The RISKS Digest
Volume 18 Issue 92

Thursday, 20th March 1997

Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems

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

Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…

Contents

Flaw in Cell-Phone Encryption Identified; Design Process Blamed
PGN
The Illusion of Truth: Software Bugs as NewsBytes
Troy Heagy via Gary Grossoehme
Bring me the head of InterNIC
Elizabeth Hanes Perry
Bank cannot believe it made a mistake!
Glenn Story via PGN
Accident at a nuclear waste processing plant: keeping log info handy
Chiaki Ishikawa
Private information in Japanese Postal Service
Chiaki Ishikawa
Taking cookies without asking permission
Shlomo-Zalman Jessel
MS Internet Explorer for NT security hole
Mark Seecof
Re: Y2K: the revenge of originality
Pete Kaiser
Credit Cards and the year 2000
Lauren Weinstein
Re: Telephone Scam
Bill Nugent
Jon S. Green
US FTC Workshop on Consumer Information Privacy
Denis McKeon
April 4 deadline of NSPW '97: Final Call for Papers
Yvo Desmedt
Info on RISKS (comp.risks)

Flaw in Cell-Phone Encryption Identified; Design Process Blamed

"Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Thu, 20 Mar 1997 12:35:16 PST
This is a press release <http://www.counterpane.com/cmea.html> from

* Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Systems, 612 823-1098  schneier@counterpane.com
* David Wagner, University of California, Berkeley 510-643-9435
    daw@cs.berkeley.edu
* Robert Sanders, University of California. Berkeley 510-643-6998
    rls@pio.urel.berkeley.edu
* Lori Sinton, Jump Start Communications, 415-938-2234 lsinton@aol.com

    Telecommunications Industry Association algorithm
    for digital telephones fails under simple cryptanalysis

MINNEAPOLIS, MN. AND BERKELEY, CA., March 20, 1997 - Counterpane Systems and
UC Berkeley jointly announced today that researchers have discovered a flaw
in the privacy protection used in today's most advanced digital cellular
phones. This discovery points to serious problems in the chosed-door process
used to develop these privacy measures. This announcement is a setback to
the US cellular telephone industry, said Bruce Schneier of Counterpane
Systems, a Minneapolis, MN consulting firm specializing in cryptography. The
attack can be carried out in a few minutes on a conventional personal
computer.

Schneier and John Kelsey of Counterpane Systems, along with graduate student
David Wagner of the University of California at Berkeley, plan to publish
their analysis in a paper entitled "Cryptanalysis of the Cellular Message
Encryption Algorithm (CMEA)." Legislators are scheduled to hold hearings
today on Rep. Goodlatte's "SAFE" (Security And Freedom Through Encryption)
bill, HR695.

The problem affects numbers dialed on the key pad of a cellular handset,
including any telephone, PIN, or credit cards numbers dialed. The system was
supposed to protect the privacy of those dialed digits, but the encryption
is weak enough that those digits are accessible to eavesdroppers with a
digital scanner.

The cryptographers blame the closed-door design process and excessive
pressure from U.S.  military interests for problems with the privacy
standard. The cellular industry attempted to balance national security with
consumer privacy concerns. In an attempt to eliminate recurring security
problems, the cellular standards arm of the Telecommunications Industry
Association(TIA) privately designed this new framework for protecting
cellular phones. The system uses encryption to prevent fraud, scramble voice
communications, and protect users' privacy. These new protections are being
deployed in today's digital cell phones, including CDMA, NAMPS, and TDMA.

Not a new problem

As early as 1992, others - including noted security expert Whitfield Diffie
- pointed out fatal flaws in the new standard's voice privacy feature. The
two flaws provide a crucial lesson for policy makers and consumers, the
researchers said. These weaknesses are symptomatic of broad underlying
problems in the design process, according to Wagner.

Many have criticized the National Security Agency (the U.S. military
intelligence agency in charge of electronically monitoring foreign powers)
for insinuating itself into the design process, pressuring designers to
cripple the security of the cellular encryption technique and hamstringing
emerging cellular security technology. "The result is weaker protection for
everybody," Kelsey said.

"This is another illustration of how U.S. government efforts to control
cryptography threaten the security and privacy of Americans," said David
Banisar, attorney for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in
Washington, D.C.

This is not the first report of security flaws in cellular telephony. Today,
most cellular phone calls can be intercepted by anyone in the area listening
to a scanner, as House Speaker Newt Gingrich learned this past January when
someone with a scanner recorded one of his cellular calls.  According to FCC
estimates, the cellular telephony industry lost more that $400 million to
fraud and security problems last year.

