I guess most readers of this blog also check out Bruce Schneier once in a while. One of his latest entries discusses the different aspects of how to sell security. What is worst, the risk for a big loss, or the certainty of a small one? Read his blog post on How to sell security and wonder why we are what we are.
Bruce Schneier have this little gem available on his site today. Bruce and Marcus Ranum are discussing security issues and trying to guess where the field will be in ten years time. I’ve got to say that they are painting a somewhat bleak picture, and I sincerely hope that they are wrong in some of their assumptions, but I fear that they are probably correct.
Maybe it’s not as secure as you think. According it this article and the following post on Slashdot, Hushmail has been caught red-handed in backstabbing their own marketing.
"The only way to decrypt or unscramble Hush messages is by using your passphrase when you open up your Hushmail account. Carnivore cannot decrypt your mail, and is therefore, powerless against messages sent between Hush users."
Now it seems that they have handed over the private keys of users to the government, and thus voided their own technology. I would guess that they soon will have a few trust issues with their customers. I am not going to discuss the old saying, "if you are not doing anything wrong, why do you worry about the government reading your email".
At the same time some people within the U.S. government wants to redefine "privacy" so that it doesn’t include anonymity, and that NSA seems to have included a backdoor to a random number generator for use in encryption programs.
Bruce Schneier had a blog entry about the security of partial fingerprints yesterday. His main point is that there has been a ruling in an US court recently that partial fingerprints cannot be used in a murder case. He links among else to the news-article (update: link removed, not longer available) describing this ruling.
Now this seems to me to be an effect due to sampling frequency. Research has shown that the fingerprints of two different individuals are different. The problem is that law agencies don’t seem to check the whole fingerprint. They check only a few different spots of the fingerprint. In other words they have a sampling frequency algorithm when they enumerate a fingerprint. Now, I am no expert on fingerprints, but I do know the weaknesses of a sampling frequency. If it is too loose you might get wrong data. To different objects can be identified with the same sampled key. (You might call it the same hashing key if you like.)
The article references among else two other cases where the fingerprint have been wrongly identified, and the judge “criticized the common method of fingerprint as overly subjective and lacking in standards”. Now the reason I am blogging about this is that we are now seeing the utilizing of fingerprint readers in a lot of devices. From laptops to airline check-in points.
As everybody that has seen the Mythbusters episode where they are trying to hack fingerprint readers know, such technology is not 100% secure. They only have to be secure enough. I have been alerted to wrongly identified airline passengers due to electronic fingerprint readers (in Norway). I would like to know if this was caused by software or hardware malfunction, or if the product did not use a “sampling frequency” capable of handling enough different passengers.
Anyway, we have to be aware of the weaknesses of a technology we are using and if there are problems we have to address them accordingly.
Link to entry on Digg
Posted from Oslo, Oslo, Norway.