The RISKS Digest
Volume 12 Issue 35

Tuesday, 17th September 1991

Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems

ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

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Contents

Computer security breach at Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant
Fernando Pereira
Allen Miller
DSA is weak
Jim Bidzos
The difficulty of RSA
Jerry Leichter
Re: RSA vs. NIST (digital security standards)
Richard A. Schumacher
Re: Export controls on workstations, ...
John R. Levine
Virus halted government computers in south China
PGN
Smart Pill Bottles (Joe Abernathy)
from CACM via VOGON
Retraction: The seriousness of statistics mistakes
Jeremy Grodberg
The seriousness of statistical mistakes
Clifford Johnson
Info on RISKS (comp.risks)

computer security breach at Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant

Fernando Pereira <pereira@klee.research.att.com>
Tue, 17 Sep 91 09:03:35 EDT
AP writer Steven K. Paulson reports on 9/16/91 that security lapses at the
Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant included the storage of top-secret bomb
designs for a week on a VAX accessible from the public phone network. In other
instances, workers transferred classified working materials from secure
computers to lower security ones, including PCs, because they were tired of
constant changes in the secure systems and wanted to work on familiar [stable?]
systems.

Head of DOE operations at Rocky Flats Bob Nelson said that the agency started
last year a $37M program to correct security problems, following the
recommendations of outside security experts.

Nelson also said that the unclassified VAX was used by employees working from
home, but that if someone tries to break in ``bells and whistles go off'' [is
he so sure???]

According to other documents obtained by the AP, other DOE computers had been
found to be vulnerable to break-ins.

   [Also noted by Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@thumper.bellcore.com> and by
   miller@lamar.ColoState.EDU (Allen Miller), who added the following comment.]


Nuclear weapons plans in unsecure computer

Allen Miller <miller@lamar.ColoState.EDU>
Tue, 17 Sep 91 13:26:05 -0600
   [...]

For those unfamiliar with Rocky Flats, it is a plant between Denver and Golden
which manufactures the Plutonium "triggers" for nuclear weapons.  These parts
are essentially small fission bombs which detonate much more powerful fusion
reactions in H-bombs.  These triggers are then shipped to the Pantex plant in
Texas where the bombs are assembled.  Rocky Flats has been shut down for
several years due to safety concerns but is apparently about to resume
production soon.


DSA is weak (Bernstein and Bellovin, RISKS-12.34)

Jim Bidzos <jim@RSA.COM>
Tue, 17 Sep 91 10:52:55 PDT
Bernstein comments in RISKS that my claim that "DSA is weak" is "entirely
unjustified" since we have learned equally about factoring and discrete logs.
As Bernstein himself notes, Greg Rose offered the discrete log-factoring
comparison, not me. (Greg Rose is not entirely incorrect, however.) Get it
right, Bernstein.

Since Bernstein obviously does not understand why I called DSA weak, I will
state my reasons again, and the group can decide rather than accept Bernstein's
erroneous statement.

DSA is cryptographically weak for 2 reasons.  (There are other serious flaws
not related to its cryptographic strength, but that's another story.)  First,
DSA proposes to limit the prime modulus p to 512 bits.  (Why is there a limit
at all?)  In "Computation of Discrete Logarithms in Prime Fields," (LaMacchia
and Odlyzko, from "Designs, Codes, and Cryptography 1," Kluwer, 1991) the
authors note that in systems with a fixed p, numbers of 512 bits "should
definitely be avoided."

Quoting from the conclusive paragraph of that paper, "Furthermore, since many
discrete log cryptographic schemes have the feature that they use a fixed prime
which cannot easily be changed, one has to allow for attacks that consume not
just a couple of months, but even a couple of years of computing time.
Therefore, even 512-bit primes appear to offer only marginal security." So,
with discrete logs and factoring being roughly equal problems, DSA is weak (one
or so p's to compute discrete logs over compared to factoring many 512
composites, not mentioning that the discrete log problem is "brittle") as I
stated.

