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New Software To Balance Privacy and Security?
An anonymous reader writes "Claiming to provide both security and privacy, researchers at UCLA say they have developed a system to monitor suspicious online communication that discards communications from law-abiding citizens before they ever reach the intelligence community." From the article: "The truly revolutionary facet of the technology is that it is a new and powerful example of a piece of code that has been mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer. In other words, it can't be analyzed to figure out its components, construction and inner workings, or reveal what information it's collecting and what information it's discarding -- it won't give up its secrets. It can't be manipulated or turned against the user."
It also means that lawful citizens who do fit the parameters are reported on. The same as if the agencies are grepping.
a savvy person may be able to tell that the program is running in the background ... by distributing this software all over the Internet to providers and network administrators, you can easily monitor a huge data flow
How will this software be "distributed"? Virus? Payload in a Sony rootkit? Thousands of patriotic sysadmins? Plenty of potential for evil to be done here!
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If that isn't putting the priest in charge of Sunday School, I don't know what is.
The problem is not Privacy vs. Security. You will never have Security. Not yours. You can have privacy, though.
The problem is, and always has been, balancing privacy and convenience.
So, it collect all data fitting into the criteria set by the agency without any chance of anyone ever knowing what those criteria were? How is the "law-abiding" citizen to know he's not accidentaly fitted one? They say it improves privacy, but it actually removes it, since you can never know you've not been deemed a "terrorist".
So, when I take my case to court, that they're illegally intercepting my communications just to look for dirt to ruin my political campaign, it's impossible to reverse engineer and prove that they were only looking for terrorists?
I mean, the captured documents could already have been altered, no way to prove that they didn't, now.
Not to mention the way it works amounts to what is essentially an eternal wiretap of everyone, guilt, innocence and suspicion matter not.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
So, it has been mathematically been proben impossible to reverse engineer... has it also been mathematically proven impossible to socially engineer?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
And who gets to define what a "law abiding" citizen is? It may be OK now but what happens when the law is that you do not oppose the state, whoops, too late, there is already the infrastructure in place to find out where those damned pro-democracy scum are and what they are upto.
Next, when we're all watching TV and doing our VoIP on the net, all have our home security systems on the net then the government 'sees' everything, 'knows' everything and you have entered into the police state where you can't even move without it being reported on.
If it can be run, it can be read. If it can be read, it can be decompiled. If it can be decompiled, it can be understood.
The core claim in the article is that an attacker with access to the code has no possibility of knowing if a given input will be flagged or not. I can see how someone with access only to the data storage could be prevented from knowing if the gigabyte of noise it stores just changed randomly or if his message was stored there in public key encrypted form. I can _not_ see how the applying of selection criteria can be hidden from someone with access to the code. The code _must_ make the decision on whether to save something or not.
...it is a new and powerful example of a piece of code that has been mathematically proven to be impossible to reverse-engineer...
Brrrrrr.. spooky! This sounds like an incredible misinterpretation of whatever the original paper/research is actually doing though. Devices may be reverse engineered without even looking inside if you have access to its inputs and outputs and can continually test and hypothesize and retest, etc. A device that distinguishes between 'evil' and 'regular' packets (as input) and outputs a bit that indicates 1='evil' or 0='not evil' (or a floating point degree of evil, say..) is no different. If you have access to the code that runs this particular device running on a router or somewhere packets drift by then obviously the situation can be no worse. I'd definitely like to see the link to this mathematical proof..
Which CPU does it run on?
Which executable format does it use?
Unless its running on dedicated hardware with really strong encryption (and even then, thats no gaurantee), it is possible to reverse engineer any piece of code piece by piece (for example, start with the first instructions the program executes and unwrap it from there). If you wanted to go deep, you could use an ICE or similar (or a software emulator with a built-in debugger that cant be detected from the emulated side)
Many commenters are claiming "it is always possible to reverse-engineer a program!," using such reasons as "you can always watch the processor perform the instructions and eventually figure it out."
