Monthly Archives: May 2020

Is science being set up to take the blame?

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of the proposed measures will be easier to implement for those on higher incomes” and the focus is on getting PHE to draft guidance.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.)

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Three Paper Thursday: Vulnerabilities! We’ve got vulnerabilities here! … See? Nobody cares.

Jurassic Park is often (mistakenly) left out of the hacker movie canon. It clearly demonstrated the risk of an insider attack on control systems (Velociraptor rampage, amongst other tragedies…) nearly a decade ahead of the Maroochy sewage incident, it’s the first film I know of with a digital troll (“ah, ah, ah, you didn’t say the magic word!”), and Samuel L. Jackson correctly assesses the possible consequence of a hard reset (namely, everyone dying), resulting in his legendary “Hold on to your butts”. The quotable mayhem is seeded early in the film, when biotech spy Lewis Dodgson gives a sack of money to InGen’s Dennis Nedry to steal some dino DNA. Dodgson’s caricatured OPSEC (complete with trilby and dark glasses) is mocked by Nedry shouting, “Dodgson! Dodgson! We’ve got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares…” Three decades later, this quote still comes to mind* whenever conventional wisdom doesn’t seem to square with observed reality, and today we’re going to apply it to the oft-maligned world of Industrial Control System (ICS) security.

There is plenty of literature on ICS security pre-2010, but people really sat up and started paying attention when we learned about Stuxnet. Possibly the most upsetting thing about Stuxnet (for security-complacent control system designers like me) was the apparent ease with which the “air gap” was bridged over and over again. Any remaining faith in the air gap was killed by Éireann Leverett’s demonstration (thesis and S4 presentation) that thousands of industrial systems were directly connected to the Internet — no air gap jumping required. Since then, we’ve observed a steady growth in Internet-connected ICS devices, due both to improved search techniques and increasingly-connectable ICS devices. On any given day you can find about 100,000 unique devices speaking industrial protocols on Censys and Shodan. These protocols are largely unauthenticated and unencrypted, allowing an attacker that can speak the protocol to remotely read state, issue commands, and even modify programmable logic without using an actual exploit.

This sounds (and is) bad, and people have (correctly) highlighted its badness on many occasions. The attacks, however, appear to be missing: we are not aware of a single instance of industrial damage initiated via an Internet-connected ICS device. In this Three Paper Thursday we’ll look at papers showing how easy it is to find and contextualise Internet-connected ICS devices, some evidence for lack of malicious interest, and some leading indicators that this happy conclusion (for which we don’t really deserve any credit) may be changing.

*Perhaps because guys of a certain age still laugh and say “Dodson! We’ve got Dodson here!” when they learn my surname. I try to explain that it’s spelt differently, but…
Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Vulnerabilities! We’ve got vulnerabilities here! … See? Nobody cares.

Three Paper Thursday – GDPR anniversary edition

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.

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Three Paper Thursday: Will we ever get IoT security right?

Academia, governments and industry frequently talk about the importance of IoT security. Fundamentally, the IoT environment has similar problems to other technology platforms such as Android: a fragmented market with no clear responsibilities or incentives for vendors to provide regular updates, and consumers for whom its not clear how much (of a premium) they are willing to pay for (“better”) security and privacy.

Just two weeks ago, Belkin announced to shut down one of its cloud services, effectively transforming its several product lines of web cameras into useless bricks. Unlike other end-of-support announcements for IoT devices that (only) mean devices will never see an update again, many Belkin cameras simply refuse to work without the “cloud”. This is particularly disconcerting  as many see cloud-based IoT as one possible solution to improve device security by easing the user maintenance effort through remote update capabilities.

In this post, I would like to introduce three papers, each talking about different aspects of IoT security: 1) consumer purchasing behaviour, 2) vendor response, and 3) an assessment of the ever-growing literature on “best-practices” from industrial, governmental, and academic sources.
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Three Paper Thursday: What’s Intel SGX Good For?

Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) represents Intel’s latest foray into trusted computing. Initially intended as a means to secure cloud computation, it has since been employed for DRM and secure key storage in production systems. SGX differs from its competitors such as TrustZone in its focus on reducing the volume of trusted code in its “secure world”. These secure worlds are called enclaves in SGX parlance and are protected from untrusted code by a combination of a memory encryption engine and a set of new CPU instructions to enforce separation.

SGX has been available on almost every Intel processor since the sixth generation of Intel Core (Skylake). It has had a bit of a rocky journey since. Upon its release, there were concerns expressed about SGX being used as a medium for malware dissemination. A proof of concept demonstrating the effectiveness of this was also published. Then there were concerns about the mandatory agreements required to publish enclave code in production. In order to use Intel’s attestation service, a key enabler for any remote application built on SGX, developers have to obtain a commercial license from Intel. This lock-in raised a fair bit of consternation and to date hasn’t been fully addressed by Intel. Then came the vulnerabilities. SGX was found to be vulnerable to cache timing attacks speculative execution vulnerabilities and to Load Value Injection attacks. This has further eroded the credibility of the platform.

That said, there have been a fair few projects that have utilized SGX either to harden existing solutions or to come up with hitherto unseen applications. In this post, we’ll look at three such proposals to see how they utilize SGX despite its concerning attributes. Where applicable, we will also talk about how the discovered vulnerabilities have affected their viability.

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