A look back at posts in May 2009

This time last year I made some of my favourite posts. First I celebrated that I had reached about 1,000 visits and 2,000 page views a month, and now I am about double that.

Rethinking Thresholds for Account Lockouts was a simple post asking if the 3-strikes-your-out password policy makes sense. I posted my second Password Roundup #2, and reviewed from Qualys their study on The Half-life of Vulnerabilities is still 30 Days.

I also developed some thoughts why web app bugs don’t get fixed in The $28,000 Question: Project vs. Production Risk, after Jeremiah Grossman estimated that 28,000 well-spent dollars could fix the bugs at many sites.

On the crypto side I broke some news about The cost of SHA-1 collisions reduced to 2^{52}, and took a look at AES-256 and Reputational Risk. The AES post is now on the first page of a Google search for “aes 256” and has brought a steady flow of visits since last May, 1346 in total. I also asked if anyone could verify that the Total Internet computational power = 2^{85} operations, a statement I read in an ECRYPT report. I ended up contacting the authors and nope, no one knows where is came from. Sounds possible though.

I also posted The Sub-Time Crisis in Web 2.0, my thoughts on information overload in Web 2.0. I only used half the text I typed in from my written notes.

Some quotes from my first 200 posts

My 200th post was sent the No Tricks blog yesterday, and to celebrate here are 30 or so quotes I quickly selected out of those posts.

The No Tricks Blog Name

The American basically asked "Why are you guys doing so much better than us?". The Japanese businessman is shown extending his fingers and counting off as he says "Your managers are greedy, your workers are lazy, and ...". But before he can finish even just the most obvious reasons, the American interrupts impatiently and says "I know, I know! But what's the trick?"

Does IT Security matter?

Excel is your new best friend

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

We can also stop beating ourselves up on the point that the weakness of IT Risk is the absence of data - the real weakness is poor modelling, and the decisions based on the output of such models.

Anonymity at the Edge

Mr. Egerstad has stated that there is no security flaw with Tor - the real threat comes from user expectations that their message contents are being protected end-to-end by Tor, when in fact encryption is only applied to internal Tor network communication.

A Blackish Swan for Debian Crypto

Flaws related to encryption always make good copy, and on occasion, strike at the heart of our fundamental beliefs in security. When encryption falters the whole edifice of security seems shaken.

Are AES 256-bit keys too large?

This may seem an odd question given that since the mid 70's discussions about cryptographic keys have been mainly concerned about their potential shortness.

The Cold Boot Attack

The Princeton team asked Nature the simple question of whether DRAM is cleared on power loss, and the simple answer is no.

Long Tail of Vulnerability for A5/1

A5/1 has operated unchanged for the last 21 years but it has now reached its cryptographic end-of-life, engulfed by the march of Moore's Law.

Quantum Computing: are you Shor?

Intel's leading chip line, the x86, has steadily progressed from 286, 386, 486, Pentium and so on, but quantum computers will not be "1000-86" devices - unimaginably faster versions of what we have today.

Risk Factors for AV Scanning

Kapersky has decided to make AV scanning more efficient not by making it faster but by doing less, as determined by risk-based criteria.

Some Black Swans in IT Security

It is common that once the torch of enterprise risk management is kindled in the higher corporate echelons, it is passed down the ranks and settles with IT Security people to assume responsibility for the management of IT Risk. And these people are ill-equipped to do so.

The spin on passwords for AES

Perhaps this reasoning prevailed at Adobe when they recently upgraded their document encryption scheme from AES-128 in v8 to AES-256 in v9. However Adobe later had to announce that v9 in fact offers less security against brute force attacks as compared to v8. What went wrong? They forgot about the spin.

Not One in a Million, but a Million and One

Risk management is about making decisions today that will protect us from the uncertainty of the future. We are not looking for one in a million (the expert) but rather a million and one (the power of many).

Moore's Lore and Attention Crash

We feel more informed, more empowered, and more enamoured with the promise of the omnipotent web. The web 2.0 narrative has worked its magic and we tacitly commit into a seemingly virtuous circle of information inflation.

Twitter as your Personal Content Proxy

Navigation and search are just for people who don't have any friends.

Scoble's Law of Twitter

Disconnect from Twitter when you are receiving more than one tweet per second.

The Positive Trust Model and Whitelisting

The AV blacklisting industry has reached a point of diminishing returns - the marginal value of producing additional signatures is minimal, but the underlying model can offer no more advice than to simply keep doing exactly that.

The Wisdom of a Random Crowd of One

It could be said that PageRank is one part brilliance and two parts daring.

“One Way Hash” Arguments

Often business has the “snappy intuitively appealing arguments without obvious problems” - plus Excel … Snappy and plausible usually wins out over lengthy, detailed and correct.

The Relegation of Security to NFR Status

The observation here is that the security function is no longer called upon to critically underwrite the security risks of a project, with the option to reject.

Marcus Ranum and the Points of No Return

Compound this disconnect between management and technical people over hundreds of thousands of projects at the corporate, national and international levels, spanning the last 3o years, and you have the disaster Ranum is describing (and lamenting).

