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Reforming CDA 230

There’s a serous debate on reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I am in the process of figuring out what I believe, and this is more a place to put resources and listen to people’s comments.

The EFF has written extensively on why it is so important and dismantling it will ben catastrophic for the Internet. Danielle Citron disagrees. (There’s also this law journal article by Citron and Ben Wittes.) Sarah Jeong’s op-ed. Another op-ed. Another paper.

Here are good news articles.

Reading all of this, I am reminded of this decade-old quote by Dan Geer. He’s addressing Internet service providers:

Hello, Uncle Sam here.

You can charge whatever you like based on the contents of what you are carrying, but you are responsible for that content if it is illegal; inspecting brings with it a responsibility for what you learn.

-or-

You can enjoy common carrier protections at all times, but you can neither inspect nor act on the contents of what you are carrying and can only charge for carriage itself. Bits are bits.

Choose wisely. No refunds or exchanges at this window.

We can revise this choice for the social-media age:

Hi Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/everyone else:

You can build a communications based on inspecting user content and presenting it as you want, but that business model also conveys responsibility for that content.

-or-

You can be a communications service and enjoy the protections of CDA 230, in which case you cannot inspect or control the content you deliver.

Facebook would be an example of the former. WhatsApp would be an example of the latter.

I am honestly undecided about all of this. I want CDA230 to protect things like the commenting section of this blog. But I don’t think it should protect dating apps when they are used as a conduit for abuse. And I really don’t want society to pay the cost for all the externalities inherent in Facebook’s business model.

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December 10, 2019 businessofsecurity, censorship, eff, facebook, nationalsecuritypolicy, Security technology Read more >

Andy Ellis on Risk Assessment

Andy Ellis, the CSO of Akamai, gave a great talk about the psychology of risk at the Business of Software conference this year.

I’ve written about this before.

One quote of mine: “The problem is our brains are intuitively suited to the sorts of risk management decisions endemic to living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 BC, and not to living in the New York City of 2008.”

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December 6, 2019 psychologyofsecurity, riskassessment, risks, Security technology Read more >

Election Machine Insecurity Story

Interesting story of a flawed computer voting machine and a paper ballot available for recount. All ended well, but only because of that paper backup.

Vote totals in a Northampton County judge’s race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than 100 precincts. Some machines reported zero votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket, one candidate’s zero votes was a near statistical impossibility. Something had gone quite wrong.

Boing Boing post.

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December 5, 2019 cybersecurity, Security technology, voting, vulnerabilities Read more >

RSA-240 Factored

This just in:

We are pleased to announce the factorization of RSA-240, from RSA’s challenge list, and the computation of a discrete logarithm of the same size (795 bits):

RSA-240 = 12462036678171878406583504460810659043482037465167880575481878888328 966680118821085503603957027250874750986476843845862105486553797025393057189121 768431828636284694840530161441643046806687569941524699318570418303051254959437 1372159029236099 = 509435952285839914555051023580843714132648382024111473186660296521821206469746 700620316443478873837606252372049619334517 * 244624208838318150567813139024002896653802092578931401452041221336558477095178 155258218897735030590669041302045908071447

[…]

The previous records were RSA-768 (768 bits) in December 2009 [2], and a 768-bit prime discrete logarithm in June 2016 [3].

It is the first time that two records for integer factorization and discrete logarithm are broken together, moreover with the same hardware and software.

Both computations were performed with the Number Field Sieve algorithm, using the open-source CADO-NFS software [4].

The sum of the computation time for both records is roughly 4000 core-years, using Intel Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs as a reference (2.1GHz). A rough breakdown of the time spent in the main computation steps is as follows.

RSA-240 sieving: 800 physical core-years
RSA-240 matrix: 100 physical core-years
DLP-240 sieving: 2400 physical core-years
DLP-240 matrix: 700 physical core-years

The computation times above are well below the time that was spent with the previous 768-bit records. To measure how much of this can be attributed to Moore’s law, we ran our software on machines that are identical to those cited in the 768-bit DLP computation [3], and reach the conclusion that sieving for our new record size on these old machines would have taken 25% less time than the reported sieving time of the 768-bit DLP computation.

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December 3, 2019 cryptanalysis, cryptography, encryption, rsa, Security technology Read more >

The Story of Tiversa

The New Yorker has published the long and interesting story of the cybersecurity firm Tiversa.

Watching “60 Minutes,” Boback saw a remarkable new business angle. Here was a multibillion-dollar industry with a near-existential problem and no clear solution. He did not know it then, but, as he turned the opportunity over in his mind, he was setting in motion a sequence of events that would earn him millions of dollars, friendships with business élites, prime-time media attention, and respect in Congress. It would also place him at the center of one of the strangest stories in the brief history of cybersecurity; he would be mired in lawsuits, countersuits, and counter-countersuits, which would gather into a vortex of litigation so ominous that one friend compared it to the Bermuda Triangle. He would be accused of fraud, of extortion, and of manipulating the federal government into harming companies that did not do business with him. Congress would investigate him. So would the F.B.I.

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December 3, 2019 courts, cybersecurity, fbi, fraud, ftc, Security technology Read more >