I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held at USC in Los Angeles. The participants’ papers are here; for background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-12 which are linked here and here. Blog posts summarising the talks at the workshop sessions will appear as followups below. (Added: there is another liveblog by Vaibhav Garg.)
A further observation on quantum computing
Today we’ve published a paper showing that Bell’s inequality is violated in fluid mechanics. What has this to do with computing or security? Well, when we posted a paper back in February pointing out that hydrodynamic models of quantum physics raise questions about the scalability of quantum computing, a number of people asked for a better explanation of how this squares with the Bell tests. John Bell proved an inequality in 1964 that applies to classical particles but that is broken by quantum mechanical ones. In today’s paper we show that Bell’s inequality does not hold in classical fluid dynamics, as angular momentum and energy are delocalised in the fluid.
This may have implications for engineering, science and philosophy. On the engineering front, nine-figure sums have been poured into developing quantum computers, but even advocates of quantum computing admit they don’t really work. As our February paper argued, a hydrodynamic interpretation of quantum mechanics may suggest reasons why.
On the scientific front, the Bell tests are commonly seen as excluding not just local hidden-variable models of quantum mechanics, but local realism too. Our paper shows that the two are distinct, and thus leaves more room for research on quantum foundations. It also shows that we should be more careful in our use of terms such as ‘local’ – which might be of interest to the philosophers; the Bell tests do not draw quite as clear a dividing line between the quantum and classical worlds as many have believed.
Revisiting secure introduction via hyperlinks
Today at W2SP I presented a new paper making the case for distributing security policy in hyperlinks. The basic idea is old, but I think the time is right to re-examine it. After the DigiNotar debacle, the community is getting serious about fixing PKI on the web. It was hot topic at this week’s IEEE Security & Privacy (Oakland), highlighted by Jeremy Clark and Paul van Oorschot’s excellent survey paper. There are a slew of protocols under development like key pinning (HPKP), Certificate Transparency, TACK, and others. To these I add s-links, a complementary mechanism to declare support for new proposals in HTML links. Continue reading Revisiting secure introduction via hyperlinks
A search engine for code
In a seminar today, we will unveil Rendezvous, a search engine for code. Built by Wei-Ming Khoo, it will analyse an unknown binary, parse it into functions, index them, and compare them with a library of code harvested from open-source projects.
As time goes on, the programs we need to reverse engineer get ever larger, so we need better tools. Yet most code nowadays is not written from scratch, but cut and pasted. Programmers are not an order of magnitude more efficient than a generation ago; it’s just that we have more and better libraries to draw on nowadays, and a growing shared heritage of open software. So our idea is to reframe the decompilation problem as a search problem, and harness search-engine technology to the task.
As with a text search engine, Rendezvous uses a number of different techniques to index a target binary, some of which are described in this paper, along with the main engineering problems. As well as reverse engineering suspicious binaries, code search engines could be used for many other purposes such as monitoring GPL compliance, plagiarism detection, and quality control. On the dark side, code search can be used to find new instances of disclosed vulnerabilities. Every responsible software vendor or security auditor should build one. If you’re curious, here is the demo.
Traceability in the Queen's Speech
The Queen’s speech at today’s state opening of Parliament includes the prediction:
“In relation to the problem of matching Internet protocol addresses, my Government will bring forward proposals to enable the protection of the public and the investigation of crime in cyberspace”
This is all that remains of the Home Office’s ambition to bring forward a revised version of the Draft Communications Data Bill that two Parliamentary Select Committees were so unimpressed by, and which the Liberal Democrats have declined to support.
The sole issue on which there appears to be political consensus is that “something must be done” about the traceability failure that regularly occurs when the Internet is accessed from a smartphone. The shortage of IPv4 addresses means that the mobile companies cannot give each smartphone a unique IP address — so hundreds of users share the same IP address with only the TCP/UDP source port number distinguishing their traffic. Because this sharing is done very dynamically the mobile phone companies find it problematic to record the source port mapping, and they have argued that the way the EU Data Retention Directive is written they have no obligation to make and keep such records.
I wrote about this issue at some length on this blog in January 2010, although until very recently the Home Office considered it to be tantamount to a state secret and were extremely coy about discussing it in the public.
The Queen’s “bring forward proposals” phrase appears to cover a range of options:
- the mobile companies decide that they can manage to log the source port mapping data after all;
- the Home Office pays for new kit at the mobile companies that will allow source port mapping to be done;
- there is a short bill (or clause in another bill) that requires the logging to be done (this might avoid any question of payments being ultra vires, or would ensure compliance by companies (possibly broadband suppliers) that looked like becoming stragglers;
- there are discussions but nothing happens at all — perhaps because the tide turns against Data Retention as being a necessary and proportionate policy. A number of other EU countries have found it to be incompatible with fundamental human rights.