Let me tell you, as a cryptographer, that these claims are false. The recent field of program obfuscation gives surprisingly strong ways to prevent reverse-engineering, in a very rigorous and strong way.
Not every program can be obfuscated (this has been proven). However, programs that fit a certain template (like: "check if the input string matches the user's password") can be obfuscated. What this means is that you can give the program's entire code to the adversary -- he can run it on his own computer (no DRM required) on whatever inputs he likes, alter it, stretch it, twist it, whatever. After all this he still will not be able to guess the password, any more than if he had some mathematically-perfect black-box that truthfully answered the question: "is [X] the password?" (Actually the definition is even stronger than this, but that's the gist of it.)
Yes, this seems extremely hard to do -- after all, the adversary has complete and total power over the code that is running. Yet it can be done, rigorously and provably, if you're willing to believe that there are some number-theory problems out there (like RSA) that are hard to solve.
For the work described in the article, it sounds like the "black-box" does something like the following: if your input string contains some "watch words," then the output is the same as the input, but encrypted under the government's key. If your input string is "benign," then the output is just "THIS WAS A BENIGN INPUT", encrypted in the government's key -- i.e., it ignores any benign input and replaces it with a placeholder. By running the obfuscated program and looking at the output, you can't tell if the input was flagged or not. Even while watching the program run, you can't tell if the program is flagging the input or not (or learn anything about the government's key). When the government collects the output and decrypts it, it only sees the flagged inputs, as the rest have been ignored.
As I've said, none of this depends on the program requiring any DRM or TPM or any other specialized hardware. It only relies on the mathematics.
Uh, have we entered some new bizarre Orwellian Twilight Zone? So basically an uncrackable secret black box that the government can install on any machine to intercept any traffic with no ability for the surveilled party to repudiate the content (or perhaps even be aware of the surveillance?) is somehow a win for privacy? WTF.
BREAKING NEWS. The government has devised a fool proof plan to protect your privacy. They will simply garrison an intelligence agent in your house recording everything you do to make sure that the government doesn't inappropriately invade your privacy. (for your own safety please do not attempt to resist; you will have to be beaten to protect your own privacy, after which you will be dumped in a shallow unmarked grave - again for your privacy)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Oh the funny part - there's no need to reverse engineer it; the guts would be fully described in the resulting Software Patent.
Worst case, pull an SCO and sue them for violating your stuff, and demand un-obfuscated *everything* during discovery.
On the fun side, wait until RIAA/MPAA gets their agenda piggybacked into these little boxes.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
"Because the code cannot be analyzed, terrorists using the Internet to communicate will never know if the filter has pinpointed their data or not."
Uhm, excuse me, but this is exactly the situation right now. Since when do terrorists ever KNOW that security is on to them until they're caught? Terrorists take precautions against being detected by ANYTHING. Terrorists with the slightest brains do not talk about operations in the clear at any time. What then is this software supposed to detect? Where is the benefit?
Supposedly the benefit is that "harmless" communication is never seen by the Fed. Bullcrap. The parameters of the software are SET by the Fed - they can see anything they want. That's obvious from the article as it glosses entirely over the matter of "criteria" in the first place.
This software would only be safe in the hands of someone who IS safe. In the words of the DRM enthusiasts, it only "keeps honest people honest." And since the criteria is changeable - as well as the appointment (or election) of the people who set the criteria - this is no security at all.
In the hands of George Bush, Dick Cheney and General Hayden, you're screwed, blued and tattooed.
This is nothing more than a propaganda piece put out at this time because Bush is in danger of being impeached over the spying issue. That's the bottom line.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
There is no tradeoff between privacy and security, so there is no need to "balance" them. An individual is not secure if their privacy is being routinely violated.
The tradeoff is between privacy and totalitarianism. Solutions that attempt to split the difference are not helpful.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty