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…
[A failed software project is a tautology, but just for the record:] After US$1B and a decade, only one of the 94 forms the US Citizenship and Immigration Services has only managed to get one form running online. Usual sorts of problems - design wasn't finished until several years in (which isn't necessarily a bad thing - may mean that they actually designed what they were building before they built it!), lots of defects, etc. They're scrapping the waterfall-based development methodology for one based on cloud. I don't really understand that - those are apples and giraffes. You can use waterfall to build a cloud-based system - but I guess this has something to do with buzzword compliance. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-decade-into-a-project-to-digitize-us-immigration-forms-just-1-is-online/2015/11/08/f63360fc-830e-11e5-a7ca-6ab6ec20f839_story.html
Google Self-Driving Car Stopped for Going Too Slow(ly): An officer spotted a Google self-driving car going 24 mph in a 35 mph zone yesterday, and stopped it—with traffic backed up behind it. Of course, this should not be a surprise, because Google limits these cars to 25 mph, for safety reasons. As a result, no Google car has ever been ticketed -- after 1.2M miles and the equivalent of 90 years' driving experience. [Source: Arden Dier, Newser via *San Jose Mercurity News* and NBC News, PGN-ed] This event actually inspires some discussion of what might happen in a future where there are many such cars on the road. * Suppose a driverless car actually has no passengers. (Perhaps it is delivering groceries or packages, or doing surveillance of a dangerous area.) How does a police vehicle actually get the car to stop? Presumably the officer gets his vehicle directly in front of the car. But if the car is programmed to back up when it reaches an immovable object, several police vehicles might have to completely boxing it in. Then, how does the officer ticket the vehicle for some offense? The citation would presumably go to the owner of the car, e.g., Google! * Suppose at least two driverless cars are involved in an accident, with no responsible adults as passengers. If all of the cars involved in such a multicar accident were driverless, would the cars be programmed to pull over to a safe siding if they were drivable. How would they exchange (non)driver's licenses, as required by law? Who would call for the tow trucks? If the damage required calling for law enforcement assistance, how would that work? * Suppose a driverless and passengerless car is being controlled remotely. Who would be liable for accidents, and would be the recipient of citations? How would an automated highway prevent malicious behavior by drivers of noncompliant cars, such as old Hummers, motorcycles weaving in and out, exhausted truck drivers in the fog, and legacy racing cars? * Suppose racing car drivers were to decide that they would prefer to be remotely controlling driverless race cars. Would people stop paying to watch the races, some of whom presumably come hoping to watch the collisions and accidents? What about the responsibility for intentionally wiping out your competition? And perhaps electric cars would have battery life sufficient to survive an Indianapolis 500 without having to recharge their batteries, completely avoiding refueling pit stops (except for tire changes)... Of course, if you believe in totally autonomous vehicles preprogrammed for the entire race without any real-time interactions, that might reduce all of the challenges in auto racing to who is the best programmer. I suppose many rule changes would be in order. This is just my top-of-the-head reaction to an officer stopping a Google car, reportedly out of curiosity to have a discussion with the car's passenger/co-pilot as to how the car chose its speeds. I presume appropriate people involved in driverless cars have thought through thoroughly all of the questions above (not to mention those that might arise in many other risks-relevant scenarios). However, because there might never have been a reported traffic citation, and because I know of only one report of a driver-present car running into a driverless one that stopped for a pedestrian (as required by law), it might be timely to discuss some of these issues in RISKS—especially as they relate to drone-like totally unoccupied cars. PGN
Sharon Gaudin, *ComputerWorld*, 11 Nov 2015, via ACM TechNews, 11 Nov 2015 Toyota is making high-profile investments in artificial intelligence (AI) research and development that could yield many benefits in human-machine interaction. In a recently announced partnership with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Toyota will give each institution $25 million over five years to set up AI research centers. Stanford AI lab executive director Steve Eglash says these efforts could lead to cars that function more safely on city streets and in inclement weather, as well as robotic assistants for the elderly and infirmed. He says Toyota contributes not only financial support, but also "a unique perspective on the future of the AI industry and robotics." Data is another important ingredient Toyota brings, which Eglash says can be applied toward making more contextual and human-centered AI. With the car industry having already introduced self-parking autos and other driving-assistive innovations, Eglash thinks in a few years cars will be able to predict traffic and road conditions minutes before the vehicle arrives. He also expects the research to lead to cars that can anticipate cyclists and pedestrians' actions and take precautionary measures. Carnegie Mellon University professor Manuela Veloso sees such initiatives as the beginning of "the reality of AI in the physical world." http://orange.hosting.lsoft.com/trk/click?ref=znwrbbrs9_5-e4c1x2d7d4x063629&
Risks of not updating technology? https://news.vice.com/article/windows-31-is-still-alive-and-it-just-killed-a-french-airport November 13, 2015 | 5:30 am A computer glitch that brought the Paris airport of Orly to a standstill Saturday has been traced back to the airport's "prehistoric" operating system. In an article published Wednesday, French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine (which often writes serious stories, such as this one) said the computer failure had affected a system known as DECOR, which is used by air traffic controllers to communicate weather information to pilots. Pilots rely on the system when weather conditions are poor. DECOR, which is used in takeoff and landings, runs on Windows 3.1, an operating system that came onto the market in 1992. DECOR's breakdown on Saturday prevented air traffic controllers from providing pilots with Runway Visual Range, or RVR, information—a value that determines the distance a pilot can see down the runway. As fog descended onto the runway and engineers battled to find the origin of the glitch, flights were grounded as a precaution. "The tools used by Aeroports de Paris controllers run on four different operating systems, that are all between 10 and 20 years old," explained Alexandre Fiacre, the secretary general of France's UNSA-IESSA air traffic controller union. ADP is the company that runs both Orly and Paris' other airport, Charles de Gaulle, one of the busiest in the world.
[Thanks to Robert Dorsett for pointing out this item.] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/11/airplane-maintenance-disturbing-truth
Margaret Coker and Paul Sonne, *WSJ*, 9 Nov 2015 A woman votes in Kiev in May 2014. A cyberattack ahead of Ukraine's 2014 presidential election threatened to derail the vote. http://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-cyberwars-hottest-front-1447121671 KIEV, Ukraine—Three days before Ukraine's presidential vote last year, employees at the national election commission arrived at work to find their dowdy Soviet-era headquarters transformed into the front line of one of the world's hottest ongoing cyberwars. The night before, while the agency's employees slept, a shadowy pro-Moscow hacking collective called CyberBerkut attacked the premises. Its stated goal: To cripple the online system for distributing results and voter turnout throughout election day. Software was destroyed. Hard drives were fried. Router settings were undone. Even the main backup was ruined. The carnage stunned computer specialists the next morning. "It was like taking a cold shower. It really was the first strike in the cyberwar." (Victor Zhora, director of the Ukrainian IT firm Infosafe, which helped set up the network for the elections. [...]
BoingBoing via NNSquad http://boingboing.net/2015/11/10/uk-government-can-secretly-ord.html Under the UK's new Snoopers Charter (AKA the Investigatory Powers Bill), the Secretary of State will be able to order companies to introduce security vulnerabilities into their software ("backdoors") and then bind those companies over to perpetual secrecy on the matter, with punishments of up to a year in prison for speaking out, even in court. The gag orders don't stop there. The Snoopers Charter also lets the government silence people it conscripts to help it with interception, hacking, bulk data collection and data-retention.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/the-snoopers-charter-would-devastate-computer-security-research-in-the-uk/ Rupert Goodwins (UK), Ars Technica, 11 Nov 2015 What happens when you are forbidden from disclosing that backdoor you found? Any law that forbids citizens from revealing what the government gets up to, or from speaking out about what they find, needs to be looked at with a very hard stare indeed. Yet that's where we find ourselves with the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, aka the Snooper's Charter. As Glyn Moody and George Danezis point out, the draft bill effectively makes it a crime to reveal the existence of government hacking. Along the way, the new law would also make it illegal to discuss the existence or nature of warrants with anyone under any circumstances, including in court or with your MP, no matter what's been happening. The powers are sweeping, absolute, and carefully put beyond public scrutiny, effectively for ever. There's no limitation of time. [...]
*WiReD* via NNSquad http://www.wired.com/2015/11/court-says-tracking-web-histories-can-violate-wiretap-act/ In the ruling, the appeals court agreed with a lower court, which dismissed the plaintiffs' claims that Google and the other defendants had violated laws like the Wiretap Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by collecting users' web browsing information. (Though the ruling does reverse the dismissal of a different claim that the defendants violated the California constitution, which will now proceed in the lawsuit.) But despite those decisions and perhaps more importantly, the court was careful to make another point: That merely tracking the URLs someone visits can constitute collecting the contents of their communications, and that doing so without a warrant can violate the Wiretap Act. And that's an opinion that will apply not just to Google, but to the Justice Department ... In their ruling, the panel of three appellate judges found that Google and its co-defendants hadn't violated the Wiretap Act because they were a "party" to the communications rather than a third-party eavesdropper--the users were visiting their websites when the cookies were installed. But the judges took special pains to make clear that the defendants hadn't been let off because their cookie-blocking circumvention technique was only collecting metadata from users, rather than the content of their communications.
