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…
They asked for the shortest route to their destination, but did not specify avoiding Palestinian areas. They passed roadside warning signs, drove into the area, and were allegedly attacked. More soldiers were sent into the area to rescue them, and two Palestinians were killed. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4773114,00.html
It's Leap Day, a comp.risks high holiday! In Germany, the Düsseldorf airport reportedly has 1200 suitcases stacked up, the local news reports, because the system did not recognize 29 Feb as a proper date. The automatic luggage distribution system refused to transport some, but not all, of the 25 to 50 thousand suitcases it deals with a day. The airport speaker suggested that air travelers pack important things such as medicines in their hand luggage. http://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/rheinland/flughafen-duesseldorf-koffer-schalttag-100.html Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff, HTW Berlin, 10313 Berlin +49-30-5019-2320 weberwu@htw-berlin.de http://www.f4.htw-berlin.de/people/weberwu/
Cystic Fibrosis is a serious genetic disease. C.C. is a child who has a genetic marker for CF but does not have the disease, a relatively common situation. C.C. only knows about the marker from a genetic screening during treatment for an unrelated condition as an infant. A CF web site claims 4% of all people have a recessive CF gene and hence a CF marker. C.C.'s family moved from Singapore to Palo Alto in 2012 and enrolled him at his neighborhood middle school and provided his medical information as part of the enrollment process. People who have CF get dangerous lung infections and should not meet each other due to risk of cross-infection. Two siblings who have CF attend the school, and when a school employee improperly told their parent (Mrs. X.) of C.C.'s genetic marker, she demanded C.C. be removed. C.C.'s parents provided a leter from C.C.'s doctor that he did not have CF and posed no risk, but the school relied on a letter from a "top Stanford doctor" who had never examined C.C., later revealed to be Dr. Carlos Milla, and ejected him anyway and moved him to a school several miles away. C.C.'s family sued, the school backed down, and in 2014 the district court dismissed the case on the bases that he was back in school and the school's concern about a threat to Mrs. X's children was reasonable. C.C.'s parents, the Chadams, appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit on the bases that they suffered damages under the Americans with Disabilities and Rehabilitation Acts, that the court had made unwarranted factual assumptions when it dismissed the case, and that the school had revealed even more of C.C.'s private medical data to Mrs. X. What makes this case more than routine is that the U.S. government intervened in January with an amicus brief supporting the Chadams. The government's brief argues that the school discriminated against C.C. based on its belief that he had a disability (CF), and that the schools did not demonstrate that C.C. was a "direct threat" (which would have been hard since he was and is not.) This case combines a privacy failure with a medical failure—C.C.'s medical information should not have been disclosed, and even if it were, the school's actions were not supported by medical evidence or necessity. As often happens, a privacy failure compounds failures of other sorts. (This summmary is from court documents in this case, public information on the courts' web sites.)
As ER doctors and nurses grapple with the transition to digitized record systems, these mistakes seem to be happening more frequently. “There are new categories of patient safety errors'' in emergency rooms that didn't exist before the push to use electronic record systems, said Raj Ratwani, scientific director at MedStar Health's National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare in Washington, D.C. Not really surprising. But I wish they would stop calling it "patient safety errors" when it is rather increased difficulty in adjusting to (ever changing) working conditions. The 'error', if any, is of the people who developed, designed, and purchased the technology.
Ars Technica reports that over 13 million sites still permit clients to request use of SSLv2, despite long-known flaws. Of these sites, 97,000 are among the top one million sites on the WWW. In short, while SSLv2 is not the default, it is possible for it to be requested. This enables an attack against the servers private key. It is recommended that all sites verify that SSLv2 support is completely disabled. An update to OpenSSL related to this vulnerability is soon to be release. The Ars Technica article is at: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/more-than-13-million-https-websites-imperiled-by-new-decryption-attack/
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/03/thieves-nab-irs-pins-to-hijack-tax-refunds/#more-34039 I will bet $$$ that this is just the tip of an iceberg, as it is breathtakingly stupid for the IRS to have been snookered by a KBA attack.
