The British Journal of General Practice has just published an editorial I wrote on Patient confidentiality and central databases. I’m encouraging GPs to make clear to patients that it’s OK to opt out – that they won’t incur the practice’s disapproval. Some practices have distributed leaflets from www.TheBigOptOut.org while others – such as The Oakland practice – have produced their own leaflets. These practices have seen the proportion of patients opting out rise from about 1% to between 6% and 19%. The same thing happened a few years ago in Iceland, where GP participation led to 11% of the population opting out of a central database project, which as a result did not become universal. GPs can help patients do the same here.
All posts by Ross Anderson
Financial Ombudsman losing it?
I appeared on “You and Yours” (Radio 4) today at 12.35 with an official from the Financial Ombudsman Service, after I coauthored a FIPR submission to a review of the service which is currently being conducted by Lord Hunt.
Our submission looks at three cases in particular in which the ombudsman decided in favour of the banks and against bank customers over disputed ATM transactions. We found that the adjudicators employed by the ombudsman made numerous errors both of law and of technology, and concluded that their decisions were an affront to reason and to justice.
One of the cases has already appeared here on lightbluetouchpaper; the other two cardholders appeared on an investigation into card fraud on “Tonight with Trevor MacDonald”, and their case papers are included, with their permission, as appendices to our submission. These papers are damning, but the Hunt review’s staff declined to publish them on the somewhat surprising grounds that the information in them might be used to commit identity theft against the customers in question. Eventually they published our submission minus the two appendices of case papers. (If knowing someone’s residential address and the account number to a now-defunct bank account is enough for a criminal to steal money from you, then the regulatory failures afflicting the British banking system are even deeper than I thought.)
The Financial Ombudsman Service, and its predecessor the Banking Ombudsman, have for many years found against bank customers and in favour of the banks. In the early-to-mid 1990s, they upheld the banks’ outrageous claim that mag-stripe ATM cards were invulnerable to cloning; this led to the court cases described here and here. That position collapsed when ATM criminals started being sent to prison. Now we have another wave of ATM card cloning, which we’ve discussed several times: we’ve shown you a chip and PIN terminal playing Tetris and described relay attacks. There’s much more to come.
The radio program is online here (the piece starts 29 minutes and 40 seconds in). We clearly have them rattled; the ombudsman was patronising and abusive, and made a number of misleading statements. He also said that the “independent” Hunt review was commissioned by his board of directors. I hope it turns out to be a bit more independent than that. If it doesn’t, then consumer advocates should campaign for the FOS to be abolished and for customers to be empowered to take disputes to the courts, as we argue in section 31-32 of our submission.
Government security failure
In breaking news, the Chancellor of the Exchequer will announce at 1530 that HM Revenue and Customs has lost the data of 15 million child benefit recipients, and that the head of HMRC has resigned.
FIPR has been saying since last November’s publication of our report on Children’s Databases for the Information Commissioner that the proposed centralisation of public-sector data on the nation’s children was not only unsafe but illegal.
But that isn’t all. The Health Select Committee recently made a number of recommendations to improve safety and privacy of electronic medical records, and to give patients more rights to opt out. Ministers dismissed these recommendations, and a poll today shows doctors are so worried about confidentiality that many will opt out of using the new shared care record system.
The report of the Lords Science and Technology Committee into Personal Internet Security also poitned out a lot of government failings in preventing electronic crime – which ministers contemptuously dismissed. It’s surely clear by now that the whole public-sector computer-security establishment is no longer fit for purpose. The next government should replace CESG with a civilian agency staffed by competent people. Ministers need much better advice than they’re currently getting.
Developing …
(added later: coverage from the BBC, the Guardian, Channel 4, the Times, Computer Weekly and e-Health Insider; and here’s the ORG Blog)
Government ignores Personal Medical Security
The Government has just published their response to the Health Committee’s report on The Electronic Patient Record. This response is shocking but not surprising.
