Category Archives: Technology

CANS 2015 submissions

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The 14th International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security (CANS 2015) will be at Marrakech in December.  The submission deadline is 19 june 2015.  The topics of interest are rather broad:

  • Access Control for Networks
  • Adware, Malware, and Spyware
  • Anonymity & Pseudonymity
  • Authentication, Identification
  • Cloud Security
  • Cryptographic Algorithms & Protocols
  • Denial of Service Protection
  • Embedded System Security
  • Identity & Trust Management
  • Internet Security
  • Key Management
  • Mobile Code Security
  • Multicast Security
  • Network Security
  • Peer-to-Peer Security
  • Security Architectures
  • Security in Social Networks
  • Sensor Network Security
  • Virtual Private Networks
  • Wireless and Mobile Security

The accepted papers will be published in Springer LNCS.  It is an IACR event.

Tribler: a (worrying) P2P client

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triblerTribler is a new P2P client that made the headlines last month.   It was claimed to make bitTorrent  unstoppable and offer anonymity.   I had a look at it and played with.

This is an open source project from the University of Delft.  It has been partly funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs.  The project started in January 2008.  Tribler is worrying to both content owners and users.

To content owners, Tribler is worrying with its features.

  •  Tribler is more convivial than other P2P clients.   It integrates in the client several functions.  First, it allows to search torrents from the client user interface within its currently connected clients.  In other words, it does not need a central tracker to keep the torrents pointers.   Thus, it is more robust and also easier to use than other clients.  If the expected content is popular, the likelihood to find it within the connected community is high.  Thus, it is unnecessary to leave the application to find torrents on trackers. Of course, it can import torrents from any external trackers such as mininova.  Thus, when content is not available in the community, the user may use traditional trackers.
    The second interesting feature is that it emulates video streaming using standard torrents.  In this mode, it buffers the video and starts to play it within the application after a few seconds.  From the user point of view, it is similar to streaming from a cyberlocker (with the difference that, once viewing completed, there is a full copy of the content on the user’s computer).
    These features are not new (emule allowed to search within it, Bittorrent Pro offers an HD player inside it…).  However,  Tribler nicely packages them.  The user experience is neat.
  • Tribler promises anonymity.  It uses a Tor-like onion structure to access the different peers.  Or at least, it should do in the future.  With the current version, it is clearly announced that it is still beta.   Furthermore, all the current peers were directly connected.  Only an experiemental torrent used the feature.  However, once validated and activated, it should become harder to trace back the seeders.

To users,Tribler is worrying for its security.  Tribler promises anonymity.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  “Yawning angel” analyzed the project.  Although his analysis was not thorough, it highlighted several critical flaws in the used protocol.  As it is possible to define circuits of arbitrary length, it would be possible to create congestion and thus create a kind of DoS.  More worrying there are several severe cryptographic mistakes such as improper use of ECB mode, fixed IV in OFB…  His conclusion was:

For users, “don’t”. Cursory analysis found enough fundamental flaws, and secure protocol design/implementation errors that I would be reluctant to consider this secure, even if the known issues were fixed. It may be worth revisiting in several years when the designers obtain more experience, and a thorough third party audit of the improved code and design has been done.

Lessons:

  • P2P seems not yet dead.  Streaming emulation may change the balance with streaming cyber lockers.
  • Be very cautious about claimed anonymity.  Developing a robust Tor-like solution requires an enormous effort and deep knowledge of cryptography and secure protocols.  Tor is continuously under attack.
  • Universities may finance projects that will facilitate piracy.  “Openess of the Internet” to fight censorship does not mandate to watch content within the client.  The illustrating screenshot of Tribler on the Delft university page clearly shows some copyrighted movies offered to sharing.

Some notes on Content Protection Summit 2014

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The conference was held on 9th December at Los Angeles. The audience was rather large for such event (more than 120 attendees) with representatives of content owners, service and technology providers and a few distributors.

The big trend and message is that cyber threats are more and more severe.  Traditional Content Protection is not anymore sufficient.  It has to be extended to IT cyber threats.  The SPE issue was cited very often.

The conference did not disclose surprisingly new information and technology.  Nevertheless, the event is a good occasion to share knowledge and basic best practices.  The following part will highlight interesting points or figures I collected during the event.

