Should we boycott John Lewis?

2013-04-06Authentication, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Security economics, Security psychologyRoss Anderson

Last weekend, my wife and I were in Milton Keynes where we bought a cradle as a present for our new granddaughter. They had only the demo model in the shop, but sold us one to pick up from their store in Cambridge. So yesterday I went into John Lewis with the receipt, to be told by the official that as I couldn’t show the card with which the purchase was made, they needed photo-id. I told him that along with over a million others I’d resisted the previous government’s ID card proposals, the last government had lost the election, and I didn’t carry ID on principle. The response was the usual nonsense: that I should have read the terms and conditions (but when I studied the receipt later it said nothing about ID) and that he was just doing his job (but John Lewis prides itself on being employee-owned, so in theory at least he is a partner in the firm). I won’t be shopping there again anytime soon.

We get harassed more and more by security theatre, by snooping and by bullying. What’s the best way to push back? Why can businesses be so pointlessly annoying?

Perhaps John Lewis are consciously pro-Labour given their history as a co-op; but it’s not prudent to advertise that in a three-way marginal like Cambridge, let alone in the leafy southern suburbs where they make most of their money. Or perhaps it’s just incompetence. When my wife phoned later to complain, the customer services people apologised and said we should have been told when we bought the thing that we’d need to show ID. She offered to post the cradle to our daughter, but then rung back later to say they’d lost the order and would need our paperwork. So that’s another 30-mile round-trip to their depot. But if they’re incompetent, why should I trust them enough to buy their food?

I invite the chairman, Charlie Mayfield, to explain by means of a follow-up to this post whether this was policy or cockup. Will he continue to demand photo-id even from customers who have a principled objection? Will he tell us who in the firm imposed this policy, and show us the training material that was prepared to ensure that counter staff would explain it properly to customers?

New medical confidentiality campaign

2013-03-28Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technologyRoss Anderson

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed growing issues with medical privacy. On April 24th, a new medical confidentiality campaign will kick off in London.

New legislation that comes into force next month will permit the upload of identifiable patient data directly from family doctors’ records to central systems, from which it will be sold and made available to researchers and private companies. Other developments include the creation of online patient records, and a proposal to create shared record systems across health and social care.

MedConfidential has been formed to deal with these multiple threats to patient privacy, and is hosting its first conference on April 24th in central London. This will be a one-day briefing session to provide details of the new policies and explain their potential impact. The conference is free of charge but places are limited. If you would like to attend, please contact Terri Dowty: terri@medconfidential.org

PhD Position on Privacy Enhancing Technologies and Anonymous Communications

2013-03-25Jobs, Meta, Privacy technologySteven J. Murdoch

Applications are invited for one PhD position in the Security Group at the Computer Laboratory to work with Dr Steven Murdoch. Funding for this position is provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in collaboration with the Royal Society.

The successful candidate will undertake research on methods to analyse the security of anonymous communication systems and privacy enhancing technologies. This broad research topic falls within an EPSRC priority area and provides considerable scope for the PhD candidate to find his or her own research direction.

Further details can be found in the advertisement (NR27372). The closing date for applications is 31 May 2013.

Dangerous Blogs Act

2013-03-22Legal issues, News coverage, PoliticsRichard Clayton

The UK Government are currently in a tremendous rush to legislate (and create a Royal Charter) before the political consensus around “implementing Leveson” evaporates. Their proposals catch not just the print media, but also online publications. That’s only proper — a newspaper should meet the same integrity standards for their journalism whether it appears in ink and paper, or on their website.

However, the Governments approach has not been to describe the activity that they wish to regulate, but to describe the various media involved and then try to write exceptions to avoid regulating the whole Internet. Those exceptions are poorly thought out and will have all sorts of unintended consequences. They might even include this blog!
Continue reading Dangerous Blogs Act →

Call for Nominations: 2013 PET Award

2013-03-18Academic papers, Awards, Call for papers, Privacy technologySteven J. Murdoch

I am on the award committee for the 2013 PET Award and we are looking for nominations of papers which have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technology.

The 2013 award will be presented at Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) and carries a prize of $3,000 USD thanks to the generous support of Microsoft. The crystal prize itself is offered by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada.

Any paper by any author written in the area of privacy enhancing technologies is eligible for nomination. However, the paper must have appeared in a refereed journal, conference, or workshop with proceedings published in the period from 16 April 2011 until 31 March 2013.

To submit a nomination, please see the instructions on the award page.

UK bank fraud up by 11% in 2012, but how much do customers lose?

2013-03-13Banking security, News coverage, Security economicsSteven J. Murdoch

Today, the UK Cards Association (UKCA) published their summary of bank fraud for 2012. This provides an important insight into banking fraud, and the level of detail which the UK banks provide is very welcome. The UKCA figures go back to 2007, but I’ve collected the figures from previous releases going back to 2004. This data reveals some interesting trends, especially related to the deployment of new security technologies.

