and fast However for encrypted search the corresponding circuit needs to be built and represented in software, which leads to large and inefficient computations So this is why the result is a breakthrough but not a practical one at the moment Gentry has estimated performing building a circuit to perform an encrypted Google search with encrypted keywords would multiply the current computing time by around 1 trillion The Outlook for Encrypted Search It remains to be seen whether Gentry s theoretical breakthrough can be converted into a practical service, in the cloud or otherwise Gentry has worked with some other researchers from IBM and MIT to remove the requirement of using lattices and to just treat the fully homomorphic encryption as operating over the integers, which provides a simpler conceptual framework Making the central ideas more accessible will increase the chances of finding more practical solutions There is a recent review of homomorphic encryption by Craig Stuntz, giving more details and promising code in an upcoming post Stuntz also points to an article by Gentry in the respected Communications of the ACM which begins Suppose that you want to delegate the ability to process your data, without giving away access to it We show that this separation is possible we describe a fully homomorphic encryption scheme that keeps data private, but that allows a worker that does not have the secret decryption key to compute any still encrypted result of the data, even when the function of the data is very complex In short, a third party can perform complicated processing of data without being able to see it Among other things, this helps make cloud computing compatible with privacy Reading further requires a subscription but it is clear that the work of Gentry and his co-authors is being positioned pitched as a core service for cloud platforms, and I am suspecting IBM s platform in particular However, just at the moment, you will have to trust Moxie with your WPA password http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/203836.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/203836.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-19 16:39:20 - No Tricks - It was announced last month by Objectif Sécurité that Ophcrack, the open source framework for breaking Windows password hashes, has passed 10 million downloads Objectif Sécurité is a Swiss security consultancy founded by Philippe Oechslin, the inventor of rainbow tables One of the products offered by Objectif Sécurité is a collection of larger and more specialized rainbow tables to extend the base table distributed with Ophcrack The set of available table options is shown below IMAGE These are the professional tables and sell for 999, and see the site for the definition of the character sets covered The basic tables included with the Ophrack distribution are derived from a set of dictionary words To celebrate the Ophcrack milestone, Oechslin has also given free on-line access to a large rainbow table representing passwords made of 52 mixed case letters, 10 numbers and 33 special characters and up to length 14 He estimates that the time to crack most such Windows passwords is less than 6 seconds This fast password recovery is approximately 100 times faster than previous methods and is supported by hosting 90GB tables on an SSD device Memory usage in intense for rainbow tables as described here Oechslin has reported to Heise Security that for tougher, better selected passwords, the entire password space can be searched at a rate of 300 billion passwords per second Please take a look at the password recovery speeds at LockDownuk to understand what this innovation means For example, passwords of length 8 consisting of only upper and lower case letters can be cracked in 2 days, and only 9 days if digits are present in the password http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/203416.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/203416.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-18 22:59:47 - No Tricks - Last week I was reading a document published by my company called Dealing with the Unexpected, which gives some lessons learnt from the recent credit crisis Early in the paper the authors speak about a 10 sigma event, or an event that we only expect to see once in 10,000 years This piqued my interest because I remembered an infamous statement made by some financial leader during the onset of the financial crisis to the effect that we are now experiencing repeated 25 sigma events Already a 10 sigma event is quite unlikely, but a 25 sigma event is just absurd exponentially smaller, but just exactly how much A one in a million year event One in a billion years First, what is sigma In statistics and probability, lower case sigma is used to denote the standard deviation of a distribution, which as the name implies, is the accepted unit to measure how much an outcome can vary from its mean or average A Wikipedia article lists the following table for the likelihood of sigma deviations for the standard normal distribution image So at 6 sigma deviations we are already talking about events that occur once every 15 million years Note that the scale is not linear, and the difference between an 2 and 3 sigma events is less than the difference between 3 and 4 sigma events That is, the likelihood of increasing sigma events is decreasing at a decreasing rate So a 25 sigma event must be very unlikely indeed so unlikely that the standard references I searched don t even bother listing this value, including the news articles that carried the original quote But after searching directly for sigma events I found a wonderful paper from researchers at the business school of the University College Dublin The researchers are a little more pessimistic by a factor of 2 in their calculations since they are only concerned with positive deviations away from the mean, as shown in the diagram for the the 2 sigma case image The paper reminds us that the 25 sigma quote came from David Viniar, CFO of Goldman Sachs, who actually said We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row Not just one 25 sigma event, but several So the likelihood of those higher deviations was calculated to be image or 1-in-10 135 years for a 25 sigma event For example, this is much less likely than guessing an AES-256 key in one attempt The researchers offer the following comparison as to how unlikely such an event is To give a more down to earth comparison, on February 29 2008, the UK National Lottery is currently was offering a prize of 25m for a ticket costing 1 Assuming it to be a fair bet, the probability of winning the lottery on any given attempt is therefore 00000004 The probability of winning the lottery n times in a row is therefore 00000004 n , and the probability of a 25 sigma event is comparable to the probability of winning the lottery 21 or 22 times in a row Either Mr Viniar was very confused or his models were very confused Or potentially both A final quote from the paper However low the probabilities, and however frequently 25-sigma or similar events actually occur, it is always possible that Goldman s and other institutions that experienced such losses were just unlucky albeit to an extent that strains credibility But if these institutions are really that unlucky, then perhaps they shouldn t be in the business of minding other people s money Of course, those who are more cynical than us might suggest an alternative explanation namely, that Goldmans and their Ilk are simply not competent at their job Heaven forbid Yes Heaven forbid http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/203139.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/203139.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-18 14:47:45 - No Tricks - Under the Quick Links list at the top left of the No Tricks homepage, you can now access my document collection at Scribd, which contains about 100 interesting documents on risk, security and analytical methods The most popular document by far is the ISACA Risk IT Framework, which since I published it on Scribd almost a year ago, has received just over 4,000 visits and 1000 downloads It was recently selected by the Scribd administrators to be moved to their Rising List page The document is not too long at 94-pages and really develops a solid framework for developing and deploying an enterprise IT Risk program http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/202964.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/202964.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-09 22:20:06 - No Tricks - Researchers at University of Michigan recently devised a method for recovering the RSA private key used for signing by sifting through a collection of faulty signatures produced by the key A faulty signature is one where the attacker has caused bits in the signature computation to be flipped from one to zero, or zero to one Fault patterns that consist of just a single flipped bit permit an attacker to guess and verify a small piece of the private key called a window , and to eventually recover the entire private key given a sufficient number of such faulty signatures The researchers ran proof-of-concept experiments to demonstrate that a 1024-bit RSA private key can be recovered from a sample of just under 9,000 faulty signatures created by manipulating the voltage level to the processor computing the signatures There are two main ingredients to the attack a method to recover information about the private key given some faulty signatures, and then a method to actually generate or induce the faulty signatures We deal with the second point first Generating Faults Through Power Fluctuations The researchers chose to exploit vulnerabilities in modern circuitry to changes environmental conditions such as temperature or power fluctuations that inhibit signal propagation, and to thus induce faults in computations The researchers experimented with varying the voltage on a SPARC-based Leon3 server running Debian, using OpenSSL for signing operations Using runs of 10,000 multiplications the researchers discovered that 125V was the optimal value to induce single fault errors, and that reducing the voltage much further resulted in an exponential increase in faults totally spurious results image At this optimal voltage level the researchers found that from a sample of 10,000 signatures about 90pourcents would contain at least one fault, and 12pourcents contained exactly one fault Note that the attacker can distinguish between faulty and non-faulty correct signatures by verifying with the public exponent, but cannot distinguish a priori between faulty signatures that contain one fault as opposed to those that contain multiple faults As explained below, the most computationally intensive part of recovering the private key is performing repeated searches over a pool of faulty signatures looking for a particular fault pattern Guessing and Verifying Exponentiation Windows The signature of a message M is computed as the exponentiation M D mod N where D is the private RSA exponent, and N the corresponding modulus Exponentiation is computationally intensive, and is achieved through repeated modular multiplication The well-known binary method computes M d mod N by processing D bit-by-bit from left-to-right most significant to least significant bit in a series of squarings and multiplications The binary method can be improved upon by processing the exponent in groups of bits, say 4 bits at a time This approach is called the m-ary method and the groups of exponent bits are called windows the binary method can be thought of as the 1-ary method, processing 1-bit windows At each step in the signature computation, m squarings are performed followed by a single multiplication if the window is non-zero The attack devised by the researchers works by recovering the bits in the most significant window, followed by the next most significant window, until the entire private key is recovered If the current window targeted for recover is window W, then the attacker requires a faulty signature on