Mark Wilson, BetaNews, 9 Nov 2015 http://betanews.com/2015/11/09/linux-users-targeted-by-new-linux-encoder-1-encryption-ransomware/ Linux users targeted by new Linux.Encoder.1 encryption ransomware Published 21 hours ago [as I write this (2015-11-10 10:38 PST). This non-dating of content has its own risks.]
The FBI set up a web portal, the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP), that provides access to an long and growing list of services and resources "that are sensitive but unclassified"—in order to "strengthen case development for investigators, enhance information sharing between agencies, and be accessible in one centralized location!" (Yes, the exclamation point is in the original.) And they made all of it accessible with just a "single sign-on," i.e., a username and password. You'll never guess what happened next! <http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2015/11/you-only-need-one-password-access-allegedly-hacked-law-enforcement-databases/123537/> FBI officials on Monday had no comment on bureau website access controls or the alleged hack beyond a statement made Friday that "those who engage" in such hacktivism activities "are breaking the law" and that the FBI will work with other agencies and industries "to identify and hold accountable those who engage in illegal activities in cyberspace." Hackers demonstrate they can gain access to LEEP, and the ensuing investigation involves several agencies, which share their investigation records on LEEP.
A multinational process control company has launched a website www.anatomyofanincident.com. It has brief narratives of process control incidents. Included in the initial launch are the BP Texas City Refinery explosion and fire, the Bayer Crop Sciences chemical tank rupture, the Buncefield oil storage depot fire, and the Piper Alpha drilling platform fire. The creators of the site note that further content is planned, deeper into the incidents and more incidents. The narratives discuss human and management contributions to the incidents, a longtime focus of the Risks Forum.
InfoWorld via NNSquad http://www.infoworld.com/article/3000943/phishing/10-reasons-why-phishing-attacks-are-nastier-than-ever.html Enter spearphishing: a targeted approach to phishing that is proving nefariously effective, even against the most seasoned security pros. Why? Because they are crafted by thoughtful professionals who seem to know your business, your current projects, your interests. They don't tip their hand by trying to sell you anything or claiming to have money to give away. In fact, today's spearphishing attempts have far more sinister goals than simple financial theft.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-and-google-yank-instagram-password-stealing-app-from-app-stores/
New Research: Encouraging trends and emerging threats in email security https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/11/new-research-encouraging-trends-and.html To that end, in partnership with the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, we're publishing the results of a multi-year study that measured how email security has evolved since 2013. While Gmail was the foundation of this research, the study's insights apply to email more broadly, not unlike our Safer Email Transparency report. It's our hope that these findings not only help make Gmail more secure, but will also be used to help protect email users everywhere as well. The irony of course is that TLS (STARTTLS) is basically clown-grade email encryption. It is—generally—easy for midpoints to defeat or disable (cracking the crypto is not necessary), and due to incompatibilities results in significant amounts of email not being delivered at all (that's why many popular mailing list systems are configured to not use it—they've actually disabled it after trying to make it work and ending up with angry respondents who didn't get their mail, and it's difficult to blame them). And of course, hack attacks virtually never relate to third-party snooping of email—rather, endpoint vulnerabilities are key to the big attacks. My gut feeling is that Google warning people about receiving unencrypted email will trigger much angst and panic without doing much good at all. But this is all part of the Internet's own version of airport "security theater": "Falling Into the Encryption Trap" - http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001108.html
FYI—Forget about a nightmare night at the museum; a cybersecurity researcher of medical device security finds himself spending two weeks hooked up to medical devices he had previously shown were extremely vulnerable to attack. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_at_the_Museum "After six months, TrapX concluded that all of the hospitals contained medical devices that had been infected by malware." "observe hackers attempting to take medical records out of the hospitals through the infected devices." "In 2011, the Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville, Ga., shut its doors to all non-emergency patients for three days after a virus crippled its computer system." Monte Reel and Jordan Robertson, November 2015 It's Way Too Easy to Hack the Hospital http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-hospital-hack/ Firewalls and medical devices are extremely vulnerable, and everyone's pointing fingers. In the fall of 2013, Billy Rios flew from his home in California to Rochester, Minn., for an assignment at the Mayo Clinic, the largest integrated nonprofit medical group practice in the world. Rios is a white-hat hacker, which means customers hire him to break into their own