Schneier on Security

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Stir-Fry

Spicy squid masala stir-fry. Easy and delicious.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.

Tags: squid

Posted on March 13, 2015 at 5:29 PM • 45 Comments

Fall Seminar on Catastrophic Risk

I am planning a study group at Harvard University (in Boston) for the Fall semester, on catastrophic risk.

Berkman Study Group -- Catastrophic Risk: Technologies and Policy

Technology empowers, for both good and bad. A broad history of "attack" technologies shows trends of empowerment, as individuals wield ever more destructive power. The natural endgame is a nuclear bomb in everybody's back pocket, or a bio-printer that can drop a species. And then what? Is society even possible when the most extreme individual can kill everyone else? Is totalitarian control the only way to prevent human devastation, or are there other possibilities? And how realistic are these scenarios, anyway? In this class, we'll discuss technologies like cyber, bio, nanotech, artificial intelligence, and autonomous drones; security technologies and policies for catastrophic risk; and more. Is the reason we've never met any extraterrestrials that natural selection dictates that any species achieving a sufficiently advanced technology level inevitably exterminates itself?

The study group may serve as a springboard for an independent paper and credit, in conjunction with faculty supervision from your program.

All disciplines and backgrounds welcome, students and non-students alike. This discussion needs diverse perspectives. We also ask that you commit to preparing for and participating in all sessions.

Six sessions, Mondays, 5:00­-7:00 PM, Location TBD
9/14, 9/28, 10/5, 10/19, 11/2, 11/16

Please respond to Bruce Schneier with a resume and statement of interest. Applications due August 14. Bruce will review applications and aim for a seminar size of roughly 16­20 people with a diversity of backgrounds and expertise.

Please help me spread the word far and wide. The description is only on a Berkman page, so students won't see it in their normal perusal of fall classes.

Tags: risks, Schneier news

Posted on March 13, 2015 at 2:36 PM • 38 Comments

Threats to Information Integrity

Every year, the Director of National Intelligence publishes an unclassified "Worldwide Threat Assessment." This year's report was published two weeks ago. "Cyber" is the first threat listed, and includes most of what you'd expect from a report like this.

More interesting is this comment about information integrity:

Most of the public discussion regarding cyber threats has focused on the confidentiality and availability of information; cyber espionage undermines confidentiality, whereas denial-of-service operations and data-deletion attacks undermine availability. In the future, however, we might also see more cyber operations that will change or manipulate electronic information in order to compromise its integrity (i.e. accuracy and reliability) instead of deleting it or disrupting access to it. Decisionmaking by senior government officials (civilian and military), corporate executives, investors, or others will be impaired if they cannot trust the information they are receiving.

This speaks directly to the need for strong cryptography to protect the integrity of information.

Tags: cryptography, cyberattack, cyberespionage, national security policy

Posted on March 13, 2015 at 6:05 AM • 21 Comments

Data and Goliath Makes New York Times Best-Seller List

The March 22 best-seller list from the New York Times will list me as #6 in the hardcover nonfiction category, and #13 in the combined paper/e-book category. This is amazing, really. The book just barely crossed #400 on Amazon this week, but it seems that other booksellers did more.

There are new reviews from the LA Times, Lawfare, EFF, and Slashdot.

The Internet Society recorded a short video of me talking about my book. I've given longer talks, and videos should be up soon. "Science Friday" interviewed me about my book.

Amazon has it back in stock. And, as always, more information on the book's website.

Tags: books, Data and Goliath, Schneier news

Posted on March 12, 2015 at 2:05 PM • 17 Comments

The Changing Economics of Surveillance

Cory Doctorow examines the changing economics of surveillance and what it means:

The Stasi employed one snitch for every 50 or 60 people it watched. We can't be sure of the size of the entire Five Eyes global surveillance workforce, but there are only about 1.4 million Americans with Top Secret clearance, and many of them don't work at or for the NSA, which means that the number is smaller than that (the other Five Eyes states have much smaller workforces than the US). This million-ish person workforce keeps six or seven billion people under surveillance -- a ratio approaching 1:10,000. What's more, the US has only ("only"!) quadrupled its surveillance budget since the end of the Cold War: tooling up to give the spies their toys wasn't all that expensive, compared to the number of lives that gear lets them pry into.

IT has been responsible for a 2-3 order of magnitude productivity gain in surveillance efficiency. The Stasi used an army to surveil a nation; the NSA uses a battalion to surveil a planet.

I am reminded of this paper on the changing economics of surveillance.

Tags: cost-benefit analysis, economics of security, history of security, national security policy, privacy, surveillance

Posted on March 12, 2015 at 6:22 AM • 44 Comments

Equation Group Update

More information about the Equation Group, aka the NSA.

Kaspersky Labs has published more information about the Equation Group -- that's the NSA -- and its sophisticated malware platform.

Ars Technica article.

Tags: Kaspersky, malware, NSA

Posted on March 11, 2015 at 2:14 PM • 25 Comments

Hardware Bit-Flipping Attack

The Project Zero team at Google has posted details of a new attack that targets a computer's' DRAM. It's called Rowhammer. Here's a good description:

Here's how Rowhammer gets its name: In the Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) used in some laptops, a hacker can run a program designed to repeatedly access a certain row of transistors in the computer's memory, "hammering" it until the charge from that row leaks into the next row of memory. That electromagnetic leakage can cause what's known as "bit flipping," in which transistors in the neighboring row of memory have their state reversed, turning ones into zeros or vice versa. And for the first time, the Google researchers have shown that they can use that bit flipping to actually gain unintended levels of control over a victim computer. Their Rowhammer hack can allow a "privilege escalation," expanding the attacker's influence beyond a certain fenced-in portion of memory to more sensitive areas.

