Gary McGraw has a new podcast, “Reality Check” about software security practitioners. The first episode features Steve Lipner. It’s some good insight into how Microsoft is approaching software security.
I’d say more, but as Steve says two or three good things about my threat modeling tool, you might think it some form of conspiracy.
You should go listen.
Cryptol is a domain specific language for the design, implementation and verification of cryptographic algorithms, developed over the past decade by Galois for the United States National Security Agency. It has been used successfully in a number of projects, and is also in use at Rockwell Collins, Inc.
…
Cryptol allows a cryptographer to:
- Create a reference specification and associated formal model.
- Quickly refine the specification, in Cryptol, to one or more implementations, trading off space, time, and other performance metrics.
- Compile the implementation for multiple targets, including: C/C++, Haskell, and VHDL/Verilog.
- Equivalence check an implementation against the reference specification, including implementations not produced by Cryptol.
The trial version & docs are here.
First, I think this is really cool. I like domain specific languages, and crypto is hard. I really like equivalence checking between models and code. I had some questions, which I’m not yet able to answer, because the trial version doesn’t include the code generation bits, and in part because I’m trying to vacation a little.
My main question came from the manual, which First off the manual states: “Cryptol has a very flexible notion of the size of data.” (page number 11, section 2.5) I’d paste a longer quote, but the PDF doesn’t seem to encode spaces well. Which is ironic, because what I was interested in is “does the generated code defend against stack overflows well?” In light of the ability to “[trade] off space, time [etc]” I worry that there are a set of options which translate, transparently, into something bad in C.
I worry about this because as important as crypto is, cryptographers have a lot to consider as they design algorithms and systems. As Michael Howard pointed out, the Tokeneer system shipped with a library that may be from 2001, with 23 possible vulns. It was secure for a set of requirements, and if the requirements for Cryptol don’t contain “resist bad input,” then a lot of systems will be in trouble.
The employer has been posting them at a prodigious rate. There’s:
In “Cloud Providers Are Better At Securing Your Data Than You Are…” Chris Hoff presents the idea that it’s foolish to think that a cloud computing provider is going to secure your data better. I think there’s some complex tradeoffs to be made. Since I sort of recoiled at the idea, let me start with the cons:
In the middle, slightly con:
Its hard to evaluate security of a cloud vendor. Do you really think a SAS-70 is enough? (Would you tell your CEO, “we passed our SAS-70, nothing to worry about?”) This raises the transaction costs, but that may be balanced by the first pro:
That last is perhaps a radical view, and I’d like to remind everyone that I’m speaking for the President-Elect and his commitment to transparency, not for my employer.
Yesterday, Nov 17, was the sesquicentenary of the zero-date of the American Ephemeris. I meant to write, but got distracted. Astronomical ephemeris counts forward from this date.
That particular date was picked because it was (approximately) Julian Day 1,000,000, but given calendar shifts and all, one could argue for other zero dates as well. The important thing is to pick one.
There are some who think that this would be a better date to use as a zero-time computer timekeeping than what most of us use presently. It has the advantages that almost all of the Julian/Gregorian calendar skew comes after this (Russia being the major exception) and far enough back that nearly all time-and-date calculations you need to do with quick math can therefore be just adding and subtracting. And it has a nice scientific tie-in.
Other common zero-dates are 1 Jan 1904 (picked because if you pick this date, you can calculate all the way to 2100 assuming that leap years are every four years), and 1 Jan 1970 (picked because this was the last day that The Beatles recorded music in Abbey Road studios — actually, their last date was Jan 4, but close enough).
And the reason it doesn’t work is that just because you’re allowed to own something doesn’t mean you’re allowed to export it. The use, ownership, production, etc. of crypto was never restricted, only its export. In an Intenet-enabled world, export control brings lots of hair with it, which is why it was important to fight export restrictions. I could go on, but I’ve already ruined an otherwise amusing strip.
I’m in Barcelona, where my employer has made three announcements about our Security Development Lifecycle, which you can read about here: “SDL Announcements at TechEd EMEA.”
I’m really excited about all three announcements: they represent an important step forward in helping organizations develop more secure code.
But I’m most excited about the public availability of the SDL Threat Modeling Tool. I’ve been working on this for the last 18 months. A lot of the thinking in “Experiences Threat Modeling at Microsoft” has been made concrete in this new tool, which helps any software engineer threat model.
I’m personally tremendously grateful to Meng Li, Douglas MacIver, Patrick McCuller, Ivan Medvedev and Larry Osterman. Each of them has contributed tremendously to making the tool what it is today. I’m also grateful to the many Microsoft employees who have taken the time to give me feedback, and I look forward to more feedback as more people use the tool.
According to The New York Times in, “Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China,” the Chinese provider TOM has software in place that reads Skype text messages, and blocks ones that use naughty words and terms, like “Falun Gong,” “Independent Taiwan,” and so on.
A group of security people and human rights workers not only found out that TOM-Skype is not secure, but found the list of banned words because, as usual, someone didn’t set up their servers very well. A report can be found here.
Skype president Josh Silverman replied to the issue today in this article. He says that yes, it’s happening:
It is common knowledge that censorship does exist in China and that the Chinese government has been monitoring communications in and out of the country for many years. This, in fact, is true for all forms of communication such as emails, fixed and mobile phone calls, and instant messaging between people within China and between China and other countries. TOM, like every other communications service provider operating in China, has an obligation to be compliant if they are to be able to operate in China at all.