Fahmida Y. Rashid, InfoWorld, 1 Mar 2016 The Drown attack decrypts TLS sessions on servers supporting SSL v2 and using RSA key exchange http://www.infoworld.com/article/3039825/security/openssl-update-fixes-drown-vulnerability.html selected text: An international team of researchers has uncovered an attack that can compromise encrypted network traffic in a matter of hours. The Drown (Decrypting RSA with Obsolete and Weakened Encryption) attack successfully decrypts TLS (transport layer security) sessions by exploiting a vulnerability in the older SSL v2 protocol that exposes private RSA keys. Once again, old cryptography is breaking the security of all online communications. mobile social collaboration faces heads Drown is different from other attacks against TLS in that it doesn't need servers to be using the older version; the attack will succeed as long as the targeted system supports SSL v2. The cross-protocol attack (CVE-2016-0800) could lead to decryption of any encrypted session using SSL/TLS protocols as long as the server supports SSL v2 and uses RSA key exchange, the researchers said in their technical paper. "In the future we must ensure that all obsolete crypto is aggressively removed from all systems. If it's not, it's going to come back to bite us, sooner or later," Ristic said. [Don't forget all the other flaws, brought to light by the IEEE SSP best paper by Beurdouche et al., noted in RISKS-28,58. PGN]
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has invited hackers participate in "Hack the Pentagon", to find & report vulnerabilities in some of their websites. Volunteers must be US citizens who pass a background check. Beware, background checks may get you on OPM, which gets hacked thru an NSA back door. A new US agency has been launched to replace some of OPM activity, the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB). I hope the replacement system learns from the mistakes of OPM. This kind of data does not need to be on the Internet, it should be on an intranet. That way NSA back doors do not reveal the data to as many adversaries. https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/03/02/hack-the-pentagon-hackers-asked-to-help-secure-public-facing-systems/ [On an intranet? But the Dark Net is not all that invisible... PGN]
Does this mean that the authorities are going to make (school) libraries censor all symbol-based swearing from their collections? If I'd had a smart phone when I was twelve, I might have done this too—because that was the way the comic books I read depicted swearing. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SymbolSwearing http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_fnXu10W5PIY/S7A1IhXZV-I/AAAAAAAADQU/PvPnFfRYueo/s1600/swear.gif (There are a bomb, a knife, 2 skulls, 2 guns, and 3 symbols that look like explosions.) [However, even for those who are trope-o-philes rather than trope-o-phobic, it may be difficult to distinguish one expletive from another. %^&#@! PGN]
A court had ordered Facebook to provide data from WhatsApp, a messaging app it owns, in connection with a criminal investigation into drug trafficking. Police in Sao Paulo questioned Facebook's VP for Latin America Diego Dzodan on Tuesday, and he remained in jail overnight. http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/02/technology/facebook-brazil-executive/index.html This could easily escalate to jailing random employees to extort a backdoor. This would be easier in some countries than others.
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/isis-apple-fbi-congressional-hearing-crypto-international/ Prompted by a case related to the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in San Bernardino, the intense discussion heavily focused on thwarting the Islamic State. But ISIS supporters online didn't seem worried at all. Instead, they've spent the week--and longer--promoting strong encryption tools from outside the United States that the American government cannot touch with legislation. In the last month, Islamic State supporters have promoted security software from Finland, Romania, America, France, the Czech Republic, Canada, Panama, Germany, Switzerland, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and other nations, a Daily Dot review found.