M such that a single fault was induced during the processing of the exponent bits represented by W The researchers derive an equation that involves the message to be signed M, the faulty signature S, the value of the window W, the position of the fault, and the sign of the fault add or subtract By equation here we mean an expression that has a left-hand side and a right-hand side which can be compared for equality The attacker can then plug all possible values of W, the position fault and fault sign into this equation and collect solutions There will either be no solutions, one unique solution, or more than one multiple solution In the first and last cases, no information about D can be extracted since either the fault did not occur during the multiplication for W, or there are multiple faults in S and another pair M, S must be examined If the solution is unique then the bits of W are determined and the attacker can move on to breaking the next window using the same guess-and-verify approach The search for a given pair M, S that has a single fault in a position covered by a specified window W is computationally intensive If S is a faulty signature then the attacker cannot easily determine the number or position of the faults in the signature The researchers generated 10,000 signatures, of which 8,800 were faulty, and tried to recover the 1024-bit exponent Using an 81-processor cluster this took 104 hours, with the guess-and-verify step for each window taking 25 seconds The private key was recovered after 650 single fault signatures processed image Conclusion The Register has headlined the announcement as breaking OpenSSL, but this unfair OpenSSL was used in the experiments but other libraries are also likely to be vulnerable to restricting voltage to induce hardware faults As to the practicality, the attacker is required to have physical access to the device housing the private key, and be able to request or observe 10,000 or so signatures, computed under reduced voltage These seem to be quite generous circumstances for the attacker, and given such proximity the attacker may prefer to try for a Cold Boot Attack instead In any case, the attack shows the importance of verifying the correctness of signing operations all the faulty signatures could be detected by merely checking that M S E before returning any results Apparently this is what OpenSSL developers are doing at the moment http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/199927.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/199927.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-08 23:22:08 - No Tricks - Recently Microsoft published a simplified version of their SDL methodology, reducing the detail in the hope of making implementations a bit easier Microsoft has also made available its four core SDL Training classes introductions to SDL Threat Modeling, Basics of Secure Design, and Privacy for SDL as well as the supporting tools Finally, Adam Shostack has also made available Elevation of Privilege, the Threat Modeling Game, which he thinks is the easiest way to get started threat modeling just try it http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/199497.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/199497.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-07 23:28:12 - No Tricks - Bruce Schneier recently posted about a new USB stick that comes with its own on-board numeric keypad, permitting a password consisting of digits to be entered directly into the USB device to authorize unlocking Such a stick and keypad would circumvent the recent USB password vulnerability that was derived from a poor implementation of password verification on the desktop image The stick in question from Corsair shown above also uses AES-256 encryption to protect the data on the stick The AES-256 key for the stick is then likely to be derived from the user-supplied password say using PKCS 5 or RFC 2898 , or used to protect a file which contains a full-length 256-bit key In either case the 256-bit key will be derived from, or protected by, a password which has a much lower entropy Bruce points out that a 77-digit password would be needed to produce the same entropy as a 256-bit key since the logarithm to the base 10 of 2 256 is about 77 I made the same point in Are AES 256-bit keys too large where I calculated that a password based on the 94 printable ASCII characters would need to be 40 characters in length to achieve the same entropy of a 256-bit key since the logarithm to the base 94 of 2 256 is about 40 Deriving or bootstrapping AES keys from passwords is really an exercise in self-deception, especially when considering 256-bit keys The discrepancy between the low entropy of passwords and the astronomical keyspace of AES-256 simply cannot be reconciled Perhaps the situation would improve if a biometric such as a fingerprint was used to bootstrap a 256-bit key I did some research about a year ago and posted what I found in On the Entropy of Fingerprints Some work has been done by IBM researchers who estimate the entropy of fingerprints to be at most 85 bits, or approximately the same as a length 13 password based on the 94 printable ASCII characters An improvement, but still a long way from 256 bits of entropy http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/199180.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/199180.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-01 23:58:46 - No Tricks - Ron Kane of offering a service to factor 512 RSA keys for a cost of about 5,000, taking two weeks or so He describes the service as Estimation on calculating the private key is 2 weeks we have 2 separate clusters running, sometimes its rented to another company We will be calculating on our private cluster super computer, no groups companies other individuals involved, your private key will not be exposed to the internet anywhere Your private key will be sold once, only to you In case someone else asks us to factor the same numbers, we will decline the request How we work You make a down payment We will start calculating the key When the private key is ready, we will sign something with it and send it to you to verify it You pay us the remaining sum we agreed We give you plain numbers, or we can embed the private key in a smartcard multos or JCOP You can contact him here http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/196781.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/196781.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-03-01 00:18:42 - No Tricks - The US DoD has tentatively rescinded its universal ban on USB devices issued over a year ago, reintroducing them under controlled conditions and for limited use, as reported by Stars and Stripes The DoD introduced the original draconian ban to prevent malicious software from infecting defence networks However it seems that the combat need to transfer data quickly and conveniently has trumped any blanket security veto The new devices can only be connected to military networks, and used for data transfer when network resources are unavailable or overloaded In short, as a method of last resort According to Defence News, the drives are designed so that they can be tracked by system administrators, are password-protected, and store information in encrypted form Additional features include on-board anti-virus software and security rules that prevent copying or forwarding of certain information from the drive or saving unapproved information on the drive The move may seem somewhat untimely since suppliers of secure USB sticks are still reeling from a vulnerability that permits password-protection to be bypassed Wired reported on the announcement as saying that both hackers and troops will be rejoicing http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/196450.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/196450.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-27 14:53:22 - No Tricks - A quick summary of this month s posts A look back, Jan Feb 2009 A Short Security Manifesto NodeXL Network Overview, Discovery and Exploratio A dissection of Koobface Major Risks in the IT Industry Metrics for Managing Project Risk Simplified implementation of the Microsoft SDL Why use SSL When to use Pie Charts Lew's Law IT expenses converge to the cost of ele An Anonymity computation using R FSA Security Controls for protecting Customer Data How to write an Information Security Policy Six Myths in Assessing Risk AON 2010 Political Risk Map Another source of USB Randomness How to Render SSL Useless Get your Faraday Bag Single DES and Double Yolks The USB Password Vulnerability Plugging the Authentication Gap in SSL Fast computations on FPGA Clusters http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/196264.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/196264.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-26 18:27:45 - No Tricks - From the Falcon's View Stop talking about traditional risk management as some sort of magical rubric or panacea Start talking about threat modeling and legal defensibility Stop using ad hoc approaches to security architecture and solutions Start adopting a holistic, systemic ISMS-like approach Stop delegating ownership of security to IT or other non-business leadership Start requiring execs and the board to directly own and be responsible for security Stop relying on shortcuts to survive audits Start demonstrating actual due diligence by adopting a reasonable standard of care Stop looking for ROI to justify security Start thinking of security as a business enabler that facilitates better decisions and helps protect the business during both the good and the bad times http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/195976.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/195976.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-26 02:03:04 - No Tricks - As the No Tricks blog steadily builds up a body of posts about 150 now , I can look back a year or so and even surprise myself at what I was posting about Here are most of the topics I was considering early in 2009 Opinion and Information Moore's Lore and Attention Crash The Restaurant at the end of the Web Google's Storm in a Teacup Downadup's Password Cracking List Social Media Data in Flight and at Rest Financial Cyber Risk Guide from ANSI The Cobbler and the Shoe Assassin Twitter Twitter as your Personal Content Proxy Scoble's Law of Twitter Scribd Publishing on Scribd Data Centric Security Model hot on Scribd Entropy and Anonymity article featured on Scribd Some books on Scribd The Black Swan on Scribd Visualizations Tipping the Long Black Tailed Swan Algebraic Group Visualization SOX in Pictures image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/195773.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/195773.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-25 23:55:33 - No Tricks - There is a very informative analysis of the social network trojan Koobface at abusech The analysis details the four stages of the victim infection, which involves malicious shorts links, registering false Blogger accounts and hijacked web sites serving out malicious javascript At the time of writing early December last year , there were just over 34,000 malicious blogposts and short URLs, directing victims to over 500 hijacked websites Ultimately code is downloaded onto the victim machine to make it part of the Koobface command control infrastructure A CAPTCHA breaking infrastructure to register new accounts with Blogger, as shown below image According to the post, the infrastructure is very sophisticated The time between grabbing a CAPTCHA and breaking it is less than three minutes most of the time just a few seconds Due to the way how Koobface s infrastructure works, it s possible to break hundreds of CAPTCHA per minute In this way it s possible to register thousands of fake bitly Blogspot accounts per day The author wonders if the security industry is placing too much faith in CAPTCHAs http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/195719.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/195719.