The problem is self-signed certificates.

A CA is not a great solution:

Using a Certification Authority (CA) could solve the attack but at the same time introduces a new set of attack vectors:

1. The CA becomes a single point of failure. It becomes the juicy/high-value target for the attacker. Single point of failures are not good. Attractive targets are not good.

   Any person with access to the CA key can undetectably fake passports. Direct attacks, virus, misplacing the key by accident (the UK government is good at this!) or bribery are just a few ways of getting the CA key.

2. The single CA would need to be trusted by all governments. This is not practical as this means that passports would no longer be a national matter.

3. Multiple CA's would not work either. Any country could use its own CA to create a valid passport of any other country. Read this sentence again: Country A can create a passport data set of Country B and sign it with Country A's CA key. The terminal will validate and display the information as data from Country B.This option also multiplies the number of 'juicy' targets. It makes it also more likely for a CA key to leak.

   Revocation lists for certificates only work when a leak/loss is detected. In most cases it will not be detected.

So what's the solution? We know that humans are good at Border Control. In the end they protected us well for the last 120 years. We also know that humans are good at pattern matching and image recognition. Humans also do an excellent job 'assessing' the person and not just the passport. Take the human part away and passport security falls apart.

• Provide a government I.D. number for verification of your identity.
• Set up custom security questions and answers, further safeguarding your domain assets.
• Provide special verification instructions and artifacts to ensure that your unique business or ownership interests are protected.
• When you request that your domains be unlocked, our security team works directly with you to verify all of the above off-line - further eliminating risks of doing business in an online world!

Eye-Fi divided its Wi-Fi SD card line-up into three parts earlier in the year: Home, which transfers to a computer ($80); Share, which uploads to a computer and to Eye-Fi's servers, which relay them to gallery, print, and social services ($100); and Explore, which ties in Wi-Fi positioning and one year of a Wayport hotspot subscription for uploads ($130). I wrote a long review of the Eye-Fi Explore on 12-Aug-2008.

If you bought a Home, you can upgrade to the Share service for $10 per year, and if you bought either a Home or Share, you can add geotagging for $15 per year and hotspot access for $15 per year. It's a smart move, since original Eye-Fi card buyers already had a firmware upgrade that converted their card into a Share model; they'll now be able upgrade to the full featureset. This is something I thought the company was offering at launch months ago, and I speculated it would be easy to add.

Eye-Fi also added two new photo sharing services: Apple's MobileMe and AdoramaPix. I cannot think of any other firm that Apple has partnered with to allow direct MobileMe uploads, although this may be technically less a big deal than it sounds. But I believe it's unique--only the iPhone and iPhoto software can transfers images into MobileMe's galleries; I'll need to investigate further. It's a good feather in Eye-Fi's cap.

Finally, Eye-Fi says they'll release tweaked firmware on 5-Oct as well that will double the speed of photo transfers from their cards to a computer on the local network.

Blogger: Dan Blum

With the crisis in financial markets still unfolding, it is important to draw what lessons we can from the experience. Since the roots of the crisis lie in a monumental failure of risk management, it’s important to understand more about what happened, and then draw some parallels to our business risk management and  IT risk management situations.

The risk management failure in the housing market and on Wall Street had multiple interdependent dimensions:

• Mortgage lenders abandoned long standing prudent loan practices. They made too many loans that buyers might not be able to repay. Exotic instruments like ARMs, option ARMs, and interest only loans proliferated. In many cases, all pretense of lending standards were abandoned, so-called “liar loans” approved.
• Capital was grossly over-leveraged. Mortgage lenders and other financial services packaged loans into securities, which they sold to raise capital to support more lending. Real capital reserve requirements to back loans were reduced. Of course, if borrowers could not repay loans, all or parts of the derivative securities would become worthless.
• Risk was aggregated at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and mortgage loan insurance companies. These companies bought or insured some mortgage loans, providing something of a backstop should loans fail. Government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie and Freddie in turn became over-leveraged and securities that they sold were in turn repackaged in the murky brew of mortgage-backed securities called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other exotic instruments returning generous yields.
• Non-Caveat Emptor. Institutional wealth funds and financial services firms who should have known better bought securities that had been deliberately structured to obfuscate risk. They bought securities they didn’t understand with buried tranches of toxic subprime loans..

