Category: Usability

“The Readability Of Scientific Texts Is Decreasing Over Time”

There’s an interesting new paper at bioRXiv, “The Readability Of Scientific Texts Is Decreasing Over Time.”

Lower readability is also a problem for specialists (22, 23, 24). This was explicitly shown by Hartley (22) who demonstrated that rewriting scientific abstracts, to improve their readability, increased academics’ ability to comprehend them. While science is complex, and some jargon is unavoidable (25), this does not justify the continuing trend that we have shown.

Ironically, the paper is released as a PDF, which is hard to read on a mobile phone. There’s a tool, pandoc, which can easily create HTML versions from their LaTeX source. I encourage everyone who cares about their work being read to create HTML and ebook versions.

“Comparing the Usability of Cryptographic APIs”

Obstacles Frame

 

(The abstract:) Potentially dangerous cryptography errors are well documented in many applications. Conventional wisdom suggests that many of these errors are caused by cryptographic Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that are too complicated, have insecure defaults, or are poorly documented. To address this problem, researchers have created several cryptographic libraries that they claim are more usable; however, none of these libraries have been empirically evaluated for their ability to promote more secure development. This paper is the first to examine both how and why the design and resulting usability of different cryptographic libraries affects the security of code written with them, with the goal of understanding how to build effective future libraries. We conducted a controlled experiment in which 256 Python developers recruited from GitHub attempt common tasks involving symmetric and asymmetric cryptography using one of five different APIs.
We examine their resulting code for functional correctness and security, and compare their results to their self-reported sentiment about their assigned library. Our results suggest that while APIs designed for simplicity can provide security
benefits—reducing the decision space, as expected, prevents choice of insecure parameters—simplicity is not enough. Poor
documentation, missing code examples, and a lack of auxiliary features such as secure key storage, caused even participants
assigned to simplified libraries to struggle with both basic functional correctness and security. Surprisingly, the
availability of comprehensive documentation and easy-to use code examples seems to compensate for more complicated APIs in terms of functionally correct results and participant reactions; however, this did not extend to security results. We find it particularly concerning that for about 20% of functionally correct tasks, across libraries, participants believed their code was secure when it was not. Our results suggest that while new cryptographic libraries that want to promote effective security should offer a simple, convenient interface, this is not enough: they should also, and perhaps more importantly, ensure support for a broad range of common tasks and provide accessible documentation with secure, easy-to-use code examples.

It’s interesting that even when developers took care to consider usability of their APIs, usability testing revealed serious issues. But it’s not surprising. The one constant of usability testing is that people surprise you.

The paper is: “Comparing the Usability of Cryptographic APIs,” Yasemin Acar (CISPA, Saarland University), Michael Backes (CISPA, Saarland University & MPI-SWS), Sascha Fahl (CISPA, Saarland University), Simson Garfinkel (National Institute of Standards and Technology), Doowon Kim (University of Maryland), Michelle Mazurek (University of Maryland), Christian Stransky (CISPA, Saarland University), The Increasingly-misnamed Oakland Conference, 2017.

How Not to Design an Error Message

SC07FireAlarm

The voice shouts out: “Detector error, please see manual.” Just once, then a few hours later. And when I did see the manual, I discovered that it means “Alarm has reached its End of Life”

No, really. That’s how my fire alarm told me that it’s at its end of life. By telling me to read the manual. Why it doesn’t say “device has reached end of life?” That would be direct and to the point. But no. When you press the button, it says “please see manual.” Now, this was a 2009 device, so maybe, just maybe, there was a COGS issue in how much storage was needed.

But sheesh. Warning messages should be actionable, explanatory and tested. At least it was loud and annoying.

People are The Weakest Link In Security?

Despite the title, end users are rarely the weak link in security. We often make impossible demands of them. For example, we want them to magically know things which we do not tell them.

Today’s example: in many browsers, this site will display as “Apple.com.” Go ahead. Explore that for a minute, and see if you can find evidence that it’s not. What I see when I visit is:

URL bar showing

When I visit the site, I see it’s a secure site. I click on the word secure, I see this:

Dropdown

But it’s really www.xn--80ak6aa92e.com, which is a Puncycode URL. Punycode is way to encode other languages so they display properly. That’s good. What’s not good is that there’s no way to know that those are not the letters you think they are. Xudong Zheng explains the problem, in more depth, and writes about how to address it in the short term:

A simple way to limit the damage from bugs such as this is to always use a password manager. In general, users must be very careful and pay attention to the URL when entering personal information. I hope Firefox will consider implementing a fix to this problem since this can cause serious confusion even for those who are extremely mindful of phishing.