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-25 23:55:33 - No Tricks - Microsoft Research has released a new Excel 2007 add-in for rendering network visualizations NodeXL is a powerful and easy-to-use interactive network visualisation and analysis tool that leverages the widely available MS Excel application as the platform for representing generic graph data, performing advanced network analysis and visual exploration of networks The tool supports multiple social network data providers that import graph data nodes and edge lists into the Excel spreadsheet The graph visualizations seem stunning for Excel An example is shown below from Visual Business Intelligence, where the graph depicts shared Board memberships of major US companies image More information on using NodeXL and the external people Microsoft collaborated with to create the tool can be found here at CodePlex http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/195718.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/195718.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-24 01:24:11 - No Tricks - I was in a bookstore over the weekend and saw of copy of Identifying and Managing Project Risk by Tom Kendrick from HP The book was published last year but I know of his work on project risk metrics from an earlier whitepaper that really showed how to get a handle on measuring and managing project risks Here are some examples or predictive risk metrics which serve as a distant early warning system for project difficulties Project size scale risk Project duration elapsed calendar time Total effort sum of all activity effort estimates Total cost budget at completion Size-based deliverable analysis component counts, number of major deliverables, lines of non-commented code, blocks on system diagrams Staff size full-time equivalent and or total individuals Number of planned activities Total length sum of all activity durations if executed sequentially Logical length maximum number of activities on a single network path Logical width maximum number of parallel paths Schedule risk Activity duration estimates compared with worst-case duration estimates Number of critical or near-critical paths in project network Logical project complexity the ratio of activity dependencies to activities Maximum number of predecessors for any milestone Total number of external predecessor dependencies Project independence ratio of internal dependencies to all dependencies Total float sum of total project activity float Project density ratio of total length to total length plus total float General risk Number of identified risks Quantitative and qualitative risk assessments severity analysis Adjusted total effort project appraisal comparing baseline plan with completed similar projects, adjusting for significant differences Survey-based risk assessment summarized risk data collected from project staff, using selected assessment questions Aggregated overall schedule risk or aggregated worst-case duration estimates Aggregated resource risk or aggregated worst-case cost estimates And the last example, the Dilbert Correlation Factor collect 30 recent Dilbert cartoons and circulate to staff Have people mark each one that reminds them of your organization If the team average is under 10 Low organization risk 10-20 Time for some process improvement Over 20 Hire a cartoonist and make your fortune http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/194883.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/194883.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-24 01:24:11 - No Tricks - Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, from the Actuarial and Insurance department, conducted a study on risk terms in 2007 The study involved comparing notions and definitions of various terms in risk across several sectors and industries, including Information Technology IT The IT respondents listed the following major risks for their industry click to enlarge image The researchers noted that the IT sector had the largest number of risks By way of comparison, the major risks for the energy industry looked like this image Notice that IT risk is on the list but very much towards the bottom http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/194882.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/194882.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-21 22:53:14 - No Tricks - A short introductory post on the advantages of using SSL, and a nice FAQ as well Cost and performance are listed as the main disadvantages However you may want to also check out How to Render SSL Useless from Ivan Ristic and the additional comments here at Pat s Daily Grind image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193967.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193967.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-21 22:53:14 - No Tricks - Microsoft has announced the release of a new 17-page whitepaper that presents a simplified version of their Security Development Lifecycle SDL From the announcement One of the common misconceptions about the Microsoft SDL is that you have to be an organization the size of Microsoft in order to be able to implement it Another misconception is that the SDL is only appropriate for Microsoft languages and Microsoft platforms, and that you need to use some other methodology if you re writing code with Ruby for OS X The Simplified SDL white paper helps address these misconceptions by explaining how the SDL can be implemented with limited resources and applied to any platform image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193966.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193966.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-21 22:02:41 - No Tricks - image from Emergent Chaos http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193962.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193962.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-20 21:21:34 - No Tricks - Interesting Last week I heard Sun Microsystems Cloud CTO Lew Tucker predict that IT expenses would increasingly track to the cost of electricity Lew s Law as described to a room of thought leaders is a brilliant theorem that weaves a microcosm of IT trends and recent reports into a single and powerful concept Lew s Law is a powerful idea whose time has come, with profound and far reaching impacts, including the automation of the network Full story here from Gregory Ness with some additional remarks here image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193855.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193855.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-20 01:22:48 - No Tricks - In April 2008 the Financial Services Authority published their recommendations for protecting customer data From the Executive Summary This report describes how financial services firms in the UK are addressing the risk that their customer data may be lost or stolen and then used to commit fraud or other financial crime It sets out the findings of our recent review of industry practice and standards in managing the risk of data loss or theft by employees and third-party suppliers At just over 100 pages, the report details controls and best practices in the following areas to protect customer data 1 Governance 2 Training and awareness 3 Access rights 4 Passwords and user accounts 5 Monitoring access to customer data 6 Data back-up 7 Access to the internet and email 8 Key-logging devices 9 Laptops 10 Portable media including USB devices and CDs 11 Physical security 12 Disposal of customer data 13 Managing third-party suppliers 14 Internal Audit and Compliance monitoring http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193723.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193723.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-20 01:22:48 - No Tricks - Back in August 2008 I posted on some research I did on traffic confirmation attacks Traffic analysis is a collection of techniques for inferring communication relationships without having access to the content that is being communicated Traffic confirmation is a special sub-case that attempts to infer communication relationships amongst users whose communications are mediated through an anonymity system The graph below shows two curves representing the observed frequency of recipients from a MIX anonymity system The attacker is targeting a particular user Alice, and the red curve represents the minimal number of times her communication partners are observed, while the blue curve represents the maximal number of observations for all other recipients The graph is created from an anonymity system with N 20,000 users, using a MIX of batch size 50 and assuming Alice has 20 communication partners image The graph shows that after the attacker has observed about 250 messages from Alice, each of her recipients has been observed more often than any of the other recipients Therefore an attacker can conclude that the 20 most frequently observed recipients are the recipients of Alice, and the anonymity of her partners has been broken The details are explained in the previous post What surprised me was how easily the data for this graph could be programmed in the R programming language The native vector operations of R makes this all very simple, and the code is below b 50 N 20000 m 20 Nset c 1 N mset c 1 m Nplot 0 mplot 0 mmin 0 Nmax 1 s sample N, b, replace T s c s, sample mset,1,replace T for t in c 1 500 s c s, sample Nset, b, replace T , sample mset,1,replace T ts table s mmin min ts c 1 m Nmax max ts -c 1 m Nplot c Nplot, Nmax mplot c mplot, mmin plot mplot, type l , col red lines Nplot, col blue http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193722.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193722.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-19 00:47:58 - No Tricks - Great 1-page summary with graphics from business advisory firm Corporate Executive Board 1 The biggest risk my company faces is financial risk 2 My company is safe because we review risks and prioritize mitigation efforts annually 3 We are good at risk-sensing because we have invested in 3 enterprise risk management ERM systems 4 We are well protected because we have a strong quantitative model to measure risk 5 Our risk assessment is comprehensive because we account for likelihood and impact 6 We can sense and protect business better because we manage risks at the business unit BU level http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193339.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193339.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-19 00:47:58 - No Tricks - Nice 9-page advice from the UK Department of Trade and Industry image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193338.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/193338.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-13 00:31:50 - No Tricks - Back in December I posted about a new USB device with dedicated hardware for producing a continuous stream of high entropy bits based on sampling P-N junctions Another lower tech randomness source with a USB interface is described at this site, and is shown below image The device has a small hourglass, and as the sand falls from the upper to the lower chamber, the pattern of grains is sampled against a light-sensitive detector at a rate of 100 times per second The site claims that each sample yields about 9 bits of entropy based on statistical tests The device detects when all the sand has passed to the lower chamber and then rotates the hourglass 180 degrees, so the sampling process can continue The samples can be accessed through a USB interface The device is a prototype, and as yet not for sale, but costs about 100 to produce The advantage of the hourglass method over other more sophisticated and higher yielding devices is simplicity and transparency Perhaps so, and you can read more about the design here, and the entropy of the output here Finally While the hourglass is not precise, accurate, or repeatable as a timekeeper, and has been almost completely supplanted by better devices, it is a good source of random entropy It is still manufactured in quantity at low cost, and it is clean, compact, durable, and uses little energy The source of the random entropy can be easily understood, and observed to be functioning correctly without instruments An off-the-shelf photointerrupter can be employed to electronically observe the random entropy, and an open-source, standardized microcontroller can be used to control the process and interface it with a host computer Related articles by Zemanta USB Hourglass random number generator makezinecom Arduino-controlled hourglass makezinecom USB Hourglass random number generator electronics-labcom http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/191544.