For example, on pages 6-7 the Department reject the committee’s recommendation that sealed-envelope data should be kept out of the secondary uses service (SUS). Sealed-envelope data is the stuff you don’t want shared, and SUS is the database that lets civil servants, medical researchers others access to masses of health data. The Department’s justification (para 4 page 6) is not just an evasion but is simply untruthful: they claim that the design of SUS `ensures that patient confidentiality is protected’ when in fact it doesn’t. The data there are not pseudonymised (though the government says it’s setting up a research programme to look at this – report p 23). Already many organisations have access.
The Department also refuses to publish information about security evaluations, test results and breaches (p9) and reliability failures (p19). Their faith in security-by-obscurity is touching.
The biggest existing security problem in the NHS – that many staff carelessly give out data on the phone to anyone who asks for it – will be subject to `assessment’, which `will feed into the further implementation’. Yeah, I’m sure. But as for the recommendation that the NHS provide a substantial audit resource – as there is to detect careless and abusive disclosure from the police national computer – we just get a long-winded evasion (pp 10-11).
Finally, the fundamental changes to the NPfIT business process that would be needed to make the project work, are rejected (p14-15): Sir Humphrey will maintain central control of IT and there will be no `catalogue’ of approved systems from which trusts can choose. And the proposals that the UK participate in open standards, along the lines of the more successful Swedish or Dutch model, draw just a long evasion (p16). I fear the whole project will just continue on its slow slide towards becoming the biggest IT disaster ever.
NHS Computer Project Failing
The House of Commons Health Select Committee has just published a Report on the Electronic Patient Record. This concludes that the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT), the 20-billion-pound project to rip out all the computers in the NHS and replace them with systems that store data in central server farms rather than in the surgery or hospital, is failing to meet its stated core objective – of providing clinically rich, interoperable detailed care records. What’s more, privacy’s at serious risk. Here is comment from e-Health Insider.
For the last few years I’ve been using the London Ambulance Service disaster as the standard teaching example of how things go wrong in big software projects. It looks like I will have to refresh my notes for the Software Engineering course next month!
I’ve been warning about the safety and privacy risks of the Department of Health’s repeated attempts to centralise healthcare IT since 1995. Here is an analysis of patient privacy I wrote earlier this year, and here are my older writings on the security of clinical information systems. It doesn’t give me any great pleasure to be proved right, though.
Econometrics of wickedness
Last Thursday I gave a tech talk at Google; you can now watch it online. It’s about work a number of us have done on searching for covert communities, with a focus on reputation thieves, phisherman, fake banks and other dodgy businesses.
While in California I also gave a talk on Information Security Economics, first as a keynote talk at Crypto and later as a seminar at Berkeley (the slides are here).
Latest on security economics
Tyler and I have a paper appearing tomorrow as a keynote talk at Crypto: Information Security Economics – and Beyond. This is a much extended version of our survey that appeared in Science in October 2006 and then at Softint in January 2007.
The new paper adds recent research in security economics and sets out a number of ideas about security psychology, into which the field is steadily expanding as economics and psychology become more intertwined. For example, many existing security mechanisms were designed by geeks for geeks; but if women find them harder to use, and as a result are more exposed to fraud, then could system vendors or operators be sued for unlawful sex discrimination?
There is also the small matter of the extent to which human intelligence evolved because people who were good at deceit, and at detecting deception in others, were likely to have more surviving offspring. Security and psychology might be more closely entwined than anyone ever thought.
Digital signatures hit the road
For about thirty years now, security researchers have been talking about using digital signatures in court. Thousands of academic papers have had punchlines like “the judge then raises X to the power Y, finds it’s equal to Z, and sends Bob to jail”. So far, this has been pleasant speculation.
