Convenience Versus Security

As always, these thoughts and opinions are mine alone and not official pronouncements, policies, or statements from Intel.

For a long time, we geeks who built the internet (and I can't take any significant credit for that) have lived in a fairy tale sandcastle in the sky. We believed in the essential goodness of people and thereby developed our hardware and software with our main focus on what what convenient and not what was secure. We also made that worse by concentrating on features rather than stability and lack of bugs.

In the security field, the bugs have gotten a fair amount of attention. People are very aware of the buffer overruns and other ways of breaking software like browsers to introduce malware into your computer or your network.

However, the convenience factor needs equal attention. Some of those lessons have been learned. When I administered my own linux server back in 1995, I learned the hard way (i.e. by being cracked and having a rootkit installed) about the importance of closing up and securing ports. Having an open telnet port was convenient for logging into my server not only for me, but for all the miscreants who thought access and using my computer might be fun or profitable.

Still, this lesson needs to be repeated over-and-over again. The sites the are open to the attacks in this video have not properly secured their assets. If you leave your property open and unlocked, someone will eventually "borrow" it or play a prank on you through it or do something else you don't want and hadn't intended. Especially, if the info on how to do so is on popular sites like bitrebels.

So, when you buy that new webcam or baby-monitor think before you expose it to the internet. The out-of-the-box configuration was probably designed by geeks who wanted to make it convenient for you to use, not to keep your private information private. That doesn't mean you can't make the device secure, just that you will need to do extra work to do so. Work that might not be detailed in the instruction book that comes with the device.

Although we geeks who design and build such devices emphasize convenience and features as that's what we've trained ourselves to do and what the market has traditionally rewarded, if consumers want safer more secure devices, we will make them. Companies are already realizing the need for that. The culture is ripe to grow and spread. Consumers just have to make informed choices that demonstrate that preference.

If you are an implementer and want to ponder some of the ways, we have helped users trade security for convenience, try reading this.

Viruses on Linux

As always, I want to reinforce that these are my personal opinions and not the stated policies, recommendations, or positions of Intel.

It has been discovered that an Open Source application that runs on Linux has had some of its repositories cracked and some of them were serving a malware infected version, as reported here and here. Now, while some has reacted like this reporting is an attempt at spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) among potential Linux users, it is simply one more incident showing that there is no security silver bullet.

Simply choosing a more secure OS is not sufficient to protect against all forms of attacks. Complacency will always leave one vulnerable. Reading your email on a Linux box will not prevent spam or phishing emails from entering your mailbox. If you click on an infected .pdf file, you probably won't get infected because the malware was probably customized for Windows. However, that doesn't mean someone couldn't infect a .pdf file with a Linux virus. Someday, someone will. Moreover, if the attack wasn't attempting to infect your system, but simply to get you to install a tracking cookie in your browser, Linux is no protection at all. Running Linux doesn't magically make one immune to social engineering.

This isn't a criticism of Linux. Linux out-of-the-box comes generally configured to be more secure than typical Windows desktop systems do. A good example is that on Linux systems root (superuser) access is done via a separate account rather than one's normal account. Many other features of Linux are specifically designed to improve security also.

However, Linux systems also often have more to configure and more to exploit. A Linux system will often run ssh and ftp servers and not just clients. Running nfs or samba servers on Linux is also very common. You might even run http or sql servers. Server systems require more complex and careful administration, because servers were designed to share their resources. Sharing requires more attention. Sharing opens avenues for attack.

If you button your Linux system up, it can be secure. However, if you run it with the telnet, ftp, ssh, and nfs ports all open to the world and without any security on them, you will eventually find more viruses and rootkits on your system than you can imagine. Believe me. I've been there. In fact, to my knowledge, the only system I've ever run that has been cracked was a Linux box. It was in part due to configuring the system to be more convenient rather than more secure.

I think that is appropriately instructive that the word rootkit derives from the name of the administrative account on Unix derivative systems. The first worm was also designed to attack Unix (not Windows) systems. Likewise, Ken Thompson gave as his Turing Award lecture how to embed a Trojan Horse in the C compiler, which shows simply compiling from source is also not a panacea either.

So, enjoy the security Linux is able to give you. Open Source is a good thing. There is ample reason why many cryptographers prefer trusting an open source algorithm. However, don't assume running Linux without appropriately configuring it makes you magically immune to attack. Life isn't quite that simple. Security still requires work. Always will.