computers. His roster of clients has included the Pentagon, major defense contractors, Microsoft, Google, and some others he can't talk about. [...] When he found vulnerabilities in an infusion pump used in hospitals, he contacted the US Department of Homeland Security's ICS-CERT, which notified the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which in turn notified the manufacturer, but nothing happened until he provided DHS and the FDA with proof-of-concept code demonstrating the risks the devices posed. The FDA issued an advisory recommending that the pumps not be used, but no one was under any obligation to fix the devices that were already in use. Trying to assign responsibility for mitigating these issues has been difficult, and Rios has concluded that the only way to make changes is to put pressure directly on the manufacturers. [... VERY LONG item truncated for RISKS. PGN-ed]
FYI—U.S. takeaway: Australia is simply further along the learning curve than the U.S.; the U.S. intends to 'lead' in the insecurity of health records, as well. "the e-health system looks more like it was designed for spooks and revenue-collectors than for doctors or patients" "[criticized the recommendation that] My Health Record be changed from an opt-in system to an opt-out system" "Once a breach has occurred, the data cannot be put back in the box" Richard Chirgwin, *The Register*, 12 Nov 2015 Oz e-health privacy: after a breach is too late Privacy foundation slams 'dangerously naive' Senators http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/12/oz_ehealth_privacy_after_a_breach_is_too_late/ Australia's peak privacy body has lambasted the country's Senate for being ignorant about the implications of the country's new e-health records. What was once called the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR), re-branded My Health Record this year to give it a smiley face, is the government's attempt to dragoon Australians into a national health database. Looking behind the mask, however, the Australian Privacy Foundation reckons the e-health system looks more like it was designed for spooks and revenue-collectors than for doctors or patients. Coming in for special criticism is the Senate committee recommendation that My Health Record be changed from an opt-in system to an opt-out system. That decision seems designed to boost the chronically low take-up of a system that this year got a budget allocation of more than AU$450 million (its 15-year estimated cost from 2010 to 2025 is $3.6 billion). [PGN-truncated]
> Does any reader know whether [Robert Wachter] is well qualified to conduct > this review? RISKS-28.59 linked to Wachter's 5-part series on Medium, excerpted from "The Digital Doctor", starting here: https://medium.com/backchannel/how-technology-led-a-hospital-to-give-a-patient-38-times-his-dosage-ded7b3688558
No, I don't mean I broke off part of my card, it means of all the credit and debit cards that I have, currently the only one with a chip in it is my Target Red Card. A couple weeks ago I had to call in and ask the automated system to send me a new card because there was a crack in the mag strip. So, Target sent me a chipped card, and when I registered it on their website it asked me to select a pin;. I did. Since it is a chipped card, guess what? No mag stripe. Since Target had to replace 100% of their card readers anyway after they got hacked, and since you can't use the card anywhere else, it makes sense to have it set up for chip-and-pin only transactions, since the whole idea is to reduce the potential for fraud. A crook not only has to steal your card, he also has to torture you for your pin number.** Merchants were supposed to be ready to take chipped cards as of October anyway, but despite the fact I have about 6 different cards. only the one from Target has yet to be chipped. All my other debit and credit cards are mag stripe. So today, I went into Target to buy a package of socks, and I found they had a nice multi pack of socks for tall and big men, fits sizes 12-14, pack of 10 black dress socks, $15. Not bad. So I go up to the self-serve register, scan the bar code on the socks, select credit card for method of payment, push the Red Card into the chip reader, it brings up a password entry box, I punch in my pin, then it burps twice to tell me to take my card back, and the transaction is approved. Very slick. My second purchase was at the pharmacy, $1.29 for one of my prescriptions after insurance. I'm actually impressed that the technology actually works. Now, anyone want to take any bets on how long before crooks figure a way to break the system in order to steal goods and/or money? I've heard the chip-and-pin system in Europe has been hacked, at least and some researchers have even written papers showing how it can be done. ** The term "pin" as used with authenticating payment cards is an acronym for "personal identification number," so actually, using the term "pin number" is redundant. I also sometimes take money out at an Automatic Teller Machine machine, so I'm also redundant when I use an ATM machine
Why the attack on Tor matters Matthew Green, Ars Technica, 12 Nov 2015 Op-ed: Comp sci researchers have a blind spot to ethical issues in their field. http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/11/why-the-attack-on-tor-matters/ On Wednesday, Motherboard posted a court document filed in a prosecution against a Silk Road 2.0 user indicating that the user had been de-anonymized on the Tor network thanks to research conducted by a university-based research institute. As Motherboard pointed out, the timing of this research lines up with an active attack on the Tor network that was discovered and publicized in July 2014. Moreover, the details of that attack were eerily similar to the abstract of a (withdrawn) BlackHat presentation submitted by two researchers at the CERT division of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). A few hours later, the Tor Project made the allegations more explicit, posting a blog entry accusing CMU of accepting $1 million to conduct the attack. A spokesperson for CMU didn't exactly deny the allegations but demanded better evidence and stated that he wasn't aware of any payment. No doubt we'll learn more in the coming weeks as more documents become public. You might wonder why this is important. After all, the crimes we're talking about are pretty disturbing. One defendant is accused of possessing child pornography, and if the allegations are true, the other was a staff member on Silk Road 2.0. If CMU really did conduct Tor de-anonymization research for the benefit of the FBI, the people they identified were allegedly not doing the nicest things. It's hard to feel particularly sympathetic. Except for one small detail: there's no reason to believe that the defendants were the only people affected. If the details of the attack are as we understand them, a group of academic researchers deliberately took control of a significant portion of the Tor network. Without oversight from the University research board, they exploited a vulnerability in the Tor protocol to conduct a traffic confirmation attack, which allowed them to identify Tor client IP addresses and hidden services. They ran this attack for five months and potentially de-anonymized thousands of users. It's quite possible that these researchers exercised strict protocols to ensure that they didn't accidentally de-anonymize innocent bystanders. This would be standard procedure in any legitimate research involving human subjects, particularly research that has the potential to harm. If the researchers did take such steps, it would be nice to know about them. CMU hasn't even admitted to the scope of the research project, nor has it published any results, so we just don't know. While most of the computer science researchers I know are fundamentally ethical people, as a community we have a blind spot when it comes to the ethical issues in our field. There's a view in our community that Institutional Review Boards are for medical researchers, and we've somehow been accidentally caught up in machinery that wasn't meant for us. And I get this—IRBs are unpleasant to work with. Sometimes the machinery is wrong. But there's also a view that computer security research can't really hurt people, so there's no real reason for this sort of ethical oversight machinery in the first place. This is dead wrong, and if we want to be taken seriously as a mature field, we need to do something about it. We may need different machinery, but we need something. That something begins with the understanding that active attacks that affect vulnerable users can be dangerous and should never be conducted without rigorous oversight—if they must be conducted at all. It begins with the idea that universities should have uniform procedures for both faculty researchers and quasi-government organizations like CERT if they live under the same roof. It begins with CERT and CMU explaining what went on with their research rather than treating it like an embarrassment to be swept under the rug. Most importantly, it begins with researchers looking beyond their own research practices. So far, the response to the Tor news has been a big shrug. It's wonderful that most of our community is responsible. But that doesn't matter if we're willing to look the other way when people in our community aren't. This story was originally published on Matthew Green's blog. http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/11/why-tor-attack-matters.html
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2399112/microsoft-finally-patches-stuxnet-and-the-freak-encryption-vulnerability Kieren McCarthy, *The Register*, 13 Nov 2015 Microsoft creates its own movie moment with fancy privacy manifesto General counsel still waiting for people to leap onto desks http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/13/microsofts_own_privacy_movie_moment/ Microsoft has published what can only be described as a privacy manifesto. The unusual online screed comes complete with interactive graphics, including a recording of the FISA court's voicemail, and appears geared at pitching Microsoft as the protector of people's global data. [Very long item truncated for RISKS. PGN]
It's also possible to store data so that it doesn't reside *anywhere* -- e.g., using RAID techniques, except that instead of RAID standing for "Redundant Array of Independent Disks", we replace it with RAIC -- "Redundant Array of Independent Countries". Search also for "erasure coding". Also: "Microsoft to store data in Germany to keep it from third parties" http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/11/technology/microsoft-germany-data-center-privacy/index.html Cory Bennett - 11/10/15 11:28 AM EST Microsoft opens UK-only data center following EU ruling http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/259656-microsoft-opens-uk-only-data-center-following-eu-ruling