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/191544.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-13 00:31:50 - No Tricks - Here on Scribd image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/191543.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/191543.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-06 23:40:54 - No Tricks - It was reported in the Daily Mail this week that a woman bought a carton of half a dozen eggs, which she later found to be all double-yolked, as shown below image Since the chances of getting a single double-yolk egg are around 1-in-1000, then it appears that we have witnessed an extremely rare event, in fact one that is a practical impossibility If we assume that the likelihood of each egg being double-yolked is independent, then the picture above is conclusive evidence of a 1-in-10 18 event manifesting This is a bit less likely than guessing a DES key at random at 1-in-10 17 The Daily Mail article goes on to give reasons why this event is not as unlikely as it seems, because on face value, the event is so unlikely that we would never expect to witness it over the lifetime of all eggs that have ever been produced Apparently the eggs are all likely to come from hens in the same flock and of the same age which reduces the likelihood to only 1-in-729 million And the occurrence becomes even more likely or less unlikely take your pick when we account for eggs of a similar weight being sorted into the same boxes A bit more detail is given over at the wonderful Understanding Uncertainty blog If the 1-in-10 18 odds were correct then given the number of eggs consumed in Britain each year, we are looking at waiting 500 years to see the photo above, so the independence assumption is not plausible Factoring in that eggs coming from the same group who may have a propensity for double yolks , packing by weight, noting that some supermarkets can detect and sell double yolked eggs, then the event seems less impressive But impressive nonetheless http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/189323.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/189323.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-06 23:40:54 - No Tricks - Get your Faraday bag here, which you can mix and match with your Faraday wallet here image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/189322.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/189322.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-06 01:19:52 - No Tricks - In early January Heise Security reported that a German security firm had discovered a vulnerability in the password authentication process of several USB sticks that are rated as being highly secure The discovery has been widely reported, and lead to various responses from USB vendors Sandisk, Verbatim and Kingston, including patching and recalling their devices from the field The full list of effected sticks has been reported by Simon Hunt for example So what is the vulnerability Well when a user plugs in a password-protected USB stick their desktop starts the stick by launching a popup application prompting the user for their password You would expect that the user supplied password is then transferred to the stick for verification, and the stick grants access if the password is correct What German security company SySS, discovered is that the verification of the user supplied password is actually performed in the popup application itself , and an acknowledgment code is sent back to the stick indicating if the candidate password is correct or not By sniffing this traffic SySS determined that the acknowledgment code granting access is static, and in particular does depend on the password entered by the user Essentially the desktop popup verifies the user supplies password and then returns yes or no to the stick SySS captured the acknowledgment code, and then wrote some proof-of-concept code which injects the acknowledgement code into the memory space of the desktop popup so that the value returned to the stick is always the positive acknowledgement code Thus regardless of what password the user enters the hack ensures that only the positive acknowledgement code is returned, and the stick will always therefore grant access What is the impact of this vulnerability Well given the injection code, the password-protection can be defeated on sticks susceptible to the attack, which turns out to be a reasonably large class of commercial secure sticks All things being equal, the risk of a data breach from lost sticks is increased And losing sticks is increasing CSO Online recently reported on a UK survey conducted by Credant which revealed that 4,500 memory sticks have been forgotten in people's pockets as they take their clothes to be washed at the local dry cleaners The incident is all the more telling in that the vulnerability impacts devices that use AES 256-bit encryption and are rated as secure by the FIPS 140-2 certification process Users are paying quite a premium over vanilla sticks for the advertised additional assurance that their data are protected by a certified device using strong cryptography, and for some US government agencies such purchases are mandatory The relative ease with which the password protection was bypassed calls into question the value of the FIPS 140-2 process In Computerworld NIST is quoted as saying From our initial analysis, it appears that the software authorizing decryption, rather than the cryptographic module certified by NIST, is the source of this vulnerability, a statement read Nevertheless, we are actively investigating whether any changes in the NIST certification process should be made in light of this issue To be fair, the FIPS 140-2 focuses on verification of cryptographic modules and not the supporting software, however the incident highlights the narrowness of the approach and the expectation that certification is more than secure cryptography Steve Ragan of the TechHerald has commented that you are better off buy a cheap stick and installing TrueCrpyt yourself, and the whole incident is quickly becoming the first FUD-based news cycle for 2010 http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/189156.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/189156.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-04 01:08:31 - No Tricks - The IETF has announced a draft document that specifies changes to the SSL protocol which closes the authentication gap exploited by the renegotiation attack announced last November I posted a plain English explanation of the attack here, and you can find better graphical explanation here by Thierry Zoller check for updates at his blog The IETF and several vendors, including Google, Microsoft, and PhoneFactor, have been working on plugging this authentication gap since October Until now, the best defence against the attack was to disable renegotiation in SSL The attack was initially dismissed as a quirk in the protocol - unexpected yet harmless - but it has ultimately resulted in several relatively small yet fundamental changes to SSL that introduce cryptographic state from one run of the handshake protocol to the next The threat profile of the attack was raised when proof-of-concept code was written to demonstrate how the attack could be applied to steal Twitter passwords PhoneFactor has described the attack as the most severe against the core SSL protocol to date The vulnerability that was uncovered is the observation that SSL does not distinguish between the initial protocol handshake of the client connecting to server, and any subsequent in-band handshakes for the renegotiation of cryptographic parameters An attacker can establish an SSL session with a server and then later highjack an initial client SSL connection request to the same server, and splice the client request into the existing SSL session that the attacker has with the server This is possible since the server interprets the client connection request as a renegotiation by the attacker Any pending commands that the attacker has established with the server are then injected into the next client SSL-protected web session and executed in the context of the client using the client cookies for example The solution proposed by the new IETF draft is for both client and server to cache the validation data that is currently computed and exchanged as the last step in the existing handshake protocol A new protocol field has been introduced which indicates if the handshake is an initial or subsequent run renegotiation , and in the latter case, the cached validation data is included in the renegotiation protocol This prevents two independent sessions from being spliced together since the required validation data will either be absent or mismatched between the client and server It now remains to make any final tweaks to the protocol and to then deploy the revised protocol in existing SSL and TLS libraries, which is expected to be a slow and tedious undertaking One of the authors of the new draft, Eric Rescorla, was a co-author in a recent study to examine the rate at which weak keys produced by a flaw in the random number generator of OpenSSL on Debian from 2008 were being patched The study tracked a collection of approximately 50,000 public web servers over a period of 6 months Initially around 15pourcents of the servers 751 to be exact were using Debian-flawed keys in their certificates, and 30pourcents of the Debian-flawed certificates were still not re-issued after almost 180 days Let s hope for a better rate of patching in this case http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/188380.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/188380.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-01 21:55:13 - No Tricks - Pico Computing recently announced a single hardware accelerated server that can process 280 billion DES decryptions per second, permitting the full 56-bit key space to be searched in 3 days This is apparently a new record, and the announcement is a prelude to a presentation at the Black Hat DC 2010 digital security conference, January 31 through February 3 in Arlington, Virginia The effort was lead by David Hulton, Pico Computing Staff Engineer, who was previously involved in an abandoned effort to create rainbow tables to break GSM encryption The latest effort focuses on understanding how FPGAs can be used to produce computations that are power efficient and scalable In a companion Pico white paper, the impact of scalable FPGA clusters on password breaking is considered A dedicated FPGA cluster with 77 nodes can break can recover an WPA key in 11 seconds, representing an improvement of almost a factor of a thousand over the same time required by a standard dual core processor image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/187454.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/187454.