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You have demonstrated a profound level of ignorance of the most basic elements of cryptography. May I suggest spending some quality time with Applied Cryptography, among other notable and readily available references in the field.

No, iOS has DRM that is designed to prevent its user from running software that Apple does not approve of. You can read more than the first sentence, you know...

Oh! You are referring to the App Store...

Well, tell me how that "non-curated" App system is working for you, fAndroid. Nevermind, I'll tell YOU.

What you have failed to realize is that the "App Store Lock-In", and even the "iOS Development Licensing" are actually there to benefit USERS (by keeping Malware OUT, OUT, OUT). Sony's Rootkit and Playstation DRM battles are there to benefit SONY.

. Can you not see the difference; or are you just being a Contrarian for Contrarian's sake?

No, the insurance key was not leaked by the guardian, it was a different key.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/unredacted_us_d.html

Schneier covers your point on the increasing rate of attack possibilities. You can see some hint of the discussion in the last diagram on this page of figures.

Read the book - this is exactly one of Schneier's points.

It's even covered in the available-on-the-web Chapter 1.

I see worries in the comments about "the police using them to spy on civilians". They already can.

The only thing a new law like this does is to fix a loophole. UAS and UAV systems can already be used by cops and state govs, by universities (limited), by companies developing experimental aircraft (limited), and for hobby purposes (unregulated, but there are some clear limitations such as flying within range of an airport or above buildings). But you cannot be legally paid to do aerial photography from a UAV/UAS! In other words, you have to pay a pilot to fly a photographer around to legally get aerial pictures. The only other option was using blimps (tethered) and cranes. An entire industry has evolved for erecting collapsible poles to attach cameras because of this rule.

Here are the rules. In it you'll find a letter with the common sense approach for hobbyists, and statements that the FAA will not grant companies any licenses to fly UAS except for experimental aircraft.

Lastly, SHAME ON THE NYT for that last sentence. They just had to jump on the idiot bandwagon and imply a connection between terrorists and photography.

that governments and phone manufacturers could successfully collude to create such a system, operate it, and manage to keep it secret at the same time beggars belief.

So it's plausible if they create and operate it without managing to keep it secret, right? Based on this it sounds plausible enough to me, though of the details are too fuzzy to be felling.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/08/low-tech_loiter.html

Instead of blaming the stupidity of the police or government officials, I think we should question the very premise of gathering intelligence using data mining.

The man allegedly sent a text message in French which translates roughly as:

Salem, I will be in New York on January 25h, we will explode ACN, if you have contacts refer them to me.

Now, it may sound reasonable to investigate something that could be a simple mistake or slang term, but also could be something sinister, just to be on the safe side. But consider for a moment how many millions of text messages are sent across the globe every day, and if even a tenth of a percent of them contain slang terms, jokes or language errors that make them sound suspicious, the police will have thousands of false positives (or more) to investigate every day. If there are terrorists who are dumb enough to send text messages about "exploding" a building, they'll be drowned out by the thousands of ordinary people who are stupid enough to send text messages that make them sound like terrorists.

We should ask ourselves if it's reasonable to devote the police's limited resources to investigating all those false positives, or if it's better used on traditional investigative work, such as infiltrating terrorist organisations.

Security expert Bruce Schneier has an excellent article on this problem.

In these parts there was a campaign to swab all the men in town for dna (they were looking for a serial rapist, or something along those lines.)

Holy crap! They actually do this?!!!
Please! Someone tell them about the Birthday problem.

A more reasoned analysis -- http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/01/british_tourist.html

Sure, just like it's normal to take things that drop out of the sky and plug them into the wall.

Yup, that's normal.

According to a test run by Homeland Security:

Computer disks and USB sticks were dropped in parking lots of government buildings and private contractors, and 60% of the people who picked them up plugged the devices into office computers. And if the drive or CD had an official logo on it, 90% were installed.

Borrowed from Bruce Schneier ( http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/06/yet_another_peo.html )

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/write_down_your.html

Yes, it's a good thing you live in England!