Fooling Turing Tests for Chats with Bots

As always, I want to be upfront that the opinions in this posting are only mine and not official statements made by Intel.

Way back in college, I came across the program called Eliza. If you haven't ever encountered it, you simply type messages to it and it types messages back, just like a person on a chat-site. The program is realistic enough that people have been known to treat it as a real person. Therein lies an interesting question. How do you tell the "person" you are talking to is a real person and not a computer? That question is so important, it is called the "Turing Test".

The Turing Test basically says a judge is allowed to talk (as one does in a chat-site by typing messages back-and-forth) to two contestants, one of which is human and the other a computer. The computer loses if is is properly identified as a computer, but if the computer is misidentified as a human it wins.

Well, in our world, there are lots of variations on chat sites, where we type messages to people rather than talk to them. Some of them are social like Facebook and Twitter. Have you met people on one of those sites that you haven't yet met in real life? Are you sure they are for real? They aren't always real. There are "bots" on these sites whose sole job is to impersonate a person and in doing so get unsuspecting users to click on malware links.

We see the result of these from time-to-time, when there are outbreaks of tainted links circulating. When that happens, people post warnings not to click on links attached to messages like "Is this really you in this picture?" or "ha, ha, this is a funny one".

Fortunately, most of these attacks are simple. The bots are not very sophisticated impersonators. Many of us have learned not to click on links from people we don't already trust and even from them only links that are in line with info we already trust from them. We apply our personal versions of the Turing Test relatively efficiently. This is partially because we are expecting these bots.

However, let's imagine someone who wants to cheat and win a Turing Test. Suppose someone wanted to insert a "computer" into the contest, but have it be real enough to fool people. One simple way of cheating is to have the "computer" be a real person. There was a famous chess-playing computer built just that way called "the Turk". Inside this computer there was actually a small chess playing person moving the levers.

As discussed here in Dark Reading or here in their PDF paper, recently some researchers figured out a way to do a variation on this cheat in a chat situation. Instead of hiding a human in the computer. They made the computer tie two humans together. That way both humans were talking to other humans, but both thought they were talking to the person who the computer was pretending to be. On both sides of the chat, a human was moving the levers. However, on neither side was the person talking to whom they thought they were. Both chatter thought they were talking to the fake ID created for the bot, rather than the real person to whom the bot forwarded their conversation. The bot is executing a classic man-in-the-middle attack.

However, even though the bot was primarily forwarding the conversations between two humans, it was still a bot, and it was able to deliver malicious payloads, either send a link which could have been to malware (but wasn't since this was a research project) or ask a phishing question (which also was a benign surrogate question for the research purposes). The bot was able to get high response rates to both forms of attacks, because the attack was in the context of an otherwise human-to-human conversation, and thus was camouflaged. The exact details of the attacks and how they were inserted and success measured are in the PDF paper or in this summary.

The effectiveness of these attacks while worrisome are dwarfed by a potential highlighted but not explored in the paper. A similar man-in-the-middle attack could be executed on online banking help chat sessions. If a bot is inserted in a banking help conversation, the bot could potentially be similarly effective at phishing details from the users. The users would be expecting to be asked questions to validate them to the system, extra questions about personal details would not be surprising. Similarly, the bot could insert questions to the help side that might help the attacker move money. Again, the help agent would not be surprised at questions on how to do various actions, as the user was calling with troubles and the helper is trained to ask "is there anything else I can assist you with?"

These results should be particularly scary for people worried about phishing attacks. The technology involved is not sophisticated. The idea while creative was not far fetched and had been predicted.

I am a prophet!!!! I eluded to this at #phneutral http://bit.ly/9BgN6L via @intel_chris and @darkreadingless than a minute ago via TweetDeckDave Marcus
DaveMarcus

That means there are probably malware writers out there who are already trying to figure out how to incorporate this attack into their repertoire. The key thing about this paper is this kind of attack is no longer just an idea. There is a real proof of concept (PoC) implementation. It will not be hard for others to replicate this work.

Is an iPad a Non-Programmable Computer?

As always, before I write anything, I need to add a disclaimer. I work for Intel and tweet under @intel_chris. However, these tweets and blog entries are simply my own opinions and not the official pronouncements of Intel in any way.

Before we look at that question, we need to define what it means. There are devices that perform computations that are not programmable. However, that isn't what I'm asking about, although it is close.

So, Sherman set the way-back machine to 1890, the time of Herman Hollerith and the census. It was a big task collating the answers from all around the country and it was done by using machines which sorted the punched cards into various slots.

If you look at old movies, you can sometimes see some of these machines. (More information and pictures at technikum29.) Early on in my career, I even used them.

Now, to perform their function these machines could be programmed, by the use of levers (in the case of the ones I used) or wires that could be connected or disconnects (in others). However, the key point is that the cards themselves could NOT affect the program, only the switches or wires could. Thus, although the machines could be programmed, from the point of view of the cards, they could not.

Modern computers keep the program in the same memory as the data. This is called the Von Neumann architecture. This architecture allows the program to be changed by sending data to the computer. It is an important advancement in what computers can do. However, it also allows computers to become infected with viruses. When a modern programmer wants a computer, this is what he wants, something he can send data to in order to reprogram. This is the kind of computer your PC or MAC is.

However, there is a "computer" in my house that I never reprogram. It's my TiVo. Inside the TiVo there is a computer that can be reprogrammed, and some people "hack" their TiVo's and change that program. However, I never do. I simply let the program run and do its thing.

Now, for those of you wondering, I do change the shows I watch and various things and that might seem like programming it. However, it isn't. It is configuring it. It's like the punch cards. Changing the shows I watch never changes the way the unit functions. Most importantly, changing the shows cannot introduce a virus into the TiVo. This is a non-programmable computer.

Of course, as I noted above the computer can be programmed. In fact, TiVo (the company) does so every once in a while. However, I never program it. More importantly, I have never heard of any virus writer ever sending malware to a TiVo.

The question worth asking is whether an iPad is more like a PC or MAC or more like a TiVo? If you don't Jailbreak your iPad (or your iPhone) I would argue that it is more like a TiVo. It provides certain services. Moreover, once you have a set of apps on your iPad, you don't reprogram it, until you add another app. Using an application on an iPad, even surfing the web, does not reprogram your iPad.

Compare this to surfing the web on a more normal computer. These computers are reprogrammed regularly. In fact, for the longest time, whenever you went to a new web site, there was a reasonable anticipation that the web site was going to use some new rendering software (e.g. a new version of flash) and would link you to a site to download it. That is one of the hooks many virus writers used to get you to load their malware onto your computer. You wanted to see Anna Kournikova and you were willing to reprogram your computer to do so.

On the iPad, one doesn't do that. One has a set of applications and they do their jobs. Moreover, Apple specifically vets all of those applications. At this level, an iPad has a virus-proof OS. If you never Jailbreak your phone, and you never download any apps that aren't approved, you should never get a virus.

Now, before everyone goes out and buys an iPad and says @intel_chris said it would protect them from viruses, let me add two caveats.

1. The fact that one programs an iPad at all, and more importantly, the fact that down deep within an iPad is a computer that can be programmed, means that it is possible to create iPad viruses. Someday, someone will do so. The more popular iPads become, the sooner that will happen. Moreover, things like Javascript embedded in web pages, are small programs, which means at some level your iPad gets reprogrammed a little by almost every web page it visits, but these programs are not supposed to persist after the web page is no longer being viewed.
   
   
2. Not all malware requires a virus be installed on your computer. In fact, spam and phishing emails are often not viruses at all. They simply get you to do something you shouldn't, e.g. order medication from a place you have never heard of, or send your banking information to a site that isn't your bank. In addition, even properly working web browsers have techniques (e.g. Javascript as mentioned above) that allow malware writers to put up deceptive web pages and surreptitiously collect information from you.
   

However, despite that I think that the iPad being a non-programmable computer is actually a good thing. For many jobs, we want something that just works and we really don't care how it works. For me, my TiVo is the perfect example of that. The fact that it is programmable, only rarely tempts me to do so. (Yes, I'm still a geek, so it does tempt me from time-to-time, but I can always find better more interesting things to program than it.) An iPad looks like another device that could act that way. Would I really want to program it, or just use it? I think for most people, just using it is the obvious answer.

If just using it has a side-effect of making us even just a little safer, that is a wonderful side benefit.

Is FaceBook A Utility

Disclaimer: These opinions are strictly my own. They do not represent the views of Intel.

Recently, Danah Boyd, @zephoria, posted an excellent article, "Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated". If you haven't read it, you should (including the comments) and form your own opinion.