Welcome Remarks (by ROSE M., Ease)

He highlighted that the cyberwar is a reality.  It is performed by government funded teams or hacktivists,  It has serious implications such as wild censorship…

The Global State of Information Security (by BANTHANAVASI S., PcW)

The cyber world becomes more dangerous.  The state seems to degrade.  Some interesting figures from PcW’s annual report:

  • In 2014, the U.S. government notified 3,000 U..S. companies that they had been attacked
  • There was 48% more reported incidents in 2014.  Furthermore, the average cost of a breach increased.
  • Investment in security diminished
  • More and more incidents are attributed to third parties with trusted access

What to do (and who to call) (panel)

The usual stuff.  The most interesting advices were:

  • Log must be switched on.   This is essential in a cloud environment where low-cost plans may not have the logging feature available.  It is worthwhile to pay for it.  It is mandatory to learn and analyze when an incident occurs.
  • Have a response team available beforehand.  You will not have to time to look for and organize it when the incident will occur or will be detected.

The focus of the discussion was always on script kiddies, and never on Advanced Persistent Attack (APT)

This script will self destruct in 2 hours (panel)

The script is of high value, especially when the actual shooting was not started, or that the decision was not yet taken.  Nevertheless, it needs to be convenient.   Typical challenge for a confidential sensitive document that needs controlled distribution.  Warner announced that sometimes they even used 3-factor authentication.  Creative people may have hard feeling about privacy and traceability.

Protecting content: where creativity and security meet (panel)

Key message:  embed security within the existing ecosystem

According to Fox, TV is more forgiven than feature movie in case of leakage (excepted perhaps for the opening and closing episodes).  The biggest coming challenge is the request of international day+1 release of TV shows.

How to Secure Workflows in the age of digital services (panel)

Key message:  be aware of third parties (and their own third parties) and freelancers

The creative process behind great storytelling (panel)

Refreshing session with creative people.  The end of the session was a playdoyer for copyright.  The arguments were similar to the ones in the book Free Ride.

It’s about the money: strategies to disrupt funding piracy (LAWRENCE E., ABS-CBN and SUNDERLAND J., Lionsgate)

According to me, the most interesting session.  They presented real use cases.

Elisha explained how she drastically reduced the online piracy against ABS-CBN (the Philippines Netflix).   She performed different steps:

  1. Analyze the pirate landscape
  2. With SEO, increase the RANK to get the official sites as the first links in Google and bring pirate sites back to farther pages.
  3. Use investigators to collect proofs to enable shutdown sites
  4. Lawsuits with high fines.  The arrested webmaster are interviewed to learn all their techniques and tricks,

Jane explored the methods to have good brands advertising on pirate sites.   80% of the revenues of streaming cyberlockers are coming from advertisement.  Among them, 22% are coming from institutional brands. Tools exist to filter out placement on malicious sites, but brands have to opt-in. Brands should be worried to place their advertisement in such sites as they are sometimes also hosting malwares.

The culture of piracy: A European perspective (VERSTEEG G., Rights Alliance)

He explained the historical rationales why much piracy went from Sweden (Kazaa, The Pirate Bay…)  He asked that there should be a transactional VOD release window concurrent with Theatrical and Home windows.   The price could be dynamic, starting high and decreasing with time.

Being European, I did not see what was specifically European.   It was more his opinion.

What’s the forecast for securing the cloud? (panel)

According to me, the worst session.   No serious discussion on actual security of the cloud.   No discussion of hybrid clouds.  No precise definition of cloud (even no mention of NIST definition).  It seemed even to me that there was a consensus that implementations in cloud would be more secure than today’s implementations.

The topic is far more complex than the simplified vision drawn during the panel.

When DRM sends personal information in the clear…

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Adobe proposes an eBook reader called Digital Editions.  Current version is 4.  So far, so good.

Unfortunately, on 7 October, the website “The Digital Reader” reported that Digital Editions 4.0 collected information about the reading usage.  The announced gathered data were eBooks that were stored in the reader, eBooks that have been opened, pages that were read, and the order.   This information was sent back to the server  adelogs.adobe.com in the CLEAR.  Thus, this version had two issues regarding privacy:

  • It collected information without informing the end user.
  • It sent personal information in the clear.  Any sniffer could extract this information.

Adobe answered

Adobe Digital Editions allows users to view and manage eBooks and other digital publications across their preferred reading devices—whether they purchase or borrow them. All information collected from the user is collected solely for purposes such as license validation and to facilitate the implementation of different licensing models by publishers. Additionally, this information is solely collected for the eBook currently being read by the user and not for any other eBook in the user’s library or read/available in any other reader. User privacy is very important to Adobe, and all data collection in Adobe Digital Editions is in line with the end user license agreement and the Adobe Privacy Policy

Obviously this answer is not satisfactory.   Last week, Adobe published a revised version 4.0.1 that sent back the information using SSL.  Furthermore, in a note published on October 23, 2014, Adobe listed the collected information:

  • User ID
  • Device ID
  • App ID
  • Device IP
  • Identification of the book
  • Duration for which the book was read
  • Percentage of the book read

The information is collected only for DRM protected eBooks.  The aim of this data gathering is used for potential clearing house.  Some business models of publishers may be based on the actual consumption.

The lesson is that technologists never learn from the past errors. It is not anymore acceptable that private information is sent over the Internet in the clear.  HTTPS is an easy solution to transfer secure data and servers scale properly in our days.

Fingerprinting canvas of browser

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In 2012, Keaton Mowery and Hovav Shacham proposed a new original method to fingerprint a browser using HTML5: Pixel perfect: Fingerprinting Canvas in HTML5.  It uses a new feature <canvas> of HML5.   <canvas> defines an area of the screen that can be drawn by primitives.   The idea is to write a text, ideally a pangram, into a canvas, to retrieve the rendered bitmap of the canvas area (using command toDataURL) and calculates from this image a digest.   The expectation was that rendering would slightly differ depending on the operating system, the version of the browser, the graphical card and the version of the corresponding driver.   Fingerprinting canvas differentiated users.  Furthermore, all modern browsers support HTML5.

Canvas fingerprinting is transparent to the user.   It bypasses any cookies protection, any private browser mode…  If combined with other fingerprinting parameters such as, for instance, http agent or font detection, the uniqueness of the fingerprint is high.   The site http://www.browserleaks.com/ demonstrates the differentiation.  Do not hesitate to test with your configuration.

This paper was a nice academic study.   This month, Gunes Acar et al. published a paper “The Web never forgets: Persistent tracking mechanisms in the wild.”   They studied different tracking methods used by the top 100,000  web sites (ranking by Alexa).   They discovered that 5.5% of these sites used fingerprinting canvas!  It is mainly used by the “AddThis.com” system.   Furthermore, by reverse engineering the AddThis code, they highlighted that AddThis improved the technique described in the seminal paper.   For instance, the developers used a perfect pangram, or draw two rectangles and checked whether a specific point was part of the path…

User tracking is an arm race and tracking softwares use the latest academic research results.

Note 1:  you can opt out from AddThis at http://www.addthis.com/privacy/opt-out.  they put a cookie on the computer to  signal the opt out  🙁

Note 2: a pangram is a sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet.  A perfect pangram is a sentence that uses all the letters of the alphabet only once.

 

Unlocking the phone with a tap on your wrist

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This is the new phone unlocking mode that vivalnk designed for Moto X phone.  The system is rather simple.   YScreen Shot 07-24-14 at 11.33 AM 001ou stick an NFC-based skin temporary tattoo on your wrist.   Once the tattoo is paired with your phone, to unlock the phone you just need to bring the phone in the range of the tattoo.  It is possible to unpair a tattoo if it was lost or stolen.

According to vivalnk, the tattoo’s adhesive lasts about five days, even under water.   It costs one dollar per tattoo.  Currently, it is only available for the Moto X.

This tattoo is a wearable authenticator.   I forecast that we will see this kind of authentication method using an NFC start to spread.   It may come in ewatches, rings, or key rings.  I believe that the ring would be a good device.  The mere fact to take your phone in your hand may unlock it.

Dr Who’s leaked

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Bad week for the BBC.   Last week, scripts of five episodes of next season of Dr Who leaked online.  The scripts were accessed from a Miami-based BBC worldwide server.  It seems that that they were publicly available (with a lot of material) and was indexed by Google.   A typical Google request provided access to this confidential material.

Unfortunately, other material was available.  A black & white unfinished watermark version of the first episode has also been put online.  The copy is visibly watermarked for a given recipient.   Drei Marc is a Brazilian company that provides subtitling and dubbing services.  Nevertheless, it seems that it comes from the same server.  It is not sure that other episodes may not surface in the coming days.  Broadcast of the first episode is planed on 23 August.

dr-who

BBC asked its fans not to spoil the release.

We would like to make a plea to anyone who might have any of this material and spoilers associated with it not to share it with a wider audience so that everyone can enjoy the show as it should be seen when it launches.

"We know only too well that Doctor Who fans are the best in the world and we thank them for their help with this and their continued loyalty

Several lessons:

  • Secure your servers and be aware of the indexing robots.   No server should be put online without prior pen testing.
  • Encryption at rest should be mandatory for early content.  If ever the attacker access the video server, he will access an encrypted video without the decryption key.  Useless.
  • Forensic marking should only occur at delivery time.  If prepared and stored before release, it is useless.  It will not hold in front of a Court with good security expert.
  • TV series are the new Eldorado of the movie industry