Summary:
The International Olympic Committee will be granting Olympic athletes the right to blog at this year’s summer games in China, and there will be a few interesting restrictions placed on what they can say. In addition to the standard laws all bloggers have to conform to (copyright, etc) the athletes are prohibited from posting photographs of events, and from writing about other athletes, as well as from writing about anything that “may compromise the security, staging and organization of the games”. I’m going to examine the motives of the committee in putting these restrictions in place as they may pertain to security, ignoring issues like intellectual property for now.
Security Review: Blogging at the Olympic Games
Posted in Security Reviews
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Amazon’s S3 Outage: Usage spike or DDoS attack?
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced an outage on the morning of February 15th, causing inaccessible content in the thousands of websites that rely on S3 for data storage. According to Amazon’s official explanation, the outage was due to a significantly increased volume of authenticated calls from multiple users. From the security perspective, this leads to more questions than answers.
Posted in Availability, Current Events
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Security Review: ASIMO Robot
ASIMO is a robot that resembles a human that is created by Honda Motor Company. It was created at the Wako Fundamental Technical Research Center in Japan. The current version of this robot is version eleven. This robot, which is about four feet tall, looks like an astronaut wearing a backpack and it can walk and run on two feet. In addition, there are various features that ASIMO can perform. For example, it can recognize moving objects, postures and gestures, and environments. Therefore, it can react under various situations. In addition, ASIMO has facial recognition capabilities and distinguish sounds. It can also find information such as weather report by connecting to the Internet or greet and guide visitors given that they are valid visitors in the user’s network. Assuming ASIMO robots will be able to work as security guards in the future, here is the security review for the robot.
Continue reading
Posted in Miscellaneous, Physical Security, Security Reviews
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Microsoft bad practices
Given all the Microsoft-bashing that takes place among Linux-users, I’m surprised that no one has posted an article (that I’ve seen, at least) that clearly has an anti-Microsoft bias. Despite the bias of the following article, it makes a valid argument that Microsoft should adopt some C-variant that is more safe with regards to buffer-overflows, which are still the “bread and butter” (according to the article) of malware-authors. The author definitely overestimates the amount of time required by a user to maintain a reasonably secure and patched system. That said, the author makes a valid point: it is the algorithm, not the language, that dictates the overall speed of an OS – hence a “safe” language would be a better choice. Unix worked fine on hardware 20+ years ago, so there is no reason Windows should not be both secure and speedy on today’s hardware. Windows/ze-bashers, indulge.
Posted in Policy
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Smart Pillbox Security Review
Summary
“Smart pillbox could be a lifesaver” that is the title on the recent news in MIT in the world. It is design to be used by elderly people so they can properly take their medication. The purpose will be to enforce the prescribe regimen to prevent drug-resistance disease and to prolong life. It might also prevent the unnecessary loss of life due to a miss of daily regiment.
Elderly people are the main target for this device, because they can be in the situation where they need to take a series of medication, like more than ten drugs. This project consists of two systems, uBox for the patient and uPhone for the health care worker. The uBox will alert the patient for his/her daily regiment by flashing lights and sound a buzzer. In addition, it will also record the time and other data which can be retrieved by the health care workers. The uBox has 14 chambers for the medication, each of which will be filled with prescription drug by the health care workers. On the other hand, the uPhone is to let the health care worker to track patient progress and retrieves the related data from the uBox.
However, smart pillbox is not only developed at MIT, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee also been trying to develop it. The difference lies on their dispenser unit which can communicate with the medical staff via the web. The purpose of the smart pillbox is the same, which is to ensure adherence in taking medication.
Insignia Photo Frame, Complete with Pre-installed Malware
An Insignia digital photo frame has been pulled off the shelves once it was discovered that the units were shipped with trojans. Installed by the (Chinese) manufacturer, the trojan bypasses Windows Firewall and anti-virus software and collects gaming passwords.
We talk about being security conscious and preventing our systems from becoming infected, but it’s a different ballgame when we can’t trust the manufacturer.
More here. http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/15/insignia-photo-frame-virus-much-nastier-than-originally-thought/
Posted in Current Events
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ISP vs. BitTorrent
Since ISPs, most notably Comcast, some time ago began identifying and purposefully destroying or severely throttling BitTorrent connections passing through their networks, the struggles on both sides of the fence have been nothing short of a game of cat and mouse.
Posted in Availability, Current Events, Privacy
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Number of Rogue DNS Servers Increasing
Researchers from Google and the Georgia Institute of Technology have published a paper indicating the increasing number of attacks from the use of rogue DNS servers (the paper estimates that there are currently about 68,000 of these servers). Continue reading
Posted in Current Events
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Valentine’s Day Malware
Human beings are often considered one of the weakest links in a security system, and this vulnerability is typified (and exploited) by the proliferation of Valentine’s Day malware (and their associated delivery mechanisms). The first article referenced below describes two recent attacks: one where an e-mail with a Valentine’s Day related subject line links to a malicious program (that remains undetected by many antivirus applications) and another scam that entails an e-greeting with a link to an American Greetings lookalike site. The site then asks users to install an application called “Adobe Flash Player”, which is actually a rootkit. Generally, attackers often steal data (for selling or identity theft) and use compromised machines to send spam, perform DDOS attacks, etc.
There is little that can be done to prevent these kinds of attacks from materializing since the e-mail (and internet) infrastructure is so open and flexible, but there are several controls for mitigating the threats. From a technical perspective, e-mail providers and other organizations can use e-mail filters to prevent the spread of malicious messages. Users can use virus-scanners (though many AV programs failed to detect these recent malware) and many browsers already include anti-phishing warnings. Training users to be wary of unsolicited e-mails and to verify legitimate urls among other safe computing practices is also important.
On a larger scale, it may be helpful to develop a more robust and trustworthy e-mail infrastructure. With authentication, message sender identities can be verified and this process may assist in the detection and capture of the perpetrators behind the attacks described above. There are several developing initiatives such as SenderID and DomainKeys, and there may be some synergies with the increasingly popular OpenID system, which can result in a trustworthy e-mail system.
Ultimately, the vulnerabilities of the human heart (security review up-and-coming…), particularly on Valentine’s day, and human curiosity/mistakes can only be controlled by training people to discern true messages (in the general case) and by helping them to find love in the right place (in the Valentine’s day case–and perhaps more generally). SDG
References:
http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/682
http://sunbeltblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/dangerous-new-fake-american-greetings.html
http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2008/02/valentine.html
Posted in Current Events
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Security Review: Online Banking
Online Banking – Many banks now provide an online application that will let the bank’s clients manage their funds. This includes both, viewing, as well as transferring funds to arbitrary third parties through a feature called ‘Online Bill Pay.’ Thus, given access to a user’s online banking credentials, an adversary can easily drain the user’s funds.