Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Do Games Teach Security?

There’s a new paper from Mark Thompson and Hassan Takabi of the University of North Texas. The title captures the question: Effectiveness Of Using Card Games To Teach Threat Modeling For Secure Web Application Developments Gamification of classroom assignments and online tools has grown significantly in recent years. There have been a number of card […]

 

Usable Security: History, Themes, and Challenges (Book Review)

Simson Garfinkel and Heather Lipford’s Usable Security: History, Themes, and Challenges should be on the shelf of anyone who is developing software that asks people to make decisions about computer security. We have to ask people to make decisions because they have information that the computer doesn’t. My favorite example is the Windows “new network” […]

 

Indicators of Impact — Ground Truth for Breach Impact Estimation

One big problem with existing methods for estimating breach impact is the lack of credibility and reliability of the evidence behind the numbers. This is especially true if the breach is recent or if most of the information is not available publicly.  What if we had solid evidence to use in breach impact estimation?  This […]

 

New paper: "How Bad Is It? — A Branching Activity Model for Breach Impact Estimation"

Adam just posted a question about CEO “willingness to pay” (WTP) to avoid bad publicity regarding a breach event.  As it happens, we just submitted a paper to Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) that proposes a breach impact estimation method that might apply to Adam’s question.  We use the WTP approach in a […]

 

Base Rate & Infosec

At SOURCE Seattle, I had the pleasure of seeing Jeff Lowder and Patrick Florer present on “The Base Rate Fallacy.” The talk was excellent, lining up the idea of the base rate fallacy, how and why it matters to infosec. What really struck me about this talk was that about a week before, I had […]

 

Time for an Award for Best Data?

Yesterday, DAn Kaminsky said “There should be a yearly award for Best Security Data, for the best collection and disbursement of hard data and cogent analysis in infosec.” I think it’s a fascinating idea, but think that a yearly award may be premature. However, what I think is sorta irrelevant, absent data. So I’m looking […]

 

Sharing Research Data

I wanted to share an article from the November issue of the Public Library of Science, both because it’s interesting reading and because of what it tells us about the state of security research. The paper is “Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting […]

 

Paper: The Security of Password Expiration

The security of modern password expiration: an algorithmic framework and empirical analysis, by Yingian Zhang, Fabian Monrose and Michael Reiter. (ACM DOI link) This paper presents the first large-scale study of the success of password expiration in meeting its intended purpose, namely revoking access to an account by an attacker who has captured the account’s […]

 

Infosec's Flu

In “Close Look at a Flu Outbreak Upends Some Common Wisdom,” Nicholas Bakalar writes: If you or your child came down with influenza during the H1N1, or swine flu, outbreak in 2009, it may not have happened the way you thought it did. A new study of a 2009 epidemic at a school in Pennsylvania […]

 

More Bad News for SSL

I haven’t read the paper yet, but Schneier has a post up which points to a paper “Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications: a Reality Today, a Challenge Tomorrow,” by Shuo Chen, Rui Wang, XiaoFeng Wang, and Kehuan Zhang.about a new side-channel attack which allows an eavesdropper to infer information about the contents of an SSL […]

 

Everybody complains about lack of information security research, but nobody does anything about it

There has been a disconnect between the primary research sectors and a lack of appropriate funding in each is leading to decreased technological progress, exposing a huge gap in security that is happily being exploited by cybercriminals. No one seems to be able to mobilize any signficant research into breakthrough cyber security solutions. It’s been very frustrating to see so much talk and so little action. This post proposes one possible solution: Information Security Pioneers Fellowship Program (ISPFP), similar to Gene Spafford’s proposal for a Information Security and Privacy Extended Grant (ISPEG) for academic researchers.

 

Human Error

In his ongoing role of “person who finds things that I will find interesting,” Adam recently sent me a link to a paper titled “THE HUMAN FACTORS ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM–HFACS,” which discusses the role of people in aviation accidents.  From the abstract: Human error has been implicated in 70 to 80% of all civil […]

 

Is Quantified Security a Weak Hypothesis?

I’ve recently read “Quantified Security is a Weak Hypothesis,” a paper which Vilhelm Verendel published at NSPW09. We’re discussing it in email, and I think it deserves some broader attention. My initial note was along these lines: I think the paper’s key hypothesis “securtity can be correctly represented with quantitative information” is overly broad. Can […]

 

Quanta In Space!

What’s the biggest problem with quantum cryptography? That it’s too expensive, of course. Quantum anything is inherently cool, just as certain things are inherently funny. Ducks, for example. However, it’s hard to justify a point-to-point quantum crypto link that starts at one-hundred grand just for the encryptors (fiber link not included, some assembly required), when […]

 

Messing with the RIAA and MPAA

Some very smart people at the University of Washington figured out how to leverage the bittorrent protocol to cause the RIAA and MPAA to generate takedown notices. From the website: * Practically any Internet user can be framed for copyright infringement today. By profiling copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing system, we were […]