"This [spying] data is sent *regardless* of whether you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service when first configuring the TV." "readers are better off foregoing the minimal benefits provided by an Internet-connected TV and settling for one with no networking at all" It's worth reading the following blog for the techniques used to crack the Vizio TV; e.g., they used repeated command injection to list the filesystem, and then use this info to mount a filesystem on a USB stick and copy the whole filesystem over. https://blog.avast.com/2015/11/11/the-anatomy-of-an-iot-hack/ Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 11 Nov 2015 Man-in-the-middle attack on Vizio TVs coughs up owners' viewing habits Hack underscores amateur goofs routinely made by Internet-of-Things developers. http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/11/man-in-the-middle-attack-on-vizio-tvs-coughs-up-owners-viewing-habits/ The cautionary tales just keep coming for Internet-connected TVs, thermostats, and other so-called "Internet-of-Things" devices. Today's lesson comes courtesy of a smart TV from Vizio that was subjected to a man-in-the-middle attack because it couldn't be bothered to validate the HTTPS certificates of servers it connected to. Researchers from security firm Avast found that the Vizio model in their lab broadcast fingerprints of users' viewing habits, even when owners hadn't consented to a privacy policy displayed during set up. What's more, the researchers uncovered a vulnerability in the smart TV that could act as a potential attack vector for a hacker attempting to access a user's home network. Specifically, the TV accepted a self-signed forged certificate when connecting to tvinteractive.tv, a site the TV accessed about once per second. After studying the data sent to and from the server, the researchers discovered that commands the server sent the TV came embedded with a token. Rather than checking the validity of the HTTPS certificate, the TV inspected a checksum at the end of the data before it would accept the data. The checksum was the MD5 hash of the command combined with a secret cryptographic salt. The researchers were unable to use traditional cracking methods to figure out what the salt was. So they instead used some reverse-engineering creativity to enumerate the entire file-system on the TV. They soon found a plain-text file that contained the salt (which they declined to name). They were then able to use their man-in-the-middle attack both to read data the TV sent to the server and to impersonate the server and send commands back to the TV. With that, they were able to decrypt the entire binary stream that traveled between the TV and tvinteractive.tv, which is operated by a company called Cognitive Networks. In a blog post published Wednesday, the researchers wrote: https://blog.avast.com/2015/11/11/the-anatomy-of-an-iot-hack/ From this, it is obvious that the same data is being sent to Cognitive Networks servers through UDP and HTTP. This data is the fingerprint of what you're watching being sent through the Internet to Cognitive Networks. This data is sent regardless of whether you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service when first configuring the TV. [...]
> I believe in an optional "side door" into our electronic lives. Overall, I think this is a good idea. When the "side door" is optional, each person can choose for himself among the risks of: * loss of privacy to the government (via search warrants or less controlled methods, e.g., national security letters, tyrannical regimes simply walking into the bank, lawyer's office, etc. with guns to get your secrets) * loss of privacy to phishers who "social engineer" the custodian * loss of critical data due to disk crash, software error, death of the only person who knows the keys or locations of data, etc. > As for the allegation that encryption slows down access to the content, if you have legal access, and a math chip to handle the decrypting, there is no slow down. This is the only part of Mcintyre's post that I disagree with. There's a reason why "strong encryption" is called "strong". The encryption algorithm, key length, etc. are carefully designed to resist attempts to access the data without knowing the key—even by attackers with the resources of a large government behind them. (e.g., the NSA, CIA, or equivalent groups in the UK, Germany, China, Russia, etc.) If the secret is important enough (that is, worth enough $$$), it's theoretically possible that a large, dedicated organization may be able to extract it without access to the key—either by using massively parallel processing or by finding a weakness in the algorithm. But note that it is at least theoretically possible to create a key long enough that you cannot brute force it even if you could do one computation with every atom in the Universe. So if you want your data to be available in case of your death or disability, find a custodian whom you trust with your passwords, encryption keys, etc. [Ah, back to trusting potentially untrustworthy third parties or escrow agents that can be compromised by insiders, outsiders, and government agents, when there is already very weak security in all systems involved. Very nice. PGN]
When my children pick up and examine a bit of litter and then attempt to drop it again I tell them if they touch it they have to bin it. I think this applies to Rob Slade's review of Computer Viruses on wikipedia. If you know within your field that a wikipedia article is misleading and possibly dangerous I think it behooves you to try do something. If they cite your book incorrectly, all the more so. Perhaps your efforts will be overwritten and lost, but then again they may not be lost. Either way the virtuous attempt is in the page history forever and you did what you could.
> Remember Japan Airlines 007?" That would be Korean Airlines KAL 007.
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