Ah... Good Ol' UK, where you don't have to decrypt your hard drive on demand -- however, where you are required to have and produce any and all encryption keys on request from police, or go to jail for the crime of failing to produce encryption keys (no court order required).

Actually [profiling's] the best possible security.

Wrong.

I didn't say it was wrong, however, there are 3 flaws with the advice to write down your password:

1. It based upon the premise that many/most systems are implemented using the currently in-vogue policies of complex, hard to remember passwords, and that you should/must use different passwords for each system. Both Schneier and the MS researcher (Jesper Johansson) whose comments at a conference inspired Schneier's blog post mention those limitations as the basis for writing them down.

2. Both of those posts are very light on the topic of actually securing the written down passwords. Something which some other security experts have stressed, but which is frequently overlooked.

3. People who do write down their passwords are not good at securing them.

Unless you give complete instructions, including tips on protecting the written down password, then writing down passwords is not materially more secure than choosing easy to guess passwords. A far better recommendation is to use a password manager such as 1Password, KeePass or LastPass with a long, but easy for THAT user to remember pass-phrase.

TL;DR: Writing down passwords is a recommendation about how to cope in a world of bad password policies, and it's an incomplete recommendation because users will leave their written passwords in easily found locations. A far better recommendation is to use a password manager such as 1Password, KeePass or LastPass with a long, but easy for THAT user to remember pass-phrase. Long term, we need sane password/pass-phrase policies.

How is this wrong? Even Bruce Schneier advocates this method. [1] Protecting little peices of paper is something everyone is already ingrained to do (think money), but remembering long strings of random numbers, characters and punctuation is not.

[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/06/write_down_your.html

Never leave anything valuable in your checked bags. Take it as carryon, leave it at home, mail it, or check it with a gun since those bags are inspected in front of you then kept locked and tracked for the whole trip.

Or you can do as Bruce Schneier does, and many others have reported: Include a starter pistol in your luggage, and declare it. It seems the TSA's rules include starter pistols as "weapons", and if you have one, they'll inspect your luggage before your eyes, lock it, and store it in a separate part of the airplane. Bruce and others have reported that this not only works; it also reduces the "loss" of luggage (or valuable contents like cameras and computers) to around zero. In effect, for the cost of a starter pistol, you are using the security folks to lock and guard your luggage and guarantee delivery.

I see that another reply deals with New York's stringent gun laws. Does anyone know whether a starter pistol (or stage pistols that just fire smoke) are considered "weapons" in New York or other states? If so, it might be interesting to push for Federal registration of such pseudo-guns, to avoid the hassle of trying to register them with the bureaucracies of N different states.

Anyway, if you try this gimmick, you might want to write up your experiences. And you might want to thank the TSA "agents" for their assistance in making the flight safe for you and your belongings. ;-)

Its not that these people are stupid or lazy. Its a serious problem related to being human. During the Nazi takeover of Germany, about a 100,000 Jews saw the writing on the wall and got out of Dodge before things got really ugly. Another 450,000 stayed put, because they couldn't believe that things would get that bad that quickly. They were educated, well to do, and socially active. They had no idea that the world was about to throw them under the bus.

This kind of behavior shows up all over the place and is a form of Risk Normalization. There's a great article about Why Human Beings are so lousy at identifying risk.

Like other mammals, we can deal with instant risk like a car coming at us, well. Slow motion risks, like building homes on the San Andreas fault, not so much. So its taken 30 years to hijack our government, really screw it over and sell it off one piece at a time to the highest bidder..Now there is only 1 party and it has two faces, whose only difference is who get's the welfare, poor folk or corporations. By the way, I assume you know whose really winning.

We are now being scrutinized more closely than any generation in the history of being human. Virtually everything you do is being recorded somewhere. The pieces haven't all fallen together yet, but they're close. God they're close. If we allow this slow motion coupe to continue, even the pretense of civil rights and human freedom could very well vanish.

