Password Lockers Part 2

So, this is becoming a trend, well two trends: follow-up posts and data breaches. As you may or may not know, there was a MASSIVE breach involving Sony Entertainment, specifically the Playstation, but more on that later. More the the point you may recall my previous post on password lockers etc. Well, this post is about what can go wrong with a password locker.

LastPass is a company that provides a password locker service. What you do is register and download their software. Your master password, which unlocks the locker is then stored there. Now it recently came to light that some of these passwords were compromised (or not). Well, LastPast, if you are reading this, have a gander over here for a sec, k? We assume, hypothetically, that the master passwords were compromised (mainly because I have already written out most of this post and I'm kinda lazy). LastPass issues a warning to all its users to change their master passwords and they all do. Their servers could not handle the load and so they had to restrict the number of users allowed to change their passwords. This actually happened before they announced they were not hacked.

Well, I would like to say that I am somewhat impressed by the expediency with which the users tried to change their passwords. I am also impressed by LastPass's inability to deal with the situation. Agreed, that they had issues dealing with the load but according to their blog they have put affected accounts in "lock-down" mode. Kudos to you.

After all of this, LastPass then claimed they were not hacked. It seems that they just broken their system. After users changed the master passwords, they were met with garbage characters, random images and occasionally the deep dark void of nothing. Somewhere somebody thought that implied a hack. And that brings us to today's lesson.

When you think you have been breached, DO NOT PANIC! Check, re-check, double-check and confirm that there has been a breach. Immediately put in place counter-measures and check for other possible backdoors opened by this breach. Take a deep breath. Notify the affected users as required by law and/or company policy. If you follow these steps properly, then there should be no need to ever retract a security warning. Issuing a security warning scares people, retracting it causes doubt. We are trying to bring digital security out of the realm of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt)!

Why the movies are wrong (Surprise, Surprise)

On the lighter side of life, my friend @zarino tweeted this link, which got me thinking about hackers in popular culture. Think about your favorite movie and/or TV hacker. My vote goes to Alec Hardison, but that's irrelevant. In any "hacking sequence" you see the hacker typing away furiously on a keyboard and all sorts of random green text on a black background. The green on black dates way back to the old days and I have no clue as to why they used those colours, but everybody loves it.

Anyway, you see them typing away furiously at a console screen and all sorts of text just popping up.

IT'S ALL WRONG!

Sadly, hacking is really not that glamorous. It's mainly typing one or two commands or even just a button click. That is preceded by actually coding the tool you are using but nobody types that fast, especially not when programming. Just by the by, the text that appears in the link is a program of some sort. Haven't read all the code, so not sure what it does. All I can say is that it looks something from the C-family.
*****EDIT******
Turns out they last change the site a touch since I visited it. It appears the code is part of the Linux kernel.

Location, Location, Location! What you don't know that they know! (Part 2)

So, some of you may remember this post. Well this is part two of that. I contemplated for about 15mins if I should end the post with the fact that your phone is also capable of tracking your movements but decided against it. Well that would been pretty cool, and mildly prophetic, but hindsight is always 20/20. Well back to the present and how your phone tracks you.

So, recently people discovered, much to their surprise, that the iPhone stores an unencrypted history of where you have been for the past 10 months. I seem to be the only person whom this did not surprise. In fact if the phone did not store any location history would surprise me. I often, mostly jokingly, say to my friends who own Apple products that Steve Jobs owns their souls. After reading this, some of them are starting to think it's true (side-note: this article seems to agree).

It also surfaced that android phones do exactly the same thing. So much for being the free and open platform right? So, I would normally take this time to be smug that I am use a Symbian smartphone, but in all honesty, I would not be surprised if they did the exact same thing. Of course I haven't forgotten all you lovely Blackberry users. RIM may well be doing the exact same thing, but I have not found any solid evidence either way.

So, base assumption: if you have a smartphone, it has a record of where you have been for the past x amount of time. Why is this a) done? and b) a problem? Well in the previous post, I covered most of the answer to b), so lets move on to why it is done. The official answer: "to improve the quality of our location based services." The real answer: "to improve the quality of our location based services." SHOCKER!

Yes, I am aware that this law enforcement agencies are aware of this data and sometimes use this data in the course of enforcing the law. But in all fairness, when the cops are looking for you, the normal rules don't totally apply. So, back to the main point: it really does help them improve the location based services. There is no other way than to actually use your actual location data. If you want a great app that finds the nearest bar, restaurant or even condoms in New York (was very amused when I read that article), your handset manufacturer needs to collect this data.