I appreciate Xudong taking the time to suggest a fix. And I don’t think the right fix is that we can expect everyone to use a password manager.

When threat modeling, I talk about this as the interplay between threats and mitigations: threats should be mitigated and there’s a threat that any given mitigation can be bypassed. When dealing with people, there’s a simple test product security engineering can use. If you cannot write down the steps that a person must take to be secure, you have a serious problem. If you cannot write that list on a whiteboard, you have a serious problem. I’m not suggesting that there’s an easy or obvious fix to this. But I am suggesting that as long as browser makers are telling their users that looking at the URL bar is a security measure, they have to make that security measure resist attacks.

Mac Command Line: Turning Apps into Commands

I moved to MacOS X because it offers both a unix command line and graphical interfaces, and I almost exclusively use the command line as I switch between tasks. If you use a terminal and aren’t familiar with the open command, I urge you to take a look.

I tend to open documents with open ~/Do[tab]… I wanted a way to open more things like this. I wanted to treat every app as if it were a command. I did this a little while back, and recently had to use a Mac without these little aliases and it was annoying! (We know that mousing was objectively faster and cognitively slower than keyboard use.

So I thought I’d share. This works great in a .tcshrc. I spent a minute translating into bash, but the escaping escaped me. Also, I suppose there might be a more elegant approach to the MS apps, but it was easier to write 5 specific aliases than to figure it out.

Anyway, here’s the code:

foreach f (/Applications/*.app /Applications/Utilities/*.app)
    set t=`basename -a $f`
	# Does not work if your app has a shell metachar in the name. Lookin' at you, superduper!
    set w=`echo $t | sed  -e 's/ //g' -e  's/.app$//'  | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
    alias $w open -a \""$f"\"
end

alias excel open -a "/Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2011/Microsoft\ Excel.app"
alias word open -a "/Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2011/Microsoft\ Word.app"
alias powerpoint open -a "/Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2011/Microsoft\ PowerPoint.app"
alias ppt powerpoint
alias xls excel

(Previously: Adding emacs keybindings to Word.)

Diagrams in Threat Modeling

When I think about how to threat model well, one of the elements that is most important is how much people need to keep in their heads, the cognitive load if you will.

In reading Charlie Stross’s blog post, “Writer, Interrupted” this paragraph really jumped out at me:

One thing that coding and writing fiction have in common is that both tasks require the participant to hold huge amounts of information in their head, in working memory. In the case of the programmer, they may be tracing a variable or function call through the context of a project distributed across many source files, and simultaneously maintaining awareness of whatever complex APIs the object of their attention is interacting with. In the case of the author, they may be holding a substantial chunk of the plot of a novel (or worse, an entire series) in their head, along with a model of the mental state of the character they’re focussing on, and a list of secondary protagonists, while attempting to ensure that the individual sentence they’re currently crafting is consistent with the rest of the body of work.

One of the reasons that I’m fond of diagrams is that they allow the threat modelers to migrate information out of their heads into a diagram, making room for thinking about threats.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about threat modeling tools, including some pretty interesting tools for automated discovery of existing architecture from code. That’s pretty neat, and it dramatically cuts the cost of getting started. Reducing effort, or cost, is inherently good. Sometimes, the reduction in effort is an unalloyed good, that is, any tradeoffs are so dwarfed by benefits as to be unarguable. Sometimes, you lose things that might be worth keeping, either as a hobby like knitting or in the careful chef preparing a fine meal.

I think a lot about where drawing diagrams on a whiteboard falls. It has a cost, and that cost can be high. “Assemble a team of architect, developer, test lead, business analyst, operations and networking” reads one bit of advice. That’s a lot of people for a cross-functional meeting.