It was a great Ponzi scheme – one that kept working as long as housing prices were going up; the recipients of subprime loans could always flip that house to the next buyer. Everyone made money. As Chuck Prince of Citigroup famously put it during a July, 2007 interview: “So long as the music is playing, you’ve got to keep dancing. We’re still dancing.” But one month later, the music stopped. Since then, Citigroup and other financial institutions have taken massive writeoffs with more to come. Wall Street titans like Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG have fallen or been bought out.

What can we learn from this risk management debacle?

As business risk managers and investors, we should ask questions like these:

• Does the executive incentive structure of the company encourage managers to dance around risk? Many Wall Street firms paid senior managers 5 times their salary in bonuses tied to annual growth alone.
• Is the company over-leveraged? Is it borrowing too much money and betting it on ventures with uncertain outcomes?
• Are financial models used for risk management realistic? Earlier, I described the mortgage market of the past few years as a Ponzi scheme, where risk management models must have assumed prices would keep rising. Unlike the dotcom boom whose demise many predicted, very few in the industry foresaw the sharp declines to come in housing prices and sales volumes. Historically, the U.S. housing market has been a steadily rising one, but on the other hand the 2000s saw unprecedented rates of price increases. In reality, what goes up must come down.
• Has your company’s risk council ever performed worst case scenario analysis and built adequate reserves? In the days before economics emerged as a would-be “hard” deterministic science, business leaders may have been more cautious, more aware of and more accepting of uncertainty. Events like the Great Tulip Bubble came once in decades or centuries – not every few years. Note that legendary investor George Soros has proposed a Theory of Reflexivity that, if true, helps explain the recent extremes of boom and bust cycles. This theory holds that market participants model market behaviors based on self-interest, and for a time, their manipulations change the reality of the market – until gravitational forces bring it back to earth. Has the music of ephemeral success played to the backbeat of deterministic-sounding economic models gone to your heads and infected your risk management models?
• Are cost cutting efforts pursued blindly? Outsourcing and other forays into treacherous global waters may be giving away the crown jewels. Smart companies cut costs, but they do it in smart ways. Smart companies think like intelligence agencies as they parcel out work to different partners with varying levels of dependability, and they check on those partners.

Risk management failures can also occur at the more technical level of IT security. As IT risk managers, we might ask questions like these:

• Are the accounting and financial systems your IT department supports under adequate control? As Fred Cohen wrote in one of our documents: “Many companies use computers to manage financial systems, and despite the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) claims about accounts being properly kept, there are many attacks on financial systems that remain. For example, most of the largest financial systems in the world running on common financial databases do not use double-entry bookkeeping and are thus susceptible to all manner of frauds by insiders.” We find it troubling that a prudent control dating back to the 12th century is going out of style in the name of convenience and cost cutting. Kind of like credit checking became anachronistic during the housing bubble, eh?
• Is the “separation” in your “separation of duty” (SoD) for real? Sure the SOX auditors are looking for SoD, and maybe you have different administrators with different accounts maintaining different systems or functions. But when they say Western civilization may be but one weak password from collapse they’re not lying. Look what happened to Sarah Palin’s email account! Weak and straggly SoD is a problem across all critical IT systems where deperimiterization and server consolidation may be bringing down protective barriers, identity management is weak, and strong process controls (e.g., where two people must sign on, one perform a critical operation such as backbone router reconfiguration, and the second observe) abandoned in the name of expediency.
• Are risks being aggregated to unacceptable levels in centralized control systems? There are many ways that risks aggregate within enterprise IT infrastructures as we pursue automation and cost cutting. Network risks aggregate when centralized domain name system control is implemented. Application risks aggregate when common infrastructure is shared among applications. And enterprises aggregate platform risks when they use low-assurance endpoints, authentication, and directory systems with single sign-on to access large numbers of resources and don’t separate high consequence systems.
• Non-caveat emptor: Has IT security really done the worst case consequence analysis, attack graphs, and vulnerability analysis to know when putting more eggs in a supposedly stronger basket aggregates risks to an unacceptable level? Or are you depending only on vendor claims about some black box appliance equivalent of a risk-obfuscated CDO security? Caveat emptor (buyer beware) again! (The good news is we’ll keep talking about promoting vendor and product rating systems so you don’t have to do all the detailed product analysis yourself, but that’s another post.)

