Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

More thoughts on blogging

Thanks for the kind introduction Adam. This has been an interesting summer as I reach out to various security bloggers. I hope my “Meet The Bloggers” podcast series will help people to get to know the various “personalities” out there. We are an interesting bunch. The one question I have for everyone, bloggers and blog […]

 

The Down Side of "Strong" Authentication

Brad Stone has a great article in Wired about his car being stolen and the insurance company insisting that he must be lying because he still had all of his fancy RFID enabled keys. This assumption that the security system is perfect is going to continue to bite consumers especially as banks move to two-factor […]

 

Don’t Cross the Streams?

So this week I’m off to Metricon and Usenix Security. Many of my co-workers are off (to present an entire track) at Blackhat. What I find really interesting is that there are these two separate streams of security research, one academic and one hacker, in the most positive sense of the word. Both have produced […]

 

Introducing Richard Stiennon

I’m pleased to introduce the Jazz Combo’s first actual rocket scientist guest blogger, Richard Stiennon. Before founding IT Harvest, a startup dedicated to re-inventing IT research, Richard worked at Gartner and PriceWaterHouseCoopers. He usually blogs at Threat Chaos, and was kind enough to feature Chris and I as his first podcast, in Meet The Security […]

 

Drowing in Notices?

In “Access controlled by a password,” Phillip Hallam-Baker writes: It probably makes sense to have an exception of this type in the first instance when the law is enacted. Otherwise we may well drown in privacy disclosure notices. I must say, I don’t get this objection. Does it apply to any other bit of information […]

 

Yet Another Coding Standard?

Over at Matasano, Tom Ptacek skewers the new CERT Secure Programming Standard by asking: Do We Need an ISO Secure Coding Standard?. The entire article is well worth reading, but it sums up nicely with this: There are already a myriad of good sources of information about secure programming, including books targeted specifically to developers […]

 

Indiana's Breach Law

Indiana’s breach notification law went into effect on July 1, 2006. An excerpt relevant the “lost laptop” phenomenon: Sec. 2. (a) As used in this chapter, “breach of the security of the system” means unauthorized acquisition of computerized data that compromises the security, confidentiality, or integrity of personal information maintained by a state or local […]

 

DHS Has Nothing Better To Do, Apparently

A federal Department of Homeland Security agent passed along information about student protests against military recruiters at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, landing the demonstrations on a database tracking foreign terrorism, according to government documents released Tuesday. From San Francisco Chronicle, “Terror database tracks UC protests U.S. agent reported on ’05 rallies against military […]

 

Return on (Other People’s) Investment

‘The Australian’ has a great story on “Focus key to crack money-laundering.” Its focused on the testimony of a British expert on “money laundering” and includes: Last year, British banks, accountants and lawyers made some 200,000 reports to the authorities. But in the three years since Britain’s law was implemented, there had been only one […]

 

It's Getting Worse All The Time?

So there’s a post over at F-Secure’s blog: There’s a growing trend here. We’ve been saying for some time that the lack of large virus outbreaks is evidence that the malware environment could be getting worse, not better. The bad guys want to make money – not make attention. So as a malware author, if […]

 

On Provable Security

Eric Rescorla writes: Koblitz and Menezes are at it again. Back in 2004, they published Another Look at “Provable Security” arguing that the reduction proofs that are de rigeur for new cryptosystems don’t add much security value. (See here for a summary.) Last week, K&M returned to the topic with Another Look at “Provable Security” […]

 

Sky Marshalls Have Suspicious Behavior Quotas?

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they’re required to submit at least one report a month. If they don’t, there’s no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments. Even better, the people who are “suspicious” are put into secret databases with no way to find out why their […]

 

I don't know if this or the 'White Pages' breach is worse

Via America’s Finest News Source: Postmaster General Loses Laptop; Zip-Code Data Of Millions At Risk July 25, 2006 | Issue 42•30 WASHINGTON, DC—The U.S. Postal Service has confirmed that a laptop computer issued to Postmaster General John Potter and containing the zip-code information of over 280 million Americans was allegedly left in a taxicab Monday […]

 

"Privacy" International

As mentioned by Ben Laurie; Simon Davies, the Director of Privacy International, was quoted in IT Weeks’s Will industry rescue the identity card? as saying: “I’ve believed for some months that a ‘white knight’ consortium from industry is needed,” Davies said. “Companies that can see the benefits of the ID card idea should approach the […]

 

