Category Archives: Legal issues

Security-related legislation, government initiatives, court cases

Three paper Thursday: Ethics in security research

Legal issues, Three Paper Thursday, ,

Good security and cybercrime research often creates an impact and we want to ensure that impact is positive. This week I will discuss three papers on ethics in computer security research in the run up to next week’s Security and Human Behaviour workshop (SHB). Ethical issues in research using datasets of illicit origin (Thomas, Pastrana, Hutchings, Clayton, Beresford) from IMC 2017, Measuring eWhoring (Pastrana, Hutchings, Thomas, Tapiador) from IMC 2019, and An Ethics Framework for Research into Heterogeneous Systems (Happa, Nurse, Goldsmith, Creese, Williams).

Ethical issues in research using datasets of illicit origin (blog post) came about because in prior work we had noticed that there were ethical complexities to take care of when using data that had “fallen off the back of a lorry” such as the backend databases of hacked booter services that we had used. We took a broad look at existing published guidance to synthesise those issues which particularly apply to using data of illicit origin and we expected to see discussed by researchers:

Continue reading Three paper Thursday: Ethics in security research →

Is science being set up to take the blame?

Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Security psychology

Yesterday’s publication of the minutes of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) raises some interesting questions. An initial summary in yesterday’s Guardian has a timeline suggesting that it was the distinguished medics on SAGE rather than the Prime Minister who went from complacency in January and February to panic in March, and who ignored the risk to care homes until it was too late.

Is this a Machiavellian conspiracy by Dominic Cummings to blame the scientists, or is it business as usual? Having spent a dozen years on the university’s governing body and various of its subcommittees, I can absolutely get how this happened. Once a committee gets going, it can become very reluctant to change its opinion on anything. Committees can become sociopathic, worrying about their status, ducking liability, and finding reasons why problems are either somebody else’s or not practically soluble.

So I spent a couple of hours yesterday reading the minutes, and indeed we see the group worried about its power: on February 13th it wants the messaging to emphasise that official advice is both efficaceous and sufficient, to “reduce the likelihood of the public adopting unnecessary or contradictory behaviours”. Turf is defended: Public Health England (PHE) ruled on February 18th that it can cope with 5 new cases a week (meaning tracing 800 contacts) and hoped this might be increased to 50; they’d already decided the previous week that it wasn’t possible to accelerate diagnostic capacity. So far, so much as one might expect.

The big question, though, is why nobody thought of protecting people in care homes. The answer seems to be that SAGE dismissed the problem early on as “too hard” or “not our problem”. On March 5th they note that social distancing for over-65s could save a lot of lives and would be most effective for those living independently: but it would be “a challenge to implement this measure in communal settings such as care homes”. They appear more concerned that “Many of the proposed measures will be easier to implement for those on higher incomes” and the focus is on getting PHE to draft guidance. (This is the meeting at which Dominic Cummings makes his first appearance, so he cannot dump all the blame on the scientists.)

Continue reading Is science being set up to take the blame? →

Three Paper Thursday – GDPR anniversary edition

Academic papers, Legal issues, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics, Three Paper Thursday

This is a guest contribution from Daniel Woods.

This coming Monday will mark two years since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. It prompted an initial wave of cookie banners that drowned users in assertions like “We value your privacy”. Website owners hoped that collecting user consent would ensure compliance and ward off the lofty fines.

Article 6 of the GDPR describes how organisations can establish a legal basis for processing personal data. Putting aside a selection of `necessary’ reasons for doing so, data processing can only be justified by collecting the user’s consent to “the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes”. Consequently, obtaining user consent could be the difference between suffering a dizzying fine or not.

The law changed the face of the web and this post considers one aspect of the transition. Consent Management Providers (CMPs) emerged offering solutions for websites to embed. Many of these use a technical standard described in the Transparency and Consent Framework. The standard was developed by the Industry Advertising Body, who proudly claim it is is “the only GDPR consent solution built by the industry for the industry”.

All of the following studies either directly measure websites implementing this standard or explore the theoretical implications of standardising consent. The first paper looks at how the design of consent dialogues shape the consent signal sent by users. The second paper identifies disparities between the privacy preferences communicated via cookie banners and the consent signals stored by the website. The third paper uses coalitional game theory to explore which firms extract the value from consent coalitions in which websites share consent signals.

Continue reading Three Paper Thursday – GDPR anniversary edition →

Security Engineering, and Sustainability

Academic papers, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics, Security engineering

Yesterday I got the audience at the 36th Chaos Computer Congress in Leipzig to vote on the cover art for the third edition of my textbook on Security Engineering: you can see the result here.