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-02-01 01:17:31 - No Tricks - Well I have to say that I still have not got back into the swing of blogging after Christmas January has already come and gone with a only a single post to show, and I am grateful for the 1,500 visitors this month There is a great deal going on in security, and I am collecting materials for posts that I imagine will come next month This is the first post written on my new netbook, and I finally succumbed to the purchase after many months of indecision The post-Christmas sales finally got me I also purchased a copy Ultra Recall for capturing and editing web content, and added some plug-ins to Windows Live Writer for improved editing and content linking You may also have noticed the site enhancements provided by Apture that provide compact previews of linked content without having to navigate away from the current the page One of the built-in previewers is for Scribd content and I have added quite a few documents of late, clearing out pdfs that have been languishing on my hard drive, in need of review My latest uploads include State of Enterprise IT Security and Emerging, Jonathon Penn, Forrester How to Organize Email How to Secure Windows and Your Privacy -- with Free Software Rainbow Tables Explained A Probabilistic Model for Cyber Attacks and Protection A Status Report on the P versus NP Question On the Entropy of Arcfour RC4 keys The last document is a copy of a 1998 IBM technical report on RC4 then only referred to as Arcfour , examining the randomness of initial state and the cost of recovering the key through backtracking This time last year I had started another blog which I had hoped would be more informal and easier to write less time per post , and also give me some exposure to Wordpress blogging tools Quite quickly it became too hard to maintain both blogs and I ended up more or less abandoning the new blog and transferring some content over to No Tricks Moore's Lore and Attention Crash The Restaurant at the end of the Web Twitter as your Personal Content Proxy Social Media Data in Flight and at Rest Scoble's Law of Twitter It seems that I was just as interested in Scribd a year ago as I am today with Data Centric Security Model hot on Scribd Entropy and Anonymity article featured on Scribd Some books on Scribd Publishing on Scribd but there was still time for a few other posts as well Google's Storm in a Teacup Downadup's Password Cracking List Algebraic Group Visualization Let s hope I am back to full strength blogging next month http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/187145.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/187145.shtml Secuobs.com : 2010-01-26 16:25:02 - No Tricks - In December I gave a talk at the Zurich Information Security Colloquium, based on a post I made in October 2008 The slides can now be found on Scribd http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/185443.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/185443.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-12-17 13:28:10 - No Tricks - Here are my recent document uploads to Scribd Threat Classification, Web Application Security Consortium Statistical-based approach to password guessing Clobbering the Cloud NIST Statistical Test Suite 2009 Key Management Report from True Catalyst iPhone Privacy presentation from Nicolas Seriot http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/173345.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/173345.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-12-13 03:05:16 - No Tricks - Do you remember the blocker tag This was a proposal from researchers Ariel Jules, Ron Rivest, and Michael Szydlo, all affiliated with RSA Data Security, published and surely patented in 2003 It was about this time that the privacy concerns over information that could be collected about you and your habits by engaging in passive exchanges with arbitrary RFID readers was reaching its zenith Your RFID tagged items could be passively giving away a lot information without your consent or knowledge image Jules, Rivest, and Szydlo jokingly suggested that you could encase yourself in protective foil or mesh, which would make walking a bit more awkward but perhaps could be useful for wallets And now we have just such a wallet, shown below image It is advertised as an Identity Theft Preventing Privacy Wallet, retailing for 7995 The product advertising states that Most credit cards now contain tiny chips that provide a unique identifier that can be scanned to retrieve your billing details Such RFID technology can, unfortunately, also be corrupted by hackers using portable scanners in crowded airports, restaurants, and stadiums Our slim and surprisingly lightweight Privacy Wallets are literally woven from over 20,000 super-fine strands of stainless steel into a flexible fabric that feels like silk but protects your ID like armor plate Stronger than leather, with no sharp edges or corners and won t stain or scratch Inside, 6 credit card slots, 2 internal slots, and a billfold let you carry plenty of purchasing power completely shielded from today s high-tech pickpockets This could go well with your swine flu suit http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/171404.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/171404.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-12-11 04:08:58 - No Tricks - Bart Preneel is a professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Brussels, and leader of COSIC, one of the largest security and cryptography research groups in Europe This is the research group that produced Rijndael, which eventually became the AES Preneel is a frequent speaker on security and cryptography, and in this post we will review a recent presentation on the topic of the Crypto Year in Review Preneel begins by observing that cryptographic research is alive at well, with over 600 papers published on the pre-print server of the IACR, amounting to over 10,000 pages of written research Not all of these papers will be published, but it does give you some idea of the reading load to keep abreast of new ideas and developments His attention then turns to AES, which still remains secure despite the publication of several theoretical attacks AES now runs at 110 MB seconds in software, and Intel has announced direct hardware support beginning with its Westmere line of chips Referring to the security of AES-256, Preneel states that for 5 billion USD, a key cracking device could be built to search a 120-bit key space that would take a billion years This was about the same work required by the so-called Luxembourg Attack announced in June, which was the first attack against full AES-256 that saved significant time over exhaustive search though a large amount of ciphertext is required Preneel calls this an academic weakness, since it relies on a related key attack which is hard to arrange in practice and can be easily avoided by making the AES key schedule more non-linear The slide below shows that relationship between AES key size and the number of rounds There are several feasible attacks when the number of rounds is 10 or less with small key sizes The 2 119 effort of the Luxembourg Attack is located far above what is considered practical image Preneel then considers hash functions, the topic of his PhD thesis He gives a benchmark slide showing the complexity of collision attacks against well-known hash functions, assuming a 100K USD funded adversary using special hardware equivalent to 4 million PCs image The downward trend of the graphs is suggestive of a meltdown for hash functions, with the worst implications for protocols and signatures yet to play out The transition path to a better hashing standard via the SHA-3 hash contest of NIST in underway, and a new standard by will be selected by 2012 However Preneel is concerned that the design of SHA-3 will be based on state-of-the-art from 2008 that is, all of the additional insights and learnings produced in the evaluation of the SHA-3 candidates will not be exploited until SHA-4 It was a relatively quite year for public key cryptography, with no factoring records announced, but a lot of fretting over the coming upgrade of RSA-1024 keys in 2010 in compliance with US standards Elliptic curves are rising in importance due to support from the NSA, and quantum computers remain a very long term threat to the security of public key systems There are some additional topics considered by Preneel, mainly around protocols and deploying cryptography His summary is that 2009 was a relatively unexciting year on the surface but you may find interesting details when you look closer Also, always remember that cryptography is a building block for information security, an essential block but far from the whole story http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/170866.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/170866.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-12-08 02:05:39 - No Tricks - Following on from the recent results of a project on the feasibility of password cracking using cloud computing, a new cloud service for cracking WPA passwords has been announced by researcher Moxie Marlinspike, best known for his work on discovering subtle flaws in the SSL protocol The cloud service attempts to crack uploaded passwords against a 135 million word WPA-optimized dictionary on a 400 CPU cluster After capturing the WPA handshake, a client can rent the cluster for just 34 to the search through the dictionary, which is expected to take just 20 minutes If the cloud service does not find a password then a client can be confident that the submitted password is resistant to dictionary attacks no refund, you still pay for the assurance The Church Of Wifi has a project to create public rainbow tables for WPA based on common passwords, but the resulting tables only encode one million passwords because the tables must be recomputed for each network identifier ESSN , which acts as salt in the password derivation function Marlinspike opted to create his own WPA-optimized dictionary list which includes word combinations, phrases, numbers, symbols, and elite speak In Security Muggles I posted about finding ways to connect with management about security Robert Graham, CEO of penetration testing company Errata Security, has commented that When I show this to management and say it would cost 34 to crack your WPA password, it's something they can understand, he said That helps me a lot image via the Register http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/169520.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/169520.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-12-06 23:39:59 - No Tricks - There is a nice write-up in the very respectable IEEE Spectrum on the A5 1 rainbow table generation project run by Karsten Knol for cracking GSM encryption The write-up for Knol in the IEEE is a signal that his project has mainstream acceptance and attention The timeliness of Knol s project was heightened a few weeks ago when MasterCard announced that they would be using GSM as an additional authentication factor in their transactions This MasterCard feature may end up being very popular since IDC recently predicted that the mobile phone market will exceed one billion handsets by the end of 2010 Hopefully this huge demand will increase the deployment of the the stronger A5 3 algorithm that is being phased in during upgrades to 3G networks The evidence continues to mount that whitelisting is an idea whose time has come Roger Grimes at InfoWorld published a large list of reviews on whitelisting products, and he was pleasantly surprised that whitelisting solutions are proving to be mature, capable, and manageable enough to provide significant protection while still giving trustworthy users room to breathe Given that the amount of malware introduced in 2008 exceeded all known malware from previous years, viable alternatives to the current blacklisting model are needed Finally, Google recently announced that it will be offering its own DNS service, nominally to increase performance and security Sean Michael Kerner wonders whether Google DNS is resistant to the attacks reported by Dan Kaminsky last year, where common DNS implementations relied on poor random numbers H D Moore has forwarded Kerner some graphs he made on the sample Google DNS for randomness First, a plot on port scanning image and then a plot of source ports against transactions IDs image In both cases the graphs look quite random, and so both Kerner and Moore conclude that Google seems to be a right track here But Moore concedes that more testing to be done http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/169159.