Fu-Sec, Dunbar Numbers, and Success Catastrophes

In “I Smell a Movement,” Chris talks about the City-sec movement, of security people getting together for beer, and about groups like ISSA. So the question I’d like to ask is why do these groups keep emerging so chaotically? Why can’t the extant groups, usually formed for the same reasons, succeed? I think there are […]

 

Usable Security: SOUPS Blog posts

There are about twenty good posts talking about the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy (SOUPS) over at Ka-Ping Yee’s Usable Security blog. If you’re reading this in the archives, start here and go forward, or here and go back. Some favorites: How will the scourge really be killed? (Panel) Decision Strategies and Susceptibility to […]

 

Security, Privacy and A Digression into Copyrights

(Via Caspar and Nicko.) I hesitated before posting this. I’m pretty sure it’s a Dr. Fun cartoon, but the jerks in “my confined space” have obscured the signature. I try hard to attribute all the images I use here. I’ve given credit to Galerie which we use to produce the frames. (They even added a […]

 

Are You Human or Not?

An reader who wants to remain anonymous points us to “Another CAPTCHA — But I failed (partly)” and “http://hotcaptcha.com/:” I cracked up when I saw this. It uses “the hotornot API” (Web 2.0 is getting out of hand!) to offer up pictures of nine women (or men) and asks you to prove you’re human by […]

 

Meet the Bugles

Check out Bugle, a collection of google searches that look for known general classes of vulnerabilities in source code such as buffer overflows and format string issues. The list is far from complete and is no replacement for real static analysis but will should get you a lot of low hanging fruit. [Via FIRST News.]

 

I smell a movement

No, not that kind, silly. I just read over at Bejtlich’s blog, that he has decided to start NoVA Sec, having been inspired by Chisec, which was begun by Matasano honcho Thomas Ptacek. ChiSec is fun, and has been rapidly imitated by other Matasano folks, yielding Seasec and NYsec (I’m hoping it will go next […]

 
 

Greed is Gummy

Wiedmaier over at Flickr, has a series of the “seven deadly sins” shot with gummy bears. Who knew sinning could be so cavity forming? Aside from gluttony of course. [via Slashfood]

 

Church 2.0

Check out Benjamin Sternke’s “Church 2.0: Emergence/Chaos theory.” Itn’s an interesting examination of how churches need to evolve to respond to a different type of parishoner: Church 2.0 will leave room for the Holy Spirit in its planning and structuring and strategizing. She’ll leave room for happy accidents to emerge. She’ll be patient with chaos, […]

 
 

Buggy Advice from Adam

So in the “Code Review Guidelines” which I wrote a long time back, I quote a bit of code by Peter Guttmann, on how to open a file securely. Last week, Ilja van Sprundel got in touch with me, and said that the lstat/open/fstat chain is insecure, because you can recycle inodes by creating a […]

 

ACLU: Feds snooping on Fedwire?

Press release describes a FOIA request seeking info on governmental surveillance of Fedwire, among other programs. This would be troubling. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the Federal Reserve System values its reputation for ethical behavior and fair play. A reputation, I might add, that based on my observations it deserves.

 

We Have A Favicon!

Because Emergent Chaos cares about your privacy, we employ industry standard measures to protect the security of our site, and convince you to provide us with personal data we don’t need, which we shall carelessly sling around. Our compliance is monitored by Ernst and Young, we ship backups via UPS to Iron Mountain, and our […]

 

Actual Data Sharing!

Cruising through my blogroll this morning over the morning coffee, I came across an article from BeyondSecurity, which walks through a forensics analysis of an on going security incident. This is a good read and it’s great to see folks in the industry talking about what they actually do and how they do it. Thanks […]

 

SMS to Email?

I’m looking for a service that will give me a US phone number capable of accepting SMS messages, and forwarding those messages to an email account. I’m happy to pay for the service, but my searches have come up blank. I don’t want a service where the user has to add the destination email manually. […]

 

Job Hunting for Security Executives

Like everyone, there comes a time in every CSOs career where they need to look for a new job. I’ve reached that point in my career and in looking around, I’ve run into several challenges. The first problem I’ve found is that there are a lot of different titles for the person who owns all […]

 

North Carolina is in the club

From North Carolina’s breach notification law, which took effect on December 1, 2005: (f) In the event a business provides notice to more than 1,000 persons at one time pursuant to this section, the business shall notify, without unreasonable delay, the Consumer Protection Division of the Attorney General’s Office and all consumer reporting agencies that […]

 