Since NIST refuses to say whether p will be fixed for all users (or small
groups; maybe there will be 4 or 5 or a dozen or so p's), we have to assume
primes will be shared.  Hmmm. Like sharing needles.

Another weakness is that every signature requires a random value to be used in
its computation.  The NIST proposal does not warn you that if an attacker can
get one random value/signature pair, your private key is history.  (Maybe a
standard random value will be proposed...)

I'd say that's weak. And that the claim is justified.

Also, Steve Bellovin comments that DSS is only a signature standard and that
"breaking" it lets you forge signatures, but not violate privacy.  He's right,
but consider this: Public-key is inherently complex and the supporting
infrastructure (certificates, directories, etc.) is too difficult to recreate
such that DSA almost certainly will become the basis for a privacy proposal
from NIST/NSA.  Of course, two years from now, the controversy over shared p,
etc., will be over.  NIST refuses to rule out DSA as a future privacy standard,
so we should assume it will be the basis for one.  Remember, NIST stated
clearly that it took the needs of law enforcement (shades of S266) into
consideration in the preparation of DSA.  Will the Justice Department benefit
from being able to forge signatures? Maybe, but I would ask NIST if they are
proposing a future privacy standard so at least I'd know what we were getting.
                                                              --Jim Bidzos


The difficulty of RSA

Jerry Leichter <leichter@lrw.com>
Tue, 17 Sep 91 07:00:58 EDT
Recent RISK's have contained a number of incorrect statements about what is
known about RSA, and the difficulty of computation problems in general:

    1.  It has never been proven that inverting RSA is "as difficult as
        factoring".  This little link has been tantalizing people
        since the original RSA paper (and presumably tantalized
        R, S, and A before publication).  It has long been known
        that CERTAIN KINDS OF ATTACKS ON RSA imply the ability to
        factor the modulus, but that's it.

    2.  It is not known that factoring (expressed properly so that the
        statement makes sense) is NP-complete.  That is, even if
        P != NP, it is possible that a polynomial algorithm for
        factoring exists.

        It is widely believed that factoring is, in fact, NP-complete.
        However, the same was believed of linear programming until
        Khachian's algorithm.

    3.  It's often claimed that factoring has been studied for hundreds of
        years.  This is true but VERY misleading.  The basis for the
        recent computational advances, both in factoring and in the
        related but (as it turns out) much easier problem of primality
        testing (which make RSA possible), are based on randomizing
        algorithms.  The very notion of a randomizing algorithm is no
        more than thirty or so years old.  Essentially, all the great
        mathematicians of the past searched carefully under the lamppost,
            and dawn has now revealed that there's a lot more street out
        there than anyone suspected.

    4.  Ultimately, we don't yet know that P != NP, though it's hard to
        find any mathematicians who doubt it.  If P = NP, public
        key cryptography becomes impossible.  (However, private key
        cryptography can still be possible.)

    5.  Lest anyone think that 1-4 are an unfair attack on RSA and related
        algorithms, whatever the state of our ignorance here, we
        know even less about the security of many other systems.  In
        particular, as far as I'm aware the only thing known about the
        security of DES is that it has resisted determined attacks.
        We have a theory for avoiding certain weaknesses in DES-like
        algorithms (and DES does seem to avoid all the known weaknesses),
        but we have not even the glimmering of a general theory
        relating the difficulty of DES to NP or any other well-studied
        class of hard problems.  (Well, maybe the NSA knows more - but
        they aren't saying!)

    6.  RSA is by no means the only known private-key system.  Several
        others have been proposed and have survived some attack.
        (Others have NOT survived attacks.)  In particular, Rabin many
        years ago proposed a "variation on the RSA theme" which has
        the nice property that it is provably as hard as factoring.
        Rabin's scheme has some disadvantages (it requires some tricks
        to use it to produce digital signatures) and, as far as I
        know, it has for the most part been ignored.