He’s right: one of the quandaries of business in China is that you have to put your belief in freedom in a trust when you go there. This is why many of us do not like doing business there.
However, he also said:
We also learned yesterday about the existence of a security breach that made it possible for people to gain access to those stored messages on TOM’s servers. We were very concerned to learn about both issues and after we urgently addressed this situation with TOM, they fixed the security breach. In addition, we are currently addressing the wider issue of the uploading and storage of certain messages with TOM.
In other words — it’s bad for the Chinese to spy, and bad for people to catch them at it. Oh, naughty Chinese, and shame on you too, Infowar for dragging this into the daylight.
This comes on top of April’s flap in which the German and Austrian governments essentially said that they have no trouble listening in to Skype. Skype hasn’t commented on that. This is a different issue, as it appears that the surveillance is being done via malware.
Despite the fact that we still don’t know what goes on inside of Skype, it appears that the software is basically secure — or at least the voice parts are. Or was at one time. The noted cryptographer Tom Berson did an analysis of Skype and showed that it was reasonably secure. There were also reverse-engineering analyses done on Skype by Philippe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux, presented at Black Hat in 2006 that showed it was secure, if eccentric in its design.
However, despite the security of the voice parts, the text parts are obviously not secure. And we have this uncomfortable set of circumstances:
The problem here is one of labeling, and the market effects. I’m sophisticated enough to know that when Josh Silverman says:
… Allowing the world to communicate for free empowers and links people and communities everywhere.
that he is stating that free (as in beer) is important, even if he’s unable to do a lot about free (as in speech) in repressive countries and in the face of law enforcement technologies.
But Skype has always touted itself as a secure technology. The reason that it became popular for free (as in beer) conversations was that we thought and were assured that it was also free (as in speech). Skype themselves paid for a security analysis.
Skype thus became not only the proverbial eight-hundred pound gorilla, but (it seems) the proverbial dog in the manger. Skype’s presence has actively hindered other secure-voice technologies. Phil Zimmermann’s Zfone, for example, has had to answer the question, “why do we need you when there’s Skype?” It seems that he’ll be answering that question less. Josh Silverman needs to do something to show us the basic integrity of the system. Presently it appears that he has empowered us to have communities everywhere but China, or Germany, or any place with a sophisticated and powerful government. At the very least, he should protect eBay’s investment, because if people conclude that Skype is not secure, eBay may wish they’d invested that $1.6 billion in mortgage-backed instruments instead.
While Babs’ vocal stylings may be an “acquired taste”, today I have a new appreciation for the Streisand Effect.
Thanks to Slashdot, I learned that Thomson Reuters is suing the Commonwealth of Virginia alleging that Zotero, an open-source reference-management add-on for Firefox, contains features resulting from the reverse-engineering of Endnote, a competing commercial reference management product.
Turns out that while I am pretty happy with Bibdesk, it’s not the perfect solution for me. I had never heard of Zotero, so I downloaded it and played around. Color me impressed. If you are looking for a browser-integrated citation and reference management tool, I’d give Zotero a look.
Bletchley Park, the site in the UK where WWII code-breaking was done, has a computing museum. The showpiece of that museum is Colossus, one of world’s first computers. (If you pick the right set of adjectives, you can say “first.” Those adjectives are apparently, “electronic” and “programmable.”) It has been rebuilt over the last fourteen years by a dedicated team, who have managed to figure out how it was constructed despite all the plans and actual machines having been dismantled.
Of course, keeping such things running requires cash, and Bletchley Park has been scrambling for it for years now. The BBC reports that IBM and PGP have started a consortium of high-tech companies to help fund the museum, starting with £57,000 (which appears to be what the exchange rate is on $100,000). PGP has also set up a web page for contributions through PayPal at http://www.pgp.com/stationx, and if you contribute at least £25 (these days actually less than $50), you get a limited-edition t-shirt complete with a cryptographic message on it.
An interesting facet of the news is that Bletchley Park is a British site and the companies starting this funding initiative are each American companies. Additionally, while PGP is an encryption company and thus has a connection to Bletchley Park as a codebreaking organization, one of the major points that PGP and IBM are making is that Bletchley Park is indeed a birthplace (if not the birthplace) of computing in general.
This is an interesting viewpoint, particularly if you consider the connection of Alan Turing himself. Turing’s impact on computing in general is more than his specific contributions to computers — he was a mathematician far more than an engineer. He was involved in designing Colossus, but the real credit goes to Tommy Flowers, who actually built the thing.
If we look at the history of computing, an interesting thing seems to have happened. The Allies built Colossus during the war, and then when the war ended agreed to forget about it. The Colossi were all smashed, but many people involved went elsewhere and took what they learned from Colossus to make all the early computers that seemed to have names that end in “-IAC.”
(A major exception is the work of Konrad Zuse, who not only built mechanical programmable computers before these electronic ones, but some early electronic ones, as well.)
This outgrowth from Colossus also seems to include the work that turned IBM from being a company that primarily made punched cards and typewriters to one that made computers. It is thus nice to see IBM the computing giant pointing to Colossus and Bletchley as a piece of history worth saving along with the cryptographers at PGP. It is their history, too.
I think this dual parentage makes Bletchley Park doubly worth saving. The information economy has computers and information security at its core, and Colossus sits at the origins of both. Please join us in helping save the history of the information society.