And if you are at all shy about using the same p/w manager as everyone else, I recommend PasswordSafe by Bruce Schneier of TwoFish encryption fame. Get it at SourceForge.

Bruce Schneier said it better than I can.

Biometrics are unique identifiers, but they are not secrets. You leave your fingerprints on everything you touch, and your iris patterns can be observed anywhere you look.

Authenticating with biometrics is little better than using social security numbers. They are both unique identifiers, but neither are secrets, making them better suited to user id's. Passwords, on the other hand, are secrets.

Quite true, but I can see biometrics becoming user-names rather then passwords. But I cant see that happening in the near future, definitely not in 5 years, hell we've had fingerprint scanners in laptops for most of the last 5, most people still type in their name and passwd.

The one bit of ID theft that scares me the most is the only bit of ID I have biometric data on... My passport. An Aussie passport is something quite sought after these days yet its only defences are a picture of me, a biometric chip (which an over-zealous Filipino immi officer put a stamp right on, on the page that says clearly "do not stamp this page") so I now have a valid Aussie passport with no biometric chip.

Biometrics are unique identifiers, but they are not secrets. You leave your fingerprints on everything you touch, and your iris patterns can be observed anywhere you look.

Authenticating with biometrics is little better than using social security numbers. They are both unique identifiers, but neither are secrets, making them better suited to user id's. Passwords, on the other hand, are secrets.

don't actually generate a full key pair (they just sign the public key, which means they don't know who actually generated it, and no signature is placed on the private key which they never see, so the installer of the private key can't know that the private key is the key corresponding to the public key they're offering).

You have just demonstrated an astounding level of ignorance of how PKI works. Please refrain from posting further on this topic until you have educated yourself. I recommend, at minimum, spending some quality time with the Google query "how PKI works." Next, you may wish to cuddle up with a copy of Applied Cryptography. Hope this helps.

Anyone can invent a security system that he himself cannot break.

Truecrypt isn't designed to be invisible at all. Aside from entirely encrypted drives, it's fairly obvious if someone HAS encrypted data. Truecrypt is about hiding that data via hidden paritions within outer encrypted containers, and plausible deniability.

Truecrypt volumes are generally detectable:
http://www.jadsoftware.com/?page_id=89
https://code.google.com/p/tcdiscover/
And if the researchers discovered drives that are filled entirely with random data, then they know they're either securely formatted or encrypted, and would likely consider them the latter - if they're securely formatted the file system appears intact. If the entire drive is encrypted (or securely erased from the MBR up) then the FS is not intact, and it's a fair bet that the researchers are claiming they found all sticks with intact file systems, formatted to the same volume as the stick, with single partitions.

As are those hidden within files:
http://16s.us/TCHunt/index.php

But - the reason for the ramble: Never make the mistake of thinking Truecrypt is invisible. It's not. What's "invisible" should be your second hidden volume within the Truecrypt container - if you've set it up correctly. And there have previously even been attacks on that, in the event attackers are able to gain access to the external container. Work on your plausible deniability. Don't rely on TC to do the work for you or you'll end up with leaks everywhere.
http://www.schneier.com/paper-truecrypt-dfs.pdf

Here's Schneier's essay describing this approach much better than I did.

It's possible that the 'starter pistol' trick might work:

• http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/expensive_camer.html

We have to let the computer choose the password, and the human agree to memorize it. And it MUST be 4 words, not one, or three.

Five is *right* *out*.

That sounds like a sendup of a Monty Python skit.

Let us now read from the Book Of Schneier, Part II: Cryptographic Techniques, Chapter 7: Key Length....

Welcome to a future where every photo you take can be uniquely attributed to the device used to produce it, registered to you.

Nikon and Canon SLRs have had 'image authentication' for a while now. A supposedly secret private key embedded in the camera's firmware may be used to sign each image file, which can then be validated with a public key (generally using an expensive software package sold mainly to forensics people). Camera serial numbers (probably recorded with your purchase) are also embedded in the files (at least in Nikon raw files), so the original images are intended to be verifiably traceable as well as tamper-evident. However, the authentication feature is optional (off by default) and both Nikon and Canon's systems have now been cracked wide open:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/05/nikon_image_aut.html

You can't stop the serial number being embedded in the file, though (verifiable or not), so be careful who you give original images to...

