Arjen's blog

Xeroxing the war

In 1969, when the Vietnam War was in full swing,  a senior analyst at the U.S. Department of Defense was quietly copying a secret report about the war. This report, which ran to 7000 pages, covered the progress of the Vietnam war in exhaustive detail. The analyst intended to share this highly classified information with influential politicians and scientists, in the hope that it would quickly bring the war to an end.

That analyst was Daniel Ellsberg, a former officer of the Marine Corps who worked for RAND, the Pentagon think tank. As a result of his experiences in Vietnam and his meetings with conscientious objectors in the US, he became convinced that the war was wrong. With his insider's knowledge, he already knew that it was militarily lost, but that the American government was misleading the people. Every day the Vietnam war took about eight hundred Vietnamese lives, more than two thirds of them civilians, and twenty American soldiers. Many more were seriously injured or maimed for life..

On June 13, 1971 The New York Times tried to publish a number of excerpts from these documents, but was blocked by the Nixon government through legal and political means. Senator Mike Gravel made a breakthrough by reading a large part of the document in the Senate. The reading of 4100 pages took a while, but the rules of the Senate do not allow a senator who is talking to be interrupted (the "filibuster"). Everything the Senator said automatically became part of the proceedings of the Senate and thus on the public record. The publication of this information was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam war and the start the process of withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Fast forward to 2010. The US is once again embroiled in unwinnable wars, launched on dubious grounds, that continue indefinitely without any clear strategy or goal. Every extra day that these wars continue, more civilians and soldiers die.

And now there are new people who leak secret information about the wars, in the hope that the resulting political pressure will bring them to a close. The Xerox technology in 1969 has been replaced by a global computer network that uses encryption to protect the identity of the whistleblowers. Even Wikileaks does not know their identities – this is safer for both the whistleblowers and Wikileaks.

But the media's response is simply surreal. The bulk of the attention and the debate is about the Xerox machine – or at least the 21st century equivalent of it, the Wikileaks website. Questions such as "is WikiLeaks journalism?" and "should you be allowed to leak classified information?" are discussed in exhaustive detail by apparently intelligent media pundits – who with alarming regularity seem to have little understanding of the very technology they are discussing.

The first 'big' coup from Wikileaks, the “Collatoral Murder" video, led to a huge debate about the culpability of the helicopter pilots and whether or not it was reasonable for them to be able to distinguish between a camera and a grenade launcher. The key topic that was not discussed was the simple fact that the Pentagon had knowingly, for three years, lied to both Reuters and the families of the civilian casualties in Baghdad about the circumstances surrounding the shooting by an Apache helicopter, which was one kilometre away and which riddled two children with bullets from its cannon. The Pentagon made a statement in 2007 saying that it knew nothing of any injuries to children, even though it had been in possession of this video from day one and it leaves nothing to the imagination.

The deliberate lying from the start of the Iraq war continues to this day. The Dutch late night talk show, P&W, led the news on TV with "Dutchman involved in leaking attack video": that, after all, is news - apparently far more important than the fact that children were shot and there was a cover-up.

Wikileaks has already been the top story in the news for more than one week, and that's a problem. The Xerox machine is not important. Illegal wars of aggression launched on the basis of lies are important. The torture of innocent citizens in secret prisons is important. Spying on UN diplomats is important. Messing about in the internal political decisions of other countries is important.

So why is the entire media is so busy with the Xerox machine and the person with his finger on the copy button? Dear journalists, you have been presented with a cornucopia of scoops, many of which make Watergate pale into insignifcance. If African dictators were doing the things Western countries are being accused of, they would be dragged in handcuffs to the International Court in The Hague. Get to work!

Cloud computing, from the frying pan into the fire

In a recent column (Dutch), Frank Benneker of Amsterdam University explored the consequences of the rapidly growing use of cloud computing. The shift of computer applications from PCs and servers to a single "service" provided through a worldwide network is probably as fundamental a shift as the earlier one from mainframe computing to PCs.

Given the objectives of the Dutch Open standards and interoperability policy plan, cloud computing seems the quick and easy-to-implement solution: I hear Web 2.0 enthusiasts say “put everything on Google Docs and we are all interoperable”. But just as in the case of the "liberation" of PCs from mainframe managers/suppliers, there are problems with cloud computing – potential snakes in the grass.