The Open Rights Group (ORG) have recently produced a pamphlet (available online here) setting out how surveillance might be better approached in this century. I contributed the chapter on the technical issues…
… if you don’t have time to read the whole thing then the New Statesman has an edited version of my chapter; and you can watch a short video of myself (and two other contributors) explaining the major issues.
How Privacy is Lost
On Friday I went to a fascinating lobbying meeting on the new EU data protection regulation. Europe is by default the world’s privacy regulator, as America doesn’t care and no-one else is big enough to matter; so this is really important. Some 3000 amendments have been proposed and the regulation is in the final stages of the committee process; the rapporteurs of the various parties are negotiating compromise amendments which should be ready for a vote within weeks. So the pressure is really on.
Friday was extraordinary because all the lobbyists came together in one room to argue their cases. This is because the liberal shadow rapporteur Alexander Alvaro was injured in a car crash last month, so Sarah Ludford, a London MEP, took over at the last minute. Normally lobbyists see MEPs singly or in small groups, but as time was short Sarah called a mass meeting at Europa House in London. So we all got to hear what the others were pushing for. Campaigners for open government say we’d have better laws if more if the process was public; here’s an example where that happened (literally) by accident.
I am posting my notes of the meeting here, as it’s a good case history of how lobbying works, as well as of how our privacy is being lost. There were about 100 people present, of which only 5 were from civil society. Most were corporate lobbyists: good-looking, articulate and impressive, but pushing some jaw-dropping agendas. For example the lovely lady from the Association of British Insurers found it painful that the regulation might ban profiling that was unfair or discriminatory.
Liveblog – MedConfidential.org launch
I’m at the launch in London of the new campaign for medical privacy, MedConfidential.org. Sam Smith and I will be liveblogging the day’s events in comments below. For background, see here, here, here and here. Most of today’s audience are from groups for whom medical privacy is particularly important, such as charities dealing with rape victims, substance abuse, sexual health and child wefare.
Is the US Government losing it again?
Those of us who love America and have many friends there were delighted at President Obama’s initial reaction to the Boston bombings. He said if whoever attacked the city sought to intimidate victims or shake American values, “it should be pretty clear by now that they picked the wrong city to do it.” It seemed that sanity had at last returned, after all the scaremongering of the “War on terror”, and the ghost of 9/11 was finally being laid to rest.
One day later, a million people were under virtual house arrest; the 19-year-old fugitive from justice happened to be a Muslim. Whatever happened to the doctrine that infringements of one liberty to protect another should be necessary and proportionate?
In the London bombings, four idiots killed themselves in the first incident with a few dozen bystanders, but the second four failed and ran for it when their bombs didn’t go off. It didn’t occur to anyone to lock down London. They were eventually tracked down and arrested, together with their support team. Digital forensics played a big role; the last bomber to be caught left the country and changed his SIM, but not his IMEI. It’s next to impossible for anyone to escape nowadays if the authorities try hard.
Current issues in payments (part 2)
With some delay here is the second and final part on our impressions of David Birch’s Tomorrow’s Transactions Forum (TTF13), which we attended thanks to Dave’s generosity (See full agenda and PowerPoint presentations here). See part 1 here.
NOTE: Although written in first person, what follows results from a combination of Laurent Simon’s and my notes.
The theme of day 2 at TTF13 was social inclusion. The kick off question was “How to develop tools to help people deal with money?” (people with no financial culture and based on a transactional account).
This was followed by presentations on “Comic Relief” (the day before ‘the big day’), “Universal Credit” and expert panel on financial inclusion.
Continue reading Current issues in payments (part 2)
Job ad: pre- and post-doctoral posts in processor, operating system, and compiler security
The CTSRD Project is advertising two posts in processor, operating system, and compiler security. The first is a research assistant position, suitable for candidates who may not have a research background, and the second is a post-doctoral research associate position suitable for candidates who have completed (or will shortly complete) a PhD in computer science or a related field.
The CTSRD Project is investigating fundamental improvements to CPU architecture, operating system (OS) design, and programming language structure in support of computer security. The project is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and SRI International, and part of the DARPA CRASH research programme on clean-slate computer system design.
These positions will be integral parts of an international team of researchers spanning multiple institutions across academia and industry. Successful candidate will provide support for the larger research effort by contributing to low-level hardware and system-software implementation and experimentation. Responsibilities will include extending Bluespec-based CHERI processor designs, modifying operating system kernels and compiler suites, administering test and development systems, as well as performing performance measurements. The position will also support and engage with early adopter communities for our open-source research platform in the UK and abroad.
Candidates should have strong experience with at least one of Bluespec HDL, OS kernel development (FreeBSD preferred), or compiler internals (LLVM preferred); strong experience with the C programming language and use of revision control in large, collaborative projects is essential. Some experience with computer security and formal methods is also recommended.
Further details on the two posts may be found in job ads NR27772 and NR27782. E-mail queries may be sent directly to Dr Robert N. M. Watson.
Both posts are intended to start on 8 July 2013; applications must be received by 9 May 2013.