CMEA Technology

CMEA is a symmetric cipher, like the Digital Encryption Standard (DES). It
uses a 64-bit key, but weaknesses in the algorithm reduce the key to an
effective length of 24 or 32 bits, significantly shorter than even the weak
keys the U.S. government allows for export.

Greg Rose, program chair of the 1996 USENIX Security Symposium, put the
results in context: This break does not weaken the digital cellular fraud
protections. And it's still true that digital cellular systems are much
harder to casually eavesdrop on than analog phones. But it's clear from this
break that a determined criminal with technical resources can intercept
these systems."

Counterpane Systems is a Minneapolis, MN-based consulting firm specializing
in cryptography and computer security. Bruce Schneier is president of
Counterpane and author of three books on cryptography and security. David
Wagner is a founding member of the ISAAC computer security research group at
UC Berkeley. In the Fall of 1995, the ISAAC group made headlines by
revealing a major flaw in Netscape's web browser. The authors also hasten to
thank Greg Rose for his advice.

    [This was also noted by "Tom Zmudzinski" <zmudzint@ncr.disa.mil>.
    Several others contributed John Markoff's article in *The New York
    Times* today.  As usual, my local source, *San Francisco Chronicle*,
    ran the NYT item without indicating its author.  PGN]


The Illusion of Truth: Software Bugs as NewsBytes

<GaryG4430@aol.com>
Thu, 20 Mar 1997 13:58:25 -0500 (EST)
This was posted on the rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated group (Babylon 5 TV
series)  It is one of the most understandable passages on the problem I have
seen. Actually several different problems. The Risk? The problem we are all
vetching about may not be the underlying problem that will kill us.
Gary Grossoehme, Oregon Electronics, GaryG4430@aol.com

Date: 20 Mar 1997 00:08:06 -0500
>From: Troy_Heagy@ccmail.orl.lmco.com
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Subject: "The Illusion of Truth" in action

Here is a good example of the press distorting the truth just as in the
recent Babylon 5 episode, "The Illusion of Truth."

Hard Pressed

Tech journalists are more interested in crises like the Explorer bug than
the fundamental problems behind them.  Ever wonder how the news really works
behind the scenes? I got a powerful firsthand lesson on 3 March, when
Worcester Polytechnic student Paul Greene discovered that "serious flaw" in
Microsoft's Internet Explorer. That's when I became the unwitting source of
a sound bite that overshadowed the real news.

My first indication that something was up was an e-mail from Gene Spafford,
who has been my co-author and editor on three computer-security books. Gene
subscribes to bugtraq@netspace.org, a "full-disclosure" mailing list about
hot computer security holes. The subject line was "FYI - browser bug." The
message pointed to Greene's Cybersnot Web page.

As I read the message, my jaw dropped. "Cool," I thought. "I can run any
program I want on anybody's computer who looks at my Web page with Internet
Explorer." Sort of like ActiveX without the code-signing.

Five minutes later, my phone rang. It was Thomas Reardon, who works at
Microsoft on IE. "I want you to know that this isn't an ActiveX problem,"
were the first words out of his mouth.

I told Reardon that I had read the Cybersnot message and didn't think that
this IE problem was any more significant than the numerous security problems
that have plagued Netscape's Java engine. After all, the Secure Internet
Programming group at Princeton University had discovered a dozen or so ways
of making Java Virtual Machines run arbitrary machine code.  The only
difference between their attacks and this one was that you needed to be
fluent in Java bytecodes, x86 assembler language, and obscure type systems
in order to exploit the Princeton attacks. For the Greene bug, all you
needed to know was HTML.

But Reardon was worried. He said that his co-workers at Microsoft were
certain that the press was going to burn them alive.  And the bug was so
simple - just two flipped bits in IE's registry entries.  Internet Explorer
has a list indicating whether files are safe or dangerous to open, Reardon
explained to me. URL files and LNK files had been listed as safe, meaning
it's OK for IE to open them without first asking the user's permission. They
should have been listed as dangerous.

Next, my pager went off. My friend Beth Weise, cyberspace correspondent for
the Associated Press, wanted me to call another reporter and fill him in. I
tried to stress to the reporter that the real problem wasn't Internet
Explorer - it's the fact that people use the Windows operating system, which
has no built-in security. "What we really need is secure operating systems,
but corporate America doesn't buy them," I said. But that didn't make for a
good story.

The AP story must have gone out over the wire about 10 minutes after I hung
up the phone, because I had just sat down to dinner when my phone rang
again. This time it was CBS Radio News. They wanted to do an
interview-to-tape right then! So I told the guy from CBS the same thing I
had told George from the AP. The impact of this bug, I said, was that it
acted as if somebody were messing with your computer while you "went out to
lunch."

That "lunch" quote had wings of its own.  Within the next 24 hours I was
quoted on CNN, CNBC, National Public Radio, and in dozens of
publications. The Seattle Times ran my quote. It was really weird, because
the woman who wrote the story knows me, knows my home phone number, but she
found it easier just to grab the quote from the AP than to call me up and
get the story behind the sound bite.

This sort of quote reuse is actually typical for the nation's news
services. I shouldn't be surprised. But I was upset that everybody focused
on the immediate problem - a bug (oh no!) in Internet Explorer.

Nobody asked why today's computers are so brittle that a single bug could
leave a Web surfer wide open to attack.  Nobody made the connection between
this bug in Internet Explorer and ActiveX. Microsoft goes to great pains to
make sure that security-critical bugs like this don't slip into its
applications, and yet this one did. What about signed ActiveX components?
They're sure to have security-critical bugs as well - especially since many
of them will be written in C++. This is a problem that Java applets simply
don't have, because they run within the restricted sandbox environment.

Nobody seems to be looking to the future. We're building a wired world, but
all those wires are crossed. We've had a lot of warnings. Pretty soon, we're
going to start having disasters. It's time we started looking harder at the
threats.


Bring me the head of InterNIC

<betsyp@vnet.net>
Thu, 20 Mar 1997 09:34:48 -0500 (EST)
Yesterday, InterNIC, having lost the receipts from my employer's domain
registration, invalidated my employer's top-level domain.  (Note that this
mail is NOT sent from my employer's domain, but from my local ISP; I am not
authorized to speak for my employer.)

Like many others in similar situations, our system administrator spent the
entire day trying vainly to get in touch with a human being at InterNIC to
correct the error.  He was eventually successful, but only after 20 hours of
"Internet death" during which all E-mail, FTP, and accesses to our Web page
bounced.

Moral? A single point of failure is just as serious when the point of
failure is an organization as when it is an hydraulic valve.  Many companies
now arrange for backup Internet access should their primary provider fail;
as far as I know, there is no way to arrange for backup name service should
InterNIC fail.

Elizabeth Hanes Perry                    betsyp@vnet.net


Bank cannot believe it made a mistake!

"Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Thu, 20 Mar 97 9:53:28 PST
Mike and Shelly Steen of Santa Rosa CA made a deposit of $3700 to their Bank
of America account.  The deposit was credited as $37,000.  When they
repeatedly tried to convince BoA there had been an error, they were told
that that it could not have been a mistake that size because it would have
been caught by the bank's verification system.  [Thanks to Glenn Story, who
spotted this item in the Palo Alto Daily News, 19 Mar 1997, p.28.]


Accident at a nuclear waste processing plant: keeping log info handy

Chiaki Ishikawa <Chiaki.Ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp>
Tue, 18 Mar 1997 12:32:20 +0900 (JST)
There was a small fire and subsequently a small explosion at a Japanese
nuclear waste processing plant in Ibaraki prefecture, north east of
Tokyo. You can probably read the latest info on http://www.asahi.com (a web
site of Asahi Shimbun newspaper. I just checked this and information is
available in English, too. It carried the ominous news that a very tiny
amount of Cesium 137 was observed in a nearby observation facility. You may
not want to keep a bookmark of a particular article you saw at Japanese
newspaper sites, though. For reasons unknown to me, they tend to recycle the
same file name for different articles and throw away the old ones.  So in a
few days, the same URL often points to totally different news.)

Before getting to the core of the story, I have to explain something I
learned from security management.  I have been managing office internet
firewall for sometime, and learned a great deal from the book, Internet
Security and Firewall, by Bellovin and Cheswick. Some of the useful tips in
the book was to log copious amount of info for analysis and to make sure
that the log is available for later analysis after incidents. Technique for
this includes recording in a safe machine within internal LAN, recording the
log on a write once media, or even using a PC with a network card so that no
one can "break" into the machine via network to tamper with the system
log. These will make sure that log is tamper-proof and accessible after
incidents occur.

Well, why am I saying this in relation to the accident at the processing
plant?  In the morning newspaper the day after the accident, I read that the
plant managers could not figure out immediately if radio active material was
released into the surrounding immediately. This is such an important thing
and I was incredulous.  Reading on, I found out this happened because of the
following design and events:

 - There are four radio activity sensors around the building to
   monitor the radio activity level in the surrounding to
   see if radio active material escapes the sealing of the building.
   I think that it is a good thing they have four such meters.

