They used this visit to announce their new party policy on protections against identity fraud. At present, credit rating companies are exempt from aspects of the Data Protection Act and can forward personal information about an individual’s financial history to companies without the subject’s consent. Clegg proposes to give individuals the rights to “freeze” their credit records, making it more difficult for fraudsters to impersonate others.

See also the Cambridge Evening News article and video interview.

One of the main problems in counterterrorism today is that there are so many people and vehicles, and so much data and material, moving through globalization's myriad networks that it seems virtually impossible to track it all effectively. Nowhere has this problem been more acute than on the high seas.

In 2006, Adm. Harry Ulrich, then U.S. commander of NATO Naval Forces Europe, decided to do something about it. Despite having virtually no resources, his dream was to transpose the global air-traffic control system onto sea traffic.

Worldwide, aircraft are transparent, because they're all required to carry an identification beacon that allows them to be tracked leaving and entering airports, and monitored between airports, by a global network of sensors. Act suspiciously and somebody's fighter aircraft will soon be on your tail.

No such pervasive system currently exists globally for maritime traffic. While bigger ships carry an ID beacon similar to aircraft, without a shared monitoring network, that's like tracking only selected commercial jets and giving everyone else a pass.
So Ulrich, upon taking command, asked a simple question: "If we can do that in the air, why can't we do it on the sea?" He made a point of pioneering his sea-traffic-control effort first inside the Mediterranean, where NATO's southern naval forces have historically been concentrated, but his real target was waters off Africa -- the most ungoverned maritime space in the world.

Ulrich knew the U. S. Navy couldn't do it alone, much less bring Africa's meager coast-guard-like navies up to snuff so they could do it on their own. So he quickly created a network of assets -- both public and private -- to manage that space, modeling his monitoring system on international air-traffic control.

Ulrich began stitching together a network of shore-based sensors ringing the Mediterranean. His naval command then began initial monitoring by tapping into the International Maritime Organization's existing Automated Identification System, transforming NATO's ability to track ship traffic in the Med.

Almost overnight, NATO went from tracking dozens of ships on the Mediterranean to thousands, and instead of getting the data sometimes up to 72 hours late, now the contacts were being tracked in one to five minutes -- to an accuracy within 50 feet on the earth's surface.

When the classic big-firm systems integrators told Ulrich it would be too costly to pull it off, the admiral turned to the Volpe Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a U.S. Department of Transportation research center. Instead of hundreds of millions of dollars, Ulrich's initial network cost $900,000. The shore-based receivers are small, roughly the size of a radar dish you might find on a pleasure craft.

The strength of the system is a function of its reach: the more countries join, the larger the shared operational picture. By the time Ulrich retired at the end of 2007, he had enlisted 32 countries throughout the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, along the west coast of Africa, around the Black Sea, and in the Pacific. Today, the network continues to spread around the planet.

With Ulrich's system in place, local police, coast guards, and border patrols catch most bad guys, obviating American military responses. As Harry told me for an article I wrote about his work in a fall 2007 issue of Esquire, "I don't do defense; I do security. When you talk defense, you talk containment and mutually assured destruction. When you talk security, you talk collaboration and networking. This is the future."

The admiral's legacy program, the Maritime Safety and Security Information System, earned the Volpe Center a prestigious "Innovations in American Government" award this month from Harvard University's Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

You will discern a certain amount of enthusiasm for blocking, and for a “something must be done” approach. However, in coming to their conclusions, they do not, in my view, seem to have listened too hard to the evidence, or sought out expertise elsewhere in the world…

Google/YouTube told them that 10 hours of video was posted every minute, and the amount is increasing. In the oral evidence session an MP helpfully suggested: “That video content is tagged. You do not need to look at every single minute of video content. Surely you could have people who would look at the video content which is tagged with labels which suggest it could be inappropriate.” Of course “happy_slapping.wmv” or “fluffy_bunnies.avi” must always contain exactly what it says on the tin (not!) but unaccountably Google said it was a “fair suggestion”, so perhaps my cynicism is misplaced.

However, back to blocking.

I submitted some evidence of my own, which the committee summarised, reasonably accurately:

Dr Richard Clayton, a researcher in the Security Group of the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University and author of several academic papers on methods for blocking access to Internet content, pointed out that there was no single blocking method which was both inexpensive and discerning enough to block access to only one part of a large website (such as FaceBook). In his view, the fatal flaw of all network-level blocking schemes was the ease with which they could be overcome, either by encrypting content or by the use of proxy services hosted outside the UK.

The committee’s conclusion, having read this was:

At a time of rapid technological change, it is difficult to judge whether blocking access to Internet content at network level by Internet service providers is likely to become ineffective in the near future. However, this is not a reason for not doing so while it is still effective for the overwhelming majority of users.

which I suppose logically means that the committee thinks that blocking should now be discarded as a policy option — but somehow I think that isn’t their intended meaning.

The Committee should perhaps have a look at this Australian report, which found that ISP level content filtering (and in Australia the politicians want to use ISP level filtering to provide a child-friendly Internet) did work (up to a point) at Tier 3 (the smallest) ISPs. The up-to-a-point is that unlike previous tests the systems didn’t completely wreck the browsing experience by slowing it down. However, the systems blocked only 85-98% of illegal material and similar percentages of material suitable for adults but not for younger children. Interestingly some products were better at different categories.

Getting that many sites wrong is really quite significant, so it’s difficult to see this as a ringing endorsement for blocking the web. Additionally, the Australian report found that the blocking was useless on “non-web” protocols (such as peer-to-peer) and their report specifically didn’t consider cost, or ease of circumvention — so it’s not just UK politicians not wanting to consider evidence on that topic!