Choicepoint Spins off 3 Businesses

From their press release: ALPHARETTA, Ga., July 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — ChoicePoint (NYSE: CPS – News) today announced its intent to divest various businesses resulting from its company-wide strategic review. The previously disclosed review process resulted in the company adopting a new strategic focus on helping customers manage economic or physical risks, as well as the […]

 

gcc -Wall -WeReallyMeanIt

Following up on a problem I mentioned long ago, (“Ranum on the Root of the Problem“) that gcc’s -Wall doesn’t actually run all the analysis it could. Apple has a great page “Improving Your Software With Xcode and Static Analysis Techniques” (I believe that this is a mirror of that page, see section 5) that […]

 

A Few More Thoughts on Disclosure

Reading Arthur’s “What Me Data Share?” and Chris’ “CSI/FBI Survey considered harmful,” I realized that what they’re discussing may not be common knowledge. I also realized that my posts about how valuable disclosure laws are assumed that everyone knows what Chris and Arthur said, and that ain’t so. The lack of information sharing that plagues […]

 

What Me Data Share?

I completely have to support Chris in his analysis of the latest CSI/FBI Survey. He sums it up nicely with: “there is no reason to give this survey any credence.” The survey, does an excellent job of highlighting a general problem within the security industry, the sharing of data. If we’re to make real progress […]

 

CSI/FBI Survey considered harmful

The latest 2006 CSI-FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey has been released. Already, it is making waves, as it does each year. I want to simply state that there is no reason to give this survey any credence. The survey instrument is sent only to CSI members. This time, it was sent to 5,000 of […]

 

In every dream home, a heartache

Barry Ritholz, an NYC hedge fund manager, blogs about a WSJ story. The gist: On Sept. 21, 2001, rescuers dug through the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Across town, families buried two firefighters found a week earlier. At Fort Drum, on the edge of New York’s Adirondacks, soldiers readied for deployment halfway across […]

 

With the Advice and Consent of The Blogosphere?

So I’ve been too busy to blog the Spector bill, but the astounding quality of analysis that’s been applied to Spector’s “”Judical Review” for Spying On Americans” bill has been really astounding. Early reports in (say) the Washington Post were really positive, saying that the bill was quite a positive development. Then legal bloggers got […]

 

Becoming More Straight-Laced

Shoelaces got you down? Constantly tripping over your own laces? Your bows off kilter? Everything you could possibly want to know about shoelaces, courtesy of Ian’s Shoelace Site.

 

Skype reverse-engineered?

According to Charlie Paglee, Skype has been cracked, and a compatible client implemented. This promises to have wide ramifications, about which Charlie writes at length.

 

The "Box Switching" Game

I have two boxes. Each has some positive amount of money in it, but I will give you no information about the possible dollar amounts other than the fact that one box has exactly twice the amount of money in it as the other. You randomly select one of the two boxes, open it, and […]

 

ThreatChaos Podcast Featuring Emergent Chaos

This week marks the first installment of a series of podcasts I am producing called “Meet The Security Bloggers”. I asked Adam Shostack and Chris Walsh to be the guinea pigs for the first one and it turned out really well. These guys write for EmergentChaos, a blog that Adam started. When he got it […]

 

Belated happy birthday

…to the United States’ Freedom of Information Act, a national law signed on July 4, 1966, by a reluctant Lyndon Johnson, after having been championed by U.S. Representative John Moss.

 

New rules, you say?

Vystar Credit Union was hit by “hackers”, who obtained personal info on 10% or so of their 334,000 customers. The information included “names, addresses, social security numbers, birth dates, mothers’ maiden names and e-mail addresses”, according to Jacksonville.com. Credit union CEO Terry West took a rather old school approach: West said the company noticed the […]

 

Well, He Had Valid ID (Houston Edition)

Houston police and the federal Transportation Security Administration disagree over who is responsible for allowing a man with what appeared to be bomb components board an aircraft at Hobby Airport last week. Although the FBI eventually cleared the man of wrongdoing, police officials have transferred the officer involved and are investigating the incident while insisting […]

 

Debian CVS server compromised

Here’s news of a breach that (I presume) involved no PII, but which could be significant. I wrote about a previous Debian breach back in December, 2003. I hadn’t realized it had been so long! Update: Local vuln used to elevate privs. Local access gained due to weak developer password. Details here.

 

Spying As a "Lifestyle Choice"

“The Plot to Hijack Your Computer” in Business Week lays out some of the history of “Direct Revenue,” a spyware company whose products are so beloved of their customers that DR receives regular death threats. Cryptome presents an except from a complaint in a lawsuit against AT&T, claiming that “NSA/AT&T Spying Began 8 Months beofre […]

 

Bye, Syd

Syd Barrett has died.

