I have experienced all kinds of difficulties travelling down to the US to teach.

It used to be a lot easier, in the old days.
Border agent: “Business or pleasure?”
Me: “Business.”
BA: “What are you doing?”
Me: “Teaching.”
BA: “OK.”
Then The-Conservative-Government-Before-The-New-Harperite-Government-Of-Canada decided, in it’s infinite wisdom, to bring in something called the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had provisions to make it “easier” to trade and travel.  Now it’s a royal pain.

(I’ve travelled and taught elsewhere, of course.  Some places I’ve had to get visas.  Nigeria was a nusiance.  Australia was a $20 charge, online, no problem at all.  Last time I taught in Ireland it was “Business or pleasure?”  “Business.”  “Welcome to Ireland!”  Last time I taught in Norway there wasn’t even anyone at the immigration desk.)

Occasionally Americans have complained that they have had troubles coming to work in Canada.  So far I have never heard anything like what I’ve had to go
through.

At the moment I’ve been dealing with American lawyers again.  This has generally been OK, since I usually don’t have to travel for that.  However, this time the other side wants to depose me.  (I suspect they are just doing this for the nusiance value.  As usuall, I’m not doing this as an “expert” witness, just as the only guy who still has the materials.)  So, the origianl plan was for me to fly down to California, spend a day with the lawyers on one side “prepping” me, and spend an hour or two with the other side for the deposition.  They’d have to pay for my fare and travel expenses, as well as my time during prep.

During the call I mentioned that, since he was a lawyer, and presumably had access to other lawyers in their firm who knew something about immigration, they should check on that point, and see if they wanted/needed to do anything about a visa for me.  He didn’t think it was an issue.  I said that, according to the official rules he was right, but that I had seen plenty of cases where the border agents interpretted the rules in idiosyncratic ways, and maybe he should just check.

Today the plan has entirely changed.  At least three lawyers (possibly more), from at least two firms (and possibly more) are flying up from California, renting a boardroom here in Vancouver, renting a court reporter, and staying at least two days (more likely three) to do the prep and deposition.  With all the extra associated costs.  (And all this on behalf of a company that has very stringent travel cost policies: I had to sign off on them for the original contract.)

I think I’ve proved the point: it’s *way* harder to go to the US than to Canada.

The food fair area of one of the local mall had a facelift recently.  Now, as you walk down the hall towards the washrooms, the first thing you see is a lighted sign stating “WOMEN” on the first hallway that takes off to the right.

Trouble is, that hallway is where the men’s washroom is located.  Unless you know the layout of the mall (and, in this season of the annual Northern-Hemisphere-Mid-Winter-Gift-and-Party-Period, there are lots of guys around who aren’t normally in the mall), you don’t really notice that the triangle next to the word “WOMEN” is actually an arrow, presumably directing you further down the hall, where the hallway to the women’s washroom is actually located.  You have to be closer, and still looking up high, to notice that the word “MEN” is printed above the word “WOMEN,” but is, for some weird design reason, right justified, so that it starts about a foot past the beginning of the word “WOMEN.”

This explains why there are lots of guys coming back up the hall looking for the men’s washroom that they passed on the way down.

User interface is important.

The flooding of New York City was, once again, an example of known threats not being addressed.

It would have been too expensive to do anything about the issues.  (Flood costs currently $50B and rising as more damage is found.)

Of course, nobody could have predicted Sandy, because this was a storm produced by changing conditions.  Brought on by global warming/climate change.  Which is another issue that is too expensive to address …

(Why do I have this old oil filter ad tagline running through my head?  “You can pay me now … or pay me later …”)

You just forced the user to change his password; periodic password changing is good policy, right?

Now lets see what happens next:

• The user sends the password to himself by email, in plaintext, so he won’t forget. Now it’s in his inbox, viewable on the email ‘preview’ section to anyone shoulder surfing
• He then writes it on a post-it note. The cleaning person threw out the previous password (but that’s ok, he finally remembered it). Now there’s a post it with the password in the top right drawer
• He then sends it to his wife/friend/colleague who also uses the account sometimes. Now it’s in another person’s inbox, again in a preview pane. He might have typed their email wrong and sent it to someone else by mistake, or maybe they put it on a post-it note too
• The next time he tries to login he will use the old password (that he remembers) and fail. Your system will lock him out, and he will call to have it released. Another false positive that makes the person auditing the log for lock outs not pay attention to the warnings
• He will then sign up to the new and cool social web site and use this last password as his password there. It’s already on the post-it note: Why write another? This new social web site will soon be cracked and your user’s password will be available online

Remind me again why changing passwords periodically is good for security? Oh, I get it. You were just living up to the bad reputation and preventing ease of use.