The Sub-Time Crisis in Web 2.0

The worst case scenario for Web 2.0 is that we are heading for a singularity, precipitated by dividing our attention into informational units effectively rated at zero content.

AES-256 and Reputational Risk

Imagine you posed the following question to a group of top physicists. You asked them to present you with ideas for new research projects where they could assume that the budget included all the money that we have, all the money that has ever been, and the total financial assets of the world for the next 10 million years. Would the resulting proposals be credible?

AES-256 puts cryptanalysts on the same research agenda.

A Risk Analysis of Risk Analysis

So for complex decisions that potentially have the greatest impact in terms of costs and/or reputation, in exactly the circumstances where a thorough risk assessment is required, transparency rather than rigour is the order of the day.

How will my loved ones break my password?

Doctorow remarks that the surprising outcome of this process was the realisation that we are missing a well-known service for handling key escrow in an era of military grade encryption being available to home users.

Thoughts on the Cult of Schneier

I don’t really think that there is a cult in operation over Bruce Schneier, but rather a hero was found when security as an industry needed to believe in heroes.

The Size of our Security World

When I look back at crypto now it seems of similar consequence to the proportions of the Sun and Antares - not merely because my professional interests have changed, but in the vast equation that constitutes ERM, crypto is a variable with minor weighting. Its gravitational force is largely exerted on specialists, and rapidly declines (much faster than the inverse square law) beyond that sphere. It's just a pixel on the football-field sized collage of ERM.

How big is 2^{128}?

So that’s 1,000 years of computation by a cluster that would envelope the earth to a height of one metre.

The TLS Renegotiation Attack for the Impatient

There are many posts and news articles of late on the TLS Renegotiation Attack. I had hoped that just by skimming a large number of these that some process of web osmosis would magically transfer an understanding of this vulnerability to me.

Not so sunny for Whit Diffie

In the short term (and maybe the longer term as well) Diffie sees the cloud as a matter of trust. He advises to pick your supplier like you pick your accountant.

The Internet Repetition Code

For each of us the web is a noisy channel, which we express through the need to search, subscribe, aggregate, recommend, post, tweet – in short a great cull of what finds its way onto our screens.

Security Muggles

And while the traits of detail, accuracy and correctness are necessary for IT activities, they are fundamentally at odds with the type of messages and opinions that senior managers are expecting.

The USB Password Vulnerability

Some articles and posts have focussed on verifying passwords in software as the culprit, which is partly true, but the real issue is not software but insecure programming of software.

In Search of Encrypted Search

Gentry has estimated that building a circuit to perform an encrypted Google search with encrypted keywords would multiply the current computing time by around 1 trillion.

A look back at posts from April 2009

As April has just passed by, let’s take a quick review of what I was blogging about in that month last year

There were a couple of posts on entropy, the first NIST, Passwords and Entropy a review of NIST’s approach to specifying password policies based on entropy and the second On the Entropy of Fingerprints, which found some research to indicate that password entropy is much lower than fingerprint entropy.

I also had a bit to say about a “rant” in Marcus Ranum and the Points of No Return where Ranum stated that the cumulative effect of many business-driven IT decisions taken over the last three decades have rendered a grand IT failure all but inevitable. I followed that post up with The Relegation of Security to NFR Status which examined the weakened position of security, and IT in general, in decision-making processes.

There was a wonderful post by Julian Sanchez on his Climate Change and Argumentative Fallacies blog where he coins the term “one way hash” arguments, by which he means the asymmetric amount of effort required to pose a plausible argument as opposed to the effort required to debunk it. I think we face the same problem in IT risk and security as I said in “One Way Hash” Arguments.

I also reposted The Data Centric Security Model (DCSM) with a link to the full document on Scribd, as the old link stopped working. The document remains very well read with about 3,000 views in total today. Some security documents on Scribd gave links to other documents I uploaded, and you can see all the categories here (called collections by Scribd).

I announced in ENISA and Security Awareness that I would be speaking at an upcoming ENISA conference, which was a very successful get together. My slides can be found here and let me point you to a great awareness presentation from Robert Hadfield of British Airways, which has just over 1700 views on Scribd.

Zero Knowledge Proofs was a longish non-technical introduction to this complex topic, and it has remained one of my posts that has a steady number of readers. I also started Password Roundup #1, with my intention to create a series of posts on password issues, which always figure regularly in security news. I got around to a second round-up about a month later but have stalled since then – not due to lack of material. Instead of waiting for me, please take a look at the Reusable Security blog by Matt Weir which is devoted to password issues and analysis.

Finally, I started to post some of the FreeMind maps I create to gather my thought son more detailed posts in Three Security maps in FreeMind and Flash. Since then I have published all my FreeMind maps, including some that don’t relate directly to articles.

A look back at posts in March 2009

Here is a quick review of my posts from this time last year.

