Jefferson's Wheel

The Associated Press has an article by Martha Irvine, Social networking applications can pose security risks, that is based on Adrienne Felt’s analysis of Facebook platform privacy.

Still, it’s an honor system, says Adrienne Felt, a computer science major at the University of Virginia. A Facebook user herself, she decided to research the site’s applications and even created her own so she could see how it worked.

Most of the developers Felt polled said they either didn’t need or use the information available to them and, if they did, accessed it only for advertising purposes.

But, in the end, Felt says there’s really nothing stopping them from matching profile information with public records. It also could be sold or stolen. And all of that could lead to serious matters such as identity theft.

“People seem to have this idea that, when you put something on the Internet, there should be some privacy model out there — that there’s somebody out there that’s enforcing good manners. But that’s not true,” Felt says.

(Note: there wasn’t actually any “polling” of developers, just examining what applications do to determine how they appeared to use information.)

The story has been picked up by some other places including BusinessWeek, CNNMoney (From games to virtual gifts, social networking applications popular — but at what risk?), Forbes, International Herald Tribune, National Public Radio, San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer, Las Vegas Sun, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, MyFOX, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

The Colorado Daily wins the best title award for MySpace is your space (and yours, and yours…) (but its the same story).

Pantagraph (Central Illinois) has it currently as their top article and includes a picture their front page.

[Added 13 May] Pew Internet and American Life Project has a post on this: Securing Private Data from Network ‘Zombies’ by Mary Madden.

My shameless self-searching google alert occasionally turns up interesting things, like this letter to the editor of the Huntington News (West Virginia) by Gary Hurd. It refutes an op-ed piece that made all sorts of crazy pseudo-scientific arguments for “intelligent design”. The letter refutes one of the specific claims in the argument about the complexity of DNA using some material found in a lecture for my CS201J course:

And is this notion that human DNA is more complex than “any program ever devised” actually factual? The book by Watson was published in 1965, and the book by Gates that Ashby is misquoting was published in 1995, before the human genome project when we did not even know how many genes humans had! At the time, Gates’ statement was entirely reasonable, even though there was no actual data to test it. But Ashby makes a further claim, “… it is a well known fact that human DNA contains more organized information than the largest set of encyclopedias ever in print.”

David Evans, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia has made some interesting comparisons between DNA and today’s computer software as part of his Computer Science 201: Engineering Software course. Let’s begin with his observation that complexity of computer software has grown at an amazing rate in the last 40 years (about since Watson’s book on the gene was published). The Apollo mission guidance programs had about 36,000 instructions, but today’s Windows XP made by Bill Gates’ Microsoft has about fifty million instructions! Professor Evans then compares this to what we now know about genes. For example, the smallest known set of genes of an organism belong to a bacterial parasite called Nanoarchaeum equitans which has 522 genes representing about 40,000 bytes of information. In other terms, it is slightly larger than the Apollo guidance system. The human genome, or as Evans called it “The Make-Human Program,” has a total of about 3 billion base pairs, which entail about 35 thousand genes. The total information content counting all of the bases is 750 megabytes, or just larger than the 650 megabytes that fit on your CDs at home. But, we have learned that massive amounts of human DNA are genetic “left overs,” non-coding segments and duplications. In short, Human DNA has fewer working instructions than Windows software, and even its total 3 billion bases are tiny compared to Wal-Mart’s 280 terabyte database (the equivalent of 1,120,000 billion DNA bases).

Like most antiscience, Ashby’s “well known facts” are not facts.

The lecture he is referring to is here: Lecture 23: Everything Else You Should Know (but won’t see on Exam 2) [PPT] (slides 18-26). Although I am happy to have anything I’ve done used to debunk intelligent design, the point I meant to make here is a bit different from what Dr. Hurd’s letter is claiming — I am not intending to suggest that the genome is not a complex program (since one could still claim it results in executions that are still far more complex, resillient, and sophisticated than anything humans have created), just that its encoding is incredibly expressive in order for such complex outcomes to be encoded with so little information. Of course, a lot of the information is not in the genome itself, but in the very complex biochemical operating system in which it is interpreted.

