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Buying Used Voting Machines on eBay

This is not surprising:

This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines — those that were used in the 2016 election — are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as “next generation,” and still in use today, are worse than they were before­ — dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation.

Cory Doctorow’s comment is correct:

Voting machines are terrible in every way: the companies that make them lie like crazy about their security, insist on insecure designs, and produce machines that are so insecure that it’s easier to hack a voting machine than it is to use it to vote.

I blame both the secrecy of the industry and the ignorance of most voting officials. And it’s not getting better.

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November 1, 2018 ebay, secrecy, Security technology, securityengineering, voting Read more >

SpiderOak’s Warrant Canary Died

BoingBoing has the story.

I have never quite trusted the idea of a warrant canary. But here it seems to have worked. (Presumably, if SpiderOak wanted to replace the warrant canary with a transparency report, they would have written something explaining their decision. To have it simply disappear is what we would expect if SpiderOak were being forced to comply with a US government request for personal data.)

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August 8, 2018 cloudcomputing, courts, nationalsecuritypolicy, secrecy, Security technology, transparency Read more >

WPA3

Everyone is writing about the new WPA3 Wi-Fi security standard, and how it improves security over the current WPA2 standard.

This summary is as good as any other:

The first big new feature in WPA3 is protection against offline, password-guessing attacks. This is where an attacker captures data from your Wi-Fi stream, brings it back to a private computer, and guesses passwords over and over again until they find a match. With WPA3, attackers are only supposed to be able to make a single guess against that offline data before it becomes useless; they’ll instead have to interact with the live Wi-Fi device every time they want to make a guess. (And that’s harder since they need to be physically present, and devices can be set up to protect against repeat guesses.)

WPA3’s other major addition, as highlighted by the Alliance, is forward secrecy. This is a privacy feature that prevents older data from being compromised by a later attack. So if an attacker captures an encrypted Wi-Fi transmission, then cracks the password, they still won’t be able to read the older data — they’d only be able to see new information currently flowing over the network.

Note that we’re just getting the new standard this week. Actual devices that implement the standard are still months away.

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July 12, 2018 passwords, secrecy, Security technology, securitystandards, wifi Read more >

Extracting Secrets from Machine Learning Systems

This is fascinating research about how the underlying training data for a machine-learning system can be inadvertently exposed. Basically, if a machine-learning system trains on a dataset that contains secret information, in some cases an attacker can query the system to extract that secret information. My guess is that there is a lot more research to be done here.

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March 5, 2018 academicpapers, datamining, secrecy, Security technology Read more >

Cabinet of Secret Documents from Australia

This story of leaked Australian government secrets is unlike any other I’ve heard:

It begins at a second-hand shop in Canberra, where ex-government furniture is sold off cheaply.

The deals can be even cheaper when the items in question are two heavy filing cabinets to which no-one can find the keys.

They were purchased for small change and sat unopened for some months until the locks were attacked with a drill.

Inside was the trove of documents now known as The Cabinet Files.

The thousands of pages reveal the inner workings of five separate governments and span nearly a decade.

Nearly all the files are classified, some as “top secret” or “AUSTEO”, which means they are to be seen by Australian eyes only.

Yes, that really happened. The person who bought and opened the file cabinets contacted the Australian Broadcasting Corp, who is now publishing a bunch of it.

There’s lots of interesting (and embarassing) stuff in the documents, although most of it is local politics. I am more interested in the government’s reaction to the incident: they’re pushing for a law making it illegal for the press to publish government secrets it received through unofficial channels.

“The one thing I would point out about the legislation that does concern me particularly is that classified information is an element of the offence,” he said.

“That is to say, if you’ve got a filing cabinet that is full of classified information … that means all the Crown has to prove if they’re prosecuting you is that it is classified ­ nothing else.

“They don’t have to prove that you knew it was classified, so knowledge is beside the point.”

[…]

Many groups have raised concerns, including media organisations who say they unfairly target journalists trying to do their job.

But really anyone could be prosecuted just for possessing classified information, regardless of whether they know about it.

That might include, for instance, if you stumbled across a folder of secret files in a regular skip bin while walking home and handed it over to a journalist.

This illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the threat. The Australian Broadcasting Corp gets their funding from the government, and was very restrained in what they published. They waited months before publishing as they coordinated with the Australian government. They allowed the government to secure the files, and then returned them. From the government’s perspective, they were the best possible media outlet to receive this information. If the government makes it illegal for the Australian press to publish this sort of material, the next time it will be sent to the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, or Wikileaks. And since people no longer read their news from newspapers sold in stores but on the Internet, the result will be just as many people reading the stories with far fewer redactions.

The proposed law is older than this leak, but the leak is giving it new life. The Australian opposition party is being cagey on whether they will support the law. They don’t want to appear weak on national security, so I’m not optimistic.

