I’m in the Security Protocols Workshop, whose theme this year is “security protocols for humans”. I’ll try to liveblog the talks in followups to this post.
Category Archives: Privacy technology
Could a gaming app steal your bank PIN?
Have you ever wondered whether one app on your phone could spy on what you’re typing into another? We have. Five years ago we showed that you could use the camera to measure the phone’s motion during typing and use that to recover PINs. Then three years ago we showed that you could use interrupt timing to recover text entered using gesture typing. So what other attacks are possible?
Our latest paper shows that one of the apps on the phone can simply record the sound from its microphones and work out from that what you’ve been typing.
Your phone’s screen can be thought of as a drum – a membrane supported at the edges. It makes slightly different sounds depending on where you tap it. Modern phones and tablets typically have two microphones, so you can also measure the time difference of arrival of the sounds. The upshot is that can recover PIN codes and short words given a few measurements, and in some cases even long and complex words. We evaluate the new attack against previous ones and show that the accuracy is sometimes even better, especially against larger devices such as tablets.
This paper is based on Ilia Shumailov’s MPhil thesis project.
Future ID
I’m in the FutureID3 workshop in Jesus College, Cambridge, and will try to liveblog the talks in followups to this post.
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.
FIPR 20th birthday
The FIPR 20th birthday seminar is taking place right now in the Cambridge Computer Lab, and the livestream is here.
Enjoy!
I may or may not find time to liveblog the sessions in followups…
Failure to protect: kids’ data in school
If you care about children’s rights, data protection or indeed about privacy in general, then I’d suggest you read this disturbing new report on what’s happening in Britain’s schools.
In an ideal world, schools should be actively preparing pupils to be empowered citizens in a digital world that is increasingly riddled with exploitative and coercive systems. Instead, the government is forcing schools to collect data that are then sold or given to firms that exploit it, with no meaningful consent. There is not even the normal right to request subject access to you can check whether the information about you is right and have it corrected if it’s wrong.
Yet the government has happily given the Daily Telegraph fully-identified pupil information so that it can do research, presumably on how private schools are better than government ones, or how grammar schools are better than comprehensives. You just could not make this up.
The detective work to uncover such abuses has been done by the NGO Defenddigitalme, who followed up some work we did a decade and more ago on the National Pupil Database in our Database State report and our earlier research on children’s databases. Defenddigitalme are campaigning for subject access rights, the deletion of nationality data, and a code of practice. Do read the report and if you think it’s outrageous, write to your MP and say so. Our elected representatives make a lot of noise about protecting children; time to call them on it.
Euro S&P
I am at the IEEE Euro Security and Privacy Conference in London.
The keynote talk was by Sunny Consolvo, who runs Google’s security and privacy UX team, and her topic was user-facing threats to privacy and security. Her first theme was browser warnings, which try to stop users doing what they want to; it’s an interruption, it’s technical and there’s no obvious way forward other than clicking through the warning. In 2013 their SSL warning had a clickthrough rate of 68% while their more explicit and graphic malware warning had only 23% clickthrough. Mozilla’s SSL warning had a much lower 33%, with an icon of a policeman and more explicit tests. After four years of experimenting with watching eyes, corporate styling / branding and extra steps – none of which worked very well – they tried a strategy of clear instruction, attractive preferred choice, and unattractive alternative. The text had less jargon, a low reading level, brevity, specifics, an illustration and colour. Her CHI15 paper shows that the new design did much better, from 69% CTR to 41%. It turns out that many factors are at play; a strong signal is site quality, but this leads many people to continue anyway to sites they have come to trust. The malware clickthrough rate is now down to 5%, and SSL to 21%. That cost five years of a huge team effort, with back-end stuff too as well as UX. It involved huge internal fights, such as with a product manager who wanted the warning to say “this site contains malware” rather than “the site you’re trying to get to contains malware” as it was shorter. Her recent papers are here, here, and here.
A second thread of work is a longitudonal survey of public opinion on privacy ranging from government surveillance to cyber-bullying. This has run since 2015 in sixteen countries. 84% of respondents thought limiting access to online but not public data is very or extremely important. 84% were concerned about hackers vs 55% worried about governments and 53% companies. 20% of Germans are very angry about government access to personal data versus 10% of Brits. Most people believe national security justifies data access (except in South Korea) while no country’s people believes the government should have access to police non-violent crime. Most people everywhere support targeted monitoring but nowhere is there majority support for bulk surveillance. In Germany 53% believed everyone should have the right to send anonymous encrypted email while in the UK it’s 39%. Germans were pessimistic about technology with only 4% believing it was possible to be completely anonymous online. Over 88% believe that freedom of expression is very or extremely important and less than 1% unimportant; but over 70% didn’t believe that cyberbullying should be allowed. Opinions are more varied on extremist religious content, with 10.9% agreeing it should be allowed and 21% saying “it depends”.