To me the real question and I believe Danah captured it well is what is the commodity the Facebook is selling. What does Facebook have a monopoly on? The answer to that question is the connectivity to its network and the private information that people have placed on it. It is that private information people want to protect. It is that connectivity they cannot afford to lose.

I will not argue with the other people commenting that Google is not as significant a near-monopoly as Facebook, nor that Facebook won't eventually be replaced by another network. In fact, I do not use Facebook that much. I prefer a different near-monopoly Twitter for most of my connections. I haven't also placed signficant private information on it at all.

However, Facebook has one attribute that some of its competitors do not, access to some of our private information. That is the information that Facebook wants to monetize. That is what has us upset. This is what people will clamor to regulate.

People do not care so much whether Facebook is a utility or not, except as it potentially exposes that private information without our consent to a much larger audience than we intended. If you read the recent polls on youth online behavior and attitudes, you will see that many of them assume that such protections against that kind of sharing are already in place. Moreover, the Facebook users who have been using the site for years also have that expectation, because that was previously the expectation set by the company.

The convenience of Facebook for reaching one's friends is hard to deny, although it does not seem to include those whom I would like to reach. In fact, the true "utility" of Facebook, what I would dearly love to have, is the universal email-address finder. The one which would allow me to find email addresses of long lost friends, and not just their home addresses and property value which I can find through scary services like Intelius. The hope that Facebook holds out is the hope of reconnection and the hope of staying connected.

Facebook is seeking to trade that for the price of our personal privacy. A price it hopes that others value more than we do. However, it has done that through what appears to many to be a bait-and-switch operation. That is what has people upset. It is not the bargain they signed up for. It is not what they were promised.

And, it is that private information that distinguishes Facebook from Google or Twitter for most people. Neither of those sites has ever asked to share information that I wouldn't naturally consider public. However, if I had a protected account on Twitter, where my tweets were construed as private I would be just as upset about having them monetized and potentially exposed. Similarly, the woman whose email name was shared to her abusive ex by Google when she joined Buzz had similar (and more dramatic) cause for upset. To whom we connect and who we are is private information.

Holding of private information is in some sense a sacred trust. It is the real reason why these companies are likely to get regulated, not their ubiquity.

Phishers are Here on Twitter

As always, I will start this note reminding you that while I work for Intel on security features on some future Intel chips, I don't speak for Intel on security matters and what I write about is purely my own opinions.

Perhaps it is irony. Maybe it is karma. However, after retweeting that twitter links were safer than google, I got a tweet with a phishing link from a user called @FasterComputerZ.

It looked innocent enough. It came as an @ message from someone who looked like one of the many security people who follow me and whom I follow. Sure, it was a new follower, but I get new followers every week. It also looked a little bit selling oriented, but that isn't completely suspicious by itself either. This wouldn't be the first person that was trying to make money and hoped to connect with twitter to aid that.

It did include a link to a web page. Since, my link expander didn't show any problems, I foolishly followed it. When I got there I saw ads for anti-spyware programs I had never heard of before. More importantly some of them had subtle grammatical errors. This increased my suspicions.

Therefore, I asked my good friend @teksquisite to look into the site. Sadly, it turned out to be a phishing site. Of course, I had already visited the site. I've since run scans on my computer and they've found and fixed some problems. Now, they may have come from elsewhere, but given that the site contained phishing scams, it is suspect.

Could I have been more suspicious in the first place? Yes. However, not everyone has access to the security resources that I have. So, unless you want to live like a hermit and never click another link, you need to realize that someday you will probably visit an infected site.

Keeping your anti-virus and anti-spyware up-to-date should help protect you.

Being extra cautious when things seem suspect with also help. In particular, your security programs probably have more extensive scans that you can run, like mine did. If you think you may have visited an infected site, run those extra scans.

Also, while you aren't sure things are ok, don't expose yourself (and others) to more risk. Don't visit web sites from your suspect computer. If you think you got the infection via twitter, facebook, myspace, or some other social media site. If you can, go to another computer and change the relevant password(s). If you can't get to a computer that you know is uninfected, wait until you have disinfected your computer before changing the passwords.

Finally, if you want to be particularly cautious, you might choose to segregate your life into different compartments. Keep one computer for doing important and private things like banking. Use a different computer for social media and web surfing. That way, if your surfing computer gets infected, your banking and private information is not at risk. I sleep better at night knowing that my banking information is not on this computer where I twitter.