For extra paranoia, seal the envelope containing your master password with tamper-evident tape.

Think through whether changing passwords every month is a good idea. I could give you my opinion but Bruce Schneier published a brief analysis on the subject:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/11/changing_passwo.html

For software, there are no tools or methods that you can use to determine if a program has some fatal bugs.

Yes there are. It's just that nobody's willing to put in the time an expense to use them.

Perhaps you're trolling, I am not.

If you look at the energy required just to cycle through all the values of a 256-bit counter, without doing any other useful work, that's more energy than is released in a supernova. Bruce Schneier has done the math for us: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html

We simply don't have the energy available to do such a thing, regardless of how much faster our computers become.

Here's a link to the earlier hack by German reseachers in PCworld , with links to video demonstration and paper of University of Virginia.

A similar hack on the same chip also in 2008 was published by Dutch researchers from Radboud Univeristy in Nijmgen, in the Netherlands. This case attracted additional attention because the company making the Mifare chip, NXP (formerly Phillips semiconductors), tried to block publication of the hack and was denied this in a Dutch court of law (security guru Schneier on this).

Even more recently, the " improved" system, but still using the same chip on the cards, was targeted by Dutch investigative journalist Brenno de Winter who was cleared from prosecution by a judge as recently as three weeks ago. His research showed that hacking was possible by using a freely available windows program (you-tubevideo of his sadly overly-long presentation at DefCon 16).

Last week it became public that the company responsible for the system, Trans Link Systems ( somewhat uninformative site) has silently been introducing cards using a different chip for two months now. It uses the Infineon SLE-66 chip (producer unknown to me; anyone?), that can have software installed. The software that was installed by TLS is to block any tampering. Dutch news site nu.nl has had such a card for two weeks and was not able to hack it with the currently known methods (their article, Dutch only, I'm afraid). Old cards are still in production until he end of the year for subscriptions (linked to personalized accounts) but the new cards are used for the anonymous day cards. Equipment of public transport personnel has been adapted to reveal hacking attempts.

So, the big question to all the security experts hovering around slashdot: how realistic is the claim that this card will prevent fraud? Let's be realistic and assume that it can eventually be hacked in the lab, but that practical application of this hack is not feasible. The interesting case is a hacking method that would make free transport available on a large scale, as is the case now.Can chip-installed software block such tampering attempts?

Did a little more digging, here is an article with some pretty good information.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/intercepting_pr.html

The signal they are receiving is not coming from the Predators at all. The signal they are receiving is the satellite downlink for the soldiers in the field, not the signal to the operators of the Predator. It also gives a pretty good explanation as to why it is not encrypted.

So my arguments have been correct except for that VHS comment.

Bruce Schneier: "Simply put, the Israeli airport security model does not scale."

1 - You misunderstand the term "Security Theater".

2 - I claimed exaggeration, rather than entrapment. Entrapment is ultimately a call for the courts, but it is a possibility. Like it or not, there is a good chance this guy was just a wind-bag (as opposed to a Terrorist) until the FBI got involved. There is growing body evidence to back up my position

The only difficulty is that you are limited to Black& (titanium) white for optimum effectiveness.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/04/makeup_to_fool.html

Look at page 25 of the Skien Whitepaper. Using C implementations, Skien-512 outperforms SHA-512 and Skien-256 is only about 75% slower than SHA-256 on a 32 bit CPU. That isn't unacceptably slow.

Bah -- fixing my link. http://www.schneier.com/book-applied.html

First, to anyone who lost loved ones in the disaster, you have my condolences, as grief can still be fresh even a decade later, especially if it was a parent's adult child who died. My main point in writing this is to prevent more such disasters.