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/169159.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-12-06 23:39:59 - No Tricks - I traced a link to my post How fast are Debian-flawed certificates being re-issued to SSL Shopper, a new site for me, and I looked back through their news items and found a link to an SSL Threat model proposed by Ivan Ristić, the principle author of ModSecurity and a leader in Apache security Referring to the origins of his threat model, Ivan states that SSL is easy to use but also very easy to use incorrectly The ecosystem, which is built of the specifications, the implementations, the CAs and the PKI, is full of traps, each of which is very easy to fall into Once I started to spend significant time thinking about SSL I set out to build a model of the ecosystem, for my own education and to ensure that I understand it all That's how I arrived to the SSL Threat Model His threat model is represented as a FreeMind map, available as a graphic as shown below The threat model considers clients, servers, PKI, protocols, users and attacks, and perhaps the model needs to be updated in light of the new The TLS Renegotiation Attack image Ivan admits that the model needs some additional clarification, but it is probably more useful as a published draft rather than waiting for him to find the time to perfect the model the same reasoning lead me releasing my outline of a password book http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/169158.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/169158.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-12-06 13:42:53 - No Tricks - I normally don t write monthly summaries of my blog, but last month there seemed to be quite a bit to write about It was a good month for visits and page views, so thank you to everyone Here is the No Tricks dashboard from Google Analytics click to enlarge image And a review of the posts Opinion and Analysis The Other Google Desktop How fast are Debian-flawed certificates being re-i The TLS Renegotiation Attack for the Impatient More on TMTO and Rainbow Tables The Internet Repetition Code Security FreeMind map sources Not so sunny for Whit Diffie Security Muggles Quadratic Football Revisited FUDgeddaboudit MasterCard bets on A5 1 TLS Renegotiation Attack Whitepaper How big is 2 128 Visualisations Visualisations of Data Loss Navigation map of the Cloud Ecosystem Growth of Wal-mart across America Death Star Threat Modeling mini-Bruce for 89 News Recent uploads to Scribd Outline of a book on Passwords Upcoming Black Swan talk at ZISC Improving Blog Navigation All Posts on Entropy All Posts on the Birthday Paradox All Posts on Security with FreeMind and Flash All Posts on AES All Posts on Passwords http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/169087.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/169087.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-12-02 14:43:56 - No Tricks - Simon Hunt, VP at McAfee, has a great Google map mashup application that visually maps crypto laws to countries around the world, including individual US states The map was last updated in September image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/167809.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/167809.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-12-01 06:22:31 - No Tricks - The detailed data collected by DataLossDBorg has been uploaded to two of the popular sites for visualization of data The first is Swivel, and the graph from here shows the number of breached records as a percentage of the TJX incident where 45 million records were compromised this is represented as 100pourcents on the graph image The spikey nature of the losses was identified by Voltage Security as the log-normal distribution The DataLossDB data has also been uploaded to Many Eyes several times it seems , and searching on data loss gives several graphs, like this one for data loss by type image You can use the loss data set at Many Eyes to produce other graphs of your own choice Lastly, Voltage also its own great graphic, showing another representation of the relative size of data losses, which has a fractal feel to it image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/167206.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/167206.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-30 17:36:44 - No Tricks - I recently gave a simplified review of the TLS renegotiation attack Thierry Zoller in a 17-page whitepaper called TLS and SSLv3 vulnerabilities explained has provided an additional level of technical detail for understanding the attacks He makes good use of protocol flow diagrams and also considers the implications for SMTP and FTP, not only HTTP He also describes fixes for the attack and a simple method to test if a server is vulnerable to the attack using OpenSSL image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/166801.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/166801.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-30 13:55:52 - No Tricks - I have collected all my posts derived from research outlined in a FreeMind map here for convenient reference from my blog homepage Also, some of the mind maps below have been uploaded to the FreeMind site and converted into a Flash format, suitable for viewing over in a browser without the need to download The Unix-like format of the bullets is Freemind Source -post -link to Flash Anonymity on the Edge -post -Flash The Cold Boot Attack -post - Flash OpenSSL key generation in Debian -post - Flash Breaking A5 1 GSM encryption -post -Flash Ranum Anatomy of a Security Disaster -post -Flash The Positive Trust Model and Whitelisting -post -Flash Quantum factoring with Shor's algorithm -post How many people have ever lived -post GPS Service Risks -post Karsten Knol and A5 1 Rainbow Tables -post -Flash US Border Digital Border Search Directive -post NIST Password Guidelines -post http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/166736.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/166736.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-30 00:42:48 - No Tricks - I came across a 2006 email thread from John Callas, CEO of PGP, trying to dispel the perception that a government agency might have the computing power to break 128-bit keys He recounts a characterization of the required effort, that he attributes to Burt Kaliski of RSA Data Security now part of EMC Imagine a computer that is the size of a grain of sand that can test keys against some encrypted data Also imagine that it can test a key in the amount of time it takes light to cross it Then consider a cluster of these computers, so many that if you covered the earth with them, they would cover the whole planet to the height of 1 meter The cluster of computers would crack a 128-bit key on average in 1,000 years So that s 1,000 years of computation by a cluster that would envelope the earth to a height of one metre Callas point was that modern cryptosystems are essentially unbreakable against brute force attacks, and speculating over the computational power of three letter agencies against 128-bit keys is verging on paranoia Breaking passwords that protect accounts, data or larger cryptographic keys is a much more credible scenario to consider Callas claims that two thirds of people use a password related to a pet or loved one, and there is no need for a planet-sized cluster to guess those passwords image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/166168.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/166168.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-27 22:13:55 - No Tricks - Two weeks ago the Economist ran an interesting article Calling All Cars, describing how systems such as OnStar GM and Sync Ford that were conceived for roadside assistance have expanded beyond their original service offerings to include remote tracking and deactivation car won t start , slowing down a moving car to a halt no high speed chases , fault diagnosis and timely servicing Even so, 60,000 OnStar subscribers a month use the service to unlock their cars the auto equivalent password resets I have often wondered why AV vendors have not leveraged their platforms and infrastructure significantly beyond their initial offerings in the same way The larger vendors that service enterprise customers have a sophisticated update network for clients, that feeds into corporate networks for secondary distribution internally Desktops are equipped with software for searching against a database of signatures, accepting or initiating dynamic updates, monitoring and reporting Surely this is the basis for useful enterprise applications beyond the necessary but not so business-friendly malware scanning It is widely reported that the traditional AV signature cycle of detect-produce-distribute is being overwhelmed, and the effectiveness of AV solutions is decreasing But even of this was not the case it would be worthwhile to consider additional services bootstrapped off the installed base I think one generalization would be the extension of the search capability away from signature matching towards a Google desktop model - away from search-and-destroy to to search-and-deliver Imagine if Norton or Kaspersky were presented to users as document management systems permitting tagging, search of file content, indexing, and database semantics for files that is, provide a useful service to users beyond informing them that opening this file would not be a good idea In the corporate setting, desktop document search and analysis could provide many useful functions Let s take data classification for example I am not sure if we can ever expect people to label documents for data sensitivity Even if people were resolved to be diligent in the new year, there would still be a large legacy problem Imagine now that senior management could create a list of sensitive documents and then feed them into an indexer, which distributed data classification signatures to desktops The local software can scan for matching documents exact or related , create the correct labelling and perhaps even inform the users that such documents should be dealt with carefully, perhaps even pop-up the data classification policy as a reminder You could also track the number of copies and location of a given sensitive document, such as a drafts of quarterly financial results, which must be distributed for review but only within a select group Again management could define which documents need to be tracked and feed them into a signature engine for propagation to desktops If a document fell outside the defined review group, then a flag could be raised When a sensitive document is detected as being attached to an email the user can be reminded that the contents should be encrypted, certainly if the recipients are external to the company, and perhaps prevented from even sending the document at all The general innovation here is to permit client management to define search and response functions for deployment within the AV infrastructure, extending beyond the malware updates from the vendor I think there are many possible applications for managing documents and other information on the basis of the present AV infrastructure for distribution, matching and scanning, especially if local management could create their own signatures I have to admit that I am not overly familiar with DLP solution capabilities, and perhaps some of my wish list is already here today I would be glad to hear about it http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/165872.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/165872.