Now the rubber starts to hit the road. Since 2006 trucks in Europe have been using digital tachographs. Tachographs record a vehicle’s speed history and help enforce restrictions on drivers’ working hours. For many years they have used circular waxed paper charts, which have been accepted in court as evidence just like any other paper record. However, paper charts are now being replaced with smartcards. Each driver has a card that records 28 days of infringement history, protected by digital signatures. So we’ve now got the first widely-deployed system in which digital sigantures are routinely adduced in evidence. The signed records are being produced to support prosecutions for working too long hours, for speeding, for tachograph tampering, and sundry other villainy.
So do magistrates really raise X to the power Y, find it’s equal to Z, and send Eddie off to jail? Not according to enforcement folks I’ve spoken to. Apparently judges find digital signatures too “difficult” as they’re all in hex. The police, always eager to please, have resolved the problem by applying standard procedures for “securing” digital evidence. When they raid a dodgy trucking company, they image the PC’s disk drive and take copies on DVDs that are sealed in evidence bags. One gets given to the defence and one kept for appeal. The paper logs documenting the procedure are available for Their Worships to inspect. Everyone’s happy, and truckers duly get fined.
In fact the trucking companies are very happy. I understand that 20% of British trucks now use digital tachographs, well ahead of expectations. Perhaps this is not uncorrelated with the fact that digital tachographs keep much less detailed data than could be coaxed out of the old paper charts. Just remember, you read it here first.
Phishing, students, and cheating at the lottery
Every so often I set an exam question to which I actually want to know the answer. A few years back, when the National Lottery franchise was up for tender, I asked students how to cheat at the lottery; the answers were both entertaining and instructive. Having a lot of bright youngsters think about a problem under stress for half an hour gives you rapid, massively-parallel requirements engineering.
This year I asked about phishing: here’s the question. When I set it in February, an important question for the banks was whether to combat phishing with two-factor authentication (give customers a handheld password calculator, as Coutts does) or two-channel authentication (send them an SMS when they make a sensitive transaction, saying for example “if you really meant to send $4000 to Latvia, please enter the code 4715 in your browser now”).
At least two large UK banks are planning to go two-factor – despite eight-figure costs, the ease of real-time man-in-the-middle attacks, and other problems described here and here. Some banks have thought of two-channel but took fright at the prospect that customers might find it hard to use and deluge their call centres. So I set phishing as an exam question, inviting candidates to select two protection mechanisms from a list of four.
The overwhelming majority of the 34 students who answered the question chose two-channel as one of their mechanisms. I’ve recently become convinced this is the right answer, because of feedback from early adopter banks overseas who have experienced no significant usability problems. It was interesting to have this insight confirmed by the “wisdom of crowds”; I’d only got the feedback in the last month or so, and had not told the students.
Ross
PS: there’s always some obiter dictum that gives an insight into youth psychology. Here it was the candidate who said the bank should use SSL client certificates plus SMS notification, as that gives you three-factor authentication: something you know (your password), something you have (your SSL cert) and something you are (your phone). So now we know 🙂
Follow the money, stupid
The Federal Reserve commissioned me to research and write a paper on fraud, risk and nonbank payment systems. I found that phishing is facilitated by payment systems like eGold and Western Union which make the recovery of stolen funds more difficult. Traditional payment systems like cheques and credit card payments are revocable; cheques can bounce and credit card charges can be charged back. However some modern systems provide irrevocability without charging an appropriate risk premium, and this attracts the bad guys. (After I submitted the paper, and before it was presented on Friday, eGold was indicted.)
I also became convinced that the financial market controls used to fight fraud, money laundering and terrorist finance have become unbalanced as they have been beefed up post-9/11. The modern obsession with ‘identity’ – of asking even poor people living in huts in Africa for an ID document and two utility bills before they can open a bank account – is not only ridiculous and often discriminatory. It’s led banks and regulators to take their eye off the ball, and to replace risk reduction with due diligence.
In real life, following the money is just as important as following the man. It’s time for the system to be rebalanced.