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US Government Sets Up Online "App Store"
krapper writes "The Obama administration has unveiled a government 'app store' designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money. The process will start small but will ramp up quickly, Vivek Kundra, the US chief information officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday. 'Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology,' Kundra writes in the post on WhiteHouse.gov. 'We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.' The app store is designed for federal employees doing official government business and is not intended for use by the public."
federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress
Maybe this means Joe Wilson can troll 4chan instead.
...they'll be too important to fail?
Agreed. This seems to be more of an official non-classified download repository than anything else. If I were in a small business and called their samba share that had the install images of Office, Acrobat, and other licensed packages for internal use an "app store", I'd be looked at by their IT people like I was some troll or pirate.
To me, a true "app store" is something like Apple's offering, Handango, Digital River, or a place where one looks through a catalog and either downloads a demo, or pays a license fee, then gets an executable to download.
There are some things I'd like to see the USG do though, if they are offering a large repository like this for internal use. The first thing is to PGP or gpg sign everything on the store so if it gets tampered with, one can find the app that has no or an invalid signature. (I'd also like to see Authenticode signing on Windows installs, and gpg package signing on BSD/RedHat/debian as another method that is transparent to the user, but will alert them if something is not right.)
I'm not sure how a TPM can establish identity. Fundamentally, a TPM is a cryptographic token that can accept a key or a passphrase, and has the option to seal it and keep it sealed until the right boot code is passed through it. Other than that, it is fundamentally just a smart card fixed onto a computer's motherboard.
A TPM wouldn't be good for validating a user, who can be using that machine, a phone, a jaw harp, or a beer mug with an IP stack for access. A TPM can validate that the first part of an OS boot was not tampered with on a machine, as well as store some private keys that are usable only on that box. The advantage of this would be for this is ensuring that an attacker can't just replace the MBR with a keylogger, then later on, steal the laptop in a two phase black bag attack.
For a single sign on for users, the US government already has a large and well established system, the DoD's Common Access Card.
Fears of a national ID card aside, using a smart card for access can be a very good thing. No passwords can be sniffed, it is quite easy to use client certificates (the server doesn't have to care one whit if a client's key is on a card, in Firefox's key storage, or in a TPM), and allows shorter passwords to be used, because all it would take is 3-15 (usual default settings on smart cards) bad attempts, and the smart card will either block further attempts until reset, or permanently brick itself needing replacement. Phishing would be useless because all a phisher would get is "yay, this user has connected to your web server with a valid certificate". The main way a smart card can be compromised would be malware that would grab the user's PIN via a keylogger, then use the smart card (if inserted) to sign/decrypt stuff in the background.
Finally, a large number of security programs like TrueCrypt can use smart cards. I have on a laptop TC protected volumes for a VM that runs my Quicken. If someone steals the laptop and manages to get past BitLocker (RAM dump while the box is on), they would need to have the passphrase, the PIN from the eToken, and the eToken itself, to be able to mount that volume. A couple wrong guesses, the eToken zaps itself, so that gets rid of the brute forcing route in. (Of course, rubber hose crypto does work, but my biggest security scenario is silent theft of the laptop, not seizure and interrogation of the owner.)
Disclaimer: TPMs are double edged swords, and they can be used to enforce DRM stacks, but I consider them a good thing in general. Especially because by the TCG spec, they are to be shipped disabled and unowned, so software companies cannot assume every computer user has one and can use it for copy protection.
The first link is about Obama staffer's former colleague being investigated for crime. I don't even know what or whose fault are you trying to imply with that.
The second link is about the said staffer having committed a crime before. He shoplifted as a lot younger man, over a decade (13 years, to be exact) ago. He pleaded guilty and paid the fine... The "once a thief, always a thief" doesn't really apply to stuff like that. I myself shoplifted a few times when I was a teenager. I can understand a young man getting the small rush of doing something wrong there, with immediate risk of getting caught... It doesn't even imply that 13 years later one would have tendency to become corrupted or something.
So, what could possibly go wrong?
I think this is a great idea, as long as the programs the government will use will encrypt the data properly before storing it outside their servers. (though even that won't be necessary. I'm sure they won't use gmail for "top secret documents ;) )