Another form of segregation you can do is to use different strong passwords (that aren't related) for the various things you access. That way, if somehow one of your passwords gets stolen, it doesn't make guessing you other passwords easier.

I've Been Hacked

There comes a time in every security worker's life, that they get hacked. In fact, it usually happens more than once.

Now, for the necessary disclaimer. I work on security for Intel, not securing Intel, but developing devices that may someday go into chips that Intel sells to make you more secure. This blog, however, is only my own viewpoints and experiences, and is in no way an official Intel declaration, recommendation, or pronouncement. It's just me getting up on my soapbox and talking about what interests me, and what I've learned about being secure in a very open world.

Sometimes, like around April 1st, it happens because one of your co-workers decides that they want to amuse you. I got some very clever emacs macros 1 year, that changed the way the screen looked to put the status bar on the other side. I actually decided I liked emacs better that way and kept them there.

Other times, one gets hacked because one has tightened the security of something enough and someone actually does break in. I used to have a very nice Unix system for the software company I own, but which I had to administrate for myself.. I left that system too open and I got root-kitted. After that, I bought a nice firewall, and tightened up the permissions on the systems ports and was safe until I retired that machine.

Well, given the rash of facebook and twitter attacks going on last fall, I figured I was about due for another learning experience. It was never really clear what perpetrated the attacks, although the koobface virus and some suspicious IQ test links sent via DM were the top suspects. However, we were never certain that the problem was resolved and that the threat had dissipated. In fact, it is quite likely still a threat, just not an active one.

So, when I turned on my tweetdeck session and saw the note that I had tagged @barackobama using this web based twitter service, I feared the worst. Here is a wonderful twitter service, that I had been using and now my account there had been hacked. Moreover, since the account is based upon my twitter credentials, those had probably been hacked too.

Remembering the preceding viruses, I immediately tweeted out that my id had been hacked and not to follow any links I had sent. I then went about turning things off.

1. I closed all windows except those I needed to turn things off.
2. I revoked the service's access to my twitter account from a machine where I hadn't been running the service.
3. I changed my twitter password.
4. I closed my last twitter session and went to a machine where I hadn't been running it and logged in and them immediately changed the password again.
5. I then felt secure enough to turn twitter back on.

By that time, the problem had been tracked down. It wasn't a virus that had hacked me. I was actually reporting a problem to the folks at the service and they had logged into my account there to check out the problem, but had forgotten to log out and the practical joke had been played there.

And, there lies the real moral of this story. In the end, most of our trust has to be in people. It was a person who forgot to log out of my account. It was a person who saw that as an opportunity to play a joke. All of the characters in this story were people. That is true in most security incidents. It usually isn't some very clever program that causes a security breach. It is usually some persons action, logging into a web site that one shouldn't have. Posting their vacation itinerary on their facebook wall. Choosing 123456 as their password.

Fortunately, this incident was more illustrative than dangerous. Plus, to live successfully, one must trust some people. Therefore, in the end, I decided I still trust the folks at the service. Although, I did ask them to read this entry, so that they can think about how to be more careful with other people's data.

However, when one encounters what looks like a hack attempt, one cannot be too careful. Taking immediate action to prevent the problem from getting worse was the prudent thing to do. I'm happy that the incident appeared to be more in my head than reality, but I'm still glad I didn't let it get out-of-hand, and would have been more so had I really been hacked by someone malicious.

Epilog

After writing this description, I had some additional exchanges with the fine folks at the service who explained what actually happened as opposed to what I perceived, I include some of that here:

Fair enough, but you have to know that I wasn't playing any kind of "joke" on you ... I was multi-tasking and trying very hard to help a valued user. And NOBODY else had access to your account --- the @barakobama "tag" was just the next thing I did in our service and I failed to notice that I was spoofed in as you via our system.

I readily admit the mistake and the tone of your post is very fair so I have no qualm.

I have not, however, figured out the issue you're having ... and I have to "spoof" your account to do so. Just as an FYI, I don't have ANY ACCESS to your Twitter account. We use Twitter to authenticate you but the resulting cookies are written to your computer (same as Twitter) and NEVER save that information on our end.

We know some applications do keep credentials and we see this as the type of grave threat you describe. And I personally only allow two applications access to my Twitter account (Our service being one.)

Anyway, when I diagnose your RT issue I will be more cautious, I promise.

Thanks for sharing and for being as generous as possible with your written commentary. We hope to keep you as a regular user, and we hope you continue to find value in our service.