    7.  One has to be VERY careful about applying "proofs" to systems
        involving adversaries.  It APPEARS that the proof (such as
        it is) of security RSA implies that you don't have to worry
        about other aspects of security, such as protocol design.  In
        fact, this is false; a classic paper (something like "How and
        Why to Use a Private Key in a Public Network", by Goldwasser,
        Micali, and Tong) displayed a generic protocol-related weakness
        of all private-key systems.  It was one of the things
        that inspired all the work on zero-knowledge proof techniques
        and such, work in which Goldwasser and Micali played central
        roles.  (I don't know what happened to Tong.)  Beyond
                considerations of efficiency, it is also the reason that today's
        systems usually propose to use RSA for securely exchanging
        private session keys, rather than for all encryption.
   — Jerry


Re: RSA vs. NIST (digital security standards) (Slone, RISKS-12.33)

Richard A. Schumacher <schumach@convex.com>
Tue, 17 Sep 1991 05:41:39 GMT
Ah, but he did have to cheat, a little, by using pairs of single quotes instead
of a lone double-quote character.


Re: Export controls on workstations, ... (Leichter, RISKS-12.33)

John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us>
16 Sep 91 14:35:03 EDT (Mon)
>  a)  Is it RIGHT that such machines [high-end workstations] should be
>
>  b)  Is there a PRACTICAL way to implement such controls, should the
>      answer to (a) be yes?
>I'll contend that hardly anyone will disagree with (a), posed in isolation,

Jerry goes on to say that since practically all high end microprocessors are
manufactured or at least licensed by U.S. companies, appropriate legal
agreements would keep them out of the hands of people we don't like.

It seems to me that we have here a severe of confusing paperwork with reality.
Workstations are not supercomputers.  They are physically small and portable.
They are sold in large enough numbers that manufacturers cannot even now track
the location of every workstation they have sold.  If a bad guy wants to buy a
few workstations in the U.S. or Europe, put them in a station wagon or a boat,
and take them east or south, there is no way to prevent that short of making
workstations unavailable to everyone.  In the U.S. at least, border controls
are targeted almost entirely at regulating what comes into the country, not
what leaves, and they have not been notably successful at stopping the incoming
flow of workstation-sized bales of marijuana.

Recent reports in the paper have described DOD proposals for extremely onerous
security devices that would audit every program run on a computer in a
putatively tamper-proof way.  This sounds to me like something that would cause
only the mildest trouble to the station wagon smugglers while bringing useful
domestic work to a halt.  ("Sorry, pal, if we fix that bug the program's
checksum will change and it'll take six weeks to have it added to the approved
list.")

Furthermore, even claim (a) is pretty dubious.  A few months ago, I expect many
people would have claimed that it was not in the U.S.'s interest to provide
large numbers of powerful PCs to the Soviet Union, but those very PCs were
instrumental in maintaining the flow of uncensored information during the coup.
You can make a strong case that tyrannical regimes are undermined by spreading
information technology, e.g. the cassette tapes that spread rebellion against
the Shah of Iran.

Any export controls that attempt to distinguish between desirable and
undesirable recipients of technology will inevitably cause some harm to the
desirable recipients, ranging from extra paperwork to complete cessation of
work.  There are some goods, e.g. plutonium, where pretty clearly the value of
keeping it away from the bad guys is worth the trouble to the good guys.  But
for workstations, export controls that had any real effect would be so
heavy-handed that the "cure" would be far worse than the disease.

John Levine, johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|world}!iecc!johnl


Virus halted government computers in south China

"Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Tue, 17 Sep 91 8:27:01 PDT
   HONG KONG, Sept 16 (AFP) - A spate of computer virus attacks put computers
in more than 90 Chinese governmental departments out of order, prompting the
authorities to have all software checked by police, a semi-official Chinese
news agency reported here Monday.  More than 20 kinds of the rogue disruptive
programmes hit more than 75 per cent of the offices' computers in southern
China's Guangdong province, the Hong Kong China News Service said.
   The provincial public security bureau had ordered all government units not
to use software from unknown origin or software which had not been inspected by
the bureau.  In addition, units or individuals were banned from engaging in the
study of computer viruses, or to hold training courses on them.  The new
regulations also forbid the sale of software capable of neutralising the
viruses.
   The report said the public security bureau had set up a testing department
for all software against the computer viruses.