Go Public, a consumer advocacy show on CBC, has produced a show on Budget Rent-A-Car overcharging customers for minor repairs.

This rang a bell with me.

In May of 2009, I rented a car from Budget, in order to travel to give a seminar.  Having had troubles with various car rental companies before, I did my own “walk around” and made sure I got a copy of the damage report before I left.  There were two marks on the driver’s door (a small dent, and a scratch), but the Budget employee refused to make two marks in that spot of the form: he said that the one tick covered both.

When I turned in the car, I was told that the tick was only good for the one scratch, and that I would be charged $400 for the dent.  I was also told that, since I had rented the car using my American Express card, I was automatically covered, by American Express, for minor damage, so I should get them to pay for it.

Since I was neither interested in paying myself, nor in assisting in defrauding Amex, I referred to the earlier statement by the employee who had checked the car.  (I had a witness to his statement, as well.)

Thus started a months-long series of phone calls from Budget.  They kept trying to get me to agree to pay the extra $400, and get Amex to reimburse me.  I wasn’t interested.

The phone calls finally stopped when, on one call, I informed the caller (by now identifying himself as someone in the provincial head office for Budget) that I had kept the copy of the original damage report form.  The caller told me that it clearly stated that there was a scratch on the door.  When I asked him how he interpreted the tick mark as a scratch, rather than a dent, he said that the word “scratch” was written on the form.

Well, of course, it hadn’t been written on the form originally.  I guess the caller must have been reasonable high up in the corporate food chain, because he knew what that meant.  I had the original, and it proved that they had messed with their copy.  That breaks the chain of evidence: they had no case at all.

(I still have a scan of that form.  Just in case …)

This goes back a bit, but I was reminded of it this morning:

Amazing where you can get inspiration.  I went to an electronics manufacturing trade show, just to keep up with what’s happening over in that sector.  Nothing particularly new that anyone was selling particularly relevant to security.

However, I sat in on a seminar on the new EU “Restriction of (certain) Hazardous Substances” directive.  (This comes into effect in nine days, and there is all kinds of concern over the fact that the specific regulations for compliance haven’t been promulgated yet.  Remember HIPAA, you lot? 

RoHS (variously pronounced “rows,” “row-hoss,” or “rosh”) is intended to reduce or eliminate the use of various toxic materials, notably lead and mercury, from the manufacture of electronic equipment.  This would reduce the toxic waste involved in manufacturing of said equipment, and particularly the toxic materials involved in recycling (or not) old digital junk.  EU countries all have to produce legislation matching the standard, and it affects imports as well.  In addition, other countries are producing similar legislation.  (Somewhat the same as the EU privacy directive, although without the “equivalent protection” clause.)  Korea is getting something very close to RoHS, California somewhat less.  Japan is going after informational labelling only.  China, interestingly, is producing more restrictive laws, but only for items and devices for sale within China.  If you want to manufacture lead, mercury, and hexavalent chromium computers in China for sale to other countries, that is just fine with them.

There are points relevant to various domains.  In terms of Physical security, and particularly life safety, there are issues of the environmental hazards of toxic materials in the electronic devices that we use.  (This is especially true in regard to BCP: lead, for example, vaporizes at temperatures seem in building fires.)

There is a certification process for ensuring compliance with the regulations.  Unfortunately, a number of manufacturers are carefully considering whether it is worth complying with the regulations.  Even if the products are compliant in terms of hazardous materials, the documentation required for compliance certificates requires details of materials used that could, to educated engineers and others in competing businesses, give away trade secrets involved in manufacturing processes.

The certification and due diligence processes are, like SOX, recursive.  In order to prove that your products are compliant, you also have to demonstrate that your suppliers, and their products, are also compliant.

There is also an interesting possibility of unintended consequences.  Outside of the glass for CRTs, the major use of lead is in solder.  Increasing the proportion of tin in the solder increases the temperature at which it melts, which is one factor.  However, another is that tin-only solder has a tendency to grow “whiskers.”  (The conditions and time for growing whiskers is not fully understood.)  Therefore, in an attempt to reduce the health risk of toxic materials, RoHS may be forcing manufacturers to produce electronic goods with shorter lifetimes, since the whiskers may become long enough to produce short circuits within electronic devices.  Indeed, these devices may have an additional risk of fire …

We seem to be missing the boat on security awareness of phishing attacks: it’s not just for bank and credit card accounts anymore.  This article notes the “DHL,” “tax refund,” and similar queries.  I would have thought these were obvious, but they seem to be the most successful ways to get spear phishing and APT information.

