Will LBT be blocked?

Academic papers, Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage

Back in July I wrote a blog article “Will Newzbin be blocked?” which discussed the granting of an injunction to a group of movie companies to force BT to block access to “Newzbin2“.

The parties were back in court this last week to hammer out the exact details of the injunction.

The final wording of the injunction requires BT to block customer access to Newzbin2 by #1(1) rerouting traffic to relevant IPs and #1(2) applying “DPI based” URL blocking. The movie companies have to tell BT which IPs and which URLs are relevant.

#2 of the injunction says that BT can use its existing “Cleanfeed” system (which I wrote about here and at greater length in my PhD thesis here) to meet the requirements of #1, even though Cleanfeed isn’t believed to use DPI at all !

#3 and #4 of the injunction allows the parties to agree to suspend blocking and to come back to court in the future, and #5 relates to the costs of the court action.

One of the (few) upsides of this injunction will be to permit lawful experimentation as to the effectiveness of the Cleanfeed system, assuming that it is used — if the studios ask for all URLs on a website to be blocked, I expect that null routing the website entirely will be simpler for BT than redirecting traffic to the Cleanfeed proxy.

Up until now, discovering a flaw in the technical implementation of Cleanfeed would result in successful access to a child sexual abuse image website. Anyone monitoring the remote end of the connection might then draw the conclusion that images had been viewed and a criminal offence committed. Although careful experimental design could avoid law-breaking, it might be some time into the investigation process before this was properly understood by the criminal justice system, and the intervening period would be somewhat stressful for the investigator.

There is no law that prevents viewing of the contents of Newsbin2, and so the block circumvention techniques proposed over the past few years (starting of course with just using “https”) can now start to be evaluated as to their actual effectiveness.

However, there is more to #1 of the injunction, in that it applies to:

[…] www.newzbin.com, its domains and sub-domains and including payments.newzbin.com and any other IP address or URL whose sole or predominant purpose is to enable or facilitate access to the Newzbin2 website.

I don’t expect that publishing circumvention experience here on LBT could be seen as the predominant purpose of this blog… so I don’t really expect these pages to suddenly become invisible to BT customers. But, since the whole process has an Alice in Wonderland feel to it (someone who believes that blocking websites is possible clearly had little else to do before breakfast), it cannot be entirely ruled out.

Trusted Computing 2.1

Internet censorship, Legal issues, News coverage, Politics, Privacy technology, Security engineering

We’re steadily learning more about the latest Trusted Computing proposals. People have started to grok that building signed boot into UEFI will extend Microsoft’s power over the markets for AV software and other security tools that install around boot time; while ‘Metro’ style apps (i.e. web/tablet/html5 style stuff) could be limited to distribution via the MS app store. Even if users can opt out, most of them won’t. That’s a lot of firms suddenly finding Steve Ballmer’s boot on their jugular.

We’ve also been starting to think about the issues of law enforcement access that arose during the crypto wars and that came to light again with CAs. These issues are even more wicked with trusted boot. If the Turkish government compelled Microsoft to include the Tubitak key in Windows so their intelligence services could do man-in-the-middle attacks on Kurdish MPs’ gmail, then I expect they’ll also tell Microsoft to issue them a UEFI key to authenticate their keylogger malware. Hey, I removed the Tubitak key from my browser, but how do I identify and block all foreign governments’ UEFI keys?

Our Greek colleagues are already a bit cheesed off with Wall Street. How happy will they be if in future they won’t be able to install the security software of their choice on their PCs, but the Turkish secret police will?

Fashion crimes: trending-term exploitation on the web

Academic papers, Security economics, Web security

News travels fast. Blogs and other websites pick up a news story only about 2.5 hours on average after it has been reported by traditional media. This leads to an almost continuous supply of new “trending” topics, which are then amplified across the Internet, before fading away relatively quickly. Many web companies track these terms, on search engines and in social media.

However narrow, these first moments after a story breaks present a window of opportunity for miscreants to infiltrate web and social network search results in response. The motivation for doing so is primarily financial. Websites that rank high in response to a search for a trending term are likely to receive considerable amounts of traffic, regardless of their quality.

In particular, the sole goal of many sites designed in response to trending terms is to produce revenue through the advertisements that they display in their pages, without providing any original content or services. Such sites are often referred to as “Made for AdSense” (MFA) after the name of the Google advertising platform they are often targeting. Whether such activity is deemed to be criminal or merely a nuisance remains an open question, and largely depends on the tactics used to prop the sites up in the search-engine rankings. Some other sites devised to respond to trending terms have more overtly sinister motives. For instance, a number of malicious sites serve malware in hopes of infecting visitors’ machines, or peddle fake anti-virus software.

Together with Nektarios Leontiadis and Nicolas Christin, I have carried out a large-scale measurement and analysis of trending-term exploitation on the web, and the results are being presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Chicago this week. Based on a collection of over 60 million search results and tweets gathered over nine months, we characterize how trending terms are used to perform web search-engine manipulation and social-network spam. The full details can be found in the paper and presentation. Continue reading Fashion crimes: trending-term exploitation on the web →

Debate at Cambridge Festival of Ideas: Internet Freedom

Internet censorship, Privacy technology, Seminars

In the evening of Thursday 27 October, I will be participating in a debate at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, on Internet Freedom. Other speakers include Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, Herbert Snorsson, founder of Openleaks.org and David Clemente, Chatham House. Further details can be found on the festival website.

Attendance is free, but booking is required.

PhD Studentship in Mobile Payments

Banking security, Security engineering

We’ve been offered funding for a PhD student to work at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory on the security of mobile payments, starting in April 2012.