It was a privilege to give a talk at 36C3; as the theme was sustainability, I spoke on The Sustainability of Safety, Security and Privacy. This is a topic on which I’ve written and spoken several times in recent years, but we now have some progress to report. The EU has changed the rules to require that if you sell goods with digital components (whether embedded software, associated cloud services or smartphone apps) then these have to be maintained for as long as the customer might reasonably expect.

SHB 2019 – Liveblog

Academic papers, Legal issues, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security psychology, Social networks

I’ll be trying to liveblog the twelfth workshop on security and human behaviour at Harvard. I’m doing this remotely because of US visa issues, as I did for WEIS 2019 over the last couple of days. Ben Collier is attending as my proxy and we’re trying to build on the experience of telepresence reported here and here. My summaries of the workshop sessions will appear as followups to this post.

WEIS 2019 – Liveblog

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics, Security psychology

I’ll be trying to liveblog the seventeenth workshop on the economics of information security at Harvard. I’m not in Cambridge, Massachussetts, but in Cambridge, England, because of a visa held in ‘administrative processing’ (a fate that has befallen several other cryptographers). My postdoc Ben Collier is attending as my proxy (inspired by this and this).

The Changing Cost of Cybercrime

Academic papers, Banking security, Cybercrime, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics

In 2012 we presented the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. We have now repeated our study, to work out what’s changed in the seven years since then.

Measuring the Changing Cost of Cybercrime will appear on Monday at WEIS. The period has seen huge changes, with the smartphone replacing as PC and laptop as the consumer terminal of choice, with Android replacing Windows as the most popular operating system, and many services moving to the cloud. Yet the overall pattern of cybercrime is much the same.

We know a lot more than we did then. Back in 2012, we guessed that cybercrime was about half of all crime, by volume and value; we now know from surveys in several countries that this is the case. Payment fraud has doubled, but fallen slightly as a proportion of payment value; the payment system has got larger, and slightly more efficient.

So what’s changed? New cybercrimes include ransomware and other offences related to cryptocurrencies; travel fraud has also grown. Business email compromise and its cousin, authorised push payment fraud, are also growth areas. We’ve also seen serious collateral damage from cyber-weapons such as the NotPetya worm. The good news is that crimes that infringe intellectual property – from patent-infringing pharmaceuticals to copyright-infringing software, music and video – are down.

Our conclusions are much the same as in 2012. Most cyber-criminals operate with impunity, and we have to fix this. We need to put a lot more effort into catching and punishing the perpetrators.

Our new paper is here. For comparison the 2012 paper is here, while a separate study on the emotional cost of cybercrime is here.

Security Engineering: Third Edition

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Internet censorship, Legal issues, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security engineering

I’m writing a third edition of my best-selling book Security Engineering. The chapters will be available online for review and feedback as I write them.

Today I put online a chapter on Who is the Opponent, which draws together what we learned from Snowden and others about the capabilities of state actors, together with what we’ve learned about cybercrime actors as a result of running the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. Isn’t it odd that almost six years after Snowden, nobody’s tried to pull together what we learned into a coherent summary?

There’s also a chapter on Surveillance or Privacy which looks at policy. What’s the privacy landscape now, and what might we expect from the tussles over data retention, government backdoors and censorship more generally?

There’s also a preface to the third edition.

As the chapters come out for review, they will appear on my book page, so you can give me comment and feedback as I write them. This collaborative authorship approach is inspired by the late David MacKay. I’d suggest you bookmark my book page and come back every couple of weeks for the latest instalment!

Does security advice discriminate against women?

Academic papers, Banking security, Cybercrime, Legal issues, Security psychology

Security systems are often designed by geeks who assume that the users will also be geeks, and the same goes for the advice that users are given when things start to go wrong. For example, banks reacted to the growth of phishing in 2006 by advising their customers to parse URLs. That’s fine for geeks but most people don’t do that, and in particular most women don’t do that. So in the second edition of my Security Engineering book, I asked (in chapter 2, section 2.3.4, pp 27-28): “Is it unlawful sex discrimination for a bank to expect its customers to detect phishing attacks by parsing URLs?”

Tyler Moore and I then ran the experiment, and Tyler presented the results at the first Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour that June. We recruited 132 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30 (77 female, 55 male) and tested them to see whether they could spot phishing websites, as well as for systematising quotient (SQ) and empathising quotient (EQ). These measures were developed by Simon Baron-Cohen in his work on Asperger’s; most men have SQ > EQ while for most women EQ > SQ. The ability to parse URLs is correlated with SQ-EQ and independently with gender. A significant minority of women did badly at URL parsing. We didn’t get round to publishing the full paper at the time, but we’ve mentioned the results in various talks and lectures.

We have now uploaded the original paper, How brain type influences online safety. Given the growing interest in gender HCI, we hope that our study might spur people to do research in the gender aspects of security as well. It certainly seems like an open goal!