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February 7, 2018 australia, control, laws, leaks, nationalsecuritypolicy, physicalsecurity, secrecy, Security technology Read more >

Israeli Scientists Accidentally Reveal Classified Information

According to this story (non-paywall English version here), Israeli scientists released some information to the public they shouldn’t have.

Defense establishment officials are now trying to erase any trace of the secret information from the web, but they have run into difficulties because the information was copied and is found on a number of platforms.

Those officials have managed to ensure that the Haaretz article doesn’t have any actual information about the information. I have reason to believe the information is related to Internet security. Does anyone know more?

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January 31, 2018 internet, israel, secrecy, Security technology Read more >

NSA “Red Disk” Data Leak

ZDNet is reporting about another data leak, this one from US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), which is also within to the NSA.

The disk image, when unpacked and loaded, is a snapshot of a hard drive dating back to May 2013 from a Linux-based server that forms part of a cloud-based intelligence sharing system, known as Red Disk. The project, developed by INSCOM’s Futures Directorate, was slated to complement the Army’s so-called distributed common ground system (DCGS), a legacy platform for processing and sharing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance information.

[…]

Red Disk was envisioned as a highly customizable cloud system that could meet the demands of large, complex military operations. The hope was that Red Disk could provide a consistent picture from the Pentagon to deployed soldiers in the Afghan battlefield, including satellite images and video feeds from drones trained on terrorists and enemy fighters, according to a Foreign Policy report.

[…]

Red Disk was a modular, customizable, and scalable system for sharing intelligence across the battlefield, like electronic intercepts, drone footage and satellite imagery, and classified reports, for troops to access with laptops and tablets on the battlefield. Marking files found in several directories imply the disk is “top secret,” and restricted from being shared to foreign intelligence partners.

A couple of points. One, this isn’t particularly sensitive. It’s an intelligence distribution system under development. It’s not raw intelligence. Two, this doesn’t seem to be classified data. Even the article hedges, using the unofficial term of “highly sensitive.” Three, it doesn’t seem that Chris Vickery, the researcher that discovered the data, has published it.

Chris Vickery, director of cyber risk research at security firm UpGuard, found the data and informed the government of the breach in October. The storage server was subsequently secured, though its owner remains unknown.

This doesn’t feel like a big deal to me.

Slashdot thread.

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November 30, 2017 leaks, nsa, secrecy, Security technology Read more >

Uber Data Hack

Uber was hacked, losing data on 57 million driver and rider accounts. The company kept it quiet for over a year. The details are particularly damning:

The two hackers stole data about the company’s riders and drivers ­– including phone numbers, email addresses and names — from a third-party server and then approached Uber and demanded $100,000 to delete their copy of the data, the employees said.

Uber acquiesced to the demands, and then went further. The company tracked down the hackers and pushed them to sign nondisclosure agreements, according to the people familiar with the matter. To further conceal the damage, Uber executives also made it appear as if the payout had been part of a “bug bounty” — a common practice among technology companies in which they pay hackers to attack their software to test for soft spots.

And almost certainly illegal:

While it is not illegal to pay money to hackers, Uber may have violated several laws in its interaction with them.

By demanding that the hackers destroy the stolen data, Uber may have violated a Federal Trade Commission rule on breach disclosure that prohibits companies from destroying any forensic evidence in the course of their investigation.

The company may have also violated state breach disclosure laws by not disclosing the theft of Uber drivers’ stolen data. If the data stolen was not encrypted, Uber would have been required by California state law to disclose that driver’s license data from its drivers had been stolen in the course of the hacking.

Uber was hacked, losing data on 57 million driver and rider accounts. They kept it quiet for over a year. The details are particularly damning:

The two hackers stole data about the company’s riders and drivers ­- including phone numbers, email addresses and names -­ from a third-party server and then approached Uber and demanded $100,000 to delete their copy of the data, the employees said.

Uber acquiesced to the demands, and then went further. The company tracked down the hackers and pushed them to sign nondisclosure agreements, according to the people familiar with the matter. To further conceal the damage, Uber executives also made it appear as if the payout had been part of a “bug bounty” ­- a common practice among technology companies in which they pay hackers to attack their software to test for soft spots.

And almost certainly illegal:

While it is not illegal to pay money to hackers, Uber may have violated several laws in its interaction with them.

By demanding that the hackers destroy the stolen data, Uber may have violated a Federal Trade Commission rule on breach disclosure that prohibits companies from destroying any forensic evidence in the course of their investigation.

The company may have also violated state breach disclosure laws by not disclosing the theft of Uber drivers’ stolen data. If the data stolen was not encrypted, Uber would have been required by California state law to disclose that driver’s license data from its drivers had been stolen in the course of the hacking.

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November 27, 2017 disclosure, hacking, secrecy, Security technology, uber Read more >