In December 2004 the Dutch government decided that the dependency on dominant software providers was a problem and had to be addressed. The Dutch action plan from 2007 was the first, tentative step in dealing with this.

The Dutch government wants to use open standards for interoperability, and open source to foster independence, lower costs and strengthen local development (services instead of licences). Open standards are fundamentally essential for interoperability. The Dutch 'standard' government desktop plan demonstrates to governments that interoperability can also be achieved with an imposed, top-down mono-culture. Give everyone the same software, and information can be conveniently exchanged.

However, the price of a mono-culture is high, both directly in money and in less quantifiable aspects such as security problems and an extreme dependence on a few foreign private companies. The latter is especially difficult to reconcile with the idea of a sovereign nation and a government that is democratically accountable. Surely our governments would wish to avoid relying on foreign companies to control the connectivity of our information databases in some nebulous “computer cloud”?

The crucial point is that even in this cloud, the hardware does not belong to the government nor is it possibly even on Dutch soil. The hardware can be located anywhere in the world, and therefore subject to multiple legal regimes beyond the Dutch government's control (or indeed, accountability).

Much of the Web 2.0 knowledge for the Dutch government and discussions about this are held on ning.com servers, and the consensus is that it would be pretty difficult to migrate away from there. Even NOiV, the Dutch open standards and opensource implementation bureau also holds regular discussions on LinkedIn instead of its own XWiki environment. It is only natural that people use what they know. However, bearing in mind not only the objectives of the Policy Document, but also the various Parliamentary Motions on the subject and the earlier decisions of the government itself, cloud computing is a major IT problem. To expect cloud computing to rid us of the issue of  “lock-in” that has been a problem for the last 20 years creates a classic example of 'out of the frying pan; into the fire '.

Our current problems arise from not foreseeing the long-term consequences of our IT choices. We need a separate government IT programme to ensure the freedom of choice that we see as entirely natural in other markets. Unless the cloud computing servers are on Dutch soil and we have access to the code under an open source licence, we shall only go from bad to worse.

The Free Software Foundation has the solution for these problems, a distributed cloud that we can all access. Servers that provide free software designed to guarantee our digital freedom. After all, this is the original intention of the Internet: all equal players in their own cloud.

Gran knows why

My grandmother was born in 1920 and left school at the age of 12 to work in her father's shop.  She has never used a computer (but has tried an iPod for audio books). She is now 90 and is still interested in what I do.

Usually I just quickly skip over the technical aspects, because it's difficult for her to understand. The “why” is much more relevant. Privacy, civil rights and the control of your own details/information. She understands this easily, without having to follow all the technical details of open source codes and cryptography.

Last Sunday, Bits of Freedom in Amsterdam  organized a lecture and discussion with Prof. Eben Moglen, a former programmer who is now a law professor and advocate for the use of free software. Part of his lecture was about the risks of cloud computing (see a previous lecture in New York on the same theme).

Besides his new plans for a technical project (the Freedom Box) , Moglen spoke mainly about the principles of digital freedom. Explaining this concept in The Netherlands remains difficult.

A video that Bits of Freedom tweeted about shows this problem. It's a short list of recent privacy breaches but does not explain why these are problematic. For many viewers there is still a pervasive feeling of "so what?”.

In The Netherlands, the problem explaining this issue is that we have no recent experience of a government that has seriously gone off the rails (unlike Spain and Eastern Europe). The use of a good recent example can be seen in an employee of the German T-Mobile explaining why the British government's Stasi-style tapping of all mobile phone traffic might not be a good idea. Churchill must be turning in his grave.

As we have only experienced two real disasters in The Netherlands in the last 100 years (the German occupation and the 1953 flood),  we as a people fall back on WW2 to explain the importance of  civil rights. And then the Godwin-accusations fly. For the post-baby boom generations the war is a (his)story that we read about, but which is not quite real. And the possibility that such a thing could happen again is inconceivable, and therefore unmentionable.