Basically:

When run on a machine vulnerable to the rowhammer problem, the process was able to induce bit flips in page table entries (PTEs). It was able to use this to gain write access to its own page table, and hence gain read-write access to all of physical memory.

The cause is simply the super dense packing of chips:

This works because DRAM cells have been getting smaller and closer together. As DRAM manufacturing scales down chip features to smaller physical dimensions, to fit more memory capacity onto a chip, it has become harder to prevent DRAM cells from interacting electrically with each other. As a result, accessing one location in memory can disturb neighbouring locations, causing charge to leak into or out of neighbouring cells. With enough accesses, this can change a cell's value from 1 to 0 or vice versa.

Very clever, and yet another example of the security interplay between hardware and software.

This kind of thing is hard to fix, although the Google team gives some mitigation techniques at the end of their analysis.

Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (3/12): Good explanation of the vulnerability.

Tags: exploits, Google, hacking, privilege escalation, side-channel attacks

Posted on March 11, 2015 at 6:16 AM • 32 Comments

Can the NSA Break Microsoft's BitLocker?

The Intercept has a new story on the CIA's -- yes, the CIA, not the NSA -- efforts to break encryption. These are from the Snowden documents, and talk about a conference called the Trusted Computing Base Jamboree. There are some interesting documents associated with the article, but not a lot of hard information.

There's a paragraph about Microsoft's BitLocker, the encryption system used to protect MS Windows computers:

Also presented at the Jamboree were successes in the targeting of Microsoft's disk encryption technology, and the TPM chips that are used to store its encryption keys. Researchers at the CIA conference in 2010 boasted about the ability to extract the encryption keys used by BitLocker and thus decrypt private data stored on the computer. Because the TPM chip is used to protect the system from untrusted software, attacking it could allow the covert installation of malware onto the computer, which could be used to access otherwise encrypted communications and files of consumers. Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

This implies that the US intelligence community -- I'm guessing the NSA here -- can break BitLocker. The source document, though, is much less definitive about it.

Power analysis, a side-channel attack, can be used against secure devices to non-invasively extract protected cryptographic information such as implementation details or secret keys. We have employed a number of publically known attacks against the RSA cryptography found in TPMs from five different manufacturers. We will discuss the details of these attacks and provide insight into how private TPM key information can be obtained with power analysis. In addition to conventional wired power analysis, we will present results for extracting the key by measuring electromagnetic signals emanating from the TPM while it remains on the motherboard. We will also describe and present results for an entirely new unpublished attack against a Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) implementation of RSA that will yield private key information in a single trace.

The ability to obtain a private TPM key not only provides access to TPM-encrypted data, but also enables us to circumvent the root-of-trust system by modifying expected digest values in sealed data. We will describe a case study in which modifications to Microsoft's Bitlocker encrypted metadata prevents software-level detection of changes to the BIOS.

Differential power analysis is a powerful cryptanalytic attack. Basically, it examines a chip's power consumption while it performs encryption and decryption operations and uses that information to recover the key. What's important here is that this is an attack to extract key information from a chip while it is running. If the chip is powered down, or if it doesn't have the key inside, there's no attack.

I don't take this to mean that the NSA can take a BitLocker-encrypted hard drive and recover the key. I do take it to mean that the NSA can perform a bunch of clever hacks on a BitLocker-encrypted hard drive while it is running. So I don't think this means that BitLocker is broken.

But who knows? We do know that the FBI pressured Microsoft to add a backdoor to BitLocker in 2005. I believe that was unsuccessful.

More than that, we don't know.

EDITED TO ADD (3/12): Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft removed the Elephant Diffuser from BitLocker. I see no reason to remove it other than to make the encryption weaker.

Tags: BitLocker, CIA, encryption, NSA, side-channel attacks, Windows

Posted on March 10, 2015 at 2:34 PM • 57 Comments

Geotagging Twitter Users by Mining Their Social Graphs

New research: Geotagging One Hundred Million Twitter Accounts with Total Variation Minimization," by Ryan Compton, David Jurgens, and David Allen.

Abstract: Geographically annotated social media is extremely valuable for modern information retrieval. However, when researchers can only access publicly-visible data, one quickly finds that social media users rarely publish location information. In this work, we provide a method which can geolocate the overwhelming majority of active Twitter users, independent of their location sharing preferences, using only publicly-visible Twitter data.

Our method infers an unknown user's location by examining their friend's locations. We frame the geotagging problem as an optimization over a social network with a total variation-based objective and provide a scalable and distributed algorithm for its solution. Furthermore, we show how a robust estimate of the geographic dispersion of each user's ego network can be used as a per-user accuracy measure which is effective at removing outlying errors.

Leave-many-out evaluation shows that our method is able to infer location for 101,846,236 Twitter users at a median error of 6.38 km, allowing us to geotag over 80% of public tweets.

Tags: academic papers, geolocation, social media, Twitter

Posted on March 10, 2015 at 6:50 AM • 7 Comments

Identifying When Someone Is Operating a Computer Remotely

Here's an interesting technique to detect Remote Access Trojans, or RATS: differences in how local and remote users use the keyboard and mouse:

By using biometric analysis tools, we are able to analyze cognitive traits such as hand-eye coordination, usage preferences, as well as device interaction patterns to identify a delay or latency often associated with remote access attacks. Simply put, a RAT's keyboard typing or cursor movement will often cause delayed visual feedback which in turn results in delayed response time; the data is simply not as fluent as would be expected from standard human behavior data.

No data on false positives vs. false negatives, but interesting nonetheless.

Tags: biometrics, identification, malware

Posted on March 9, 2015 at 1:03 PM • 18 Comments