UK Cards Association fraud statistics 2012
larger version (PDF)

The overall fraud losses in 2012 are £475.3m, up 11% from the 2011 level, but for the purposes of comparison it is helpful to exclude the losses from phone banking since these figures were only available since 2009 (and are only 2.7% of the total). If we look at the resulting trend in total fraud (£462.7m) we can see that while there was an increase in 2012, that is from a starting position of a 10-year low in 2011 so isn’t a reason to panic. We are still far from the peak in 2008 of £704.3m.

[You may have noticed the miniaturised graph in line with the text above, which an an example of a sparkline and I’ll be using these throughout this post to more clearly show trends in the data. Each graph shows the change in a single value over the 2004–2012 period, and is followed by the figure for 2012 in red.]

However, there is a large omission in the UKCA data – it records losses of the banks and merchants but not customers. If a customer is a victim of fraud, but the bank refuses to refund them (because the bank claims the customer was negligent), we won’t see it in these figures – as confirmed by a UKCA representative in an interview on BBC Radio Merseyside on 2007-02-19. We don’t know how much is missing from the fraud statistics as a result, but from the Financial Services Authority statistics we can see that there were 483,666 complaints in the first half of 2012 against firms regarding disputed charges, so the sums in question could be substantial. But despite this limitation, the statistics from the UKCA are valuable, especially in that it gives a break down of fraud by type.

Continue reading UK bank fraud up by 11% in 2012, but how much do customers lose? →

Health record privacy in Scotland

2013-03-08Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economicsRoss Anderson

Last week I spoke at a conference on digital health at the Scottish parliament. The talks are now online; my talk is here, and my slides here. At present, medical records in Scotland are organised differently under its fourteen different health boards, with wide variations in privacy, safety and functionality. Needless to say, officials in Edinburgh see this as an opportunity for centralisation; they want to follow the sad story in England. The political dynamic north of the border is much the same: officials want to grab all the data, GPs are not keen, but the public’s not paying attention.

If you’re interested in these issues, save April 24th in your diary; there will be a big medical privacy event in London organised by a number of NGOs.

Fixing popping/clicking audio on Raspberry Pi

2013-02-10Hardware & signals, Operating systems, Useful softwareSteven J. Murdoch

I’m working on a security-related project with the Raspberry Pi and have encountered an annoying problem with the on-board sound output. I’ve managed to work around this, so thought it might be helpful the share my experiences with others in the same situation.

The problem manifests itself as a loud pop or click, just before sound is output and just after sound output is stopped. This is because a PWM output of the BCM2835 CPU is being used, rather than a standard DAC. When the PWM function is activated, there’s a jump in output voltage which results in the popping sound.

Until there’s a driver modification, the work-around suggested (other than using the HDMI sound output or an external USB sound card) is to run PulseAudio on top of ALSA and keep the driver active even when no sound is being output. This is achieved by disabling the module-suspend-on-idle PulseAudio module, then configuring applications to use PulseAudio rather than ALSA. Daniel Bader describes this work-around and how to configure MPD, in a blog post. However, when I tried this approach, the work-around didn’t work.

Continue reading Fixing popping/clicking audio on Raspberry Pi →

EU cyber security directive considered harmful

2013-02-08Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Security economicsRoss Anderson

Yesterday the European Commission launched its new draft directive on cybersecurity, on a webpage which omits a negative Opinion of the Impact Assessment Board. This directive had already been widely leaked, and I wrote about it in an EDRi Enditorial. There are at least two serious problems with it.

The first is that it will oblige Member States to set up single “competent authorities” for technical expertise, international liasion, security breach reporting and CERT functions. In the UK, these functions are distributed across GCHQ, MI5/CPNI, the new NCA, the ICO and various private-sector bodies. And the UK is relatively centralised; in Germany, for example, there’s a constitutional separation between police and intelligence functions. Centralisation will not just damage the separation of powers essential in any democracy, but will also harm operational effectiveness. Most of our critical infrastructure is in the hands of foreign companies, from O2 through EDF to Google; moving cybersecurity cooperation from the current loose association of private-public partnerships to a centralised, classified system will make it harder for most of them to play.

Second, whereas security-breach notification laws in the USA require firms to report breaches to affected citizens, articles 14 and 15 instead require breach notification to the “competent authority”. Notification requirements can be changed later by order (14.5-7) and the “competent authorities” only have to tell us if they determine it’s in the “public interest” (14.4). So instead of empowering us, it will empower the spooks. But that’s not all. Member States must “ensure that the competent authorities have the power to require market operators and public administrations to: (a) provide information needed to assess the security of their networks and information systems, including documented security policies; and (b) undergo a security audit carried out by a qualified independent body or national authority and make the results thereof available to the competent authority” (15.2). States must also “ensure that competent authorities have the power to issue binding instructions to market operators and public administrations” (15.3) Now as Parliament has just criticised the Home Office’s attempt to take powers to order firms like Google and Facebook to disclose user data by means of the Communications Data Bill, I hope everyone will think long and hard about the implications of passing this Directive as it stands. It’s yet another unfortunate step towards the militarisation of cyberspace.

Light Blue Touchpaper

Security Research, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge