November 22, 2024

Hurricane Ike status report

Many people have been emailing me to send their best wishes. I thought it would be helpful to post a brief note on what happened and where we’re all at.

As you know, Hurricane Ike hit shore early Saturday morning. The wind, combined with a massive storm surge, caused staggering devastation along the Texas coast. Houston is further inland, so the big issue for us was and still is fallen trees and downed power lines. Rice University, as a result of what must have been a huge amount of advance effort, came through with flying colors. They had power and a working network pretty much the whole time. They didn’t have any water pressure for a while, but that came online Monday. Our main data center, built recently with an explicit goal of surviving events like this, apparently lost power for a while, at least in part. (I don’t have the full story yet. I do know that a failed DNS server caused our email server to experience problems.)

Our own house had no particular damage, although the back fence came down. We still have no power, but we’ve had water pressure (initially low, now fine) and natural gas the whole time. The hardwired telephone had a few outages, but continues to work reliably. Cellular phones were initially dicey but are now working great.

Luckily, the weather has been unseasonably cool, so we and all our neighbors have been leaving windows open. Over the weekend, the highs are in the mid 80’s (28-30C), with cooler weather at night, so we’ll do okay on that front. At this point, many restaurants are open, so the lack of power doesn’t mean living off canned food. Likewise, some gas stations and supermarkets are coming online again. Life, at least in this part of the city, is starting to resemble normality.

A looming concern is mosquitos. After Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 (see my photos), the big issue was clearly mosquitos. Lots of rain means lots of standing water, and that means mosquitos are on their way. Back then, few people lost power. This time, it’s going to get ugly.

Rice had a full faculty meeting on Tuesday morning. Our president announced that we would be resuming classes on Tuesday afternoon, but we could not have any assignments due or exams given this week. Last night, we got an email saying that everybody has made assignments due Monday next week, and that we needed do something else (without saying what). Apparently, there’s been an outpouring, among our students, of interest in volunteering to help the community (a good thing!), and I’d certainly like our students to get out and help. But if we’re supposed to get back to teaching, then that means work. I’m not sure how we’ll ultimately resolve this.

Unscientific data: our president asked for a show of hands at the meeting. How many faculty had no power? Maybe 90%. How many faculty had no daycare for their kids? Maybe 80%. How many faculty had significant damage to their homes? Maybe 20%.

For any of you who want to see what I saw, I took a bunch of pictures.

Meanwhile, I need to get back to work myself. We’ve got a research paper due Friday. Life goes on.

On digital TV and natural disasters

As I’m writing this, the eye of Hurricane Ike is roughly ten hours from landfall.  The weather here, maybe 60 miles inland, is overcast with mild wind.  Meanwhile, the storm surge has already knocked out power for ten thousand homes along the coast, claims the TV news, humming along in the background as I write this, which brings me to a thought.

Next year, analog TV gets turned off, and it’s digital or nothing.  Well, what happens in bad weather?  Analog TV degrades somewhat, but is still watchable.  Digital TV works great until it starts getting uncorrectable errors.  There’s a brief period where you see block reconstruction errors and, with even a mild additional amount of error, it’s just unwatchable garbage.  According to AntennaWeb, most of the terrestrial broadcast towers are maybe ten miles from my house, but that’s ten miles closer to the coast.  However, I get TV from Comcast, my local cable TV provider.  As I’ve watched the HD feed today, it’s been spotty.  Good for a while, unwatchable for a while.  The analog feed, which we also get on a different channel, has been spot on the whole time.

From this, it would appear that Comcast is getting its feed out of the air, and thus has all the same sorts of weather effects that I would have if I bothered to put my own antenna on the roof.  Next year, when the next hurricane is bearing down on the coast, and digital TV is the only TV around, it’s an interesting question whether I’ll get something useful on my TV during a disaster.  Dear Comcast, Engineering Department: please get a hard line between you and each of the local major TV stations.  Better yet, get two of them, each, and make sure they don’t share any telephone poles.

[Sidebar: In my old house, I used DirecTV plus a terrestrial antenna for HD locals, run through a DirecTV-branded HD TiVo.  Now, I’m getting everything from Comcast, over telephone poles, into a (series 3) TiVo-HD.  In any meaningful disaster, the telephone poles are likely to go down, taking out my TV source material. I get power and telephone from the same poles, so to some extent, they make a single point of failure, and thus no meaningful benefit from putting up my own antenna.

Once the storm gets closer, I’ll be moving the UPS from my computer to our, umm, shelter-in-place location.  I don’t expect I’d want to waste precious UPS battery power running my power-hungry television set.  Instead, I’ve got an AM/FM portable radio that runs on two AA’s.  Hopefully, the amount of useful information on the radio will be better than the man-on-the-street TV newscasters, interviewing fools standing along the ocean, watching the pretty waves breaking.  Hint: you can’t “ride through” a storm when the water is ten feet over your head.]

Preparing for a natural disaster

As Tinker readers may know, I live in Houston, Texas, and we’ve got Hurricane Ike bearing down on us.  Twenty-four hours ago, I was busy with everything else and hadn’t even stopped to think about it.  Earlier this week, the forecasts had Ike going far south of here.  That all changed and now it appears likely that Ike will hit the Texas coast not to far away.  The eye of the storm is probably not going anywhere near us, but we’ll be on the “dirty” side of the storm, and that means lots of rain and possible power outages.

