MyDRMSpace

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Do you want to add a digital watermark to your personal pictures or audio records? The MyDRMspace site offers such a free service free (although in the terms of use, there is a possibility to charge).

Polish developers and entrepreneurs opened this site in 2009. Once registered, you can upload a photo or a piece of audio to the server. Then, you enter information related to the file and mydrmspace will add a watermark to it (signature in their vocabulary). Of course, you can upload a file to check if any watermark is present. If the watermark is present, then mydrmspace will point to the corresponding information.

The developers had the bright idea to offer the infrastructure as a platform for watermark designers. Any watermark designer can upload his/her embedders and detectors (so called coder and decoder on the site :Sad: ) Then the public may use this technology. In other words, when uploading to mark, you can choose the embedder (coder). I have no clue on which criteria, normal users would use one technology rather than another one. The most probable would be that normal user would choose either the first one presented or the most popular one. When checking a file, you have to select the right detector (decoder).

Unfortunately, they seem not to have tremendeous success. There is only one audio watermark technology available and two image watermark technologies (from the same author). The place holder for video watermark is empty.

I have not tested if the watermarks are robust.

Do you know any similar site that offers free watermarking service?

Thank you to TF for the pointer :Happy:

Augmented Identity

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Technologies were around. Social networks become prevalent. People are not aware of risks (or at least they are less paranoid than me 🙂 ). Somebody had to do it.

The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) did shake all the elements together and presented recognizr. Using a mobile phone to capture a picture of the person, recognizr extracts 3D parameters of the face and sends it to a server. The server uses a face recognition software and looks in social networks to identify the person and provide data.

TAT was privacy aware. Thus, the system works on strict opt in. In other words, you must register to the system to be recognized.

TAT is privacy aware, but what prevents another company/agency/group to design a similar software and scout the social networks without the consent of the people? Law enforcement? Well, it uses only public data. The data that you/we posted on the Internet.

This application was inevitable. Everything was available. Nevertheless, it scares me. Once more, be very cautious on what personal data you post on the Internet.

Digital Personal Property

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Paul Sweazey believes he has found the solution that mitigates the problem of DRM. He wanted to emulate a property of physical goods: rivalry (If you want more information about rivalry, please have a look on Bomsel’s works). In a nutshell, rivalry is the fact that when consuming a good you reduce the access for others. For instance, when you play your DVD, someone else cannot play it on another player. This is not true for electronic files. By definition, electronic goods are non-rival. One of the purposes of DRM is to add a pinch of rivalry.

To do so, Sweazey created the concept of Digital Personal property. How does it work? Content has two elements: an encrypted folder containing the essence and a playkey that you preciously keep in a vault. Sounds familiar, isn’t it? In DRM vocabulary, his playkey is called a license. You may freely distribute the encrypted folder but will give your playkey only to trusted people who would not steal your license. The license must be UNIQUE in the sense that there is one unique instance at any time. Thus, if the person you gave your playkey does not return it, you lost its ownsership.

The technical trick will be to be able to create a rival license that should not be linked to a device (else you end up with the typical problem of interoperability).

He just moved the problem of DRM towards the license. He will still have to find a method to generate a license (playkey) that can exist only as one unique instance in the world and that could be played everywhere. This is the Holy Grail of DRM that we have been all looking for years. TCreating rivalry is difficult without introducing physical constraints.

It reminds me one of the concepts we built in an old system called SmartRight. The objective was to control the size of an authorized domain for a familly but without any central online authority. We used an electronic token that was passed to the newly joining device. Of course, you could add a device from your neighbour, but then your neighbour “owned” the electronic token. Would the neighbour leave or not collaborate anymore, you could not anymore add devices to your domain. It was based on the use of secure processors and on the fear of loosing the token.

Will DPP work? If Sweazy finds a robust and user friendly way to create this unicity of instance, it would work. This would also offer a lot more applications. But is it feasible? Bruce Schneier would probably say no. (Wait our next security newsletter with his interview.) And many brains are researching this topic.

For more information, read Goodbye, DRM; hello “stealable” Digital Personal Property at Ars technica.

Attacking the BitLocker Boot Process

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TPM and BitLocker are interesting targets for security experts. Tarnovsky has recently reverse engineered a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip from Infineon. Five researchers from German Fraunhofer Institute have explored attacks on BitLocker when using TPM to seal the data.