The upshot: this is something you have to give in order for you to get the services that you want. I for one think it's a fair trade-off. I have no proof that my phone does this, but if it turns out that it does, I'm OK with that. Again, in the digital age, privacy is not quite what it used to be, which is a fact we all have to deal with.

Why you are not dead from the robot-induced nuclear apocolypse (or why CAPTHAs still wotk)

If you are reading this then you are not dead. That is generally a good thing. Now, you may ask yourself as to why you should be dead. Well according to the popular Terminator series of movies, 18th of April the day when we all bite the big one. Unless you happen to be John Conner.

The original premise of the movie was that the Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as "Skynet" became self aware and decided that it reaaaaallly hated humans. So, it decided to get rid of them the best way it knew how; it nuked the living daylights out of EVERYTHING (Barring John Conner and the other lucky guys) and then some. And then we have time-travel and fights and craziness spread over 4 movies and a TV series. Why, you may ask, do I care about this. Well, apart from being a massive geek?

There is a mild connection between the Skynet and computer security. What Skynet represents is a sentient AI, which is basically a computer that can think for itself. Now, having personally worked with an AI (for my undergraduate thesis) I now look at all movies/TV shows that have real full AI with a great amount of scepticism. I know I am not an expert by any metric, but it took me close to 2 months to write an AI agent that learns to play blackjack. Nothing fancy at all, just plays a basic strategy. The upshot: it's really really hard.

I know that they have made some massive leaps in the field, such as Watson and Deep Blue, but that's not quite the same. There are supervised AI agents that can just do one thing and had to be fed a ton of data before hand. Watson for example has the whole of Wikipedia stored, which is in my books cheating just a little bit. Although these are very impressive, they are still far away from full self-awareness and sentience.

The only way that could happen is if we had an unsupervised agent, that is, an AI agent who is given only knowledge of the problem and needs to learn how to solve it. For example, you could tell an agent what a maze it and then put it in a maze and tell it to find it's way out. It will (eventually) learn how to do that. Then you give it another maze and it will learn and so on and so forth. And then you have to make it able to learn new tasks. But once you hammer out those little details, then you have the computer that will end the world.

To, the main point: the reason AI is interesting from a computer security point of view is several things, but the main is CAPTCHAs. Now, it's a little bit of an abuse of the term, but for simplicity I use CAPTCHA to mean all the systems and implementations thereof. The general idea is that you are shown a picture of somewhat distorted letters and you have to enter the letters in to prove you are a human.

The reason for this is that computers, such as automated sign-ups and spambots etc were use to make THOUSANDS of false email accounts for the purpose of spreading spam, viruses, boredom, marketing maybe, but generally evil stuff. IF you can prove you are human, then all will be hunky-dory and you can sign up. A computer will almost always fail these tests. AIs can try to learn these things, for example, using neural networks. And some of these algorithms have had some reasonable success. This is exactly why you sometimes get a CAPTCHA that is completely unintelligible, to protect against smart AIs, with the side effect of annoying the humans, ironically, as the machines wanted.

But, if we could for a second just shift back to self-aware AI. Well, the upshot is if the AI were self-aware, it's well beyond breaking CAPTCHA. We would basically have a robot with human cognitive skills, but much more computing power. I leave it to your imagination (mostly sculpted by TV and movies) to do the rest.

SIDENOTE: More real/relevant blog posts to come soon.

More irony

So, after this post went up this story surfaced pretty soon. I never got round to writing about it, because I have just moved from my old flat to a new one. So, I've kinda preoccupied. There really isn't more to say about this than how ironic it is. I may be tempted to do a post on Cross-Site Scripting soon, but we'll see how that goes

Irony thou name is SQL injection

As I clicked on my slashdot bookmark, I for some reason said to my browser "Please give me something juicy" and it did not disappoint. It gave me this article. The sheer irony alone made me chuckle for 2-3 minutes. So, meine Damen und Herren, (I just had to throw a little German in there) let's talk about SQL injections. I promise this won't hurt (much)!


So, to understand a SQL injection, we need to understand SQL. To understand SQL, we need to know what a database is. And that's where we will start. This may be a bit round about, because to frank I find databases to be a dull and boring topic. We start at the bottom, with data elements. Now a data element is a single piece of data about an entity e.g. Name, Gender, Age, Favourite Star Wars Character and so on. A record is all the specific data elements about a specific entity e.g. {Saqib A Kakvi, Male, 23, Yoda} would be a record about me. If we have several such records stored as rows, we get a table. If we have more tables (generally related) we now have a database. In summary: A database is a collection of tables, which in turn is a collection of records, which in turn are a set of data elements.