My grandmother has no such problem because she lived through it. A real war - where the previous government was suddenly replaced by a new administration that energetically started using data collected in previous decades, and which found the accurate ethnic records extremely useful: an administration which could put your neighbours on a train to Westerbork, and would shoot you for owning a radio.

Eben Moglen suggested that we all ask our grandparents why privacy and other civil rights are important. People who have lived through an oppressive state are largely immune to Godwin's rules. They can speak out from a personal, rather than an abstract, historical perspective. My grandmother is not well enough to speak out, but hopefully there are some grandparents out there who can explain to the younger, Facebooking and tweeting generation in The Netherlands the vital importance of privacy and other civil liberties.

When I'm done explaining things Gran always grabs my hand and whispers "just you be careful!". Because you never know what could happen when you are critisizing governments. She knows this, so take a bit of time to listen to your gran.

Dedicated to my grandmother, Tet de Boer - Olij,
Kollum 1920 - Leidschendam 2010

Cybercrime or the end of scarcity? The future of hacking.

On October 14th The Club of Amsterdam is meeting to discuss 'the future of hacking'.

The term hacking (and hacker) means very different things to different people. Most will associate the term with computer-enabled crime; from Russian mobsters stealing western credit cards to spammers sending billions of unwanted email advertisements for Viagra to Chinese intelligence employees attempting to break into NATO computers. For those calling themselves hacker (or being called hackers by their peers) hacking just refers to the creative use of technology, any technology, to do new and unexpected things.

These two very different meaning of the term continue to cause a lot of confusion in any discussion about it. This piece will expand on both the cybercrime and creative technology uses and see where they meet.

The term cybercrime itself suggests that computer and the networks that connect them are a new phenomenon in the eyes of law-enforcement and the justice ministry. If a crime is enabled by a telephone or car this is not worthy or separate classification. But if a computer or the Internet is involved a crime quickly becomes a 'cybercrime'. A recent BBC item mentions a big case were 45 million credit cards were  stolen. The financial impact of this theft was either not known or not made public. The trouble with evaluating 'cyber'-crime is both the scope of the subject and the lack of hard data. From copyright infringement via credit card fraud to child pornography (more accurately imagery of child-abuse) cybercrime is a field that encompasses a wide range of activities of varying seriousness and with very different levels of impact on the victims. Even more troubling is estimating the effectiveness of law-enforcement do prevent or these crimes or at least bring to justice the perpetrators after the fact. Can this effectiveness be measured and if we can, is it worth logging everyone's e-mail and cellphone communications to capture an unspecified number of thieves? Precisely because we lack clear information on both the scale of the problem and the effectiveness of the measures trying to cope with it  there is no way of telling either way. Frans Kolkman (Head High Tech Crime Unit East-NL) will hopefully enlighten us a bit more.

The much happier side of hacking is all the wonderful things people are doing with technology all over the world, taking it apart and making it do stuff the original designers and producers never imagined. Thanks to intrepid hackers computers have become utterly commoditized and all of us can get connected to the global Internet for 10 euros per month. This democratization of technology has spawned not only entire new industries but also new ways for people to communicate, organize and participate in global affairs whoever en wherever you are. Martijn Aslander (Life hacker) will talk with us about using all these tools to get more out of life.

Before computers became small and cheap people calling themselves hackers were tinkering with all kinds of other hardware. Now computers, sensors and other components have become so cheap hardware hacking is becoming just as democratized as merely using a computer. Alper Çugun will give us an overview of the possibilities and perils of the digital world meeting the real world again.

The first desktop factories, also known as 3D printers, for home use with use-at-home pricing are a reality today and over the next decade they will develop in the same way our commodore 64 developed into smart-phones and laptops. Cheaper and twice as powerful every 18 months. If we can all print our consumer goods at home, will anyone even want to steal anything? Of course someone will figure out a way to print an AK-47 (just for fun mind you!) and then things will get really interesting.

Everyone having aces to technology has both benefits and problems; from youtube and wikileaks as new global media to road-side bombs detonated by cheap mobile phones and surveillance possibilities the Stasi could only dream of. In a world re-defined by technology everybody needs to become a little bit techno-literate. Ignorance of new possibilities will mean losing out on great opportunities for a better life and becoming a victim of those who would use the new tools for criminal or other bad purposes. Hackers might save the world, especially if every citizen adopts the hacker ethic of collaboration, free sharing of knowledge and an anti-authoritarian attitude to keep would-be stasis at bay.