Smart Pill Bottles

Joe Abernathy <edtjda@magic322.chron.com>
Tue, 17 Sep 91 15:09:25 CDT
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  T h e   V O G O N   N e w s   S e r v i c e  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

VNS TECHNOLOGY WATCH:                           [Mike Taylor, VNS Correspondent]
=====================                           [Littleton, MA, USA            ]
                                 Rx Remedy

    Medical researchers have created a method for determining whether
    patients have failed to take prescribed pills. A minuscule computer
    chip, embedded into a bottle's cap, can record every date and time
    the vial is opened. Recent medical reports confirm that patient
    compliance to prescription regimes is a growing problem with
    potentially dangerous consequences should a doctor alter a
    prescription assuming the previous dose is not strong enough. A
    recent study of epileptics indicates most patients take only 76% of
    their antiseizure medication. the chip may be one remedy, although
    at this point an expensive one at $7 a cap.
    {CACM August 1991}


Retraction: The seriousness of statistics mistakes (RISKS 12.31)

Jeremy Grodberg <jgro@summit.lia.com>
Sat, 14 Sep 91 00:38:22 PDT
See, now I'm doing it too :-(.  I've just spent the last 6 hours in a medical
library researching some of the questions my posting raised, and I now need to
retract almost all of my previous posting concerning the risks of statistics
mistakes.

First, I need to apologise to Mr. Fulk, as I accused him of not knowing what a
false positive was, and I now have no basis for that accusation; rather it is I
who didn't know what a false positive was.

I thought I had the right definition for false positive on the basis of
information provided to me by someone who did the research for me, backed up by
the guesses of the medical researchers I mentioned in the original posting as
guessing it right (and I can now say were all wrong, every one of them), and
sanity-checked by the analysis I presented in the posting.  Well, I was wrong
about what a false positive was, although the definition I attributed to Mr.
Fulk was also wrong (one cannot deduce from his posting whether he used the
right definition or the one I attributed to him.)  He was, however, misinformed
about many of the numbers he presented.

Also, as I have noted in an interim posting, my example of the smallpox vaccine
was poor at best.  I will correct that part more definitively later in this
posting.

So, now that I have been properly humbled, let me share my new-found
information, so that future researchers won't be mislead by me more recent
mistakes.


In the realm of diagnostic and screening tests, there are 2 variables and
4 possible outcomes.  The test results can be positive or negative, T+ or T-,
and the "correct diagnosis" is either positive (has the disease) or negative,
D+ or D-.  The "False Positive rate" is the number of T+ given D-, divided
by the number of D-.  In other words, if you tested only people without
the disease, the False Positive rate is the rate of positive test results
you would get.  Similarly, the "False negative rate" is the T- given D+,
divided by the number of D+.

So, the one thing I criticized Mr. Fulk about turned out to be one of the few
things I cannot quarrel with from his original posting.  However, I can quarrel
with all the other numbers he presented.  I'm not actually sure now what he
defined as what I called "the disease", but I believe it was basically anything
that the MSAFP test would detect, which is all neural tube defects
(anencephaly, spina bifida, etc.).  It may, however, have excluded anencephaly,
which is the most common neural tube defect, but which can be very reliably
detected with ultrasound.  For the rest of this discussion, I will be talking
about all neural tube defects except anencephaly; and referring to them all as
a single disease.

Mr. Fulk cited a prevalence of less that 1 in 10,000 for the disease.  The
studies I looked at, including some very recent ones, gave a range of
prevalences from 1 in 1,000 to 6 in 1,000.  Based on my readings of the
studies, and giving greater weight to the more recent studies (which take into
account the earlier studies), I would propose 2 per 1,000 as the most likely
rate of incidence for a healthy woman who was 29 when she got pregnant.