The specific claim from the original op-ed piece, that “DNA contains more organized information than the largest set of encyclopedias ever in print”, of course, is blatantly false. A few image-laden pages of a World Book volume contain far more information that the entire human genome.

Congratulations to two of our students who received awards yesterday!

Adrienne Felt received the Outstanding Student Award for the School of Engineering and Applied Science from the Virginia Engineering Foundation. This is an annual school-wide award for the graduating fourth-year student who has “demonstrated outstanding academic performance, leadership and service”.

Karsten Nohl won the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Louis T. Rader Graduate Research Award recognizing his outstanding research as a Computer Engineering PhD student.

Even I won an award this week.

Congratulations to Karsten and Adrienne for their much-deserved awards.

ComputerWorld has an article about the new cryptanalysis of Crypto-1 results:
MiFare RFID crack more extensive than previously thought: Seconds, not hours, to effect; plus version tappable too, ComputerWorld, 15 April 2008.

The ubiquitous MiFare Classic RFID chip — used daily by millions worldwide in access control keys, subway passes and other applications — is even easier to crack than previously thought, according to security researchers who announced the development Tuesday at EuroCrypt, an international cryptography conference in Istanbul.

Mere seconds are all that is required to crack the chip’s security — not a few hours, as estimated last month. Karsten Nohl, a computer science graduate student and one of the masterminds behind reverse-engineering MiFare security, said in an interview that it now takes only 12 seconds to recover the key on a MiFare Classic card on an ordinary laptop.

On Monday, the Dutch government issued a final report arriving at the decisive conclusion that the chips, used by millions of citizens in the Netherlands, must be replaced. An earlier Dutch report had stated that a security breach on the MiFare cards was possible, but would be too unwieldy for the average attacker to accomplish.

There is also a series of articles in the Brisbane Times (Austrailia):

• Go cards ‘doomed’ over security, Brisbane Times, April 11, 2008.
• Reveal contract details: Opposition, Brisbane Times, April 11, 2008. (This one is mostly political.)
• New report slams go card security, Brisbane Times, April 16, 2008.

Other articles include: Dutch transit card crippled by multihacks, The Register, 16 April 2008.

An external assessment of the Dutch OV-Chipkaart found the card to be vulnerable to various attacks and recommends additional protections as well as the migration to better cards. The report concludes that proprietary ciphers like the Mifare Crypto-1 stream cipher are hardly ever secure:

Indeed, the security of proprietary stream ciphers has a reputation of “falling apart” once exposed to scrutiny by the cryptographic expert community.

The report also recommends that public transport systems should be more open about their security measures to enable independent reviews. Similarly, the migration of current systems to more secure cards should be discussed publicly:

Providing open communication on progress towards the [migration] may have a deterrent effect on attackers and the independent review of draft versions of the plan should provide added confidence that migration will succeed.

We are certainly looking forward to reviewing new systems (and perhaps to suggesting improvements).

The Crypto-1 stream cipher used in Mifare Classic smart cards has been broken yet again. The new attack is the most efficient one yet taking only 12 seconds to recover the secret key. In this algebraic attack, we construct a system of linear equations that describe the cipher and then solve this system for a given authentication using MiniSAT to recover the secret state and ultimately the secret key. The attack can operate on passively sniffed data which enables an attacker to gather the required data from meters away. Unlike previous attacks, it also works regardless of the quality of random numbers.

The Mifare Plus card that is meant to replace Mifare Classic in legacy installation is only marginally affected by the new results. Mifare Plus includes AES encryption—an open cipher that is generally assumed to be very secure.