While Apple is fighting the FBI in court over encryption, Amazon quietly disabled the option to use encryption to protect data on its Android-powered devices. The tech giant has recently deprecated support for device encryption on the latest version of Fire OS, Amazon's custom Android operating system, which powers its tablets and phones. In the past, privacy-minded users could protect data stored inside their devices, such as their emails, by scrambling it with a password, which made it unreadable in case the device got lost or stolen. With this change, users who had encryption on in their Fire devices are left with two bad choices: either decline to install the update, leaving their devices with outdated software, or give up and keep their data unencrypted. https://motherboard.vice.com/read/amazon-removes-device-encryption-fire-os-kindle-phones-and-tablets
A federal judge has ruled that Apple does not have to unlock iPhone in a New York drug case, where the All Writs Law was used, This is NOT the San Bernardino case, but there are similarities. * All Writs Act used in both cases. * NY case is an iPhone running iOS 7. * San Bernardino case asks for a lot more than was asked in NY case. According to news media reports, Judge James Orenstein wrote: “The U.S. government's argument doesn't justify "imposing on Apple the obligation to assist the government's investigation against its will.'' “The government posits a reading so expansive—and in particular, in such tension with the doctrine of separation of powers—as to cast doubt on the AWA's constitutionality if adopted.'' “Nothing in the government's arguments suggests any principled limit on how far a court may go in requiring a person or company to violate the most deeply rooted values to provide assistance to the government the court deems necessary.'' Orenstein said law enforcement is inappropriately trying to use powers that it hasn't been given by Congress. The feds say they will appeal this case. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/federal-judge-apple-doesnt-have-to-unlock-iphone-in-ny-case-219999 http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/29/technology/judge-apple-feds/ http://www.wired.com/2016/02/judge-says-apple-doesnt-have-to-unlock-iphone-in-case-similar-san-bernardino/ To avoid confusion, be aware that there are about 60,000 cases of law enforcement demanding that Apple unlock individual iPhones, about a dozen of them from the feds, including the San Bernardino terrorist iPhone. A ruling in one case is not a binding precedent on other cases, and some people can even defy the US Supreme Court with impunity. The antique nature of the All Writs Law is not relevant, unless you also want to throw out the US Constitution, which has the same age.
> There is an error in Rebecca Mercuri's analysis of the FBI-Apple issue. Well, maybe. > FBI can image the phone (phone "cloning" is something else, BTW), but FBI >cannot image the secure enclave. Indeed they cannot, because the Secure Enclave was introduced in the A7 processor used in the iPhone 6 series, and the A6 processor in the San Bernadino iPhone 5C doesn't have one. As I read the Apple document, the main CPU in the A6 contains the secret random UID and only has instructions to use it as part of a key for encryption or decryption. So it seems like the claim is correct that if Apple wrote and installed a new GovtOS, that OS could use the crypto instructions to test entered passcodes, but not add the time delays or do the data wipe. For that matter, why couldn't GovtOS just try all of the passcodes itself and display the one that worked on the welcome screen? Seems a lot easier than entering them all by hand or via some remote data source, although I suppose that would make it more obvious what a privacy disaster it was.
Simson Garfinkel wrote: > FBI can image the phone (phone "cloning" is something else, BTW), but FBI > cannot image the secure enclave. Simson said essentially what I said, but got this almost irrelevant point wrong. The 5c under question does not have the secure enclave. What is not clear from the white paper is how much of the software (aka firmware) in the secure enclave is burned in silicon and how much is booted from the file system. I am guessing that just like for the application processor the lowest level boot code is burned in hardware and everything else is pulled in from the file system (after passing the signature check.) What the secure enclave does is complicated enough it would seem necessary to be able to update it ("securely", of course) when a bug needs to be fixed or some design enhancement made. It is clear, for instance, that the Touch ID code is updateable, since that is one of the publicly announced changes in one of the recent IOS updates. So I suspect a court order to do the same sort of thing on, say, a iPhone 6, that they are asking be done on the 5c would be technically possible—just more complicated. BTW, I don't know how many people reading this noticed that there were some recent press reports that Apple is already designing fixes for the vulnerabilities in the present state of affairs, including those in the iCloud backup process that allows Apple to accede to warrants for backups. See, for instance, among several similar articles, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/technology/apple-is-said-to-be-working-on-an-iphone-even-it-cant-hack.html