The paper is interesting even if you are not familiar with TPM. The team targets the boot loader and especially the recovery strategy. If you illegaly modify the environment of the machine, the TPM will detect it but the sealing data for BitLocker will not be accurate anymore. Thus, Bitlocker uses a recovery mechanism independent from the TPM. The idea is to trick the user in this mode. They suggest five attacks: create a false plausible recovery situation, spoof the recovery message, Spoof then hide, replace the computer by a “‘phishing” computer, and preemptive modification (i.e. modify the computer before activating BitLocker. The two last attacks are less plausible. All attacks require physical access to the target.

Lesson: The attacks target the operating mode and process and not the technology itself. Therefore, they are clever.
Recovery systems are always BACKDOORS in a system!!

The paper is available at here.

Computer System Security: basic concepts and solved exercises

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This book, written by Gildas Avoine, Pascal Junod and Philippe Oeschlin, is a collection of eight chapters and 106 solved exercises. Each chapter proposes an introduction to a generic problem encountered in computer security systems. After the introduction, the authors propose a set of exercises. Of course, the authors also reveal the succinct corresponding solutions. In a simplified summary, each chapter proposes a lesson, the examination and the corrected results.

The “lessons” are very basic. I would even state too basic. If you are already knowledgeable about the topic, then you will probably learn nothing. If you are not knowledgeable, then you will just get a glimpse of the main issues. Fortunately, the bibliographic references often allow exploring more in details the topic.

The book, initially written in 2005, neglects (or does not give enough emphasis to) the newest threats such as web services exploits. For instance, there is no emphasis on XSS or Cross Site Reference Forgeries (XSRF). It does not present the latest “hot” trends such as the use of cloud for anti viruses or intrusion detection. A revised version should add several new chapters taking into account the Web 2.0 environment, more detailed application vulnerabilities…

Should you read this book? If you are a student in security computer science, then this book is for you. It is a kind of book of past exams. Would you succeed to solve all the exercises, then you are pretty ready to get graduated. If you are not a student, you may read it for fun or to refresh aging knowledge. If you are looking for an introduction to computer system security, try another book or even better several dedicated books.

Sadly, readers who do not understand French will lose the touches of humor of the names used in the exercises. Thus, readers may encounter Salem Enthal, Mehdi Khamenteux, Sosie Sonsek…  :Happy:

A more detailled review is available at IACR book review.

Blizzard and the hackers

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It seems that Blizzard’s World Of Warcraft (WoW) has very serious issues with account theft. Why would it be interesting to steal an account of a game? Of course, not to play on the behalf of the stolen gamer, but to steal his/her virtual belongings. There is a black market where you can purchase artifacts, and gimmicks. It is done with REAL money. (This is different from gold farming where somebody looks after your character on your behalf. You pay the farmer for him to increase the level of your character)

The hackers use the usual toolbox such as keylogger or phising. And of course, it works. Once your account stolen, you have two choices; either you expect Blizzard to restore your virtual belonging using backups. Unfortunately, there is a queue of several days (hard task for addicts) or you accept a standard care package.

Blizzard is already proposing a solution for gamers. it is the authenticator token, b a company named Vasco, that serves to log into youraccount. It is similar to the usual RSA ID token used for business VPNs. Of course, this makes the theft more difficult. The use of this token is not yet mandatory!

We see that online games become interesting targets for professional hackers. There is (a lot of) money at stake. Security of games will need to leapfrog.

For more information, check wow.com

SF: The nine princes of Amber

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Last week, I run out of new books to read. Thus, I went down in my cellar and explored the box containing many books I purchased while student. Among the first ones I found, was Zelazny’s “The nine princes of Amber”.

Why not reading it again? Good surprise, I had as much pleasure to read the book than 20 years ago! I finished it quickly, and no other choices that dive in the box to find the four other volumes of the saga.

Zelazny is one of my favorite authors. He mastered many mythologies. If you have never read Zelazny’s saga of Amber, run quickly to your library and start. If you read it long time ago, I recommend you to re-read them.

In the past, I started with the two first volumes of the sequel of the saga relating the history of Merlin who is the son of Corwin (the heroe of the first saga). I did not read the complete saga. Did somebody read it? Did you appreciate it?

I am always surprised that nobody in Hollywood tried to adapt this saga to the screen. I am sure that it could be a blockbuster.