Mr. Fulk cited a false positive rate of 10% for the MSFAP test.  This test is
not a yes/no test, but rather yields a quantitative result.  The medical
literature recommends making it a yes/no test by comparing the results to a
threshold level, but there are odds charts available for more specifically
determining the likelihood of having the disease based on the quantitative
result.  There are two thresholds recommended in the literature, with false
positive rates of 3% and 1.4%.

(The threshold which yields the higher false positive rate is the one that was
originally recommended, and continues to be used because it greatly reduces the
false negative rate, which can be as high as 44%.)

The rate of abortion caused by amniocentesis is much the subject of controversy
in the medical community.  One reasons is that the skill of the person
performing the amniocentesis, and the method used, have a significant impact on
the safety.  Another complication is that something like 1% of pregnancies are
terminated due to spontaneous abortion occurring after the gestational stage
where an amniocentesis would have been done, so it is hard to know how many
additional abortions are caused by the amniocentesis.  I found studies ranging
in their conclusions about the number of spontaneous abortions due to
amniocentesis from 2 in 1000 to 1 in 100; the figure I would chose based on my
reading is 5 in 1000.

Another very important point not mentioned by Mr. Fulk is that ultrasound has
essentially 0% false positive, and 20%-40% false negative for spina bifida,
which represents the great majority of the problems MSAFP is testing for
(remembering that ultrasound is a nearly-perfect diagnostic tool for
anencephaly, and ignoring the hints in a 1988 study that says the MSAFP might
be useful for detecting Down's syndrome).  The existence of this test greatly
changes the numbers involved with deciding whether or not to have the MSAFP.

Anyway, crunching all these numbers around yields a range of very roughly from
5 to 50 incidents detected by the MSAFP for every 10 healthy fetuses
accidentally aborted by the amniocentesis.  So, in the end, Mr. Fulk made the
right choice, given the utility values he spoke of (he had a strong bias in
favor of having a sick baby over killing a healthy one).

All the studies I could find recommended counseling for patients who might
benefit from amniocentesis, and in most cases indicated that doctors could not
make a strong recommendation either way; it was a matter of values.  In the UK,
where the first studies on this stuff were done, researchers found that most
couples were more worried about having a sick (i.e.  seriously handicapped)
child than they were worried about inadvertently killing a healthy fetus as a
side effect of the testing or through misdiagnosis.  Still, the recommendations
generally take the form of "its too close to call, let the patient decide,"
although the medical bias is toward testing.

So, there it is, more than you wanted to know about this stuff.
We see the risks of bad data, the risks of bad research (on my part), the
risks of believing what people tell you, as well as the risks of medical
testing.  And, of course, we see that even the people who complain loudest
about other people's ignorance and mistakes occasionally come up just as short.

Now, about smallpox.  I knew there weren't any smallpox patients; I just
shouldn't have brought it up.  What's worse, the risks of the smallpox
vaccine do not include getting smallpox!  Smallpox (variola) vaccine is made
from vaccina virus, which provides cross immunity, but causes something like
50 serious adverse reactions/illnesses per million people. Vaccination
with smallpox virus was ended in the (early?) 1800's because it carried a
1-3% risk of death due to a full-blown smallpox infection developing.

The last case of smallpox occurred in 1978, wide-spread vaccinations in North
America were curtailed in 1970, although laboratory researchers and some
military personnel continued to receive vaccinations into the '80s.  (So, if I
had made the statements in question in 1974, they would have been accurate.)
The only stocks of smallpox known to exist in the world are at the Centers for
Disease Control in Atlanta, and the Research Institute for Viral Preparations
in Moscow.  According to the journal "Nature", these stocks "should be
destroyed by the end of 1993, after US and Soviet laboratories have finished
sequencing the smallpox viral genome."  This in spite of the fears of some
archeologists that the smallpox virus may still exist in nature, waiting to
re-infect to world.  (An Egyptian mummy was found of someone who appears to
have died of smallpox.  An attempt to detect the smallpox virus in the "pox"
remnants failed, but since the museum authorities were understandably reluctant
to give the researchers lots of the mummy's skin, the researchers didn't really
get as much sample as they would have liked.)