That meeting can be a great way to find disconnects in what people conceive of building. And there’s a difference between drawing a diagram and being handed a diagram. I want to draw that out a little bit and ask for your help in understanding the tradeoffs and when they might and might not be appropriate. (Gary McGraw is fond of saying that getting these people in a room and letting them argue is the most important step in “architectural risk analysis.” I think it’s tremendously valuable, and having structures, tools and methods to help them avoid ratholes and path dependency is a big win.)

So what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Whiteboard

  • Collaboration. Walking to the whiteboard and picking up a marker is far less intrusive than taking someone’s computer, or starting to edit a document in a shared tool.
  • Ease of use. A whiteboard is still easier than just about any other drawing tool.
  • Discovery of different perspective/belief. This is a little subtle. If I’m handed a diagram, I’m less likely to object. An objection may contain a critique of someone else’s work, it may be a conflict. As something is being drawn on a whiteboard, it seems easier to say “what about the debug interface?” (This ties back to Gary McGraw’s point.)
  • Storytelling. It is easier to tell a story standing next to a whiteboard than any tech I’ve used. A large whiteboard diagram is easy to point at. You’re not blocking the projector. You can easily edit as you’re talking.
  • Messy writing/what does that mean? We’ve all been there? Someone writes something in shorthand as a conversation is happening, and either you can’t read it or you can’t understand what was meant. Structured systems encourage writing a few more words, making things more tedious for everyone around.

Software Tools

  • Automatic analysis. Tools like the Microsoft Threat Modeling tool can give you a baseline set of threats to which you add detail. Structure is a tremendous aid to getting things done, and in threat modeling, it helps in answering “what could go wrong?”
  • Authority/decidedness/fixedness. This is the other side of the discovery coin. Sometimes, there are architectural answers, and those answers are reasonably fixed. For example, hardware accesses are mediated by the kernel, and filesystem and network are abstracted there. (More recent kernels offer filesystems in userland, but that change was discussed in detail.) Similarly, I’ve seen large, complex systems with overall architecture diagrams, and a change to these diagrams had to be discussed and approved in advance. If this is the case, then a fixed diagram, printed poster size and affixed to walls, can also be used in threat modeling meetings as a context diagram. No need to re-draw it as a DFD.
  • Photographs of whiteboards are hard to archive and search without further processing.
  • Photographs of whiteboards may imply that ‘this isn’t very important.” If you have a really strong culture of “just barely good enough” than this might not be the case, but if other documents are more structured or cared for, then photos of a whiteboard may carry a message.
  • Threat modeling only late. If you’re going to get architecture from code, then you may not think about it until the code is written. If you weren’t going to threat model anyway, then this is a win, but if there was a reasonable chance you were going to do the architectural analysis while there was a chance to change the architecture, software tools may take that away.

(Of course, there are apps that help you take images from a whiteboard and improve them, for example, Best iOS OCR Scanning Apps, which I’m ignoring for purposes of teasing things out a bit. Operationally, probably worth digging into.)

I’d love your thoughts: are there other advantages or disadvantages of a whiteboard or software?

Phishing and Clearances

Apparently, the CISO of US Homeland Security, a Paul Beckman, said that:

“Someone who fails every single phishing campaign in the world should not be holding a TS SCI [top secret, sensitive compartmentalized information—the highest level of security clearance] with the federal government” (Paul Beckman, quoted in Ars technica)

Now, I’m sure being in the government and trying to defend against phishing attacks is a hard problem, and I don’t want to ignore that real frustration. At the same time, GAO found that the government is having trouble hiring cybersecurity experts, and that was before the SF-86 leak.

Removing people’s clearances is one repsonse. It’s not clear from the text if these are phishing (strictly defined, an attempt to get usernames and passwords), or malware attached to the emails.

In each case, there are other fixes. The first would be multi-factor authentication for government logins. This was the subject of a push, and if agencies aren’t at 100%, maybe getting there is better than punitive action. Another fix could be to use an email client which makes seeing phishing emails easier. For example, an email client could display the RFC-822 sender address (eg, “<account.management@gmail.com>” for any email address that that email client hasn’t sent email to, rather than the friendly text. They could provide password management software with built-in anti-phishing (checking the domain before submitting the password. They could, I presume, do other things which minimize the request on the human being.