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-27 03:24:00 - No Tricks - I was just searching through my notes in Google Notebook when a link to great set of videos called Death Star Threat Modeling came up It is a series of three videos from 2008 on threat modeling by Kevin Williams Sometimes as risk managers we struggle to explain the purpose of risk, and in IT Security the notions of threat, vulnerability and consequence But sit back and let Kevin take you through a tour of these concepts in terms of Star Wars, and in particular, the defence of the Death Star There are 3 videos and the link to the first is here, and the other two are easily found in the Related Videos sidebar image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/165675.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/165675.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-26 23:13:00 - No Tricks - In 2008 it was discovered that the OpenSSL package in Debian had been producing low entropy public keys for about a year and a half on its Etch distribution While it was relatively easy to patch the offending code only a few lines , it was going to be more difficult to track down and re-issue all the weak public keys that had found their way into SSL server certificates From my post on the topic An article in the Register, called Debian's Epic SSL Blunder, states that the number of SSL certificates that may need replacing could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions So while the OpenSSL PRNG code can be easily patched, identifying and replacing all the weak keys generated by the flawed code is a big operational headache It may be months or years before all the weak keys and their corresponding certificates are tracked down and upgraded At the Internet Measurement Conference IMC held in early November, researchers Scott Yilek, Eric Rescorla, Hovav Shacham, Brandon Enright, and Stefan Savage presented a study on the rate at which Debian-flawed SSL server certificates were being replaced In short, the news could have been better The researchers tracked a collection of approximately 50,000 public web servers over a period of 6 months Initially around 15pourcents of the servers 751 to be exact were using Debian-flawed keys in their certificates, and the observed rate at which these certificate were being re-issued is shown in the graph below image The researchers stress that as compared to typical patching rates for general vulnerabilities, re-issuing certificates for the sample of weak servers was very slow A long term study by Qualys reported this year that the patching half-life for vulnerabilities is 30 days, and so over a 6 month period we should see an exponential decrease in unpatched endpoints However the graph above is approximately linear, and 30pourcents of the Debian-flawed certificates were still not re-issued after almost 180 days The authors conclude that unlike other vulnerabilities which have been studied and typically show a short, fast, fixing phase followed by levelling off, certificates were replaced on a slower cycle with substantial fixing extending well past five months after the announcement We also found that in some cases certificate authorities continued to issue certificates to weak keys long after the vulnerability was announced Incidentally the researchers also found that approximately 2pourcents of the sampled servers 1000 or so were still using 512-bit RSA keys While such keys are not as weak as those produced by the Debian flaw, recovering the associated private keys was recently shown to require nothing more than a 3-day desktop calculation Nonetheless, this faction of 512-but keys is a dramatic improvement over the results of a survey conducted in 2000 which found almost a quarter of the 8,000 servers sampled were using 512-bit keys http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/165643.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/165643.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-26 00:32:06 - No Tricks - There are many posts and news articles of late on the TLS Renegotiation Attack I had hoped that just by skimming a large number of these that some process of web osmosis would magically transfer an understanding of this incident to me But alas the topic has remained impenetrable and I had to dedicate some time to tracking down the details By the end of this post you should have a better idea what descriptions of the attack like this one actually mean The vulnerability in the transport layer security protocol allows man-in-the-middle attackers to surreptitiously introduce text at the beginning of an SSL session The TLS Handshake TLS has a handshake protocol that performs authentication, negotiates cryptographic parameters and generates a session key, called a bulk encryption key in TLS-speak The cryptographic parameters include a key exchange establish method usually RSA or Diffie-Hellman , the bulk encryption algorithm and a hash algorithm for MAC-ing session data Collectively this information is called a cipher suite, and the set of acceptable cipher suites are pre-defined by TLS So the TLS handshake negotiates a cipher suite for the client and server, as well as a matching bulk encryption key Any time during an active TLS session either the client or server may choose to renegotiate the cipher suite One reason for doing this would be to refresh a bulk encryption key that had been used to encrypt a large amount of session data Also, the client for example could decide to change from AES128 to AES256 for additional security The point is that in all three cases negotiating a initial cipher suite, refreshing a session key or upgrading a key the TLS handshake protocol is used, and therefore these operations are indistinguishable to TLS This is the vulnerability that is exploited by the attack Splicing TLS Sessions To explain the attack further, let s assume that there is a client, server and an attacker the usual suspects The attacker establishes a normal TLS session with the server, which we will denote as TLS A, S Now let s assume that the attacker is able to hijack sessions from the client, so that any TLS traffic from the client is routed through the attacker When the client attempts to create a TLS session with the server- call it TLS C, S - the handshake data is sent to the attacker Now the attacker sends this client handshake data into TLS A, S which will be interpreted by the server as a renegotiation of TLS A, S Note that this is possible since the handshake for initial negotiation and renegotiation looks identical When the server replies the attacker just relays the message to the client, and continues relaying messages between the client and server until the handshake is complete and the session TLS C, S is created Traffic between the client server will now be encrypted and unreadable by the attacker The point here is that an attacker can splice a client request for a TLS session with the server into an existing TLS session with the server that the attacker has established Plaintext Injection Attack Even though splicing TLS sessions together is an unintentional property of the TLS protocol, it is not malicious as we have described it It may even seem charitable of the attacker to give up his TLS session with the server for the client However some mischief can be undertaken TLS is typically used to provide security for an application layer protocol, most often the HTTP traffic of a web application Now if a partial or incomplete web command is sent to a web server then it will cache that partial command until the remainder of the command is received, whereupon the now complete command will be executed Recall that the attacker has created a TLS session with the server, TLS A, S , and the attacker can send a partial HTTP command to the web server, which it caches, pending further input When the attacker splices the client-requested TLS session TLS C, S into TLS A, S then the first HTTP commands and data sent by the client will be added to the chosen HTTP command of the attacker that is pending in the web server cache, and then executed as a valid command This is being called a plaintext injection attack PIA even though the attacker does not have access to the encrypted TLS traffic, he can inject a portion of a HHTP command into the decrypted traffic sent by the client It is also being called a prefix attack since the attacker is manipulating the initial part of the HTTP command Responses This may all seem a bit theoretical, but the Register recently reported a practical implementation of this attack by Turkish grad student Anil Kurmus to steal Twitter login credentials that passed through encrypted data streams The simple and immediate workaround for TLS is to disable session renegotiation, with the long term solution being to explicitly distinguish between the first and subsequent runs of the TLS handshake protocol Eric Rescorla has a detailed post on the renegotiation attack, including both long and short term solutions http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/165352.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/165352.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-24 15:07:24 - No Tricks - Appiro has created a nice RIA map for navigating through the cloud computing ecosystem The map is a 3 X 3 grid with applications, platforms and infrastructure on one axis, and public private or hosted cloud solutions on the other The complexity of the map does not bode well for decision makers and the support to be provided by risk management See ReadWriteWeb for more commentary and background on Appiro http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/164536.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/164536.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-22 22:53:20 - No Tricks - imageI first came across the term fuhgeddaboudit in writing while reading the The Black Swan, where Taleb was answering the question as to whether journalists can be relied on to unearth all of the silent evidence on a given topic - fuhgedaboudit The term is short for forget about it , popularized in the US gangster media such as the Sopranos It has several related meanings including An issue is not worth the time, energy, mental effort, or emotional resources, Whatever the current topic of discussion may be, regardless of who has stated it even the speaker is thereby declared null and void and without merit see taken from here and here Both of these sentiments were called forth when I read the recent post from Anton Chuvakin on FUD-based security Anton was reminding us that FUD is alive and well in IT Security, and actually it has no where to go but up in terms of mindshare since more sophisticated methods, such as ROSI, have no where to go but down Even though FUD is a blunt instrument, Anton argues that it is very effective when it comes to getting things done, allowing real issues to be brought to the table, and limits reliance on decision makers to do the right thing which they often don t He even jokes that FUD is a more pragmatic triad for security than the venerated CIA The whole post was ethically stomped on by RThomas Russell someone from the New School of Information Security blog NSOIS who stated in a comment that FUD is the distorted and irrational exaggeration of fears and uncertainties for the sole purpose of manipulating the decision-maker The term FUD originated in the 1970s regarding IBM's selling tactics against competitors The FUD technique was used to destabilize the decision-maker's thinking process regarding potentially viable alternatives FUD issues raised could not really be answered by the decision-maker or the competitor, and so nagged at the back of the mind They had the effect of causing the decision-maker to retreat to the safe decision, which was IBM Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM was one famous phrase embodying the effects of FUD There are substantial reasons for framing risks in a way that goes beyond simple statement of facts and statistics, namely to deal with the psychology of risk The ethical security or risk professional will take pains to present scenarios that are feared in a way that the decision-maker can understand and, most important, to see those scenarios in perspective relative to other possibilities and probabilities and Russ further point home quite hard in an additional post