I’m at the fourth Cambridge Cybercrime Conference, which I will try to liveblog in followups to this post.
Category Archives: Security economics
SHB 2019 – Liveblog
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
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
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
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!
Future ID
I’m in the FutureID3 workshop in Jesus College, Cambridge, and will try to liveblog the talks in followups to this post.
Financial Cryptography 2019
I’m at Financial Crypto 2019 and will try to liveblog some of the sessions in followups to this post.
Symposium on Post-Bitcoin Cryptocurrencies
I am at the Symposium on Post-Bitcoin Cryptocurrencies in Vienna and will try to liveblog the talks in follow-ups to this post.
The introduction was by Bernhard Haslhofer of AIT, who maintains the graphsense.info toolkit and runs the Titanium project on bitcoin forensics jointly with Rainer Boehme of Innsbruck. Rainer then presented an economic analysis arguing that criminal transactions were pretty well the only logical app for bitcoin as it’s permissionless and trustless; if you have access to the courts then there are better ways of doing things. However in the post-bitcoin world of ICOs and smart contracts, it’s not just the anti-money-laundering agencies who need to understand cryptocurrency but the securities regulators and the tax collectors. Yet there is a real policy tension. Governments hype blockchains; Austria uses them to auction sovereign bonds. Yet the only way in for the citizen is through the swamp. How can the swamp be drained?
Privacy for Tigers
As mobile phone masts went up across the world’s jungles, savannas and mountains, so did poaching. Wildlife crime syndicates can not only coordinate better but can mine growing public data sets, often of geotagged images. Privacy matters for tigers, for snow leopards, for elephants and rhinos – and even for tortoises and sharks. Animal data protection laws, where they exist at all, are oblivious to these new threats, and no-one seems to have started to think seriously about information security.
So we have been doing some work on this, and presented some initial ideas via an invited talk at Usenix Security in August. A video of the talk is now online.
The most serious poaching threats involve insiders: game guards who go over to the dark side, corrupt officials, and (now) the compromise of data and tools assembled for scientific and conservation purposes. Aggregation of data makes things worse; I might not care too much about a single geotagged photo, but a corpus of thousands of such photos tells a poacher where to set his traps. Cool new AI tools for recognising individual animals can make his work even easier. So people developing systems to help in the conservation mission need to start paying attention to computer security. Compartmentation is necessary, but there are hundreds of conservancies and game reserves, many of which are mutually mistrustful; there is no central authority at Fort Meade to manage classifications and clearances. Data sharing is haphazard and poorly understood, and the limits of open data are only now starting to be recognised. What sort of policies do we need to support, and what sort of tools do we need to create?
This is joint work with Tanya Berger-Wolf of Wildbook, one of the wildlife data aggregation sites, which is currently redeveloping its core systems to incorporate and test the ideas we describe. We are also working to spread the word to both conservators and online service firms.
How Protocols Evolve
Over the last thirty years or so, we’ve seen security protocols evolving in different ways, at different speeds, and at different levels in the stack. Today’s TLS is much more complex than the early SSL of the mid-1990s; the EMV card-payment protocols we now use at ATMs are much more complex than the ISO 8583 protocols used in the eighties when ATM networking was being developed; and there are similar stories for GSM/3g/4g, SSH and much else.
How do we make sense of all this?
Reconciling Multiple Objectives – Politics or Markets? was particularly inspired by Jan Groenewegen’s model of innovation according to which the rate of change depends on the granularity of change. Can a new protocol be adopted by individuals, or does it need companies to adopt it en masse for internal use, or does it need to spread through a whole ecosystem, or – the hardest case of all – does it require a change in culture, norms or values?
Security engineers tend to neglect such “soft” aspects of engineering, and we probably shouldn’t. So we sketch a model of the innovation stack for security and draw a few lessons.
Perhaps the most overlooked need in security engineering, particularly in the early stages of a system’s evolution, is recourse. Just as early ATM and point-of-sale system operators often turned away fraud victims claiming “Our systems are secure so it must have been your fault”, so nowadays people who suffer abuse on social media can find that there’s nowhere to turn. A prudent engineer should anticipate disputes, and give some thought in advance to how they should be resolved.
Reconciling Multiple Objectives appeared at Security Protocols 2017. I forgot to put the accepted version online and in the repository after the proceedings were published in late 2017. Sorry about that. Fortunately the REF rule that papers must be made open access within three months doesn’t apply to conference proceedings that are a book series; it may be of value to others to know this!