Votingcomputers, the bugs are not the problem

While the use of voting computers in the Netherlands has been banned for over half a year, even for water board elections, there remains a fundamental misunderstanding of the essence of the problem with voting machines.

While the many clumsy security problems (video) or the absence of the source code of the software (in the case of Nedap and SDU voting computers), are an excellent opportunity to develop the topic through the media and in the political agenda, these issues are not core of the problem. And although the voting computer dossier at the Ministry of Home Affairs is now labelled with a bright fluorescent sticker: 'radioactive, do not touch!", there is still a risk that local authorities or suppliers continue to feel that voting by computer is best "if we can just iron out a few little bugs”.

The real objections are more fundamental and have little to do with security bugs or open source code. They are the fundamental principles of the reasons why we have democracy, which the use of voting computers threatens. In the many discussions on mailing lists and web forums it seems that people lose sight of the fundamental principles.

In the first year of operations of the wedonttrustvotingcomputers work group, by government and suppliers that had not been suspicious. The Netherlands is a great country and the suggestion that someone is committing fraud with something so fundamental as ridiculous as the election was done by hand. It was simply unthinkable and further discussion or justification about it was not necessary. This attitude demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the essence of democracy. That is not a question of trust but distrust of organized power.

Through trial and error we have learned over the past few thousand years that power corrupts, and absolute power can corrupt absolutely. An enlightened dictator can be an efficient form of government but how do you ensure they remain enlightened once they have the power?? To solve this problem we have evolved a complex system of temporary mandate (four years), with checks and balances as th need arises. You can only gain power if many people have said that they really want you there, and even then you will be closely monitored by 150 other people who are also only be allowed to do so because of the vote of thousands of fellow citizens. The system is far from perfect and is plagued by inertia and a focus on what is hot in the media, but we have yet to invent something better. This system makes it difficult to take important decisions publicly without authorisation. And a king or president cannot simply on a whim ruin the country or violate the fundamental rights of citizens - unless those citizens and their representatives agree to it by inaction, but then they only have themselves to blame.

The abuse of power cannot be solved by having online the the source code of a voting computer because citizens cannot determine whether the published source code actually runs on the specific voting computers in their neighborhood. Even more important is the fact that 99.99% of the population cannot audit the code. It still comes down again to having confidence in a very small group of technical experts. And having to trust a very small group (any small group whatsoever!) is precisely what we no longer want. If we have small groups of technicians whom we trust, we might as well make up the parliament based on a sample of a research firm. That saves a lot of time and paper and there is probably a good TV night to build around.

It has often been said that paper ballots can also be fraudulent, with the recent election in Zimbabwe cited. The important aspect here is not the possibility of fraud but its detectability. Large-scale, and therefore effective, fraud in a paper voting system is impossible to keep secret and that makes it possible to intervene when small groups try to exploit the system. In most cases, fraud with voting computers is impossible to prove afterwards. The records are then erased and there are no ballot papers available for another recount. This proved once more painful when a local election where the candidate gemeenteraadsid also operator of the voice computer was. In the polling station where he was present he was unlikely many more votes than all other locations in the municipality. Yet no matter OM could get around this potential fraudster to lack of evidence. The man can this lack of evidence but never convincingly prove his innocence. The result is therefore a situation where the integrity of the process itself is called into question, and thus the legitimacy of the ballot. The distinction is thus the detectability of fraud, not the (im)possibility of it.

Voting computers do not solve any major problems, are more expensive to use than paper and undermine the legitimacy of democratic governments. And as Churchill said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.'

London is your Oyster

The Oystercard is a electronic debit card that has all but replaced tickets on the London tube and bus transport systems. It allows users to put money on the card and discounts this credit as the card is used to enter and exit the underground and buses. The system is fast and unobtrusive and almost everyone who uses London public transport has one. Everyday millions of pounds are being put on these cards and taken of again as Londoners move about their city. The security mechanisms that are supposed to be keeping these millions (your money ultimately!) safe have now been shown to be, frankly, utter crap.