 

UK ID Cards Dead?

Via Charlie Stross we learn that the Sunday Times reports, “ID cards doomed, say officials:” TONY BLAIR’S flagship identity cards scheme is set to fail and may not be introduced for a generation, according to leaked Whitehall e-mails from the senior officials responsible for the multi-billion-pound project. … [Peter Smith, acting commercial director at the […]

 

And Yet, It Transmits!

Ian Goldberg likes to state Kerckhoffs’ principle as “The security of a system shouldn’t rely on anything that’s hard to change.” So it is with deep amusement that I report on what’s probably one of the hardest to change systems out there. And I do mean out there: 23,222 km out there. Let me back […]

 

Human Powered Blender

Nothing says “prepared for power outages” at your summer parties like a human powered blender, so you can crush that all ice into frothy goodness before it melts. And thanks to the wonders of capitalism, now you don’t have to build your own. (Forgot to mention..click the picture to go to their site.)

 

Enforcement

People whine about Sarbanes-Oxley as if it were government accountants with a sense of neither humor nor proportion watching everything an executive does, 24/7. Thing is, much of the actual regulation is courtesy of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a private corporation. My hat is off to the accounting profession, which successfully met an […]

 

DOD Monitoring of Students Extended to Email

The Department of Defense monitored e-mail messages from college students who were planning protests against the war in Iraq and against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy against gay and lesbian members of the armed forces, according to surveillance reports released last month. While the department had previously acknowledged monitoring protests on campuses as […]

 

What Choicepoint Learned

Another new measure: ChoicePoint this month created a security advisory committee comprised of DiBattiste, the company’s CIO, head of internal audit, the chief business officer, chief marketing officer, chief administrative officer and general counsel. The group meets regularly “to ensure we’re hitting every aspect of security and privacy,” says DiBattiste. “One of the lessons we […]

 

Do Lost Computers Matter?

Over at Concurring Opinions, Dan Filler asks a question that a lot of people are asking: We have seen several stories, recently, about lost or stolen laptops containing troves of private data. These incidents do introduce a risk that the data will be converted to improper uses – most obviously identity fraud – but I […]

 

Chivalry isn't dead

Regarding the theft of Coca Cola intellectual property and its attempted sale to arch-rival Pepsico, we learn PepsiCo was offered a new product sample and confidential documents in May, in a letter from someone calling himself ‘Dirk’. But instead of taking the bait it tipped off Coca-Cola, which brought in the FBI. […] Coca-Cola’s chairman […]

 

Does Lost Data Matter?

At WEIS last week, Allan Friedman presented “Is There a Cost to Privacy Breaches? An Event Study.” The study looked at the effect of a privacy breach on stock value, and roughly concluded that it doesn’t do any harm to the shareholders after a few days. Tom Espiner of ZDNet has an article that explains […]

 

Never Say Never

Over at Security Incite, Mike Rothman discusses the recovery of the VA laptop: In other good news, they found the missing VA laptop, evidently with all the data intact. That really is great news, but I guess we’ll never get to test Adam Shostack’s contention (link here) that identity thieves could get to all 26 […]

 

Hamdan Analysis

On the plane home from England, I watched V for Vendetta. (If you haven’t seen it, the basic story is that terror attacks cause turn England into a police state, and a masked freedom fighter terrorist blows things up and kills people and makes it all better. Oh, he plays with Natalie Portman’s head, too. […]

 
 

In Congress Assembled, July 4, 1776

In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which […]

 

Sorry for not posting this earlier…

…but my internet tube was flooded. If you want to know what the heck that means, the good folks at 27B Stroke 6 (easily the best blog name I’ve seen this year), provide the details. The short and sweet is that U.S. senator Ted Stevens ain’t exactly Vint Cerf: I just the other day got, […]

 

Innovation, Emerging From Chaos

Following up on Friday’s internet innovation post, I’d like to clarify a few things: First, net neutrality is about regulating a set of regulated monopolies, whose services and profits are protected by the state against new entrants. The regulatory apparatus has fairly clearly been captured by the regulated. The discussion about larger packets misses the […]

 

Flippin' sweet!

Maybe IBM does have a sense of humor. “Knock it off, Napoleon! Just make yourself a dang quesa-dilluh!”. This phrase, from the movie Napoleon Dynamite, is the cipher key IBM are using to publish encrypted XML at this year’s Wimbledon grand slam. But is this a rather glaring lapse in security, or simply an anticipatory […]