Her third thread was intimate partner abuse, which has been experienced by 27% of women and 11% of men. There are typically three phases: a physical control phase where the abuser has access to the survivor’s device and may install malware, or even destroy devices; an escape phase which is high-risk as they try to find a new home, a job and so on; and a life-apart phase when they might want to shield location, email address and phone numbers to escape harassment, and may have lifelong concerns. Risks are greater for poorer people who may not be able to just buy a new phone. Sunny gave some case stories of extreme mate guarding and survivors’ strategies such as using a neighbour’s phone or a computer in a library or at work. It takes seven escape attempts on average to get to life apart. After escape, a survivor may have to restrict childrens’ online activities and sever mutual relationships; letting your child post anything can leak the school location and lead to the abuser turning up. She may have to change career as it can be impossible to work as a self-employed professional if she can no longer advertise. The takeaway is that designers should focus on usability during times of high stress and high risk; they should allow users to have multiple accounts; they should design things so that someone reviewing your history should not be able to tell you deleted anything; they should push 2-factor authentication, unusual activity notifications, and incognito mode. They should also think about how a survivor can capture evidence for use in divorce and custody cases while minimising the trauma. Finally she suggests serious research on other abuse survivors of different age groups and in different countries. For more see her paper here.
I will try to liveblog the rest of the talks in followups to this post.
Don’t blame Cambridge for Facebook’s privacy crisis
Mark Zuckerberg tried to blame Cambridge University in his recent testimony before the US Senate, saying “We do need to understand whether there was something bad going on in Cambridge University overall, that will require a stronger action from us.”
The New Scientist invited me to write a rebuttal piece, and here it is.
Dr Kogan tried to get approval to use the data his company had collected from Facebook users in academic research. The psychology ethics committee refused permission, and when he appealed to the University Ethics Committee (declaration: I’m a member) this refusal was upheld. Although he’d got consent from the people who ran his app, the same could not be said of their Facebook “friends” from whom most of the data were collected.
The deceptive behaviour here has been by Facebook, which creates the illusion of privacy in order to get its users to share more data. There has been a lot of work on the economics and psychology of privacy over the past decade and we now understand the dynamics of advertising markets better than we used to.
One big question is the “privacy paradox”. Why do people say they care about privacy, yet behave otherwise? Part of the answer is about context; and part of it is about learning. Over time, more and more people are starting to pay attention to online privacy settings, despite attempts by Facebook and other online advertising firms to keep changing privacy settings to confuse people.
With luck, the Facebook scandal will be a “flashbulb moment” that will drive lots more people to start caring about their privacy online. It will certainly provide interesting new data to privacy researchers.
Financial Cryptography 2018
I’m at Financial Crypto 2018 and will try to liveblog some of the sessions in followups to this post.
What Goes Around Comes Around
What Goes Around Comes Around is a chapter I wrote for a book by EPIC. What are America’s long-term national policy interests (and ours for that matter) in surveillance and privacy? The election of a president with a very short-term view makes this ever more important.
While Britain was top dog in the 19th century, we gave the world both technology (steamships, railways, telegraphs) and values (the abolition of slavery and child labour, not to mention universal education). America has given us the motor car, the Internet, and a rules-based international trading system – and may have perhaps one generation left in which to make a difference.
Lessig taught us that code is law. Similarly, architecture is policy. The architecture of the Internet, and the moral norms embedded in it, will be a huge part of America’s legacy, and the network effects that dominate the information industries could give that architecture great longevity.
So if America re-engineers the Internet so that US firms can microtarget foreign customers cheaply, so that US telcos can extract rents from foreign firms via service quality, and so that the NSA can more easily spy on people in places like Pakistan and Yemen, then in 50 years’ time the Chinese will use it to manipulate, tax and snoop on Americans. In 100 years’ time it might be India in pole position, and in 200 years the United States of Africa.
My book chapter explores this topic. What do the architecture of the Internet, and the network effects of the information industries, mean for politics in the longer term, and for human rights? Although the chapter appeared in 2015, I forgot to put it online at the time. So here it is now.