My wife flew home on 9/10/2001 from Washington, D.C. I can't think what might have happened had it been one day later. She attended a Genoa I workshop to talk on narrative methods and conflict resolution where someone said, "Maybe we should apply some of these ideas to thinking about that Osama bin Laden guy?" But it was too late to prevent what happened.

I agree with other comments here that in some ways 9/11 was Slashdot's finest hour as it kept working when other sites crashed under the load, and it was where I too turned for news updates. We lived near NYC at the time (we could smell the towers burning) and we lost reception on some TV stations with the loss of the towers. When the first tower fell, besides thinking about the sad loss of people, I recalled all the discussions on Slashdot previously on the attempts at encroachment on civil liberties, and thought, with the fall of the tower, so would fall our civil liberties, as those efforts would get the upperhand finally. I'm glad things have been not quite as bad as they could have been domestically, even if the amount of suffering caused abroad (like in Iraq) by the USA as it lashed out in a blind rage has been enormous (and to what end?).

It has been very sad also to see the USA develop some kind of immune disorder as it attacks itself in various ways (same as with asthma or arthritis) like with a war on the "unexpected".
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html

In the same way that the sunshine vitamin, vitamin D, can help moderate the human immune system, I can think that some sunshine on global issues will ultimately help heal them. But, as Stephen Zunes, a middle east academic scholar said after he tried to make people aware of what was going on with the Middle East and the USA but was accused of all sorts of things:
http://www.truth-out.org/legacy-911-and-war-intellectuals/1315608304
"Raising such questions was not popular, however. Detectives investigating a crime trying to establish a motive are generally not accused of defending the criminals. Fire inspectors inspecting the ruins of a building for the cause of the blaze are not accused of defending its destruction. Yet I found myself, along with scores of other Middle Eastern scholars, being attacked for supposedly defending terrorism."

Ironically, while many people still believe "they hate us because we are free" and that terrorists abhor our democratic values, the truth is more that "they hate us because we fund their oppressors" and if we had stuck to our democratic values in crafting our foreign policy, we might not have seen so much blowback. Sadly, the invasion of Iraq based on false information and broad misconceptions has likely spawned a whole generation of terrorists. As Smedley Butler, a Major General in the US Marine Corps, said, "War is a racket". So, some have said, Iraq and even Afghanistan were supposed to be quagmires.
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

9/11 has brought the issue of security into the public consciousness in the USA. A big problem is that our mainstream view of collective security is not very advanced. In the same way Stephen Zunes says we need to think more deeply about the Middle East and our foreign policy, I'd suggest we in the USA need to think more deeply about what our notion of participatory democracy and how it could relate to collective security, including, for slashdotters' contemplation, how to prevent a cyber-9/11.

Towards that goal of moving such a dialog forward, here are some l

Bruce Scheier cites a number of sources here. The short answer is that it is very, very unlikely. First, the chemicals are difficult to work with under the best of circumstances. An airplane is not the best of circumstances. Second, the chemicals, being volatile organic compounds, have strong, unpleasant odors. While people may be expecting "strong, unpleasant" odors to be emanating from a bathroom, these would be unusual enough that even the least observant passengers on the airplane would become more than just a little suspicious. Third, you can't just mix up a batch of binary explosives in a few minutes. It is a long, drawn-out process, and as the line to the loo began to grow suspiciously long, someone would be bound to intervene.

Bottom line: We've already lost the war on terror. TSA is a political entity, and that means that every time some potential terrorist yells, "Boo!" TSA jumps, because if EVER, even once, they don't jump and something does happen, there will be a lot of Congress Critters on the streets looking for work. Consequently, the terrorists don't have to blow anything up ever again. All they have to do is let it be known that maybe they are thinking about some new attack vector and our fear will do the rest for them.

Here and here.

There is an existing key schedule attack against AES-256 (attack complexity 2^119) and AES-192 (complexity 2^176). The existing attack is a related-key attack, and some modes of operation (e.g. XTS as used by TrueCrypt) are not vulnerable to it.

The big deal about this paper is that it (a) operates in a single-key model, rather than requiring a related-key; and (b) is the first attack against full round AES-128.

