Jefferson's Wheel

Adrienne Felt was interviewed on KCPW Midday Utah:

Users of the popular social networking website called Facebook should be concerned about security, according to Adrienne Felt. As a senior in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia where she specializes in computer security, her research shows that when users download a Facebook application – a program that allows the user to interact with other users – privacy is compromised.

The KCPW site has audio: http://www.kcpw.org/article/5281. Its quite an in-depth interview (about 20 minutes long).

I (David Evans) was interviewed for this story on NBC 29 news about a lawsuit challenging the use of DREs (software-only) voting machines as unconstitutional because they do not support non-secret counting:

Should the Voting Machines be Scrapped?, WVIR (NBC 29) TV News, 4 February 2008. (Includes Video)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about Adrienne Felt’s Facebook privacy study: Study Raises New Privacy Concerns About Facebook, 4 February, 2008.

Another report from WINA 1070 AM:

A UVa student is examining a popular social networking site

A student at the UVa Engineering School is investigating Facebook’s information vulnerabilities. Fourth-year student Adrienne Felt is in charge of a research project dealing with privacy issues having to do with applications on the popular social networking site. Facebook allows independently developed applications to appear in user profiles; when these applications run, the developer is given access to the user’s available information, causing a potential security breach. Felt’s goal is to make users more aware of how their information can be unknowingly accessed.

From ACM TechNews, 1 February 2008: University of Virginia Engineering School Student Probes Facebook’s Vulnerabilities

University of Virginia computer science major Adrienne Felt is leading a research project focusing on privacy issues surrounding the Facebook social networking site, and is investigating the information sharing that takes place when users download a Facebook application. Although the applications add variety to a Facebook user’s profile page, they also increase the user’s vulnerability. Anyone with a Facebook account can create and distribute an application. While the applications appear to be part of Facebook’s platform, they are actually running on the developer’s server. When a user installs an application, the developer is capable of seeing everything the user can see, including names, addresses, friends’ profiles, and photos. “Since all applications receive access to private information,” Felt says, “this means that 90.7 percent of Facebook’s most popular applications unnecessarily have access to private data.” There are currently no restrictions on what applications, and their developers, can do with user information, and while Facebook’s “Terms of Use” warn developers not to abuse the data they have access to, there is no way for Facebook to enforce this rule, Felt says. “An application developer could easily acquire personal information for millions of users,” says U.Va. computer science professor David Evans. Felt’s goal is to close this privacy loophole with a privacy-by-proxy system she developed that will allow Facebook to hide user information while still maintaining the applications’ functionality.

WCAV had a story on Adrienne Felt’s work on Facebook platform privacy risks:
UVa Student Raises Facebook Security Concerns, WCAV TV 19 News, Charlottesville, VA. (Includes a video clip from the newscast)

Many use the social networking site Facebook without ever thinking about security but you could be leaving yourself vulnerable anytime you share music or play a game. Facebook applications are not necessarily from Facebook.

Here’s another article on Adrienne Felt’s work on privacy issues with the Facebook platform: 90% of Facebook Apps Have Unnecessary Access to Private Data, Dark Reading, January 31, 2008.

UVa Today has an article about Adrienne Felt’s work on the privacy risks of the Facebook platform:
U.Va. Engineering School Student Probes Facebook’s Vulnerabilities, UVa Today, January 30, 2008.

Here are a few excerpts:

Facebook, the social networking platform that has redefined communications, has millions of users. According to University of Virginia computer science major Adrienne Felt, all of these users should be concerned about security.

Felt, a fourth-year student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at U.Va., leads a research project on privacy issues surrounding social networking platforms and is investigating the information sharing that occurs when users download a Facebook application — a program that allows the user to interact with other users in interesting ways, from sharing music to playing games.

Although these applications add variety to a Facebook user’s profile page, they also increase the user’s vulnerability. Here’s how: anyone with an account on Facebook can create an application. Although this application appears as if it is part of Facebook’s platform, it is actually running on application developer’s server. When a user installs an application, that application’s developer is given the ability to see everything the user can see — name, address, friends’ profiles, photos, etc.

…

Felt’s goal is to make users more aware of how their private information is being used — and to close this privacy loophole.

She has developed a privacy-by-proxy system — a way for Facebook to hide the user’s private information, while still maintaining the applications’ functionalities. Under Felt’s system, at the point at which the Facebook server is communicating with the application developer’s server, the Facebook server would provide the outside server with a random sequence of letters instead of the user’s name (and other personal information).

Felt is working on refining the privacy-by-proxy design and building a prototype implementation. “This is the first step,” she said. “Hopefully, the research findings and proposed solution will trigger more responsible privacy and information management policies from social networking sites and will better inform users.”

The full article also includes an audio clip.

[Added 2 March] There is an audio version of this story on The Oscar Show: Privacy and Facebook, 27 February 2008.

Karsten Nohl, in collaboration with Starbug and Henryk Plötz, has reverse-engineered the encryption algorithm used in Mifare Classic RFID tags, and identified several serious weaknesses in the ciper design and the way it generated random numbers. Mifare tags are used in several large public transportation systems including London Transport’s Oyster cards, and the Dutch government was planning to used them for the nationwide OV-Chipkaart system, but is reconsidering this in light of the revealed security weaknesses. The work involved reverse engineering the cipher from images of its hardware implementation.

The results were announced at the Chaos Communication Congress (December 28). Here’s Karsten’s talk (including a link to a video): Mifare: Little Security, Despite Obscurity.

Some posts about this work include:

• Schneier on Security (Bruce Schneier), Dutch RFID Transit Card Hacked
• Freedom to Tinker (Ed Felten), New $2B Dutch Transport Card is Insecure.
• Andy Tanenbaum, Dutch Public Transit Card Broken (includes links to many Dutch newspaper articles).

Karsten will also be giving a talk about this work at the RFID Security Workshop at Johns Hopkins University, January 23-24.

Chris Soghoian’s blog on CNET.com has an article about Adrienne Felt’s work on privacy for web platforms with open APIs:  Exclusive: The next Facebook privacy scandal, c|net Blogs, January 23, 2008:

But a new study suggests there may be a bigger problem with the applications. Many are given access to far more personal data than they need to in order to run, including data on users who never even signed up for the application. Not only does Facebook enable this, but it does little to warn users that it is even happening, and of the risk that a rogue application developer can pose.

The report is available here:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/felt/privacy/.