The objective is to explore how we can make mobile payment systems dependable despite the presence of malware. Research topics include the design of next-generation secure element hardware, trustworthy user interfaces, and mechanisms to detect and recover from compromise. Relevant skills include Android, payment protocols, human-computer interaction, hardware and software security, and cryptography.

As the sponsor wishes to start the project by April, we strongly encourage applications by 28 October 2011 (although candidates who do not need a visa to work in the UK might conceivably apply as late as early December). Enquiries should be directed to Ross Anderson.

Trusted Computing 2.0

Hardware & signals, Legal issues, Security economics, Security engineering

There seems to be an attempt to revive the “Trusted Computing” agenda. The vehicle this time is UEFI which sets the standards for the PC BIOS. Proposed changes to the UEFI firmware spec would enable (in fact require) next-generation PC firmware to only boot an image signed by a keychain rooted in keys built into the PC. I hear that Microsoft (and others) are pushing for this to be mandatory, so that it cannot be disabled by the user, and it would be required for OS badging. There are some technical details here and here, and comment here.

These issues last arose in 2003, when we fought back with the Trusted Computing FAQ and economic analysis. That initiative petered out after widespread opposition. This time round the effects could be even worse, as “unauthorised” operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD just won’t run at all. (On an old-fashioned Trusted Computing platform you could at least run Linux – it just couldn’t get at the keys for Windows Media Player.)

The extension of Microsoft’s OS monopoly to hardware would be a disaster, with increased lock-in, decreased consumer choice and lack of space to innovate. It is clearly unlawful and must not succeed.

PhD studentship available for research on anonymity and privacy

Privacy technology

Funding is available for a PhD student to work at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, on the topic of privacy enhancing technologies and anonymous communications, starting in April 2012.

The sponsorship is jointly provided by Microsoft Research Cambridge and under the Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Awards scheme. As such, applicants must be nationals from India, China, Hong Kong, South Africa, Brazil, Russia or countries in the developing world as defined by the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD.

The application deadline is soon (28 October 2011), so please circulate this advertisement to anyone who you think might find it of interest.

Further details can be found on the University website, and enquiries should be sent to me (Steven.Murdoch@cl.cam.ac.uk).

Randomly-generated passwords at myBART

Security engineering, Usability, Web security

Last week, in retaliation against the heavy-handed response to planned protests against the BART metro system in California, the hacktivist group Anonymous hacked into several BART servers. They leaked part of a database of users from myBART, a website which provides frequent BART riders with email updates about activities near BART stations. An interesting aspect of the leak is that 1,346 of the 2,002 accounts seem to have randomly-generated passwords-a rare opportunity to study this approach to password security. Continue reading Randomly-generated passwords at myBART →

Pico: no more passwords (at Usenix Security)

Academic papers, Authentication, Security psychology, Usability, Web security

The usability community has long complained about the problems of passwords (remember the Adams and Sasse classic). These days, even our beloved XKCD has something to say about the difficulties of coming up with a password that is easy to memorize and hard to brute-force. The sensible strategy suggested in the comic, of using a passphrase made of several common words, is also the main principle behind Jakobsson and Akavipat’s fastwords. It’s a great suggestion. However, in the long term, no solution that requires users to remember secrets is going to scale to hundreds of different accounts, if all those remembered secrets have to be different (and changed every couple of months).

This is why, as I previously blogged, I am exploring the space of solutions that do not require the memorization of any secrets—whether passwords, passphrases, PINs, faces, graphical squiggles or anything else. My SPW paper, Pico: No more passwords, was finalized in June (including improvements suggested in the comments to the previous blog post) and I am about to give an invited talk on Pico at Usenix Security 2011 in San Francisco.

Usenix talks are recorded and the video is posted next to the abstracts: if you are so inclined, you will be able to watch my presentation shortly after I give it.

To encourage adoption, I chose not to patent any aspect of Pico. If you wish to collaborate, or fund this effort, talk to me. If you wish to build or sell it on your own, be my guest. No royalties due—just cite the paper.

Measuring Search-Redirection Attacks in the Illicit Online Prescription Drug Trade

Academic papers, Security economics, Web security

Unauthorized online pharmacies that sell prescription drugs without requiring a prescription have been a fixture of the web for many years. Given the questionable legality of the shops’ business models, it is not surprising that most pharmacies resort to illegal methods for promoting their wares. Most prominently, email spam has relentlessly advertised illicit pharmacies. Researchers have measured the conversion rate of such spam, finding it to be surprisingly low. Upon reflection, this makes sense, given the spam’s unsolicited and untargeted nature. A more successful approach for the pharmacies would be to target users who have expressed an interest in purchasing drugs, such as those searching the web for online pharmacies. The trouble is that dodgy pharmacy websites don’t always garner the highest PageRanks on their own merits, and so some form of black-hat search-engine optimization may be required in order to appear near the top of web search results.

Indeed, by gathering daily the top search web results for 218 drug-related queries over nine months in 2010-2011, Nektarios Leontiadis, Nicolas Christin and I have found evidence of substantial manipulation of web search results to promote unauthorized pharmacies. In particular, we find that around one-third of the collected search results were one of 7,000 infected hosts triggered to redirect to a few hundred pharmacy websites. In the pervasive search-redirection attacks, miscreants compromise high-ranking websites and dynamically redirect traffic different pharmacies based on the particular search terms issued by the consumer. The full details of the study can be found in a paper appearing this week at the 20th USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco.
Continue reading Measuring Search-Redirection Attacks in the Illicit Online Prescription Drug Trade →