Some dramatic news that eventually came to my attention was the The Great Laptop Giveaway at US Airports, where a study sponsored by Dell concluded that over 12,000 laptops go missing each week in US airports. More big numbers were reported in The Flap over Twitter where new statistics for Twitter showed that almost every metric was growing exponentially, and the micro-blogging service was dominated by power laws. I also posted on Twitter and Extremistan, discussing how Twitter provides the basis for extreme behaviour since we are connecting a viral technology with social media. Extremistan is a mythical country introduced in Taleb's Black Swan book to characterize non-Gaussian dynamics.

I had spent some time tracking down a copy of the paper Randomness Tests for Packed Malware which proposed statistical tests to distinguish packed malware from purely random data. Sticking with statistical arguments, there was also a New Birthday Attack on DJBDNS, a secure version DNS.

I had also come across a presentation The Positive Trust Model and Whitelisting discussing the general merits of whitelisting. Whitelisting is gaining credence, and while it may not be rapidly replacing blacklisting technologies, several companies are opting for hybrid solutions as the exponential growth of malware variants is simply outstripping the scan-and-detect (sometimes called the block-and-tackle) paradigm.

There was also a repost of The Wisdom of a Random Crowd of One describing how Google uses link data to create the PageRank algorithm. The post was created in the context of answering the question of how we in IT Security can make better use of data. Finally, I uploaded a few more of my FreeMind maps for my posts to the FreeMind Flash server, which provides an online navigation service. Now you can get all the FreeMind sources here.

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A look back, Jan – Feb 2009

As the No Tricks blog steadily builds up a body of posts (about 150 now), I can look back a year or so and even surprise myself at what I was posting about. Here are most of the topics I was considering early in 2009.

Opinion and Information

• Moore's Lore and Attention Crash
• The Restaurant at the end of the Web
• Google's Storm in a Teacup
• Downadup's Password Cracking List
• Social Media Data in Flight and at Rest
• Financial Cyber Risk Guide from ANSI
• The Cobbler and the Shoe Assassin

Twitter

• Twitter as your Personal Content Proxy
• Scoble's Law of Twitter

Scribd

• Publishing on Scribd
• Data Centric Security Model hot on Scribd
• Entropy and Anonymity article featured on Scribd
• Some books on Scribd
• The Black Swan on Scribd

Visualizations

• Tipping the Long Black Tailed Swan
• Algebraic Group Visualization
• SOX in Pictures

The Crypto Year in Review from Bart Preneel

Bart Preneel is a professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, in Brussels, and leader of COSIC, one of the largest security and cryptography research groups in Europe. This is the research group that produced Rijndael, which eventually became the AES. Preneel is a frequent speaker on security and cryptography, and in this post we will review a recent presentation on the topic of the Crypto Year in Review.

Preneel begins by observing that cryptographic research is alive and well, with over 600 papers published on the pre-print server of the IACR, amounting to over 10,000 pages of written research. Not all of these papers will be published, but it does give you some idea of the reading load to keep abreast of new ideas and developments.

His attention then turns to AES, which still remains secure despite the publication of several theoretical attacks. AES now runs at 110 MB/seconds in software, and Intel has announced direct hardware support beginning with its Westmere line of chips. Referring to the security of AES-256, Preneel states that for $5 billion USD, a key cracking device could be built to search a 120-bit key space that would take a billion years. This was about the same work required by the so-called Luxembourg Attack announced in June, which was the first attack against full AES-256 that saved significant time over exhaustive search (though a large amount of ciphertext is required).

Preneel calls this an academic weakness, since it relies on a related key attack which is hard to arrange in practice and can be easily avoided by making the AES key schedule more non-linear. The slide below shows that relationship between AES key size and the number of rounds. There are several feasible attacks when the number of rounds is 10 or less with small key sizes. The 2^{119} effort of the Luxembourg Attack is located far above what is considered practical.

Preneel then considers hash functions, the topic of his PhD thesis. He gives a benchmark slide showing the complexity of collision attacks against well-known hash functions, assuming a $100K USD funded adversary using special hardware (equivalent to 4 million PCs).

The downward trend of the graphs is suggestive of a meltdown for hash functions, with the worst implications for protocols and signatures yet to play out. The transition path to a better hashing standard via the SHA-3 hash contest of NIST in underway, and a new standard by will be selected by 2012. However Preneel is concerned that the design of SHA-3 will be based on state-of-the-art from 2008 – that is, all of the additional insights and learnings produced in the evaluation of the SHA-3 candidates will not be exploited until SHA-4.

It was a relatively quite year for public key cryptography, with no factoring records announced, but a lot of fretting over the coming upgrade of RSA-1024 keys in 2010 in compliance with US standards. Elliptic curves are rising in importance due to support from the NSA, and quantum computers remain a very long term threat to the security of public key systems.

There are some additional topics considered by Preneel, mainly around protocols and deploying cryptography. His summary is that 2009 was a relatively unexciting year on the surface but you may find interesting details when you look closer. Also, always remember that cryptography is a building block for information security, an essential block but far from the whole story.