Agreed, it's all fine and dandy having all this data nicely stored, but how do we access specific parts of it? The answer is Structured Query Language or SQL (sometimes pronounced 'sequel') for short. SQL is basically a language that allows us to get a section of a database based on some criteria e.g. all the records of people who are over the age of 30. Although SQL gives you quite a lot of lean room, it is strongly typed, which means that all SQL statements must have a very specific form, syntax and all the right symbols in all the right places.


And this brings us to SQL injection. A SQL injection exploits the srong-typing of SQL and issues malformed statements which cause the SQL interpreter to go a little bit bonkers and produce some crazy result. By taking very, for lack of a better phrase, well-formed malformed queries, an attacker can recover parts of (and even all of) the database. When implementing a database, one must ensure that any and all malformed queries are rejected, thus making SQL injections irrelevant. 


MySQL is a software that helps you implement, run and maintain a database (known as a Relation DataBase Management System {RDBMS}). The MySQL company seems to have forgotten about this vulnerability in a primary part of their system. As we have seen, MySQL (and apparently sun.com) have been so ironically compromised due to a SQL vulnerability. Well who would have thought it?


ME! ME! ME! Well, actually the thought had crossed my mind a few times and I thought it was funny, but sincerely hoped that it would never happen. Well done world, you continue to surprise me.

Location, Location, Location! What you don't know that they know!

Alrighty then folks, I have been away for about a month. Between my holiday, work and trying to write another post which I hope to publish some time soon, you have seen zero in terms of output from me. This is me correcting that. So, as I was browsing through the magical interwebz, I happened upon this article. This set of all kinds of crazy alarm bells in my mind. So, let's look at this issue in a bit more detail.

Historically, your mobile provided has always known where you are to some extent. With GSM (I believe there is a difference with CDMA, but I am not to familiar with it, so I will skip it) the service would know what the nearest base station to you was. With this information, they would that you were in a certain area. The reason they need to know this is so that when you make a phone call, they know which base station to forward the authentication information to.

One little point to make here is that one  can tell approximately how far you are from a base station based on signal strength. If you can find out the distance from several base stations, you can use a method called multilateration to calculate an more accurate location. The more distances you know, the more accurate the location is. This is how location-based services, such as Google Maps, work on a handset with no GPS.

Now, it would be very very very easy for an service provider to obtain the location of any customer and store it, but it may be ILLEGAL!!! Under the European Data Protection Directive (and analogous legislation in other countries) no company may collect any personal data about you without your explicit consent. Now we need to clear up two points (in the simplest case):
1) Is your location personal data
2) Did the company have your consent

So, let's start with point 1. The defintion of personal data is as follows in Article 1 Clause 2 Sub-Clause a:

'personal data' shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity;

I think we can safely say that a person's location and their movements would definitely qualify. So that's one point out of the way.

Next, we need to know if this information was collected legally. I'm going to go out on a limb and say probably. Most companies have you agree to a Terms of Service, which nobody ever reads. This is because it tends to be dozens of pages written in legal parlance. It's enough to make any sane non-lawyer cry tears of sheer anguish. We all sign our consent to it having read the summary and hope we haven't signed away one of our kidneys.

In this case, it's not really the end of the world if our cellphone provider knows where we are. The problem arises when they decide to share that data. In the Terms of Service it may say that  they can share this information with certain 3rd parties for any reason. This means that marketing companies could potentially track your every move and learn a lot about your preferences. This could be a problem. 

This is an example of why privacy experts complain bitterly about the loss of privacy in the digital age. And they have every right to, with things like this, less and less information is becoming private. However, their constant and sometimes annoyingly repetitive rants tend to fall on deaf ears. Unfortunately, some people release this information themselves using applications such as Foursquare. It's a classic case of taking a horse to the river and the horse drowning itself scenario.

Although despite this, people such as Malte Spitz (link is in German) still have concerns about the privacy of their data. I would not recommend that anybody try and get their hands on what locational data they have, as it would probably not go down well. According to the article it took 6 months of legal wrangling for Herr Spitz to get this data. It would be at least as for you.

Now to sum up I would say "Big Brother is watching you!" but that is trite and cliché. And frankly a tad more alarmist than I would like to be at dark-and-scary-o'clock in the morning. So, I will go with the slightly milder "Be careful what you share on the Internet!"