John Levine helpfully indicated that the Apple iPhone in question is a 5C which does not have a "Secure Enclave." I was confused, because I had referred to the current Apple iOS Security Guide [1]. The operative Security Guide for the iPhone 5c is Apple's May 2012 Security Guide [2], which is no longer available on the Apple website, but which is available on a course website at MIT [2]. In the previous Security Guide, Apple uses the term "tangled" to describe the combination of the hardware AES key with the user's PIN. (The current Security Guide's use of the word "entangled" comes from quantum computing, although there is no quantum computer within the iPhone.) On the 5c is AES key is burned into the Apple processor. The important difference, as John and I discussed in several private emails, is that the hardware does not enforce wiping of the key, which is enforced by Apple's operating system. This means that if you can perform a forensic removal and restore of the memory in the iPhone 5c, you can do a brute force attack, with an 80msec delay between each attempt. So the question is this: how can you remove and restore the memory of the iPhone 5c? Oxygen Forensics [3], one of the leading iPhone forensics providers, claims that the passcode is required for memory extraction. Another way is to use the JTAG interface, but I've found no indication online that this is possible with an iPhone 5C. It may be possible remove the surface mount memory chips and try to set up some kind of socket arrangement, so that the memory can copied out and repeatedly rewritten as the next 10 codes are tried. To get an idea of how hard this would be, look at the iFixIt teardown photos of the iPhone 5c [4]. The memory module is evident in Step 10, the Toshiba THGBX2G7B2JLA01 128 Gb (16 GB) NAND flash. Good luck getting that off without damaging the A6 processor on the other side. I haven't heard of anyone doing this in practice. I wrote an article about back in 2012 that discussed these issues in more depth [5]. [1] https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf [2] http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2015/readings/ios-security-may12.pdf [3] http://www.oxygen-forensic.com/en/compare/devices/software-for-iphone [4] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+5c+Teardown/17382 [5] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/428477/the-iphone-has-passed-a-key-security-threshold/ However, Apple's Security Guide specifically discusses another approach for extracting the key. Once it's extracted, you can mount an attack on your cluster: "A 256-bit AES key that's burned into each processor at manufacture. It cannot be read by rmware or software, and is used only by the processor's hardware AES engine. To obtain the actual key, an attacker would have to mount a highly sophisticated and expensive physical attack against the processor's silicon. The UID is not related to any other identifier on the device including, but not limited to, the UDID."
Cindy Cohn, Executive Director, cindy@eff.org, +1 415-436-9333 x108 David Greene, Civil Liberties Director, davidg@eff.org, > +1 415-436-9333 x143 EFF and 46 Technology Experts Ask Court To Throw Out Unconstitutional Apple Order Forcing Apple to Write and Sign Code Undermining iPhone Security Violates First Amendment Riverside, California—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and 46 technology industry experts, including inventors of modern cryptography, told a federal court today that forcing Apple to write and sign computer code disabling crucial iPhone security features that protect millions of users violates the company's free speech rights. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) should not be allowed to, in effect, stand over the shoulders of Apple programmers and force them to create and sign off on code that would decimate the iPhone;s security, EFF said. The signed code would send a clear message that it's OK to undermine encryption that users rely on—a view the government endorses but Apple fiercely opposes. EFF made its arguments in a friend-of-the-court brief filed today in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The brief was signed by 46 technologists, security researchers, and cryptographers, including digital signature pioneers Martin Hellman and Ronald Rivest. [...]
To quote the (sadly) late Louise Rennison: "Honestly, what planet do these people live on? Any why isn't it farther away?" Let me give a different slant to this, amalgamating a number of aspects into one article. My apologies for the length but, paraphrasing Mark Twain, I don't have time to shorten it. Please note that this is opinion, I'm not a lawyer. To recap: - Apple was ordered to assist in accessing an iPhone 5C, the only device the San Bernadino shooters had not wiped; - To do so, Apple would have to break its own security, and create forensic tools that as yet do not exist; - The order states it would be a one-off, never to be repeated, limited, unique (etc., etc.) exercise; - Apple has filed a later motion that shows other pending cases by the FBI, so much for the one-off, but we'll get back to that. The technical bit: - There has as yet not been even the most remote assessment of this being possible, although the 5C is rumoured to be the last model with *some* softness in its protection; - There have been no statements as to what would happen in the purely theoretical case that Apple would and could do this, and then fails; - It is not possible to lift the data from the device and run it on (n) virtual machines to crack it because the encryption is tied to a unique chip in the device that is designed to defy analysis. In other words, lifting the data from the device means trying a lot more