When Rob Reeder, Ellen Cram Kowalczyk and I created the “NEAT” guidance for usable security, we didn’t make “Necessary” first just because the acronym is neater that way, we put it first because the poor person is usually overwhelmed, and they deserve to have software make the decisions that software can make. Angela Sasse called this the ‘compliance budget,’ and it’s not a departmental budget, it’s a human one. My understanding is that those who work for the government already have enough things drawing on that budget. Making people anxious that they’ll lose their clearance and have to take a higher-paying private sector job should not be one of them.

Towards a model of web browser security

One of the values of models is they can help us engage in areas where otherwise the detail is overwhelming. For example, C is a model of how a CPU works that allows engineers to defer certain details to the compiler, rather than writing in assembler. It empowers software developers to write for many CPU architectures at once. Many security flaws happen in areas the models simplify. For example, what if the stack grew away from the stack pointer, rather than towards it? The layout of the stack is a detail that is modeled away.

Information security is a broad industry, requiring and rewarding specialization. We often see intense specialization, which can naturally result in building expertise in silos, and tribal separation of knowledge create more gaps. At the same time, there is a stereotype that generalists end up focused on policy, or “risk management” where a lack of technical depth can hide. (That’s not to say that all risk managers are generalists or that there’s not real technical depth to some of them.)

If we want to enable more security generalists, and we want those generalists to remain grounded, we need to make it easier to learn about new areas. Part of that is good models, part of that is good exercises that appropriately balance challenge to skill level, part of that is the availability of mentoring, and I’m sure there are other parts I’m missing.

I enjoyed many things about Michael Zalewski’s book “The Tangled Web.” One thing I wanted was a better way to keep track of who attacks whom, to help me contextualize and remember the attacks. But such a model is not trivial to create. This morning, motivated by a conversation between Trey Ford and Chris Rohlf, I decided to take a stab at drafting a model for thinking about where the trust boundaries exist.

The words which open my threat modeling book are “all models are wrong, some models are useful.” I would appreciate feedback on this model. What’s missing, and why does it matter? What attacks require showing a new element in this software model?

Browser security
[Update 1 — please leave comments here, not on Twitter]

  1. Fabio Cerullo suggests the layout engine. It’s not clear to me what additional threats can be seen if you add this explicitly, perhaps because I’m not an expert.
  2. Fernando Montenegro asks about network services such as DNS, which I’m adding and also about shared trust (CA Certs), which overlap with a question about supply chain from Mayer Sharma.
  3. Chris Rohlf points out the “web browser protection profile.

I could be convinced otherwise, but think that the supply chain is best addressed by a separate model. Having a secure installation and update mechanism is an important mitigation of many types of bugs, but this model is for thinking about the boundaries between the components.

In reviewing the protection profile, it mentions the following threats:

Threat Comment
Malicious updates Out of scope (supply chain)
Malicious/flawed add on Out of scope (supply chain)
Network eavesdropping/attack Not showing all the data flows for simplicity (is this the right call?)
Data access Local storage is shown

Also, the protection profile is 88 pages long, and hard to engage with. While it provides far more detail and allows me to cross-check the software model, it doesn’t help me think about interactions between components.

End update 1]

On Language

I was irked to see a tweet “Learned a new word! Pseudoarboricity: the number of pseudoforests needed to cover a graph. Yes, it is actually a word and so is pseudoforest.” The idea that some letter combinations are “actual words” implies that others are “not actual words,” and thus, that there is some authority who may tell me what letter combinations I am allowed to use or understand.

Balderdash. Adorkable balderdash, but balderdash nonetheless.

As any student of Orwell shall recall, the test of language is its comprehensibility, not its adhesion to some standard. As an author, I sometimes hear from people who believe themselves to be authorities, or who believe that they may select for me authorities as to the meanings of words, and who wish to tell me that my use of the word “threat” threatens their understanding, that the preface’s explicit discussion of the many plain meanings of the word is insufficient, or that my sentences are too long, comma-filled, dash deficient or otherwise Oxfordless in a way which seems to cause them to feel superior to me in a way they wish to, at some length, convey.

In fact, on occasion, they are irked. I recommend to them, and to you, “You Are What You Speak.”

I wish them the best, and fall back, if you’ll so allow, to a comment from another master of language, speaking through one of his characters:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’