Came back to the computer after some time away, to find the sun shining full on the desk and part of the screen.  And, of course, the screen has blanked from lack of input during that time.

So, I pull the drapes forward to shade the screen–and the screen pops up, even though I haven’t touched the keyboard or the mouse.

Considering this, I realize that a) it’s an optical mouse, and b) it was on the part of the desk that was in the sun, and is now shaded when I pulled the drapes.

So, being a security geek, I start to wonder:

a) how the system interpretted that light?
b) how hard it would be to figure out how to get a laser to create specific “actions” on the computer?  (And if the optical sensor’s range is wide enough that you can do it with an IR laser, so the user doesn’t realize what you are doing?)

I’m not sure how far back to go, to get to the beginning.

Could be the time, a few years back, when the townhouse complex’s main water supply, after 30 years of flawless operation, was “upgraded.”  This, of course, inevitably resulted, a couple of years later, in some very odd variations in water pressure.  Some of the time we had little more than a trickle of water in the taps, and occasionally the washing machine took forever to fill.  (The “upgrade” may also have been responsible for the Great Flood of Aught-Nine, out on the main road.  But I digress.)

This year the main pressure regulator for the complex was replaced, and water was back to full pressure.  As a matter of fact, it was back to significantly higher than full pressure.  Filling the washer (or sink) is much quicker than it used to be.  You have to be careful not to turn the kitchen sink on full blast, or much of the counter around it gets sprayed.

A couple of day ago, the upstairs toilet stopped working.  Well, it would still flush, if the tank was full, but refilling slowed to a stream of drips.  (Hypothesis: the intake valve in the tank has blown from the higher water pressure.)  The manager happens to be away this weekend (of course), so we’ve been muddling through.

This morning, while attempting to refill the tank manually, I discovered that, if the tank was in the process of filling itself, and you turned on the bath tap full blast, the toilet would start filling normally.  Further experimentation determined that it had to be full blast: half or even three quarters wasn’t good enough.  (Revised hypothesis: the valve is partly damaged, and reducing the pressure allows it to function, temporarily.)

Weird.

Anyway, it reminded me: if a system as simple as a toilet, and household plumbing, can have these sorts of effects, what makes you think your incredibly complicated IT system, and its protective elements, is working as you think it should be?

The Cyber Security Research Alliance has just announced it’s formation.

If you want to join, it’s $60,000 for a founding membership, but a mere $15,000 if you want to be an affiliate member.

I think I’ll stick with my membership in the Vancouver Security Special Interest Group (or SecSIG).  We actually celebrate our thirtieth anniversary in January, and, for all of that time, we’ve managed to keep the annual fees to $0.

“Media artist” creates a form of spyware using Macbook webcams.  Runs it on computers in Apple Stores.  Apple calls Secret Service about the artist.  Lots more.  Some interesting and provocative concepts in the article, covering privacy, legality, search and seizure, and the fact that people show little affect when working with/on computers:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/people-staring-at-computers/all/

A lot of people a speculating that since the PS3 LV0 encryption key has leaked, that all bets are off and piracy for the PS3 is now a fact and there is nothing Sony can do to resolve. They further claim, even if Sony releases a patch, with the availability of this LV0 encryption key, hackers would just need to decrypt the update and snatch from it the new LV0 keys if those are updated using a patch.

This reminds me of a story about a Satellite Broadcaster a few years ago that has lost similar encryption keys that were part of its update mechanism for enabling/disabling your subscription card. Once you had this encryption key you could enable your card without needing to pay anything to the broadcaster.

When this news got out, it seemed to be an obvious bet that the company would go bankrupt in a few months as piracy would ruin them.

But the broadcaster didn’t lose hope and devised a plan that was quite ingenuous. They knew that updating the encryption key in one “bang” would be blunt and very easy to track down. So instead, over the course of a year they sent “junk” data as part of their updates, gradually sending out more and more chunks of indecipherable data. Then one day, they “executed” this “junk” data, and voila! the “junk” wasn’t junk at all. It was self decrypting pieces of code.

There were two very clever parts to their plan. First, they data they sent just hid there until it got executed. In fact, only in retrospect it was noticed that there was even “junk” data there. The second part was that it was not executable on anywhere but on their specific platform. You couldn’t decrypt that data as it used inherit functionality of the hardware on which it ran – you couldn’t easily disassemble it without knowing some of the secret ASM code that ran on their hardware.

The moral of this story  is, even when all is lost, as long as your true customers are updating, and your thieves need to upgrade too in order to enjoy the full benefits of the system, you can always regain control over you hardware – in essence having “code execution” on your system allows you full control over it, even if someone else is watching and tracking what you are doing – it is just a tad harder to do so in a way that will mask from guy who controls the system what you are doing.