The reason that AES remains a better choice than serpent or twofish is precisely because this sort of cryptanalysis is going on - we gain more knowledge about the weak points of AES and higher confidence in exactly what security strength it offers. Ciphers with less rigorous study may just be offering the appearance of security because we know less about their weaknesses.

linky...

Well, Bruce Schneier doesn't put a password on his WiFi either for that matter from what I hear.

The other systems (databse & biometrics) are already built and in place, Bruce Schneier just doesn't know about them (he's a mathematician, not an airport security expert).

See http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/08/counterfeit_pil.html#c569857 and the same commenter's post 2 down.

The problem is not really preventing pilots from carrying guns on planes. It's preventing people who look like pilots from being given special security breaks and dealing with the costs associated with preventing that while reaping only minimal gains from not scanning pilots.

This essay: https://www.schneier.com/essay-130.html by Schneier does a fantastic job at explaining the problem. The basic synopsis is:
1) Security is a system, and for all the easy changes you make ("Let's not screen pilots, that makes no sense!"), you actually need to build tons of other systems (Databases to validate pilot IDs, training for security personnel to access those databases, hard to forge ID cards to identify pilots, etc).
2) Because of those things you didn't think of in (1), and because security is a zero-sum game, all the dollars you spend building security systems to deal with pilots and all the minutes that you save not screening them could have been spent doing more impactful things that make everyone safer and reduce time at the security checkpoint for less money.

Basically, with limited resources and the hidden costs of not scanning pilots, is it worth it to not scan pilots? Probably not.

Epic.
Fail.

PKI's aren't good security, really...especially for something of this nature.

10 Risks of PKI
TLS Renegotiation Attack
MD5 Considered Harmful

And the list goes on and on and on...

You can walk across a busy highway, and by some miracle escape being hit by a vehicle. That doesn't prove that everyone who told you that you are doing something stupid was wrong.

Fair enough. The question is, how many times do you have to walk across the busy highway and escape being hit by a vehicle in order to prove the person's fears were invalid? 10 times? 100 times? 1000 times?

You're right--she didn't prove him wrong because it is possible that a bad thing could have happened. The issue here is how likely is it that something bad could happen. If I rent my condo 1000 times for $50, I've made $50,000. If I have one bad person who causes $10,000 worth of damage, I'm still ahead. If I have 10 bad people, I've lost money renting my place. The questions is, "How many bad people are out there who are doing this?" Is it a 1% chance? If I rent to 100 people, is it likely that 1 of them will trash the place? Should I charge more with the understanding that, at some point, it's going to happen and I'm going to have to pay to have things fixed?

Bruce Schneier has an interesting article on Worst Case Thinking. While it relates to security, it can also relate to how we look at the world. Is the world full of bad people that we have to defend against and there are only a few good people out there we can trust? Is the world full of good people who we can trust and there are only a few bad people out there that we have to defend against?

I'm not all that impressed with Airbnb. They were originally sympathetic and offered to help. But those offers went away when she posted the blog about what happened and the CEO of the company seemed more concerned about what her blog post might do to the investment money than in helping someone.

If I were Airbnb, I would make sure that this person was happy. That's going to do a hell of a lot more to impress investors than trying to sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. Such a thing is a possibility--we can argue about how remote this possibility is, certainly, but is is possible. Airbnb should be doing it's best to protect it's customers from such things happening. Nothing is perfect and there will always be incidents like this one. How Airbnb responds is going to be very important.

The premise is that if you have access to the keychain, you can decrypt the stored passwords. The keychain is, as you say, just another layer of security. It adds complexity to the system, making it harder to get the password back out, but it doesn't add any security; if someone has access to the keychain, it only requires a token amount of additional effort to acquire the password.

"Secrets are fragile; once they're lost, they're lost forever. Security that relies on secrecy is also fragile; once secrecy is lost there's no way to recover security. Trying to base security on secrecy is simply bad design. "
Bruce Schneier