 - But, these monitoring data are gathered and displayed in the
   monitoring room of the processing plant building, but *only* there.

 - Because of the small fire and the smoke that erupted, the operators
   had to be evacuated, and after the small explosion (most likely an
   incident where the high-pressure within the sealed confinement of
   the building punched holes via weak windows, doors and such) that
   took place hours after the initial fire,
   nobody could return to the control room to check out the meters.

So the four meters were running to check the radio activity levels and sent
data to the control room, but nobody could read it.  I think extra sensor
devices were brought in when the deficiency was realized by the top brass at
the plant.

I believe the designers of the processing plants took note and plan a
revision of their monitoring systems very soon now.

After writing all this, I am planning to do some sort of dry run to see if
my firewall system can be restored in a quick manner if a disk drive is
disconnected and such.  There is a Japanese saying that goes something like,
"Correct yourself by looking the behavior of others". I took due note of it.

(As far as the incident goes, it is rumored to be level 3 in the nuclear
incident scale in which 1 is the lightest and the worst is level
8. Chernobyl was level 8 and Three Mile Islands was level 5.  Because of the
expanding warm gas of the fire and smoke and such, the air conditioners to
keep the internal pressure lower than external (to prevent leakage) could
not keep running and when they failed, adjacent rooms got contaminated one
by one. One incredibly stupid thing that happened was that apparently the
initial small fire probably caused by the high-temperature asphalt was not
put out completely and led to the small "explosion" that tore holes in the
supposedly sealed walls. Coupled with the deliberate lies that were aired to
the public when a nuclear breeder reactor Monju had a major accident of
releasing hot melting Sodium outside its secondary cooling system, the half
public/half private corporation which controls the nuclear power reactors
research and waste disposal is under heavy media criticism in Japan right
now. Their inept handling of PR this time around by inexperienced engineer
turned PR people added fuel to the criticism. I think we can learn a lot
from efficient American PR people here: I am saying this with a tongue in
cheek.)


Private information in Japanese Postal Service

Chiaki Ishikawa <Chiaki.Ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp>
Tue, 18 Mar 1997 12:32:20 +0900 (JST)
Regarding the slippery handling of private information such as one's
signature information by US Postal Service (or was it Post Office), I often
ask myself whether it can happen to us in Japan whenever I read such
articles in RISKS.

Well, just this morning Mar 18, I read in Asahi Shimbun newspaper (Yokohama
edition) that Japanese Postal Service will offer tracking services for some
special services such as registered mails and such staring June 1st via
network.  That is a good news. I think they are motivated by the success of
FedEx and other private courier services.

But I was thrilled after reading some details. According to the article,
customers can type in the number assigned to the package to find out where
it is going and other pertinent information: I mean if I read the article
correctly, it seems that the system gives out the information of the
addressee(!) WITHOUT any authentication whatsoever!  I wish I am mistaken
here. Maybe the number itself has some extra field that authenticate the
validity of the number as known only to the holder of the assigned number?

In any case, I can't wait to mistype a digit/letter of an assigned number
to MY package to see if it will print out someone's supposedly private info.

(I checked the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication's web page for more
info:
    http://www.postal.mpt.go.jp/

Unfortunately, I could not find the details about the tracking service
although the page has the mailto: to solicit a catchy name for this new
tracking service from the public.)

Chiaki Ishikawa, Personal Media Corp., Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan 142
ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp  or Chiaki.Ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp


Taking cookies without asking permission

Shlomo-Zalman Jessel <mss@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il>
Tue, 18 Mar 1997 16:58:04 +0200 (WET)
I recently received this notice from a friend:

I just downloaded Netscape Navigator 4.0 preview release 2.  At long last,
Navigator has an option that will block all cookies without popping up a
warning for each one.  It is in Edit->Preferences->Advanced.  It seems to
work properly, too!

Curiously, when I installed it it ignored my current setting (Always warn
before accepting a cookie) and set me up with "Always accept cookies."
Users upgrading should be aware of this.

Faculty of Medicine, School of Occupational Therapy, Hebrew University /
Hadassah Hospital P.O. Box 24026, Mount Scopus Jerusalem   91240 Israel


MS Internet Explorer for NT security hole

Mark Seecof <Mark.Seecof@latimes.com>
Mon, 17 Mar 1997 15:00:29 -0800
At <http://www.efsl.com/security/ntie> a description may be had of YASH in
MS-IE, this time involving the silent disclosure of user/"domain"/machine
identity info and a transform of the user's "domain" password which could be
used for false-presence attacks or offline cracking.

