Crypto-Gram
February 15, 2020

by Bruce Schneier
Fellow and Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School schneier@schneier.com
https://www.schneier.com

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In this issue:

    Critical Windows Vulnerability Discovered by NSA
    Securing Tiffany's Move
    Clearview AI and Facial Recognition
    SIM Hijacking
    Brazil Charges Glenn Greenwald with Cybercrimes
    Half a Million IoT Device Passwords Published
    Apple Abandoned Plans for Encrypted iCloud Backup after FBI Complained
    Technical Report of the Bezos Phone Hack
    Smartphone Election in Washington State
    Modern Mass Surveillance: Identify, Correlate, Discriminate
    Google Receives Geofence Warrants
    Customer Tracking at Ralphs Grocery Store
    Collating Hacked Data Sets
    US Department of Interior Grounding All Drones
    NSA Security Awareness Posters
    Attacking Driverless Cars with Projected Images
    New Research on the Adtech Industry
    Tree Code
    A New Clue for the Kryptos Sculpture
    New Ransomware Targets Industrial Control Systems
    Security in 2020: Revisited
    Apple's Tracking-Prevention Feature in Safari has a Privacy Bug
    Crypto AG Was Owned by the CIA
    Companies that Scrape Your Email
    A US Data Protection Agency
    DNSSEC Keysigning Ceremony Postponed Because of Locked Safe
    Upcoming Speaking Engagements

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Critical Windows Vulnerability Discovered by NSA

[2020.01.15] Yesterday's Microsoft Windows patches included a fix for a critical
vulnerability in the system's crypto library.

    A spoofing vulnerability exists in the way Windows CryptoAPI (Crypt32.dll)
validates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates.

    An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by using a spoofed code-signing
certificate to sign a malicious executable, making it appear the file was from a
trusted, legitimate source. The user would have no way of knowing the file was
malicious, because the digital signature would appear to be from a trusted
provider.

    A successful exploit could also allow the attacker to conduct
man-in-the-middle attacks and decrypt confidential information on user
connections to the affected software.

That's really bad, and you should all patch your system right now, before you
finish reading this blog post.

This is a zero-day vulnerability, meaning that it was not detected in the wild
before the patch was released. It was discovered by security researchers.
Interestingly, it was discovered by NSA security researchers, and the NSA
security advisory gives a lot more information about it than the Microsoft
advisory does.

    Exploitation of the vulnerability allows attackers to defeat trusted
network connections and deliver executable code while appearing as legitimately
trusted entities. Examples where validation of trust may be impacted include:

        HTTPS connections
        Signed files and emails
        Signed executable code launched as user-mode processes

    The vulnerability places Windows endpoints at risk to a broad range of
exploitation vectors. NSA assesses the vulnerability to be severe and that
sophisticated cyber actors will understand the underlying flaw very quickly and,
if exploited, would render the previously mentioned platforms as fundamentally
vulnerable.The consequences of not patching the vulnerability are severe and
widespread. Remote exploitation tools will likely be made quickly and widely
available.Rapid adoption of the patch is the only known mitigation at this time
and should be the primary focus for all network owners.

Early yesterday morning, NSA's Cybersecurity Directorate head Anne Neuberger
hosted a media call where she talked about the vulnerability and -- to my shock
-- took questions from the attendees. According to her, the NSA discovered this
vulnerability as part of its security research. (If it found it in some other
nation's cyberweapons stash -- my personal favorite theory -- she declined to
say.) She did not answer when asked how long ago the NSA discovered the
vulnerability. She said that this is not the first time the NSA sent Microsoft a
vulnerability to fix, but it was the first time it has publicly taken credit for
the discovery. The reason is that the NSA is trying to rebuild trust with the
security community, and this disclosure is a result of its new initiative to
share findings more quickly and more often.

Barring any other information, I would take the NSA at its word here. So, good
for it.

And -- seriously -- patch your systems now: Windows 10 and Windows Server
2016/2019. Assume that this vulnerability has already been weaponized, probably
by criminals and certainly by major governments. Even assume that the NSA is
using this vulnerability -- why wouldn't it?

Ars Technica article. Wired article. CERT advisory.

EDITED TO ADD: Washington Post article.

EDITED TO ADD (1/16): The attack was demonstrated in less than 24 hours.

Brian Krebs blog post.

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Securing Tiffany's Move

[2020.01.16] Story of how Tiffany & Company moved all of its inventory from one
store to another. Short summary: careful auditing and a lot of police.

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Clearview AI and Facial Recognition

[2020.01.20] The New York Times has a long story about Clearview AI, a small
company that scrapes identified photos of people from pretty much everywhere,
and then uses unstated magical AI technology to identify people in other photos.

    His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition
app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of
that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system --
whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview
claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other
websites -- goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States
government or Silicon Valley giants.

    Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only
limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its
app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and
child sexual exploitation cases.

    [...]

    But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have
started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which
declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by
The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with
augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every
person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive
stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived,
what they did and whom they knew.

    And it's not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to
at least a handful of companies for security purposes.

Another article.

EDITED TO ADD (1/23): Twitter told the company to stop scraping its photos.

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SIM Hijacking

[2020.01.21] SIM hijacking -- or SIM swapping -- is an attack where a fraudster
contacts your cell phone provider and convinces them to switch your account to a
phone that they control. Since your smartphone often serves as a security
measure or backup verification system, this allows the fraudster to take over
other accounts of yours. Sometimes this involves people inside the phone
companies.

Phone companies have added security measures since this attack became popular
and public, but a new study (news article) shows that the measures aren't
helping:

    We examined the authentication procedures used by five pre-paid wireless
carriers when a customer attempted to change their SIM card. These procedures
are an important line of defense against attackers who seek to hijack victims'
phone numbers by posing as the victim and calling the carrier to request that
service be transferred to a SIM card the attacker possesses. We found that all
five carriers used insecure authentication challenges that could be easily
subverted by attackers.We also found that attackers generally only needed to
target the most vulnerable authentication challenges, because the rest could be
bypassed.

It's a classic security vs. usability trade-off. The phone companies want to
provide easy customer service for their legitimate customers, and that system is
what's being exploited by the SIM hijackers. Companies could make the fraud
harder, but it would necessarily also make it harder for legitimate customers to
modify their accounts.

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Brazil Charges Glenn Greenwald with Cybercrimes

[2020.01.21] Glenn Greenwald has been charged with cybercrimes in Brazil,
stemming from publishing information and documents that were embarrassing to the
government. The charges are that he actively helped the people who actually did
the hacking:

    Citing intercepted messages between Mr. Greenwald and the hackers,
prosecutors say the journalist played a "clear role in facilitating the
commission of a crime."

    For instance, prosecutors contend that Mr. Greenwald encouraged the hackers
to delete archives that had already been shared with The Intercept Brasil, in
order to cover their tracks.

    Prosecutors also say that Mr. Greenwald was communicating with the hackers
while they were actively monitoring private chats on Telegram, a messaging app.
The complaint charged six other individuals, including four who were detained
last year in connection with the cellphone hacking.

This isn't new, or unique to Brazil. Last year, Julian Assange was charged by
the US with doing essentially the same thing with Chelsea Manning:

    The indictment alleges that in March 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy
with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist
Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers
connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government
network used for classified documents and communications. Manning, who had
access to the computers in connection with her duties as an intelligence
analyst, was using the computers to download classified records to transmit to
WikiLeaks. Cracking the password would have allowed Manning to log on to the
computers under a username that did not belong to her. Such a deceptive measure
would have made it more difficult for investigators to determine the source of
the illegal disclosures.

    During the conspiracy, Manning and Assange engaged in real-time discussions
regarding Manning's transmission of classified records to Assange. The
discussions also reflect Assange actively encouraging Manning to provide more
information. During an exchange, Manning told Assange that "after this upload,
that's all I really have got left." To which Assange replied, "curious eyes
never run dry in my experience."

Good commentary on the Assange case here.

It's too early for any commentary on the Greenwald case. Lots of news articles
are essentially saying the same thing. I'll post more news when there is some.

EDITED TO ADD (2/12): Marcy Wheeler compares the Greenwald case with the
Assange case.

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Half a Million IoT Device Passwords Published

[2020.01.22] It's a list of easy-to-guess passwords for IoT devices on the
Internet as recently as last October and November. Useful for anyone putting
together a bot network:

    A hacker has published this week a massive list of Telnet credentials for
more than 515,000 servers, home routers, and IoT (Internet of Things) "smart"
devices.

    The list, which was published on a popular hacking forum, includes each
device's IP address, along with a username and password for the Telnet service,
a remote access protocol that can be used to control devices over the internet.

    According to experts to who ZDNet spoke this week, and a statement from the
leaker himself, the list was compiled by scanning the entire internet for
devices that were exposing their Telnet port. The hacker than tried using (1)
factory-set default usernames and passwords, or (2) custom, but easy-to-guess
password combinations.

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Apple Abandoned Plans for Encrypted iCloud Backup after FBI Complained

[2020.01.23] This is new from Reuters:

    More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users
end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one
current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple
employee.

    Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no
longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to
turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.

    In private talks with Apple soon after, representatives of the FBI's cyber
crime agents and its operational technology division objected to the plan,
arguing it would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against
iPhone-using suspects, the government sources said.

    When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the
following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to
the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan.

EDITED TO ADD (2/13): Android has enrypted backups.

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Technical Report of the Bezos Phone Hack

[2020.01.24] Motherboard obtained and published the technical report on the hack
of Jeff Bezos's phone, which is being attributed to Saudi Arabia, specifically
to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

    ...investigators set up a secure lab to examine the phone and its artifacts
and spent two days poring over the device but were unable to find any malware on
it. Instead, they only found a suspicious video file sent to Bezos on May 1,
2018 that "appears to be an Arabic language promotional film about
telecommunications."

    That file shows an image of the Saudi Arabian flag and Swedish flags and
arrived with an encrypted downloader. Because the downloader was encrypted this
delayed or further prevented "study of the code delivered along with the video."

    Investigators determined the video or downloader were suspicious only
because Bezos' phone subsequently began transmitting large amounts of data.
"[W]ithin hours of the encrypted downloader being received, a massive and
unauthorized exfiltration of data from Bezos' phone began, continuing and
escalating for months thereafter," the report states.

    "The amount of data being transmitted out of Bezos' phone changed
dramatically after receiving the WhatsApp video file and never returned to
baseline. Following execution of the encrypted downloader sent from MBS'
account, egress on the device immediately jumped by approximately 29,000
percent," it notes. "Forensic artifacts show that in the six (6) months prior to
receiving the WhatsApp video, Bezos' phone had an average of 430KB of egress per
day, fairly typical of an iPhone. Within hours of the WhatsApp video, egress
jumped to 126MB. The phone maintained an unusually high average of 101MB of
egress data per day for months thereafter, including many massive and highly
atypical spikes of egress data."

The Motherboard article also quotes forensic experts on the report:

    A mobile forensic expert told Motherboard that the investigation as
depicted in the report is significantly incomplete and would only have provided
the investigators with about 50 percent of what they needed, especially if this
is a nation-state attack. She says the iTunes backup and other extractions they
did would get them only messages, photo files, contacts and other files that the
user is interested in saving from their applications, but not the core files.

    "They would need to use a tool like Graykey or Cellebrite Premium or do a
jailbreak to get a look at the full file system. That's where that
state-sponsored malware is going to be found. Good state-sponsored malware
should never show up in a backup," said Sarah Edwards, an author and teacher of
mobile forensics for the SANS Institute.

    "The full file system is getting into the device and getting every single
file on there -- the whole operating system, the application data, the databases
that will not be backed up. So really the in-depth analysis should be done on
that full file system, for this level of investigation anyway. I would have
insisted on that right from the start."

    The investigators do note on the last page of their report that they need
to jailbreak Bezos's phone to examine the root file system. Edwards said this
would indeed get them everything they would need to search for persistent
spyware like the kind created and sold by the NSO Group. But the report doesn't
indicate if that did get done.

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Smartphone Election in Washington State

[2020.01.27] This year:

    King County voters will be able to use their name and birthdate to log in
to a Web portal through the Internet browser on their phones, says Bryan Finney,
the CEO of Democracy Live, the Seattle-based voting company providing the
technology.

    Once voters have completed their ballots, they must verify their
submissions and then submit a signature on the touch screen of their device.

    Finney says election officials in Washington are adept at signature
verification because the state votes entirely by mail. That will be the way
people are caught if they log in to the system under false pretenses and try to
vote as someone else.

    The King County elections office plans to print out the ballots submitted
electronically by voters whose signatures match and count the papers alongside
the votes submitted through traditional routes.

    While advocates say this creates an auditable paper trail, many security
experts say that because the ballots cross the Internet before they are printed,
any subsequent audits on them would be moot. If a cyberattack occurred, an audit
could essentially require double-checking ballots that may already have been
altered, says Buell.

Of course it's not an auditable paper trail. There's a reason why security
experts use the phrase "voter-verifiable paper ballots." A centralized printout
of a received Internet message is not voter verifiable.

Another news article.

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Modern Mass Surveillance: Identify, Correlate, Discriminate

[2020.01.27] Communities across the United States are starting to ban facial
recognition technologies. In May of last year, San Francisco banned facial
recognition; the neighboring city of Oakland soon followed, as did Somerville
and Brookline in Massachusetts (a statewide ban may follow). In December, San
Diego suspended a facial recognition program in advance of a new statewide law,
which declared it illegal, coming into effect. Forty major music festivals
pledged not to use the technology, and activists are calling for a nationwide
ban. Many Democratic presidential candidates support at least a partial ban on
the technology.

These efforts are well-intentioned, but facial recognition bans are the wrong
way to fight against modern surveillance. Focusing on one particular
identification method misconstrues the nature of the surveillance society we're
in the process of building. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is increasingly the
norm. In countries like China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by
the government for social control. In countries like the United States, it's
being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behavior, and is
incidentally used by the government.

In all cases, modern mass surveillance has three broad components:
identification, correlation and discrimination. Let's take them in turn.

Facial recognition is a technology that can be used to identify people without
their knowledge or consent. It relies on the prevalence of cameras, which are
becoming both more powerful and smaller, and machine learning technologies that
can match the output of these cameras with images from a database of existing
photos.

But that's just one identification technology among many. People can be
identified at a distance by their heartbeat or by their gait, using a
laser-based system. Cameras are so good that they can read fingerprints and iris
patterns from meters away. And even without any of these technologies, we can
always be identified because our smartphones broadcast unique numbers called MAC
addresses. Other things identify us as well: our phone numbers, our credit card
numbers, the license plates on our cars. China, for example, uses multiple
identification technologies to support its surveillance state.

Once we are identified, the data about who we are and what we are doing can be
correlated with other data collected at other times. This might be movement
data, which can be used to "follow" us as we move throughout our day. It can be
purchasing data, Internet browsing data, or data about who we talk to via email
or text. It might be data about our income, ethnicity, lifestyle, profession and
interests. There is an entire industry of data brokers who make a living
analyzing and augmenting data about who we are -- using surveillance data
collected by all sorts of companies and then sold without our knowledge or
consent.

There is a huge -- and almost entirely unregulated -- data broker industry in
the United States that trades on our information. This is how large Internet
companies like Google and Facebook make their money. It's not just that they
know who we are, it's that they correlate what they know about us to create
profiles about who we are and what our interests are. This is why many companies
buy license plate data from states. It's also why companies like Google are
buying health records, and part of the reason Google bought the company Fitbit,
along with all of its data.

The whole purpose of this process is for companies -- and governments -- to
treat individuals differently. We are shown different ads on the Internet and
receive different offers for credit cards. Smart billboards display different
advertisements based on who we are. In the future, we might be treated
differently when we walk into a store, just as we currently are when we visit
websites.

The point is that it doesn't matter which technology is used to identify people.
That there currently is no comprehensive database of heartbeats or gaits doesn't
make the technologies that gather them any less effective. And most of the time,
it doesn't matter if identification isn't tied to a real name. What's important
is that we can be consistently identified over time. We might be completely
anonymous in a system that uses unique cookies to track us as we browse the
Internet, but the same process of correlation and discrimination still occurs.
It's the same with faces; we can be tracked as we move around a store or
shopping mall, even if that tracking isn't tied to a specific name. And that
anonymity is fragile: If we ever order something online with a credit card, or
purchase something with a credit card in a store, then suddenly our real names
are attached to what was anonymous tracking information.

Regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process. A ban on
facial recognition won't make any difference if, in response, surveillance
systems switch to identifying people by smartphone MAC addresses. The problem is
that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs
rules about when that is permissible.

Similarly, we need rules about how our data can be combined with other data, and
then bought and sold without our knowledge or consent. The data broker industry
is almost entirely unregulated; there's only one law -- passed in Vermont in
2018 -- that requires data brokers to register and explain in broad terms what
kind of data they collect. The large Internet surveillance companies like
Facebook and Google collect dossiers on us are more detailed than those of any
police state of the previous century. Reasonable laws would prevent the worst of
their abuses.

Finally, we need better rules about when and how it is permissible for companies
to discriminate. Discrimination based on protected characteristics like race and
gender is already illegal, but those rules are ineffectual against the current
technologies of surveillance and control. When people can be identified and
their data correlated at a speed and scale previously unseen, we need new rules.

Today, facial recognition technologies are receiving the brunt of the tech
backlash, but focusing on them misses the point. We need to have a serious
conversation about all the technologies of identification, correlation and
discrimination, and decide how much we as a society want to be spied on by
governments and corporations -- and what sorts of influence we want them to have
over our lives.

This essay previously appeared in the New York Times.

EDITED TO ADD: Rereading this post-publication, I see that it comes off as
overly critical of those who are doing activism in this space. Writing the
piece, I wasn't thinking about political tactics. I was thinking about the
technologies that support surveillance capitalism, and law enforcement's usage
of that corporate platform. Of course it makes sense to focus on face
recognition in the short term. It's something that's easy to explain, viscerally
creepy, and obviously actionable. It also makes sense to focus specifically on
law enforcement's use of the technology; there are clear civil and
constitutional rights issues. The fact that law enforcement is so deeply
involved in the technology's marketing feels wrong. And the technology is
currently being deployed in Hong Kong against political protesters. It's why the
issue has momentum, and why we've gotten the small wins we've had. (The EU is
considering a five-year ban on face recognition technologies.) Those wins build
momentum, which lead to more wins. I should have been kinder to those in the
trenches.

If you want to help, sign the petition from Public Voice calling on a moratorium
on facial recognition technology for mass surveillance. Or write to your US
congressperson and demand similar action. There's more information from EFF and
EPIC.

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Google Receives Geofence Warrants

[2020.01.28] Sometimes it's hard to tell the corporate surveillance operations
from the government ones:

    Google reportedly has a database called Sensorvault in which it stores
location data for millions of devices going back almost a decade.

The article is about geofence warrants, where the police go to companies like
Google and ask for information about every device in a particular geographic
area at a particular time. In 2013, we learned from Edward Snowden that the NSA
does this worldwide. Its program is called CO-TRAVELLER. The NSA claims it
stopped doing that in 2014 -- probably just stopped doing it in the US -- but
why should it bother when the government can just get the data from Google.

Both the New York Times and EFF have written about Sensorvault.

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Customer Tracking at Ralphs Grocery Store

[2020.01.29] To comply with California's new data privacy law, companies that
collect information on consumers and users are forced to be more transparent
about it. Sometimes the results are creepy. Here's an article about Ralphs, a
California supermarket chain owned by Kroger:

    ...the form proceeds to state that, as part of signing up for a rewards
card, Ralphs "may collect" information such as "your level of education, type of
employment, information about your health and information about insurance
coverage you might carry."

    It says Ralphs may pry into "financial and payment information like your
bank account, credit and debit card numbers, and your credit history."

    Wait, it gets even better.

    Ralphs says it's gathering "behavioral information" such as "your purchase
and transaction histories" and "geolocation data," which could mean the specific
Ralphs aisles you browse or could mean the places you go when not shopping for
groceries, thanks to the tracking capability of your smartphone.

    Ralphs also reserves the right to go after "information about what you do
online" and says it will make "inferences" about your interests "based on
analysis of other information we have collected."

    Other information? This can include files from "consumer research firms" --
read: professional data brokers -- and "public databases," such as property
records and bankruptcy filings.

The reaction from John Votava, a Ralphs spokesman:

    "I can understand why it raises eyebrows," he said. We may need to change
the wording on the form."

That's the company's solution. Don't spy on people less, just change the wording
so they don't realize it.

More consumer protection laws will be required.

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Collating Hacked Data Sets

[2020.01.30] Two Harvard undergraduates completed a project where they went out
on the dark web and found a bunch of stolen datasets. Then they correlated all
the information, and combined it with additional, publicly available,
information. No surprise: the result was much more detailed and personal.

    "What we were able to do is alarming because we can now find
vulnerabilities in people's online presence very quickly," Metropolitansky said.
"For instance, if I can aggregate all the leaked credentials associated with you
in one place, then I can see the passwords and usernames that you use over and
over again."

    Of the 96,000 passwords contained in the dataset the students used, only
26,000 were unique.

    "We also showed that a cyber criminal doesn't have to have a specific
victim in mind. They can now search for victims who meet a certain set of
criteria," Metropolitansky said.

    For example, in less than 10 seconds she produced a dataset with more than
1,000 people who have high net worth, are married, have children, and also have
a username or password on a cheating website. Another query pulled up a list of
senior-level politicians, revealing the credit scores, phone numbers, and
addresses of three U.S. senators, three U.S. representatives, the mayor of
Washington, D.C., and a Cabinet member.

    "Hopefully, this serves as a wake-up call that leaks are much more
dangerous than we think they are," Metropolitansky said. "We're two college
students. If someone really wanted to do some damage, I'm sure they could use
these same techniques to do something horrible."

That's about right.

And you can be sure that the world's major intelligence organizations have
already done all of this.

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US Department of Interior Grounding All Drones

[2020.01.31] The Department of Interior is grounding all non-emergency drones
due to security concerns:

    The order comes amid a spate of warnings and bans at multiple government
agencies, including the Department of Defense, about possible vulnerabilities in
Chinese-made drone systems that could be allowing Beijing to conduct espionage.
The Army banned the use of Chinese-made DJI drones three years ago following
warnings from the Navy about "highly vulnerable" drone systems.

    One memo drafted by the Navy & Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned
Aircraft Systems Program Manager has warned "images, video and flight records
could be uploaded to unsecured servers in other countries via live streaming."
The Navy has also warned adversaries may view video and metadata from drone
systems even though the air vehicle is encrypted. The Department of Homeland
Security previously warned the private sector their data may be pilfered off if
they use commercial drone systems made in China.

I'm actually not that worried about this risk. Data moving across the Internet
is obvious -- it's too easy for a country that tries this to get caught. I am
much more worried about remote kill switches in the equipment.

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NSA Security Awareness Posters

[2020.01.31] From a FOIA request, over a hundred old NSA security awareness
posters. Here are the BBC's favorites. Here are Motherboard's favorites.

I have a related personal story. Back in 1993, during the first Crypto Wars, I
and a handful of other academic cryptographers visited the NSA for some meeting
or another. These sorts of security awareness posters were everywhere, but there
was one I especially liked -- and I asked for a copy. I have no idea who, but
someone at the NSA mailed it to me. It's currently framed and on my wall.

Boris and Natasha poster

I'll bet that the NSA didn't get permission from Jay Ward Productions.

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Attacking Driverless Cars with Projected Images

[2020.02.03] Interesting research -- "Phantom Attacks Against Advanced Driving
Assistance Systems":

    Abstract: The absence of deployed vehicular communication systems, which
prevents the advanced driving assistance systems (ADASs) and autopilots of
semi/fully autonomous cars to validate their virtual perception regarding the
physical environment surrounding the car with a third party, has been exploited
in various attacks suggested by researchers. Since the application of these
attacks comes with a cost (exposure of the attacker's identity), the delicate
exposure vs. application balance has held, and attacks of this kind have not yet
been encountered in the wild. In this paper, we investigate a new perceptual
challenge that causes the ADASs and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous to
consider depthless objects (phantoms) as real. We show how attackers can exploit
this perceptual challenge to apply phantom attacks and change the abovementioned
balance, without the need to physically approach the attack scene, by projecting
a phantom via a drone equipped with a portable projector or by presenting a
phantom on a hacked digital billboard that faces the Internet and is located
near roads. We show that the car industry has not considered this type of attack
by demonstrating the attack on today's most advanced ADAS and autopilot
technologies: Mobileye 630 PRO and the Tesla Model X, HW 2.5; our experiments
show that when presented with various phantoms, a car's ADAS or autopilot
considers the phantoms as real objects, causing these systems to trigger the
brakes, steer into the lane of oncoming traffic, and issue notifications about
fake road signs. In order to mitigate this attack, we present a model that
analyzes a detected object's context, surface, and reflected light, which is
capable of detecting phantoms with 0.99 AUC. Finally, we explain why the
deployment of vehicular communication systems might reduce attackers'
opportunities to apply phantom attacks but won't eliminate them.

The paper will be presented at CyberTech at the end of the month.

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New Research on the Adtech Industry

[2020.02.04] The Norwegian Consumer Council has published an extensive report
about how the adtech industry violates consumer privacy. At the same time, it is
filing three legal complaints against six companies in this space. From a
Twitter summary:

    1. [thread] We are filing legal complaints against six companies based on
our research, revealing systematic breaches to privacy, by shadowy
#OutOfControl #adtech companies gathering & sharing heaps of personal data.
https://forbrukerradet.no/out-of-control/#GDP... #privacy

    2. We observed how ten apps transmitted user data to at least 135 different
third parties involved in advertising and/or behavioural profiling, exposing
(yet again) a vast network of companies monetizing user data and using it for
their own purposes.

    3. Dating app @Grindr shared detailed user data with a large number of
third parties. Data included the fact that you are using the app (clear
indication of sexual orientation), IP address (personal data), Advertising ID,
GPS location (very revealing), age, and gender.

From a news article:

    The researchers also reported that the OkCupid app sent a user's ethnicity
and answers to personal profile questions -- like "Have you used psychedelic
drugs?" -- to a firm that helps companies tailor marketing messages to users.
The Times found that the OkCupid site had recently posted a list of more than
300 advertising and analytics "partners" with which it may share users'
information.

This is really good research exposing the inner workings of a very secretive
industry.

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Tree Code

[2020.02.05] Artist Katie Holten has developed a tree code (basically, a font in
trees), and New York City is using it to plant secret messages in parks.

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A New Clue for the Kryptos Sculpture

[2020.02.06] Jim Sanborn, who designed the Kryptos sculpture in a CIA courtyard,
has released another clue to the still-unsolved part 4. I think he's getting
tired of waiting.

    Did we mention Mr. Sanborn is 74?

    Holding on to one of the world's most enticing secrets can be stressful.
Some would-be codebreakers have appeared at his home.

    Many felt they had solved the puzzle, and wanted to check with Mr. Sanborn.
Sometimes forcefully. Sometimes, in person.

    Elonka Dunin, a game developer and consultant who has created a rich page
of background information on the sculpture and oversees the best known online
community of thousands of Kryptos fans, said that some who contact her
(sometimes also at home) are obsessive and appear to have tipped into mental
illness. "I am always gentle to them and do my best to listen to them," she
said.

    Mr. Sanborn has set up systems to allow people to check their proposed
solutions without having to contact him directly. The most recent incarnation is
an email-based process with a fee of $50 to submit a potential solution. He
receives regular inquiries, so far none of them successful.

    The ongoing process is exhausting, he said, adding "It's not something I
thought I would be doing 30 years on."

Another news article.

EDITED TO ADD (2/13): Another article.

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New Ransomware Targets Industrial Control Systems

[2020.02.07] EKANS is a new ransomware that targets industrial control systems:

    But EKANS also uses another trick to ratchet up the pain: It's designed to
terminate 64 different software processes on victim computers, including many
that are specific to industrial control systems. That allows it to then encrypt
the data that those control system programs interact with. While crude compared
to other malware purpose-built for industrial sabotage, that targeting can
nonetheless break the software used to monitor infrastructure, like an oil
firm's pipelines or a factory's robots. That could have potentially dangerous
consequences, like preventing staff from remotely monitoring or controlling the
equipment's operation.

    EKANS is actually the second ransomware to hit industrial control systems.
According to Dragos, another ransomware strain known as Megacortex that first
appeared last spring included all of the same industrial control system
process-killing features, and may in fact be a predecessor to EKANS developed by
the same hackers. But because Megacortex also terminated hundreds of other
processes, its industrial-control-system targeted features went largely
overlooked.

Speculation is that this is criminal in origin, and not the work of a
government.

It's also the first malware that is named after a Pokemon character.

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Security in 2020: Revisited

[2020.02.07] Ten years ago, I wrote an essay: "Security in 2020." Well, it's
finally 2020. I think I did pretty well. Here's what I said back then:

    There's really no such thing as security in the abstract. Security can only
be defined in relation to something else. You're secure from something or
against something. In the next 10 years, the traditional definition of IT
security -- that it protects you from hackers, criminals, and other bad guys --
will undergo a radical shift. Instead of protecting you from the bad guys, it
will increasingly protect businesses and their business models from you.

    Ten years ago, the big conceptual change in IT security was
deperimeterization. A wordlike grouping of 18 letters with both a prefix and a
suffix, it has to be the ugliest word our industry invented. The concept, though
-- the dissolution of the strict boundaries between the internal and external
network -- was both real and important.

    There's more deperimeterization today than there ever was. Customer and
partner access, guest access, outsourced e-mail, VPNs; to the extent there is an
organizational network boundary, it's so full of holes that it's sometimes
easier to pretend it isn't there. The most important change, though, is
conceptual. We used to think of a network as a fortress, with the good guys on
the inside and the bad guys on the outside, and walls and gates and guards to
ensure that only the good guys got inside. Modern networks are more like cities,
dynamic and complex entities with many different boundaries within them. The
access, authorization, and trust relationships are even more complicated.

    Today, two other conceptual changes matter. The first is consumerization.
Another ponderous invented word, it's the idea that consumers get the cool new
gadgets first, and demand to do their work on them. Employees already have their
laptops configured just the way they like them, and they don't want another one
just for getting through the corporate VPN. They're already reading their mail
on their BlackBerrys or iPads. They already have a home computer, and it's
cooler than the standard issue IT department machine. Network administrators are
increasingly losing control over clients.

    This trend will only increase. Consumer devices will become trendier,
cheaper, and more integrated; and younger people are already used to using their
own stuff on their school networks. It's a recapitulation of the PC revolution.
The centralized computer center concept was shaken by people buying PCs to run
VisiCalc; now it's iPads and Android smartphones.

    The second conceptual change comes from cloud computing: our increasing
tendency to store our data elsewhere. Call it decentralization: our email,
photos, books, music, and documents are stored somewhere, and accessible to us
through our consumer devices. The younger you are, the more you expect to get
your digital stuff on the closest screen available. This is an important trend,
because it signals the end of the hardware and operating system battles we've
all lived with. Windows vs. Mac doesn't matter when all you need is a web
browser. Computers become temporary; user backup becomes irrelevant. It's all
out there somewhere -- and users are increasingly losing control over their
data.

    During the next 10 years, three new conceptual changes will emerge, two of
which we can already see the beginnings of. The first I'll call deconcentration.
The general-purpose computer is dying and being replaced by special-purpose
devices. Some of them, like the iPhone, seem general purpose but are strictly
controlled by their providers. Others, like Internet-enabled game machines or
digital cameras, are truly special purpose. In 10 years, most computers will be
small, specialized, and ubiquitous.

    Even on what are ostensibly general-purpose devices, we're seeing more
special-purpose applications. Sure, you could use the iPhone's web browser to
access the New York Times website, but it's much easier to use the NYT's special
iPhone app. As computers become smaller and cheaper, this trend will only
continue. It'll be easier to use special-purpose hardware and software. And
companies, wanting more control over their users' experience, will push this
trend.

    The second is decustomerization -- now I get to invent the really ugly
words -- the idea that we get more of our IT functionality without any business
relationship. We're all part of this trend: every search engine gives away its
services in exchange for the ability to advertise. It's not just Google and
Bing; most webmail and social networking sites offer free basic service in
exchange for advertising, possibly with premium services for money. Most
websites, even useful ones that take the place of client software, are free;
they are either run altruistically or to facilitate advertising.

    Soon it will be hardware. In 1999, Internet startup FreePC tried to make
money by giving away computers in exchange for the ability to monitor users'
surfing and purchasing habits. The company failed, but computers have only
gotten cheaper since then. It won't be long before giving away netbooks in
exchange for advertising will be a viable business. Or giving away digital
cameras. Already there are companies that give away long-distance minutes in
exchange for advertising. Free cell phones aren't far off. Of course, not all IT
hardware will be free. Some of the new cool hardware will cost too much to be
free, and there will always be a need for concentrated computing power close to
the user -- game systems are an obvious example -- but those will be the
exception. Where the hardware costs too much to just give away, however, we'll
see free or highly subsidized hardware in exchange for locked-in service; that's
already the way cell phones are sold.

    This is important because it destroys what's left of the normal business
relationship between IT companies and their users. We're not Google's customers;
we're Google's product that they sell to their customers. It's a three-way
relationship: us, the IT service provider, and the advertiser or data buyer. And
as these noncustomer IT relationships proliferate, we'll see more IT companies
treating us as products. If I buy a Dell computer, then I'm obviously a Dell
customer; but if I get a Dell computer for free in exchange for access to my
life, it's much less obvious whom I'm entering a business relationship with.
Facebook's continual ratcheting down of user privacy in order to satisfy its
actual customers -- the advertisers -- and enhance its revenue is just a hint of
what's to come.

    The third conceptual change I've termed depersonization: computing that
removes the user, either partially or entirely. Expect to see more software
agents: programs that do things on your behalf, such as prioritize your email
based on your observed preferences or send you personalized sales announcements
based on your past behavior. The "people who liked this also liked" feature on
many retail websites is just the beginning. A website that alerts you if a plane
ticket to your favorite destination drops below a certain price is simplistic
but useful, and some sites already offer this functionality. Ten years won't be
enough time to solve the serious artificial intelligence problems required to
fully realize intelligent agents, but the agents of that time will be both
sophisticated and commonplace, and they'll need less direct input from you.

    Similarly, connecting objects to the Internet will soon be cheap enough to
be viable. There's already considerable research into Internet-enabled medical
devices, smart power grids that communicate with smart phones, and networked
automobiles. Nike sneakers can already communicate with your iPhone. Your phone
already tells the network where you are. Internet-enabled appliances are already
in limited use, but soon they will be the norm. Businesses will acquire smart
HVAC units, smart elevators, and smart inventory systems. And, as short-range
communications -- like RFID and Bluetooth -- become cheaper, everything becomes
smart.

    The "Internet of things" won't need you to communicate. The smart
appliances in your smart home will talk directly to the power company. Your
smart car will talk to road sensors and, eventually, other cars. Your clothes
will talk to your dry cleaner. Your phone will talk to vending machines; they
already do in some countries. The ramifications of this are hard to imagine;
it's likely to be weirder and less orderly than the contemporary press describes
it. But certainly smart objects will be talking about you, and you probably
won't have much control over what they're saying.

    One old trend: deperimeterization. Two current trends: consumerization and
decentralization. Three future trends: deconcentration, decustomerization, and
depersonization. That's IT in 2020 -- it's not under your control, it's doing
things without your knowledge and consent, and it's not necessarily acting in
your best interests. And this is how things will be when they're working as
they're intended to work; I haven't even started talking about the bad guys yet.

    That's because IT security in 2020 will be less about protecting you from
traditional bad guys, and more about protecting corporate business models from
you. Deperimeterization assumes everyone is untrusted until proven otherwise.
Consumerization requires networks to assume all user devices are untrustworthy
until proven otherwise. Decentralization and deconcentration won't work if
you're able to hack the devices to run unauthorized software or access
unauthorized data. Deconsumerization won't be viable unless you're unable to
bypass the ads, or whatever the vendor uses to monetize you. And depersonization
requires the autonomous devices to be, well, autonomous.

    In 2020 -- 10 years from now -- Moore's Law predicts that computers will be
100 times more powerful. That'll change things in ways we can't know, but we do
know that human nature never changes. Cory Doctorow rightly pointed out that all
complex ecosystems have parasites. Society's traditional parasites are
criminals, but a broader definition makes more sense here. As we users lose
control of those systems and IT providers gain control for their own purposes,
the definition of "parasite" will shift. Whether they're criminals trying to
drain your bank account, movie watchers trying to bypass whatever copy
protection studios are using to protect their profits, or Facebook users trying
to use the service without giving up their privacy or being forced to watch ads,
parasites will continue to try to take advantage of IT systems. They'll exist,
just as they always have existed, and -- like today -- security is going to have
a hard time keeping up with them.

    Welcome to the future. Companies will use technical security measures,
backed up by legal security measures, to protect their business models. And
unless you're a model user, the parasite will be you.

My only real complaint with the essay is that I used "decentralization" in a
nonstandard manner, and didn't explain it well. I meant that our personal data
will become decentralized; instead of it all being on our own computers, it will
be on the computers of various cloud providers. But that causes a massive
centralization of all of our data. I should have explicitly called out the risks
of that.

Otherwise, I'm happy with what I wrote ten years ago.

** *** ***** ******* *********** *************
Apple's Tracking-Prevention Feature in Safari has a Privacy Bug

[2020.02.10] Last month, engineers at Google published a very curious privacy
bug in Apple's Safari web browser. Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a
feature designed to reduce user tracking, has vulnerabilities that themselves
allow user tracking. Some details:

    ITP detects and blocks tracking on the web. When you visit a few websites
that happen to load the same third-party resource, ITP detects the domain
hosting the resource as a potential tracker and from then on sanitizes web
requests to that domain to limit tracking. Tracker domains are added to Safari's
internal, on-device ITP list. When future third-party requests are made to a
domain on the ITP list, Safari will modify them to remove some information it
believes may allow tracking the user (such as cookies).

    [...]

    The details should come as a surprise to everyone because it turns out that
ITP could effectively be used for:

        information leaks: detecting websites visited by the user (web browsing
history hijacking, stealing a list of visited sites)
        tracking the user with ITP, making the mechanism function like a cookie
        fingerprinting the user: in ways similar to the HSTS fingerprint, but
perhaps a bit better

    I am sure we all agree that we would not expect a privacy feature meant to
protect from tracking to effectively enable tracking, and also accidentally
allowing any website out there to steal its visitors' web browsing history. But
web architecture is complex, and the consequence is that this is exactly the
case.

Apple fixed this vulnerability in December, a month before Google published.

If there's any lesson here, it's that privacy is hard -- and that privacy
engineering is even harder. It's not that we shouldn't try, but we should
recognize that it's easy to get it wrong.

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Crypto AG Was Owned by the CIA

[2020.02.11] The Swiss cryptography firm Crypto AG sold equipment to governments
and militaries around the world for decades after World War II. They were owned
by the CIA:

    But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly
owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German
intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company's devices so they could
easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages.

This isn't really news. We have long known that Crypto AG was backdooring crypto
equipment for the Americans. What is new is the formerly classified documents
describing the details:

    The decades-long arrangement, among the most closely guarded secrets of the
Cold War, is laid bare in a classified, comprehensive CIA history of the
operation obtained by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public broadcaster,
in a joint reporting project.

    The account identifies the CIA officers who ran the program and the company
executives entrusted to execute it. It traces the origin of the venture as well
as the internal conflicts that nearly derailed it. It describes how the United
States and its allies exploited other nations' gullibility for years, taking
their money and stealing their secrets.

    The operation, known first by the code name "Thesaurus" and later
"Rubicon," ranks among the most audacious in CIA history.

EDITED TO ADD: More news articles. And a 1995 story on this. It's not new news.

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Companies that Scrape Your Email

[2020.02.12] Motherboard has a long article on apps -- Edison, Slice, and
Cleanfox -- that spy on your email by scraping your screen, and then sell that
information to others:

    Some of the companies listed in the J.P. Morgan document sell data sourced
from "personal inboxes," the document adds. A spokesperson for J.P. Morgan
Research, the part of the company that created the document, told Motherboard
that the research "is intended for institutional clients."

    That document describes Edison as providing "consumer purchase metrics
including brand loyalty, wallet share, purchase preferences, etc." The document
adds that the "source" of the data is the "Edison Email App."

    [...]

    A dataset obtained by Motherboard shows what some of the information pulled
from free email app users' inboxes looks like. A spreadsheet containing data
from Rakuten's Slice, an app that scrapes a user's inbox so they can better
track packages or get their money back once a product goes down in price,
contains the item that an app user bought from a specific brand, what they paid,
and an unique identification code for each buyer.

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A US Data Protection Agency

[2020.02.13] The United States is one of the few democracies without some formal
data protection agency, and we need one. Senator Gillibrand just proposed
creating one.

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DNSSEC Keysigning Ceremony Postponed Because of Locked Safe

[2020.02.14] Interesting collision of real-world and Internet security:

    The ceremony sees several trusted internet engineers (a minimum of three
and up to seven) from across the world descend on one of two secure locations
-- one in El Segundo, California, just south of Los Angeles, and the other in
Culpeper, Virginia -- both in America, every three months.

    Once in place, they run through a lengthy series of steps and checks to
cryptographically sign the digital key pairs used to secure the internet's root
zone. (Here's Cloudflare's in-depth explanation, and IANA's PDF step-by-step
guide.)

    [...]

    Only specific named people are allowed to take part in the ceremony, and
they have to pass through several layers of security -- including doors that can
only be opened through fingerprint and retinal scans -- before getting in the
room where the ceremony takes place.

    Staff open up two safes, each roughly one-metre across. One contains a
hardware security module that contains the private portion of the KSK. The
module is activated, allowing the KSK private key to sign keys, using smart
cards assigned to the ceremony participants. These credentials are stored in
deposit boxes and tamper-proof bags in the second safe. Each step is checked by
everyone else, and the event is livestreamed. Once the ceremony is complete --
which takes a few hours -- all the pieces are separated, sealed, and put back in
the safes inside the secure facility, and everyone leaves.

    But during what was apparently a check on the system on Tuesday night --
the day before the ceremony planned for 1300 PST (2100 UTC) Wednesday -- IANA
staff discovered that they couldn't open one of the two safes. One of the
locking mechanisms wouldn't retract and so the safe stayed stubbornly shut.

    As soon as they discovered the problem, everyone involved, including those
who had flown in for the occasion, were told that the ceremony was being
postponed. Thanks to the complexity of the problem -- a jammed safe with
critical and sensitive equipment inside -- they were told it wasn't going to be
possible to hold the ceremony on the back-up date of Thursday, either.

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Upcoming Speaking Engagements

[2020.02.14] This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

    I'll be at RSA Conference 2020 in San Francisco. On Wednesday, February 26,
at 2:50 PM, I'll be part of a panel on "How to Reduce Supply Chain Risk: Lessons
from Efforts to Block Huawei." On Thursday, February 27, at 9:20 AM, I'm giving
a keynote on "Hacking Society."
    I'm speaking at SecIT by Heise in Hannover, Germany on March 26, 2020.

The list is maintained on this page.

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Since 1998, CRYPTO-GRAM has been a free monthly newsletter providing summaries,
analyses, insights, and commentaries on security technology. To subscribe, or to
read back issues, see Crypto-Gram's web page.

You can also read these articles on my blog, Schneier on Security.

Please feel free to forward CRYPTO-GRAM, in whole or in part, to colleagues and
friends who will find it valuable. Permission is also granted to reprint
CRYPTO-GRAM, as long as it is reprinted in its entirety.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a
security guru by the Economist. He is the author of over one dozen books --
including his latest, Click Here to Kill Everybody -- as well as hundreds of
articles, essays, and academic papers. His newsletter and blog are read by over
250,000 people. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet
and Society at Harvard University; a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard
Kennedy School; a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow,
and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of EPIC and
VerifiedVoting.org.

Copyright C 2020 by Bruce Schneier.

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