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The Role of Worst Practices in Insecurity

December 11, 2009 by

These days, security advisors talk a lot about Best Practices: establishes procedures that are generally held to yield good results. Deploy Best Practices in your organization, the advisors say, and your security will improve. That’s true, as far as it goes, but often we can make more progress by working to eliminate Worst Practices.

A Worst Practice is something that most of us do, even though we know it’s a bad idea. One current Worst Practice is the way we use passwords to authenticate ourselves to web sites. Sites’ practices drive users to re-use the same password across many sites, and to expose themselves to phishing and keylogging attacks. We know we shouldn’t be doing this, but we keep doing it anyway.

The key to addressing Worst Practices is to recognize that they persist for a reason. If ignorance is the cause, it’s not a Worst Practice — remember that Worst Practices, by definition, are widely known to be bad. There’s typically some kind of collective action problem that sustains a Worst Practice, some kind of Gordian Knot that must be cut before we can eliminate the practice.

This is clearly true for passwords. If you’re building a new web service, and you’re deciding how to authenticate your users, passwords are the easy and obvious choice. Users understand them; they don’t require coordination with any other company; and there’s probably a password-handling module that plugs right into your development environment. Better authentication will be a “maybe someday” feature. Developers make this perfectly rational choice every day — and so we’re stuck with a Worst Practice.

Solutions to this and other Worst Practices will require leadership by big companies. Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others will have to step up and work together to put better practices in place. In the user authentication space we’re seeing some movement with new technologies such as OpenID which reduce the number of places users must log into, thereby easing the move to better practices. But on this and other Worst Practices, we have a long way to go.

Which Worst Practices annoy you? And what can be done to address them? Speak up in the comments.

Filed Under: Privacy & Security Tagged With: ,

Soghoian: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight

December 1, 2009 by

If you’re interested at all in surveillance policy, go and read Chris Soghoian’s long and impassioned post today. Chris drops several bombshells into the debate, including an audio recording of a closed-door talk by Sprint/NexTel’s Electronic Surveillance Manager, bragging about how easy the company has made it for law enforcement to get customers’ location data — so easy that the company has serviced over eight million law enforcement requests for customer location data.

Here’s the juiciest quote:

“[M]y major concern is the volume of requests. We have a lot of things that are automated but that’s just scratching the surface. One of the things, like with our GPS tool. We turned it on the web interface for law enforcement about one year ago last month, and we just passed 8 million requests. So there is no way on earth my team could have handled 8 million requests from law enforcement, just for GPS alone. So the tool has just really caught on fire with law enforcement. They also love that it is extremely inexpensive to operate and easy, so, just the sheer volume of requests they anticipate us automating other features, and I just don’t know how we’ll handle the millions and millions of requests that are going to come in.

— Paul Taylor, Electronic Surveillance Manager, Sprint Nextel.

Chris has more quotes, facts, and figures, all implying that electronic surveillance is much more widespread that many of us had thought.

Probably, many of these surveillance requests were justified, in the sense that a fair-minded citizen would think their expected public benefit justified the intrusiveness. How many were justified, we don’t know. We can’t know — and that’s a big part of the problem.

It’s deeply troubling that this has happened without significant public debate or even much disclosure. We need to have a discussion — and quickly — about what the rules for electronic surveillance should be.

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There’s anonymity on the Internet. Get over it.

October 27, 2009 by

In a recent interview prominent antivirus developer Eugene Kaspersky decried the role of anonymity in cybercrime. This is not a new claim – it is touched on in the Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency Report and Cybersecurity Act of 2009, among others – but it misses the mark. Any Internet design would allow anonymity. What renders our Internet vulnerable is primarily weakness of software security and authentication, not anonymity.

Consider a hypothetical of three Internet users: Alice, Bob, and Charlie. If Alice wants to communicate anonymously with Charlie, she may relay her messages through Bob. While Charlie knows Bob is an intermediary, Charlie does not know with whom he is ultimately communicating. For even greater anonymity Alice can pass her messages through multiple Bobs, and by applying cryptography she can ensure no individual Bob can piece together that she is communicating with Charlie. This basic approach to anonymity is remarkable in its independence of the Internet’s design: it only requires that some Bob(s) can and do run intermediary software. Even on an Internet where users could verify each other’s identity this means of anonymity would remain viable.

The sad state of software security – the latest DHS weekly bulletin alone identified over 40 “high severity” vulnerabilities – is what enables malicious users to exploit the Internet’s indelible capacity for anonymity. Modifying the prior hypothetical, suppose Alice now wants to spam, phish, denial of service (DoS) attack, or hack Charlie. After compromising Bob’s computer with malicious software (malware), Alice can send emails, host websites, and launch DoS attacks from it; Charlie knows Bob is apparently misbehaving, but has no means of discovering Alice’s role. Nearly all spam, phishing, and DoS attacks are now perpetrated with networks of compromised computers like Bob’s (botnets). At the writing of a July 2009 private sector report, just five botnets sourced nearly 75% of spam. Worse yet, botnets are increasingly self-perpetuating: spam and phishing websites propagate malware that compromises new computers for the botnet.

Shortcomings in authentication, the means of proving one’s identity either when necessary or at all times, are a secondary contributor to the Internet’s ills. Most applications rely on passwords, which are easily guessed or divulged through deception – the very mechanisms of most phishing and account hijacking. There are potential technical solutions that would enable a user to authenticate themselves without the risk of compromising accounts. But any approach will be undermined by weaknesses in underlying software security when a malicious party can trivially compromise a user’s computer.

The policy community is already trending towards acceptance of Internet anonymity and refocusing on software security and authentication; the recent White House Cyberspace Policy Review in particular emphasizes both issues. To the remaining unpersuaded, I can only offer at last a truism: There’s anonymity on the Internet. Get over it.

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PrivAds: Behavioral Advertising without Tracking

October 12, 2009 by

There’s an interesting new paper out of Stanford and NYU, about a system called “PrivAds” that tries to provide behavioral advertising on web sites, without having a central server gather detailed information about user behavior. If the paper’s approach turns out to work, it could have an important impact on the debate about online advertising and privacy.

Advertisers have obvious reasons to show you ads that match your interests. You can benefit too, if you see ads that are relevant to your needs, rather than ones you don’t care about. The problem, as I argued in my Congressional testimony, comes when sites track your activities, and build up detailed files on you, in order to do the targeting.

PrivAds tries to solve this problem by providing behavioral advertising without having any server track you. The idea is that your own browser will track you, and analyze your online activities to build a model of your interests, but your browser won’t reveal this information to anyone else. When a site wants to show you an interest-based ad, your browser will choose the ad from a portfolio of ads offered by the ad service.

The tricky part is how your browser can do all of this without incidentally leaking your activities to the server. For example, the ad agency needs to know how many times each ad was shown. How can you report this to the ad service without revealing which ads you saw? PrivAds offers a solution based on fancy cryptography, so that the ad agency can aggregate reports from many users, without being able to see the users’ individual reports. Similarly, every interaction between your browser and the outside must be engineered carefully so that behavioral advertising can occur but the browser doesn’t telegraph your actions.

It’s not clear at this point whether the PrivAds approach will work, in the sense of protecting privacy without reducing the effectiveness of ad targeting. It’s clear, though, that PrivAds is asking an important question.

If the PrivAds approach succeeds, demonstrating that behavioral advertising does not require tracking, this doesn’t mean that companies will stop wanting to track you — but it does mean that they won’t be able to use advertising as an excuse to track you.

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Privacy as a Social Problem, Not a Technology Problem

October 7, 2009 by

Bob Blakley had an interesting post Monday, arguing that technologists tend to frame the privacy issue poorly. (I would add that many non-technologists use the same framing.) Here’s a sample:

That’s how privacy works; it’s not about secrecy, and it’s not about control: it’s about sociability. Privacy is a social good which we give to one another, not a social order in which we control one another.

Technologists hate this; social phenomena aren’t deterministic and programmers can’t write code to make them come out right. When technologists are faced with a social problem, they often respond by redefining the problem as a technical problem they think they can solve.

…

The privacy framing that’s going on in the technology industry today is this:

Social Frame: Privacy is a social problem; the solution is to ensure that people use sensitive personal information only in ways that are beneficial to the subject of the information.

BUT as technologists we can’t … control peoples’ behavior, so we can’t solve this problem. So instead let’s work on a problem that sounds similar:

Technology Frame: Privacy is a technology problem; since we can’t make people use sensitive personal information sociably, the solution is to ensure that people never see others’ sensitive personal information.

We technologists have tried to solve the privacy problem in this technology frame for about a decade now, and, not surprisingly (information wants to be free!) we have failed.

…

The technology frame isn’t the problem. Privacy is the problem. Society can and routinely does solve the privacy problem in the social frame, by getting the vast majority of people to behave sociably.

This is an excellent point, and one that technologists and policymakers would be wise to consider. Privacy depends, ultimately, on people and institutions showing a reasonable regard for the privacy interests of others.

Bob goes on to argue that technologies should be designed to help these social mechanisms work.

A sociable space is one in which people’s social and antisocial actions are exposed to scrutiny so that normal human social processes can work.

A space in which tagging a photograph publicizes not only the identities of the people in the photograph but also the identities of the person who took the photograph and the person who tagged the photograph is more sociable than a space in which the only identity revealed is that of the person in the photograph – because when the picture of Jimmy holding a martini washes up on the HR department’s desk, Jimmy will know that Johnny took it (at a private party) and Julie tagged him – and the conversations humans have developed over tens of thousands of years to handle these situations will take place.

Again, this is an excellent and underappreciated point. But we need to be careful how far we take it. If we go beyond Bob’s argument, and we say that good design of the kind he advocates can completely solve the online privacy problem, then we have gone too far.

Technology doesn’t just move old privacy problems online. It also creates new problems and exacerbates old ones. In the old days, Johnny and Julie might have taken a photo of Jimmy drinking at the office party, and snail-mailed the photo to HR. That would have been a pretty hostile act. Now, the same harm can arise from a small misunderstanding: Johnny and Julie might assume that HR is more tolerant, or that HR doesn’t watch Facebook; or they might not realize that a site allows HR to search for photos of Jimmy. A photo might be taken by Johnny and tagged by Julie, even though Johnny and Julie don’t know each other. All in all, the photo scenario is more likely to happen today than in the pre-Net age.

This is just one example of what James Grimmelmann calls Accidental Privacy Spills. Grimmelmann tells the story of a private email message that was forwarded and re-forwarded to thousands of people, not by malice but because many people made the seemingly harmless decision to forward it to a few friends. This would never have happened with a personal letter. (Personal letters are sometimes publicized against the wishes of the author, but that’s very rare and wouldn’t have happened in the case Grimmelmann describes.) As the cost of capturing, transmitting, storing, and searching photos and other digital information falls to near-zero, it’s only natural that more capturing, transmitting, storing, and searching of information will occur.

Good design is not the whole solution to our privacy problem. But design has the huge advantage that we can get started on it right away, without needing to reach some sweeping societal agreement about what the rules should be. If you’re designing a product, or deciding which product to use, you can support good privacy design today.

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