The April 2008 Communications of the ACM includes an article by Hal Berghel,
Faith-Based Security: A tongue-in-cheek look at serious security issues (requires ACM subscription, otherwise see [ungated version]). It includes the MIFARE cryptanalysis (along with Windows buffer overflow vulnerabilities, WEP’s RC4 implementation, Cisco’s LEAP) as an example of the failure of security through obscurity. Its worth reading the whole article, but here are a few excerpts:

IT security has received increased attention over the past few decades primarily, but not exclusively, due to the increased threat from viruses, worms, password crackers, Trojan horses, and a cornucopia of other types of malware and exploits. As a consequence of this increased attention, a variety of security models have been proposed. Security-in-depth (SID) is one such example. Winn Schwartau’s time-based security is another. In this column I offer another modest example extrapolated from popular culture: Faith-Based Security, aka “no network left behind.”
…
I admit that a prima facie case could be made for security-in-depth even in the naïve sense of “more-is-better.” When I propose adding a new vitamin to my diet, my internist tells me “at this point there is no physiological evidence that suggests that this substance is harmful to humans, so knock yourself out.” As with my vitamins, a random application of security applications and systems is unlikely to do any more harm than lure one into a false sense of security, and perhaps slow things down a bit. And like the vitamins, when carefully and judiciously applied and evaluated in a controlled experimental setting, even naive security-in-depth can be of some value.

Such is not the case with our third model: security-through-obscurity. No prima facie case may be made here.
…
My final example came to my attention within the past few weeks. MIFARE is an proprietary encryption technique for RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) developed by Philips and Siemens in the late 1990′s. MIFARE is an attempt to cryptographically secure the now-ubiquitous RFID space which relies on RF transmission for communication between transmitter and receiver.

Following the common theme, the security of the proprietary MIFARE system is predicated on the belief that no one will discover how it works. And, as one might predict, some MIFARE circuits were reverse-engineered down to the gate level. The result was the discovery that the random number generation that drove the encryption resulted from a 16-bit key linear feedback shift register based on a master key and a time signature. With RFID sniffing via an open PICC (proximity integrated contactless chip) card and a logic analyzer, it is possible to discern patterns in the challenge-response authentication procedure that can be used in a replay attack, and from there it is possible to recover the key from the value of the unique identifier and the observed behavior of the shift register in the authentication process. We’ll create STO category III for this MIFARE vulnerability: turning chip designers loose with CAD/CAM software without adequate education and training.

EETimes and RFID-world.com published an op-ed piece by me that discusses the current lack of security in NFC cell phone standards.

Near Field Communication (NFC) phones automatically exchange data with other phones and objects in their vicinity. These phones are the latest example of a new technology developed with a strong focus on potential applications, but without sufficient thought to security and privacy concerns.
…
Adding sound security and privacy protection will slow down the deployment process and most likely increase the cost. Perhaps, security has this intrinsic cost that cannot be avoided as long as technologies create new incentives for thieves. NFC phones will attract misuse and computer fraud unless strong protection is included as a mandatory part of the NFC standards, similar to e-mail that promised simple, cheap, world-wide communication for everyone, but is now spoiled for many by spam, viruses and phishing.

The EETimes reports on our Mifare work after the news had gotten out in Germany through an article in the c’t magazine. Slashdot picked up on it as well and summarizes:

[T]he device is used in many contactless smartcard applications including fare collection, loyalty cards, and access control cards. NXP downplays the significance of the hack, saying that that model of RFID card uses old technology and they do a much better job these days.

One is left wondering why the old technology is then not replaced by those much better products that have been available for many years.

Chris Soghoian has a new article, Hackers target Facebook apps, March 27, 2008, that follows up his earlier article about Adrienne Felt’s analysis of privacy issues for the Facebook platform. Unsurprisingly, many Facebook applications are written without basic security protections; since they have access to private user data, flawed (but not intentionally malicious) Facebook applications can be exploited to compromise other user accounts.