So the Oystercard has been definitely compromised. Its fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced by new technology concepts. Independent experts warned about this back in 2004 so there's no excuses for being all surprised now. Then they warned again in 2005 and last December at the Chaos Computer Club  international IT conference in Berlin. Now the attack on the lackluster security system of the London Oystercard has been practically demonstrated last April by a group of Dutch researchers who were investigating the same technology that was about to be implemented nationally in the Netherlands. "The Oystercard system uses the same chip and has the same basic vulnerabilities" according to Professor Bart Jacobs of the Computer Science faculty of Nijmegen University.

After the publication of some of the inner workings of the data-encryption mechanism of the chip used in the Oystercard last December in Berlin, a fully operational breach was predicted by many experts. With the basic knowledge of the inner workings of the chip available online for anyone to see, implementing a working attack against the system was just a matter of time. The Dutch research group has been able to clone the funds on an Oystercard to another Oystercard. This provides at-home top-up mechanism allowing essentially free travel in the greater London area after an initial investment of 10 pounds plus a few blank Oystercards at 3 pounds each. Since the required devices and software are otherwise pretty much free today or in the near future (at most a few months from now), the London Transport Authority needs to get moving on this or accept that they will be providing free travel for those capable of using a laptop and a high-end mobile phone (and all their friends).

The systems failure bears all the classical hallmarks of public-sector IT screw-ups. Basing your security mechanism on trying to keep the inner workings of such a system a secret while at the same time distributing 12 million copies of said system into the hands of the public is, frankly, insane. Does anyone think a handful of engineers locked in a room at Philips can come up with a system clever enough so that the combined expertise of 1 billion Internet users cannot defeat it? One has to wonder what they were smoking that day. Then there are bonus points for ignoring repeated warnings from independent experts for several years.

Among security professionals it is considered scripture that the only systems that can be trusted are those that have been tempered in the fire of public scrutiny. No one is as clever as everyone, and with a few million interested specialists online there is nowhere to hide for a system containing design flaws. Flaws are always found sooner or later and most often sooner. One would think that after six decades of spectacular failures the method of keeping a system secure by trying to hide its inner workings (know in the security trade as 'security by obscurity') would be utterly invalidated. The Germans used this method for their supposedly secure communications using the Enigma machine in World War 2. It cost them the battle for the Atlantic and ultimately the war (ok, ok, attacking Russia in August without winter coats for the troops was not a smart move either). More recently a $400 million DVD encryption method was broken by a 16 year old Norwegian hobbyist.

The Dutch system will probably not be implemented in its current form, but the London system is already operational with an estimated 12 million people using the card. For the sake of the financial stability of the tube system one can only hope that clever engineers have already been working on a solution that can be implemented quickly. But I'm not holding my breath.

(earlier post on the Dutch card here - posts in Dutch here)

The Times picked up the story, and has a writeup of the wider security implications (accescards to buildings and such).

Bruce Schneier on security trade-offs

Bruce Schneier just posted a really good explanation about "the difference between feeling and reality in security". It is one of those articles I wish I'd written. Not because there is a great new nugget of insight in it but because it explains some very basic problems in thinking about security so very well.

The gist of the article is that as people living in modern environments we can have a hard time accurately estimating realistic trade offs between risks and reward. When the world was closely resembling the world we had developed in as a species we were better at it. Our brains were supported by millions of years of evolution in correctly estimating the risk versus rewards of certain actions. There's food here and a lion, should I stay or run? The specimens who made bad trade-off calls died of hunger or lions. The ones making good calls had many babies.

The risk vs reward trade-off estimations have become a lot more complex in a hightech, globalised world. How much should we spend of keeping us safe from terrorism versus say, tripping on our wet bathroom floors? The fact that other parties have political or financial interest in making it harder for us to make good choices in these matter complicates things even further. As with many things critical thinking and good information are key to making better decisions. And don't worry, today those do not necessarily lead to many babies.

More of Bruce Scheiers thinking van be found on his blog and in his 2003 book 'Beyond fear' that can be read about here, read online here entirely and bought in dead-tree form here. I highly recommend it to anyone who needs to think about security issues, not just information security.

Get a famous fingerprint

The German Chaos Computer Club, the oldest and largest hacker group of Europe, made available to the public the fingerprint of the German Minister Schäuble for the Interior. They wanted to show how easy it is to obtain someone's identity when identity is based on fingerprints.

The German government is preparing to build a national database containing the fingerprints of all its citizens for the purposes of fraud-prevention and national security. Minister Schäuble is very angry about the release of his fingerprints and has stated he will take legal measures against the CCC. Dutch hacker Rop Gongrijp pointed out that the Minister's anger was curious since it was the minister after all who wanted to collect the fingerprints of over 82 million Germans and the CCC only collected one.

The CCC has been demonstrating for several years how easy it is to 'steal' someone's fingerprint and use is to fool all kinds of security measures such as payment systems, physical access controls and computer security systems. As with the doomed RFID cards these demonstrations need to be very 'in your face' before media and governments take notice. Worldwide there are over 200 million devices in use of the 20 different types that were fooled by the CCC experts. As with the 100 million RFID cards they are all essentially worthless as serious methods for securing transactions or granting access.

It is curious how we as citizens are constantly required to trust governments to handle our most private data when these governments often are not that trustworthy themselves and also not very technically competent in guarding our information. Passports are easy to fake, RFID cards are easy to copy, fingerprint readers can be fooled. Before we base our entire lives on these technologies we'd better make sure they actually provide a minimum level of security. For now I'm sticking to encrypted mail and strong passwords.

German TV broadcast an item about the possibility of stealing a fingerprint and using it to go shopping at someone else's expense at a large German supermarket chain.

Since the TV piece did not include the entire method for making your own fingerprints I include it here. As with the RFID cards, these vulnerabilities have been known for several years, it's just that some companies and governments are a bit slow in picking up on them. If you want to go shopping as Minister Schäuble, just click on the picture at the top and follow the procedure from the movie.

A friend and IT security expert pointed out that since anyone can now pretend to be Minister Schäuble, that pretty much makes his fingerprint useless as evidence in  court. Maybe we should all publish our fingerprints (and retina scans and DNA profiles) to gain plausible deniability on future accusations of anything ...

Public Transport card fully hacked

What experts foresaw last December and the Dutch research institute TNO denies was possible in their recent report has been done. The deepest level of data-encryption on the NXP Mifare RFID chip has been hacked. Cash from cards can now be copied to other cards through cloning and that makes this system utterly unsuitable for serious applications involving real people and real money.

But this is essentially old news. The more interesting news as far as I'm concerned is the fact that TNO was immediately re-hired by the company implementing the card system to do more research on the validity of the hack. You have to wonder what the thinking is here. This company dropped the ball on at least three separate occasions in this area so why do they get another chance to write a big rapport to claim 'there is no problem' ? And this is not the first time, on the sensitive subject of voting computers (now banned in The Netherlands) they also kept telling us 'all is well'.

If you merely want a paper to reassure yourself just ask the secretary to print out a pretty picture from the Interweb with a caption that says 'everything will be ok'. That's a lot cheaper then hiring a company like TNO, and apparently just as valid.

Does TNO just write down whatever the customer asks of them or do they really not know any better? Either alternative is troublesome. As an important expert-adviser to the governments we should hold TNO to a higher standard. When faced with an impossible request from a client they should respectfully decline the job explain that the client's request is either technically impossible or not in line with laws concerning citizen privacy and such.

Our government (and parliament!) allowing such organizations to indirectly guide technology policy is a real problem that will continue to cost us dearly (in real money, privacy violations, theft and missed technology opportunities).

Next up for big IT-projects is a road-toll system that should allow for more flexible costs of (pay-as-you-go) owning and using a car. Hopefully it won't be as insecure as this project, that could be expensive for government or the citizen (or both).

Tomorrow there will be a meeting in parliament on this matter. The independent experts (the ones that got it right from day 1) have decided to boycott this meeting since they are not allowed access to the 'secret' paragraph of the most recent TNO rapport. They wisely refuse to legitimize more 'security-by-obscurity' bullshit.