There are many parallels between the monumental risk management failure in the financial markets, and the probable weaknesses in our day to day business risk management and IT risk management. Abandonment of prudent practices for profit; excessive leverage and centralization; ill-constructed risk analysis models; risk obfuscation; and a failure of caveat emptor seem to be common problems. Please take this as a wakeup call to sharpen up the risk management thinking, process, and execution.

When an alternate email account or cell phone number is not tied to an account, online services often use personal information, supposedly only known by the account holder, to verify identity and reset a password. The risk here is the personal information is often known to other individuals and if the account holder is a public figure then the information may be easily researched. Birthdays, names of pets, locations of homes, schools, and events can often be discovered online or guessed.

Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account, and thus all her Sidekick cell phone contents which were mirrored online, was compromised when someone “guessed” the answer to her secret question. The secret questions was, “What is your pet’s name.” The answer of course was, “Tinkerbell”. Something easily researched. Many people would not have their pet’s name online but friends, family members, or perhaps an ex would know the answer. Using a pet’s name is a very bad security practice.

Now we have Sarah Palin, another public figure, having her online account compromised because someone used the password reset functionality and guessed the answer to Sarah Palin’s secret question. This is how the attacker says he found out her personal information and guessed the answer to her secret question. He details this on 4chan.org:

rubico 09/17/08(Wed)12:57:22 No.85782652

Hello, /b/ as many of you might already know, last night sarah palin’s yahoo was “hacked” and caps were posted on /b/, i am the lurker who did it, and i would like to tell the story.

In the past couple days news had come to light about palin using a yahoo mail account, it was in news stories and such, a thread was started full of newfags trying to do something that would not get this off the ground, for the next 2 hours the acct was locked from password recovery presumably from all this bullshit spamming.

after the password recovery was reenabled, it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)

the second was somewhat harder, the question was “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college, if youll look on some of the screenshits that I took and other fellow anon have so graciously put on photobucket you will see the google search for “palin eloped” or some such in one of the tabs.

I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower…

Best practices for setting up the password reset functionality of any online service:

1. Tie an account to another email account or cell phone number if that is an option. This will cause the service to send an out of band message and in essence make the password reset a 2-factor authentication.
2. Do not use any personal information that can be guessed as the answers to secret questions. Treat these answers like passwords. Don’t use dictionary words. Add some numbers or symbols to the answer. For example is Sarah Palin had used “Wasilla high 1964″ or “!Wasilla high!” it is far less likely it would be guessed. Pick a scheme to modify your secret answers so they aren’t guessable.
3. Try resetting your password. See if there are downgrade attacks which make it easier to reset the password. Yahoo for instance will allow you to specify that you don’t have access to the email address tied to your account and thus not send a password reset email. Since an attacker can do this the safety of using another account is eliminated thus making the answers to the secret question all that more important.

Linksys addressed many of my concerns with that previous device. The 610N can mount a drive and share it via SMB and FTP, have two full-speed connections running over both bands without skipping a beat, and supports several methods of getting the one-click WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) to work. Read the review for all the details, but I can't recommend this router to Mac users with any needs beyond basic networking; I'm perfectly happy to give it a full thumbs-up for Windows XP and Vista users, however.

WPS is a particular mess, by the way. Linksys has four somewhat distinct methods of using WPS to enable a password-free encrypted connection between a client and a base station: a button on the front that, when pressed, turns on WPS; and three modes (one of them similar to that button) accessible via their Web configuration software. One option is to get the base station to create a short PIN that's then entered on the client system as an out-of-band confirmation that there's no man in the middle.

Apple, by contrast, has a single way of joining a WPS-offering base station: it displays the network's name in bold. Select the network, and Mac OS X displays a key code that needs to be entered on the base station. But the WRT610N can't handle that option. If you put the WRT610N into a mode in which Apple can spot the device as offering a WPS handshake, you can't enter the code into the Linksys router!

This shows that there's still rough edges in the WPS protocol that two of the highest-selling makers of Wi-Fi gear can manage to not mesh up their respective options. (Apple declined to comment for my Macworld story; Linksys confirmed the lack of compatibility, but put the burden on Apple's doorstep.)