Finally, I should note that the Culture Media and Sport Committee has also ignored some rather more recent academic work. The MPs have put into their report that they were horrified to discover that child sexual abuse images took 24 hours to remove in the UK. What (should they ever learn of it) will they make of the recent discovery by Tyler Moore and myself that shows that if the website is hosted abroad then a month is more to be expected?

This limits the attack since in many cases TCP timestamps may be unavailable. In particular, Tor hidden services operate at the TCP layer, stripping all TCP and IP headers. If an attacker wants to estimate clock skew over the hidden service channel, the only directly available clock source may be the 1 Hz HTTP timestamp. The quantization noise in this case is three orders of magnitude above the TCP timestamp case, making the approach I used in the paper effectively infeasible.

While visiting Cambridge in summer 2007, Sebastian Zander developed an improved clock skew measurement technique which would dramatically reduce the noise of clock-skew measurements from low-frequency clocks. The basic idea, shown below, is to only request timestamps very close to a clock transition, where the quantization noise is lowest. This requires the attacker to firstly lock-on to the phase of the clock, then keep tracking it even when measurements are distorted by network jitter.

Sebastian and I wrote a paper — An Improved Clock-skew Measurement Technique for Revealing Hidden Services — describing this technique, and showing results from testing it on a Tor hidden service installed on PlanetLab. The measurements show a large improvement over the original paper, with two orders of magnitude lower noise for low-frequency clocks (like the HTTP case). This approach will allow previous attacks to be executed faster, and make previously infeasible attacks possible.

The paper will be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium, San Jose, CA, US, 28 July – 1 August 2008.

Not bad. I actually managed to get a good night sleep.

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And now, the news…

1. Google and Wildcard Domains | GNUCITIZEN
2. Trojan plays anti-China games for hacking | The Economic Times
3. Villains Getting Smarter: Are We, Too? | Korea Times
4. Agency Sees Theft Risk for ID Card in Medicare | NY Times
5. Universities urged to tighten computer security | The Arizona Daily Star
6. Organised e-crime targets students for recruitment | ZDNet UK
7. Time to dismount the hamster security wheel of pain | The Regsiter
8. New security awareness posters aid the battle | Cambridge Network

Tags: News, Daily Links, Security Blog, Information Security, Security News

The solution to the above problem is very useful in practice — in fact, so useful that it spawns a lot “fights” over patents. Many techniques were patented, including the well-known Encrypted Key Exchange (EKE) and Simple Password Exponential Key Exchange (SPEKE). A secondary problem is technical; both the EKE and SPEKE protocols have subtle but worrying technical limitations (see the paper for details).

At the 16th Workshop on Security Protocols held in April 2008, Cambridge, UK, I presented a new solution (joint work with Peter Ryan) called Password Authenticated Key Exchange by Juggling (or J-PAKE). The essence of the protocol design inherits from the earlier work on solving the Dining Cryptographers problem; we adapted the same juggling technique to the two-party case to solve the PAKE problem. To our best knowledge, this design is significantly different from all past PAKE solutions.

Intuitively, the J-PAKE protocol works like a juggling game between two people — if we regard a public key as a “ball”. In round one, each person throws two ephemeral public keys (”balls”) to each other. In round 2, each person combines the available public keys and the password to form a new public key, and throws the new “ball” to each other.

After round 2, the two parties can securely compute a common session key, if they supplied the same passwords. Otherwise, the protocol leaks nothing more than: “the supplied passwords at two sides are not the same”. In other words, one can prove his knowledge of the password without revealing it. A Java implementation of the protocol on a MacBook Pro laptop shows that the total computation time at each side is merely 75 ms.

We hope this protocol is of usefulness to security engineers. For example, compared with SSL/TLS, J-PAKE is potentially much more resistant against phishing attacks, not to mention that it is PKI-free. Since this protocol is the result of an academic research project, we didn’t — and have no intention to — patent it. As explained in the paper, J-PAKE even has technical advantages over the patented EKE and SPEKE in terms of security, with comparable efficiency. It has been submitted as a follow-up to the future extension of IEEE P1363.2.

We believe the PAKE research is important and has strong practical relevance. This post is to facilitate discussions on this subject. The paper can be viewed here. Any comments or questions are welcome.

The registrar is Red Register, a registrar with a troubled legal history. They are currently being sued by Microsoft for registering 125 names that typosquat Microsoft's trademarks.

According to the letter sent by ICANN to Red Register, the company was informed back in February of a finding in the arbitration case of Cambridge Pavers, Inc. v Versata Software, Inc. c/o Versata Hostmaster heard by the National Arbitration Forum, pursuant to the ICANN UDRP (Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy). The domain at issue was cambridgepavingstone.com. The registrant, Versata software, lost the case, unsurprisingly since they didn't bother to file a response to the UDRP charges. The cambridgepavingstone.com home page is, of course, parked with the usual boring set of ads.

[Full disclosure: My front walk is built with Cambridge Pavers, and it's really nice. We're very happy with our decision.]

Red Register, as the registrar of record on the domain, was ordered to transfer the domain to Cambridge Pavers, and has ignored the orders. To get a sense of what kind of registrar Red Register is, try running whois on their own domain redregister.com: yes, it's a private registration. In fact, just who these people are is a little fuzzy here; the Contact Us page at Red Register lists addresses in Columbus, OH. But the ICANN notice is sent to a Daniel Sundin in Madison, WI. Two college football towns; perhaps Red Register hasn't responded because Mr. Sundin went off to grad school.

This will be fun to follow; it's hard to imagine they won't relinquish the domain in time. Not only have their permission to operate a registrar business been threatened, but it's getting press. But who knows, maybe the company is on autopilot and the snail mail piles up behind the front door.