over at the NSOIS, concluding that Security is always a secondary objective to some other upside enterprise objectives Security investments are always subject to evaluation relative to other investment alternatives, both inside and outside of IT These are the realities of enterprise performance and leadership Some security people may stomp their feet in protest, or resort to unethical tactics like FUD, but don t delude yourself that you are making the world or the enterprise a better place This is the same sentiment that I addressed in my The Relegation of Security to NFR Status post NFR stands for non-functional requirement and includes things like ensuring that there is sufficient network capacity, that the servers are adequately sized for peak loads, help desk support is created, back-up and recovery is deployed, the web interface is friendly, and so on FUD is not really IT Security s opportunity to get some skin back in the functional business requirements game, as we will still look like uninvited gate crashers at best, and bullies at worst At the recent CSI meeting in Washington, as reported by Dark Reading, with my take here in Security Muggles, several CSOs opined that we need better communication with business people on their terms so that Security people are earning a seat at the decision-making table They want to do more RSVP-ing than crashing Wade Baker over on the Verizon blog recently asked how people make security decisions, beginning from the frank assumption that In most cases, it is impossible to precisely formulate all factors in the decision, so we abandon the scientific route and revert to some other method of making it see below This is where our predominantly engineering mindset hurts us Instead, we should realize that organizations have always made decisions using varying amounts of information of varying quality Our dilemma is not new Valid and vetted approaches exist for structured decision problems with an abundance of precise data and also for unstructured problems with sparse amounts of fuzzy data These approaches are out there and are eagerly waiting for us to apply them to problems in our domain FUD can be seen as a response to this reality, but not a very structured response, and one that ignores the methods and techniques developed in other fields for coping with decisions under uncertainty Wade also ran a little survey on the approaches that security people use for decision-making and he received just over 100 responses You can read his summary of the response here, and his summary graph is below image Even given the small sample size it seems that some people are opting away from FUD, far away in fact I don t think IT Security as a profession, or any profession except maybe politics , has a long run future based on FUD since you don t need much technical skill or experience to pursue this approach, and there are probably plenty of people for hire to carry out such campaigns who are not particularly well-qualified in security So ethical considerations aside, I have never considered FUD a long term strategy Its persistence I imagine can be attributed largely to regular changes in the ranks of security decision makers, and a mind-numbing churn in technology and the IT sector as a whole The same new fears are being presented to new people, as FUD has gone into heavy syndication in the IT Security industry and its always showing in re-runs somewhere Put your time and energy somewhere else In short fuhgeddaboudit http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163968.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163968.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-21 23:55:57 - No Tricks - There is a great visualization of the spread of Wal-mart stores across America at FlowingData The visualization starts with the first Arkansas store in 1962 and plots the sprouting of additional locations all the way up to 3176 stores in 2006 The data for the visualization can be found here, researched for the paper Diffusion of Wal-Mart and Economies of Density image http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163870.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163870.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-21 23:55:57 - No Tricks - MasterCard recently announced see here and here for example that it will introduce out-band GSM authentication into its Chip Authentication Program Consumers will be able to authenticate banking and other online transactions using their mobile phones by either entering a password into the card reader sent to the phone by SMS or generated directly by a Java application on smart phone MSN Money states that This new development leverages the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones According to latest research from Forrester, the number of individual mobile users in Europe will increase to 344 million users by the end of 2014, representing 84pourcents of the Western European population Coupled with growing online banking fraud activity the UK Card Association reports that online banking fraud has jumped 132pourcents in 2008 to stand at a record 525m the possibility to harness the mobile phone for authentication purposes is considerable This strategic decision makes the A5 1 rainbow table generation project, led by Karsten Knol, all the more timely The project was announced at the Hacking At Random conference in August,and described in the paper Subverting the security base of GSM Knol has stated that one of the reasons for the project to highlight the weaknesses of A5 1 encryption is the increased usage of GSM as an additional out-of-band authentication mechanism for online protocol, and the MasterCard announcement may well prove his point However the stronger A5 3 algorithm is being phased in during upgrades to 3G networks, providing secure 128-bit encryption, which is immune to rainbow attacks Knol s project appears to have hit a snag about 3 weeks ago On October 29th it was announced that a critical bug was found All versions prior to the one released on 25 of October 2009 use a buggy LFSR to generate round function values Instead of producing 2 64 -1 distinct values there are in fact only 32 This means that tables that ought to not produce chain merges in the event of a collision because of different round functions do produce merges The message is a bit cryptic but it points to a fundamental coding error in the linear feedback shift register LFSR components of A5 1 The bug has been fixed and let s hope it does not delay the project too much http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163869.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163869.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-20 22:02:46 - No Tricks - The US Department of Homeland Security DHS announced last week new directives to enhance and clarify oversight for searches of computers and other electronic media at US ports of entry, justified as a critical step designed to bolster the Department s efforts to combat transnational crime and terrorism while protecting privacy and civil liberties Border searches as an issue flared up last year when a group including the Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF , the American Civil Liberties Union and the Business Travel Coalition, published an open letter calling on the House Committee on Homeland Security to limit searches to be appropriate and non-invasive The purpose of the latest policies is To provide guidance and standard operating procedures for searching, reviewing, retaining, and sharing information contained in computers, disks, drives, tapes, mobile phones and other communication devices, cameras, music and other media players, and any other electronic or digital devices, encountered by US Customs and Border Protection CBP at the border Notice that the scope of devices that can be searched is quite broad And well it might be, since the policy is designed to detect electronic evidence relating to terrorism, human trafficking, bulk cash smuggling, contraband, and child pornography, as well as other run-of-the-mill crimes Where practical, these searches will be conducted in the presence of a supervisor and the owner of the electronic device Devices should only be detained if there is probable cause to believe that the device contains evidence of a crime that border authorities are authorized to prosecute Devices may be detained for up to 5 days without justification, and this period can be extended in the case of extenuating circumstance but requires supervisor approval The policy also makes clear that your device or a copy of its contents can be sent to another location for additional assistance, which includes requests for translation, decryption, or general subject matter consulting Such requests must be approved by a supervisor, transmitted securely, and processed within 15 days The DHS reports that between Oct 1, 2008, and Aug 11, 2009, border authorities encountered more than 221 million travellers at US ports of entry Amongst these travellers, approximately 1,000 laptop searches were performed, land ess than 50 of the searches were detailed So using these figures, your chances of being searched are less than one percent of one percent per traveller volume However, I think the chances of being searched would be higher if the figures were restricted to travellers who were actually carrying a laptop or some other visible electronic device http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163570.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163570.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-20 22:02:46 - No Tricks - I was sent a link from StumbleUpon that referred to a post which showed the relative sizes of planets in our solar system, then compared them to our Sun, and moved onto comparisons with much larger other stars Surprisingly much larger stars - in fact in the final screen-size graphic our Sun is just represented as a single pixel as compared to the Antares, a red supergiant star in the Milky Way My 15-year-old daughter was impressed by this, and if you have a 15-year-old, then you can appreciate what a momentous achievement this is I started out my post-university life working in cryptography, then I spent a long time in IT Security, then IT Risk and most recently in Enterprise Risk Management ERM When I look back at crypto now it seems of similar consequence to the proportions of the Sun and Antares - not merely because my professional interests have changed, but in the vast equation that constitutes ERM, crypto is a variable with minor weighting Its gravitational force is largely exerted on specialists, and rapidly declines much faster than the inverse square law beyond that sphere It's just a pixel on the football-field sized collage of ERM http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163569.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163569.shtml Secuobs.com : 2009-11-20 22:02:46 - No Tricks - The title comes from a list of conclusions I gave at a presentation called Does IT Security Matter just before Christmas in 2007 The wonderful thing about the writing process is that every now and again you hit upon a pithy phrase like that which communicates so much But it's like mining for gold - you have to move a lot of earth to find the nuggets The full presentation is available on Sribd as shown below There have been about 1200 reads and 240 downloads Re-reading it now, the presentation could do with an update, however the core messages are still valid My main conclusions were There is a dependency between IT and IT Security but not a strategic relation IT and IT Security are good neighbours but not good friends IT Security is one area competing for attention and funding, amongst many If you don t make IT security matter, it won t Focus on securing business processes not the process of securing Excel is your new best friend - make your spreadsheets work with their business spreadsheets Does IT Security Matter http://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163568.shtmlhttp://www.secuobs.com/revue/news/163568.shtml