The military doesn't think much of the smallpox virus as a weapon (too hard to
transmit, takes to long to work), the vaccine doesn't require the virus, and
the danger of an outbreak is huge, so it looks like the smallpox virus may
become extinct in only 2 years.

One last note: my email address will be changing next week, probably to
jgro@netcom.com.  I don't know if or for how long mail will be forwarded to my
new address, so I apologize in advance if I don't answer my mail, because I may
not get it.
                            Jeremy Grodberg   jgro@lia.com

   [It seems important for RISKS to include correction of
   earlier errors, even when we drift from relevance.  But,
   it is certainly nice when contributors take pains to get
   it right the first time!


The seriousness of statistical mistakes

"Clifford Johnson" <GA.CJJ@Forsythe.Stanford.EDU>
Fri, 13 Sep 91 14:53:30 PDT
> What is worse, for some reason Mr. Fulk did not find it
> unbelievable that his doctor would recommend a test which was
> 10 time more likely to kill his fetus than the disease was . ...
> If the test was as bad as Mr. Fulk thought, standard practice
> would have been formulated to recommend against testing in his case.

There's at least one field of medicine where Mr. Fulk would be right to
disregard the medical profession's routine application and endorsement of
life-changing tests, namely, clinical psychology.  An exemplary test is the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which is used routinely as
an admissions classification procedure for mental patients, and is used
routinely outside medical applications to screen job applicants, decide
parental suitabilities in custody cases, etc.

Like other such tests, the MMPI is a computer-scored questionnaire requiring
some 550 yes/no responses to questions such as "There is life after death", "I
am important", "My father is a good person", "I would like to be a flower
seller".  The computer calculates from the responses normalized scores on about
ten psychotic scales, e.g.  manic-depressive, schizophrenic, hypochondriac,
paranoid, etc.  If an examinee's score is in the top 5% for any scale, he's
generally diagnosed (by the computer) as having that mental condition.  (Worse,
most such computer tests nowadays print-out pages of detailed analysis, drawn
from a text library of case histories.)

What is the probability that a person diagnosed by the test as having a mental
problem (being in the top 5% of a scale) is in fact in the top 5% of that
scale?  The answer is sensitive to the population being tested.  Applied to
mental patients, the probability of a correct diagnosis is obviously much
higher than when the test is applied to the population at large.  But most
applications of the test (with life-changing decisions being dependent thereon)
are to the population at large.  In those cases, if a person is diagnosed as,
for example, "paranoid", the chance of that person really being clinically
paranoid is at an unrealistic best about 1 in 4 (whereas without the test it
would be 1 in 20, assuming our 5% cut-off/base rate).  Thus, a positive test,
on which people are rejected for employment / parenthood etc., is known to be
much more likely to wrong than right in each instance of application.

What does the profession have to say about this?  I've made a hobby of reading
personality measurement "validation" studies in academic journals, and am
appalled by the myopic presentations of statistics by the foremost authorities
(i.e. Minnesotan academics).  Their prestigious journal articles claim to
validate the MMPI scales (and sub-scales), affirming the value of their
continued application throughout society, but the figures simply do not support
their salesmanlike claims.  A significant correlation over a large sample is
the quintessential proof of "validity", when the correlations are nevertheless
between purely subjective variables and even so are so low that an accurate
diagnosis remains improbable in any particular case.

Worse, the articles often contain statistical nonsense, and in some cases the
data presented, when properly analyzed, flatly contradicts the conclusions
drawn from it by the authors.  Worse, my pointing out these contradictions
results in nothing whatsoever, the authors evidently can't be bothered to make
corrections or recognize criticism.  I do believe that statistics as applied to
physical medicines is much more rigorous, but let's at all times be on our
guard against people called "Professor" who nevertheless misuse statistics and,
in so doing, abuse us through computers.

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