Mark S. (Disclaimer removed)


Re: Y2K: the revenge of originality

<Kaiser@acm.org>
Tue, 18 Mar 97 09:36:45 +0100
Amos Shapir notes that many COBOL programmers use "nonsense words for
variable names, to avoid reuse of a reserved word."

It seems to me this is a problem principally for badly documented programs
-- in my experience, the majority.  It's hardly limited to Y2K problems.

Yesterday I talked with someone who told me about a crucially important
program his company uses: it's years old, is utterly undocumented, and was
created by a brilliant programmer who was with the company for many years
until recently he committed suicide.  Now, and only now, they're trying to
figure out what to do about the program.  Oh, yes: undocumented and written
in assembler code.  I wish them well.

Pete  kaiser@acm.org


Credit Cards and the year 2000 (Re: Bowdidge, RISKS-18.91)

Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
Tue, 18 Mar 97 00:14 PST
It's worth nothing that at least some banks are attempting to get a handle
on this problem, now that cards expiring in 2000 and beyond are actually
appearing...  Wells Fargo, for example, sent a letter to merchants
requesting that they attempt a particular "fictitious" transaction, and
noted what the various return codes would indicate.  In case of a year 2000
problem, the merchant is supposed to contact the bank and eventually receive
(for a fee, of course, in most cases) firmware/software upgrades.
Naturally, this doesn't do anything right away for the folks who already
have the dreaded "00" expiration cards during this early phase of the
transition period.

--Lauren--  Moderator, PRIVACY Forum  www.vortex.com


Re: Telephone Scam (Fernandez, RISKS-18.91)

Bill Nugent <whn@topelo.lopi.com>
Wed, 19 Mar 1997 20:24:05 -0500
Phone companies are pretty good about catching lines that are disconnected.
More likely this is a life-safety regulation.  In Massachusetts the
telephone company can not turn off dial tone on disconnected service because
of the risk to life safety.  These 'disconnected' phone numbers can only
call 911, the operator, and the NYNEX business office (for new service).

    Bill


Re: Telephone Scam (Daniels, RISKS-18.90)

Jon S Green <jonsg@harlequin.co.uk.NO.SPAM>
Tue, 18 Mar 1997 09:57:49 GMT
In RISKS-18.90 Dewi Daniels describes a problem where calls to Guyana
were billed to his telephone account, apparently in error.  This neatly
dovetails with a report on the BBC TV programme "Watchdog" which showed
that a number of British Telecom customers had suffered similar
problems.  Although the reason was never fully established, one
conjecture was that BT employees with access to calling card details had
used them illegally to call overseas premium-rate phone-sex lines.

Jon  jonsg@harlequin_co_uk   See http://pobox.com/~jonsg/junkmail.html


US FTC Workshop on Consumer Information Privacy

Denis McKeon <Dmckeon@swcp.com>
Wed, 19 Mar 1997 10:46:46 -0700
The following is condensed from:

    FTC: Public Workshop on Consumer Information Privacy;

thanks to a pointer in news.admin.announce
by "russ-smith" of http://www.consumer-info.org/

Written comments (paper/disk) are due by April 15
for the June 10-13 workshops in Washington, DC.

=========================

SUMMARY: The Federal Trade Commission has determined to hold a public
workshop devoted to consumer information privacy. The workshop will be
divided into three sessions.

Session One is intended to gather information as part of a Commission
study of the collection, compilation, sale, and use of computerized data
bases that contain what consumers may perceive to be sensitive
identifying information, often referred to as "look-up services."
These data bases typically are used to locate individuals or develop
individual background information.
...
Session Two will address recent developments in the collection,
compilation, sale, and use of personal information online generally,
including self-regulatory efforts, technological innovations, and
unsolicited commercial e-mail. Session Three will address the same
developments as they pertain to children's personal information.


April 4 deadline of NSPW '97: Final Call for Papers

"Dr. Yvo Desmedt" <desmedt@blatz.cs.uwm.edu>
Wed, 19 Mar 1997 18:36:40 -0600
  [See RISKS-18.69 for earlier message.  PGN]

FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS, NEW SECURITY PARADIGMS '97
A workshop sponsored by ACM and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
                Langdale Hotel, Great Langdale, Cumbria, UK
                          23 - 26 September 1997

More information will be provided on-line as it becomes available.
 E-mail to:                         newparadigms97@opengroup.org
 use anonymous FTP from:            ftp.cs.uwm.edu
           in directory:            /pub/new-paradigms
 Use World Wide Web from:           http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~new-paradigms

Please report problems with the web pages to the maintainer

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