passwords than just a 4 digit PIN (how do we know it's only 4 digits?). - As the phone is the property of the State, it was supposed to be managed via a Mobile Device Management system (MDM) which would have allowed changing the PIN. This went wrong, so from a technical perspective this is asking a Super Secure Safe manufacturer to publicly crack their own safe AFTER the receiving bank had set its own combination and forgot what it was. The real problem in my opinion: - By going public instead of following informal channels, this order demands that Apple commits commercial seppuku by publicly undoing many man years of security development. - The US legal system relies on precedent. It is so fundamental that there is no established way to *prevent* precedent setting, and that renders any success of this case a template for repeat ad infinitum - Both FBI council and judge should be familiar with the principle of precedent, which makes "this is a one-off statements" not just questionable and misleading, but actively alarming. - The thickness of the terrorist sauce poured over this case alone is enough to set off alarm bels. Experience shows that the more emotional pressure is exerted, the more one must look underneath to see what the attempt at emotional distraction seeks to conceal. My theory: - Establishing such a precedent will initiate an absolute FLOOD of demands, affecting every US provider of equipment and services of note. The aim of such a campaign of simple brute harassment would be to make it simply more economical for such companies to build in a backdoor than to fight lawsuit after lawsuit. Capitalism works. Some evidence is already apparent of this harassment as the on-off clearly wasn't as shown by Apple's latest filing. In this context it is worth noting that the FBI has been a long standing and vocal critic of iOS security; - The next thing that happens to such a precedent is scope creep. Now it would used to access data of evil people with suspected links to terror (note that that is very carefully already one step removed from "people suspected of being terrorists themselves"), but eventually that will be worn down, precedent after precedent to "anyone we feel like investigating because, well, hey, the sun is shining and we are bored". - In short, the long con appears to be a play to get the beloved backdoors in place, this time the attack vector is a campaign of aggressive legal harassment using the above precedent. The FBI doesn't have to worry about costs as it uses the tax payer's money and it gives their flood of lawyers something to do, but the companies so attacked are not just facing costs, see below. Conclusions and questions: - FBI as well as DoJ are publicly stating here that "the fate of the world" (to slide along with the hyperbole) depends on access to the one and only device the San Bernadino killers did NOT bother wiping (and to which they should have had access if not for technical error). Thus, they casually admit that they were unable to gather enough alternative intelligence, despite multi-billion dollar budgets and unprecedented vaguely legalised data access powers since 9/11: they need the data on that single off-the-shelf consumer device so desperate that they are quite prepared to harm the security of billions. What on earth have they then done with those budgets and powers? Methinks Congress ought to know. - The implications of a win are that it will no longer be possible to protect ANY information held on US provided equipment and services. Consumers might as well buy a Chinese knock off for the level of security it brings. One would presume that Huawei et al are praying on their knees that the FBI and DoJ win this because it will pretty much bar US providers from selling into markets that respect the right to privacy, and that is not just Europe. A win for the DoJ and FBI is would be the last straw for Silicon Valley companies already reeling from the EU canceling Safe Harbor. It confirms my opinion that in matters privacy, security plays but a quiet second fiddle - law comes first (to be exact, security actually plays *third* fiddle, but that's for another day). - It is worth noting that FBI and DoJ appear not to be above misleading the American public and the Court (from what I have gathered, it appears the judge merely went along with FBI's talk about one-off, which is troubling in itself). Any talk about this affair being "once, "a one off", "an exception", "a special case" and "limited" is wilful misdirection and no doubt will now be used by any defence lawyer seeking to discredit the agency's statements in Court. Oops. - Is it really a good idea to set a precedent that it is quite OK to legally compel a company to commit commercial suicide when it has not broken any laws? And finally: - Don't get me wrong, I am for law enforcement having the tools to do their job, but with great power comes great responsibility and I have as yet not seen any movement towards the required transparency and accountability for such powers to be exercised. Edward Snowden's revelations should have been a wake up call, but not much has changed. - Asking Apple to remove its security because bad people use it is equivalent to asking Volvo to remove all car safety measures because criminals use their cars to ram-raid shops. If I recall correctly, harming a large volume of people at once is supposed to be the *terrorists'* modus operandi. - Given that the FBI considers iPhones so uncrackable, are Apple now their phone provider of choice? :)
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