Category Archives: computer security

On the Cyber Safety Review Board

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When an airplane crashes, impartial investigatory bodies leap into action, empowered by law to unearth what happened and why. But there is no such empowered and impartial body to investigate CrowdStrike’s faulty update that recently unfolded, ensnarling banks, airlines, and emergency services to the tune of billions of dollars. We need one. To be sure, there is the White House’s Cyber Safety Review Board. On March 20, the CSRB released a report into last summer’s intrusion by a Chinese hacking group into Microsoft’s cloud environment, where it compromised the U.S. Department of Commerce, State Department, congressional offices, and several associated companies. But the board’s report—well-researched and containing some good and actionable recommendations—shows how it suffers from its lack of subpoena power and its political unwillingness to generalize from specific incidents to the broader industry…

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LLMs’ Data-Control Path Insecurity

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Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying. A phone hacker named John Draper noticed that the plastic whistle that came free in a box of Captain Crunch cereal worked to make the right sound. That became his hacker name, and everyone who knew the trick made free pay-phone calls.

There were all sorts of related hacks, such as faking the tones that signaled coins dropping into a pay phone and faking tones used by repair equipment. AT&T could sometimes change the signaling tones, make them more complicated, or try to keep them secret. But the general class of exploit was impossible to fix because the problem was general: Data and control used the same channel. That is, the commands that told the phone switch what to do were sent along the same path as voices…

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A Cyber Insurance Backstop

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In the first week of January, the pharmaceutical giant Merck quietly settled its years-long lawsuit over whether or not its property and casualty insurers would cover a $700 million claim filed after the devastating NotPetya cyberattack in 2017. The malware ultimately infected more than 40,000 of Merck’s computers, which significantly disrupted the company’s drug and vaccine production. After Merck filed its $700 million claim, the pharmaceutical giant’s insurers argued that they were not required to cover the malware’s damage because the cyberattack was widely attributed to the Russian government and therefore was excluded from standard property and casualty insurance coverage as a “hostile or warlike act.”…

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New iPhone Security Features to Protect Stolen Devices

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Apple is rolling out a new “Stolen Device Protection” feature that seems well thought out:

When Stolen Device Protection is turned on, Face ID or Touch ID authentication is required for additional actions, including viewing passwords or passkeys stored in iCloud Keychain, applying for a new Apple Card, turning off Lost Mode, erasing all content and settings, using payment methods saved in Safari, and more. No passcode fallback is available in the event that the user is unable to complete Face ID or Touch ID authentication.

For especially sensitive actions, including changing the password of the Apple ID account associated with the iPhone, the feature adds a security delay on top of biometric authentication. In these cases, the user must authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID, wait one hour, and authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID again. However, Apple said there will be no delay when the iPhone is in familiar locations, such as at home or work…

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Friday Squid Blogging: Unpatched Vulnerabilities in the Squid Caching Proxy

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In a rare squid/security post, here’s an article about unpatched vulnerabilities in the Squid caching proxy.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
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Decoupling for Security

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This is an excerpt from a longer paper. You can read the whole thing (complete with sidebars and illustrations) here.

Our message is simple: it is possible to get the best of both worlds. We can and should get the benefits of the cloud while taking security back into our own hands. Here we outline a strategy for doing that.

What Is Decoupling?

In the last few years, a slew of ideas old and new have converged to reveal a path out of this morass, but they haven’t been widely recognized, combined, or used. These ideas, which we’ll refer to in the aggregate as “decoupling,” allow us to rethink both security and privacy…

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New York Increases Cybersecurity Rules for Financial Companies

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Another example of a large and influential state doing things the federal government won’t:

Boards of directors, or other senior committees, are charged with overseeing cybersecurity risk management, and must retain an appropriate level of expertise to understand cyber issues, the rules say. Directors must sign off on cybersecurity programs, and ensure that any security program has “sufficient resources” to function.

In a new addition, companies now face significant requirements related to ransom payments. Regulated firms must now report any payment made to hackers within 24 hours of that payment…

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Ethical Problems in Computer Security

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Tadayoshi Kohno, Yasemin Acar, and Wulf Loh wrote excellent paper on ethical thinking within the computer security community: “Ethical Frameworks and Computer Security Trolley Problems: Foundations for Conversation“:

Abstract: The computer security research community regularly tackles ethical questions. The field of ethics / moral philosophy has for centuries considered what it means to be “morally good” or at least “morally allowed / acceptable.” Among philosophy’s contributions are (1) frameworks for evaluating the morality of actions—including the well-established consequentialist and deontological frameworks—and (2) scenarios (like trolley problems) featuring moral dilemmas that can facilitate discussion about and intellectual inquiry into different perspectives on moral reasoning and decision-making. In a classic trolley problem, consequentialist and deontological analyses may render different opinions. In this research, we explicitly make and explore connections between moral questions in computer security research and ethics / moral philosophy through the creation and analysis of trolley problem-like computer security-themed moral dilemmas and, in doing so, we seek to contribute to conversations among security researchers about the morality of security research-related decisions. We explicitly do not seek to define what is morally right or wrong, nor do we argue for one framework over another. Indeed, the consequentialist and deontological frameworks that we center, in addition to coming to different conclusions for our scenarios, have significant limitations. Instead, by offering our scenarios and by comparing two different approaches to ethics, we strive to contribute to how the computer security research field considers and converses about ethical questions, especially when there are different perspectives on what is morally right or acceptable. Our vision is for this work to be broadly useful to the computer security community, including to researchers as they embark on (or choose not to embark on), conduct, and write about their research, to program committees as they evaluate submissions, and to educators as they teach about computer security and ethics…

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