Or: One Of The Reasons Why I’ve Never Actually Bought Any Kindle Books from Amazon, And Only Install Free Books:

Amazon closes account and wipes Kindle. Without notice. Without explanation.

We recently received a request to adapt the beSTORM  fuzzing framework to fuzz a series of Windows Device Drivers. It appears that there is little documentation and practically no commercial tools to provide proper fuzzing for Windows Drivers.

Adding support for device driver fuzzing required us to add a few function to our already existing File Utils library. This library allows you to create and read files with the intent of using the information inside these files to either fuzz something else, or provide a file to a piece of software that you intend to test.

With a device driver you basically do the same, but instead of opening an ordinary file, you open a device driver – usually in the form of “\\.\AAA”. The AAA is replaced by a string that tells the Windows operating system what device he should open. To provide this function inside beSTORM we introduced the Win32CreateFile wrapper function which receives the device driver’s name. This function returns a HANDLE that is then fed to the Win32CloseHandle wrapper function to close the opened handle.

The next step in fuzzing a Windows Device Driver is to send it information and in some cases read from it information. This is done through our Win32DeviceIoControl wrapper function, which receives the HANDLE from Win32CreateFile, and is passed an InBuffer as well as a IoControlCode value. Most commonly this value will be generated through the CTL_CODE macro under Visual Studio, and since it is usually very difficult to calculate this value by “hand” we provide a wrapper function called Win32CtlCode to allow you to do this inside the module you create.

Here is a complete “block” that utilizes all these wrapper functions and exploits a vulnerability in DVWDDriver – which was built with vulnerabilities inside it as an educational tool.

<SC Name="Sequence">
<SP Name="Win32CreateFile" Procedure="Win32CreateFile" Library="File Utils.dll">
<S Name="Filename">
<EV Name="Filename value" ASCIIValue="\\.\DVWD" Description="CreateFile Filename" />
</S>
<S Name="DesiredAccess">
<C Name="DesiredAccess value" Value="C0 00 00 00" />
</S>
<S Name="ShareMode">
<C Name="ShareMode value" Value="00 00 00 07" />
</S>
<S Name="CreationDisposition">
<C Name="CreationDisposition value" Value="00 00 00 03" />
</S>
</SP>
<SP Name="Win32DeviceIoControl" Procedure="Win32DeviceIoControl" Library="File Utils.dll">
<S Name="HANDLE">
<PC Name="HANDLE" ConditionedName="Win32CreateFile" Parameter="HANDLE"/>
</S>
<S Name="InBuffer">
<B Name="InBuffer value" />
</S>
<SP Name="IoControlCode" Procedure="Win32CtlCode" Library="File Utils.dll">
<S Name="DeviceType">
<C Name="DeviceType value" Value="00000022" Comment="FILE_DEVICE_UNKNOWN" />
</S>
<S Name="Function">
<C Name="Function value" Value="00 00 08 01" />
</S>
<S Name="Method">
<C Name="Method value" Value="00 00 00 03" Comment="METHOD_NEITHER" />
</S>
<S Name="Access">
<C Name="Access value" Value="00 00 00 03" Comment="FILE_READ_DATA | FILE_WRITE_DATA" />
</S>
</SP>
</SP>
<SP Name="Win32CloseHandle" Procedure="Win32CloseHandle" Library="File Utils.dll">
<S Name="HANDLE">
<PC Name="HANDLE" ConditionedName="Win32CreateFile" Parameter="HANDLE"/>
</S>
</SP>
</SC>

The US Treasury wants to show how much they care about security. To show how much, here are their password guidelines:

Must be at least 8 characters long.
Must contain at least one uppercase letter.
Must contain at least one lowercase letter.
Must contain at least one numeric character.
Must contain at least one special character.
Must not have more than two repeating characters.
Must not repeat any of your last ten passwords.
Must not have been your password in during the last ten days.
Must not be a word in a language, slang, dialect, or jargon.
Must not be related to personal identity, history, environment, or other personal associations.

(No idea how they can enforce the last rule). But here’s the kicker. The last rule is:

Must not be shared or displayed in plain view.

Of course not, because you will be able to easily memorize it based on the rules above.

Here’s a hint for someone trying to break into one of their accounts: THE PASSWORD IS ON A POST-IT NOTE IN THE TOP DRAWER.

When will they realize a simple password is so much more secure?

Overconfidence makes you successful in business.

Not just confidence, mind you, overconfidence.

Add in the Dunning-Kruger effect, and the Peter Principle, and you start to realize why all those huge banks keep failing …