Yesterday, I went to the supermarket and stocked up on assorted non-perishable goods, waters, batteries, and all that.  The lines were entirely reasonable.  The supermarket was clearly more prepared than I was, bringing in several shipping palettes of bottled water.  (Today, I’d bet the supermarket is crazier, but I’m not heading there to find out.)

My house is 51 feet above sea level and is outside the statutory flood plain.  At least in theory, I don’t have to worry much about flooding.  The most likely concern would be wind-driven rain getting through the not-terribly-well-sealed front door or some of the “French doors” that our builder overused on the house.  (“French doors”, which I doubt have much to do with France, are double doors, hinged on the side, and meeting in the middle where they latch to one another.)  My plan is to run a seam of duct tape around around the outside of the doors and windows on the first floor.  We’ll get in and out via the garage (which we tend to do, anyway).  I’m not going to try climbing up a ladder to the second story, since those “casement” windows seem to be more solid.

To evacuate or not to evacuate?  That’s the question.  When Hurricane Rita came through three years ago, we spent a thoroughly unpleasant 17 hours driving from Houston to Dallas (normally a four hour drive), where my parents live.  This time, our plan is to ride out the storm and then evaluate what we’re doing next.  Assuming the house is intact and we have power, we’ll be fine.  If we lose power and it appears unlikely to come back any time soon, or if our house is thrashed, then we’ll worry about evacuating.

Of course, I have to worry about more than just my family.  I also have to worry about my research group, the students in my classes, and so forth.  My security class meets this afternoon.  We’ll be talking about disasters.  (I tried to get some people from our university’s IT department to come talk about their disaster preparation, but unsurprisingly they’re busy preparing.  I’ll try to get some of them after it’s all over.)

For our research group, I’ve got a paper in the works for NDSS ’09, whose submission deadline is basically the same as when the hurricane is due.  The chair was nice enough to give us an extension, so now we just have to work out how we can keep doing the writing, even if there’s no power around.  (Felten has graciously offered to host our subversion server.  Luckily, the experimental work is all done, so it’s just a matter of getting it written up properly.)

Who knew disaster preparation could be so much fun?

A curious phone scam

My phone at work rings.  The caller ID has a weird number (“50622961841” – yes, it’s got an extra digit in it).  I answer.  It’s a recording telling me I can get lower rates on my card (what card?) if I just hit one to connect me to a representative.  Umm, okay.  “1”.  Recorded voiced: “Just a moment.”  Human voice: “Hello, card center.”

At this point, I was mostly thinking that this was unsolicited spam, not a phishing attack.  Either way, I knew I had a limited time to ask questions before they’d hang up. “Who is this?  What company is this?”  They hung up.  Damn! I should have played along a little further.  I imagine they would have asked for my credit card number.  I could have then made something up to see how far the interaction would go.  Oh well.

Clearly, this was a variant on a credit card phishing attack, except instead of an email from a Nigerian dictator, it was a phone call.  I’m sure the caller ID is total garbage, although that, along with the demon-dialer, says that the scammer has some non-trivial infrastructure in place to make it happen.

So, the next time one of you receives an unsolicited call offering to get you lower rates on your card, please do play along and feed them random numbers when they ask for data.  At the very least, there’s some entertainment value.  If you’re lucky, you might be able to learn something that would be useful to mount a criminal investigation.  Maybe half-way through you could suddenly have an important meeting to get to and see if you can get them to give you a callback phone number.

Update: reader “anon” points to an article from The Register that discusses this in more detail.

How do you compare security across voting systems?

It’s a curious problem: how do you compare two completely unrelated voting systems and say that one is more or less secure than the other?  How can you meaningfully compare the security of paper ballots tabulated by optical scan systems with DRE systems (with or without VVPAT attachments)?

There’s a clear disconnect on this issue.  It shows up, among other places, in a recent blog post by political scientist Thad Hall:

The point here is that, when we think about paper ballots and absentee voting, we do not typically think about or evaluate them “naked” but within an implementation context yet we think nothing of evaluating e-voting “naked” and some almost think it “cheating” to think about e-voting security within the context of implementation.  However, if we held both systems to the same standard, the people in California probably would not be voting using any voting system; given its long history, it is inconceivable that paper ballots would fail to meet the standards to which e-voting is held, absent evaluating its implementation context.

Hall then goes on to point to his recent book with Mike Alvarez, Electronic Elections, that beats on this particular issue at some length.  What that book never offers, however, is a decent comparison between electronic voting and anything else.

I’ve been thinking about this issue for a while: there must be a decent, quantitative way to compare these things.  Turns out, we can leverage a foundational technique from computer science theory: complexity analysis.  CS theory is all about analyzing the “big-O” complexity of various algorithms.  Can we analyze this same complexity for voting systems’ security flaws?

I took a crack at the problem for a forthcoming journal paper.  I classified a wide variety of voting systems according to how much effort you need to do to influence all the votes: effort proportional to the total number of voters, effort proportional to the number of precincts, or constant effort; less effort implies less security.  I also broke this down by different kinds of attacks: integrity attacks that try to change votes in a stealthy fashion, confidentiality attacks that try to learn how specific voters cast their votes, and denial of service attacks that don’t care about stealth but want to smash parts of the election.  This was a fun paper to write, and it nicely responds to Hall and Alvarez’s criticisms.  Have a look.

(Joe Hall also responded to Thad Hall’s post.)