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Thank Goodness For the NSA — A Fable
davecb writes "Slaw was kind enough to post my fable on how to not have a problem with the NSA, Thank Goodness for the NSA, and a link to the more technical MAC paper. My challenge to the Slashdot community: what's the first big step to making this all come true?"
The actual title should be "thank goodness $SECURITY_THREAT made use realize our security was worse than crap".
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
The Article:
If it weren't for the U.S. National Security Agency's trying to spy on everyone in the world, Bleeker Street Law would have been a cooked goose.
Back in 2013, we had a group of clients from a particular country applying for refugee status here in Canada. Because the NSA spying was in the news, we did a forensic audit of our computers, just to be safe. We promptly discovered that we had been hacked. Not by our clients' former national security service, or by the NSA, but by a for-profit organization. A set of aspiring criminals had broken our security and were making everything they stole available by subscription on Silk Road. Several foreign firms and at least one government had subscribed to us. . . .
The country in question had a revolution, Silk Road doesn't exist any more, and we now have a much simpler but more secure computer system, mostly on tablets and phones.
What we do differently
We used to worry about privileged communications with our clients, because we did all too much communicating with ordinary unencrypted email. Now we have encryption programs for our pads and phones, and encrypted email to boot. Older machines storing files get them already encrypted, so crooks can't just subscribe to “every updated file”.
One new machine keeps the keys. We guard it like the cabinet of office keys, and it in turn is locked in the law librarian's office and not connected to networks.
What's on the pads?
Pads are very popular, and both Apple and Android have “end to end” encryption programs on them. This allows us to “label” files with encryption keys, so only the right people can decrypt them.
Personal information is labeled with the person's name, which in effect means it is encrypted with the person's personal key. Business information is labeled with both Bleeker Street's name and the name of the person whose pad or phone it is on. It is therefore encrypted with a per-person business key.
Only little bits of data are in memory and unencrypted at any time, and because it's labeled, it's re-encrypted when it's written back to disk..
Clients can download a free app and have secure email labeled “From client, for Bleeker Street”. We have the for-pay version and can talk to them and to each other, using keys that live in the locked machine.
What's in the keystore?
Our keys, starting with a private key for each of us, then a collection of public keys from our staff and clients, and finally a collection of keys, each of which is for the combination of Bleeker Street and an individual staff member or client. We also have some signatures for software we use (we have a secure subscription), certificates for web pages and the like.
A legitimate investigator can get a court order to get individual keys, but they won't get all the keys and therefore individual lawyers and clients aren't at risk from them.
Where's the risk now?
Stealing data while it's in use is the big risk, followed by people shoulder-surfing for passwords when they're typed. The labeling of accounts keeps most data safe from anyone other than its owner, but if someone subverts the machine itself, they can get data from memory and tiptoe away with it.
It's not perfect security, but we're not an attractive nuisance any more. Criminals used to target us because we had lots of valuable information in one place. No longer: now they have to attack individuals.
They still do, mind you: someone tried to claim they were a partner's daughter in a foreign jail last week; but they can't just break into a file server and take the company's crown jewels. If they do that now, all they'll get is encrypted files, which are about as valuable as zircons.
E. Nothing to do with the NSA, and not a fable. His company's security sucked, they got hacked, the improved their security. That's TFA.
So, what these articles are both calling for is Capability Based Security, in which you feed a list of resources to the OS when you run a program. This has the pleasant and reasonable effect of limiting the side effects a program can do, and protects the user, the operating system, and everyone else on the internet.
The trusted systems of the 1980s required the Administrator to supply these lists... it could reasonably be done by users these days, because we're all system administrators of our own machines, when it comes down to brass tacks. It doesn't even have to look much different than what we're used to seeing. A capability based version of Word would ask the system to get a file... which would do so via a "powerbox" (a secure way of picking files which side-steps the application doing it directly).
I applaud this fellow traveler who seeks the same sane approach I've been shouting about for years. 8)
Thank the person that brought these security breaches to light, not the people who have been illegally performing them.
Well, yay for corporate censorship combined with misleading headlines, then.
Try to convince yourself that you didn't just get tricked into reading an article.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Except for this little bit in the italics below the main article text:
All of the capabilities mentioned are real as of 2013, and have some degree of availability. No-one has a product that provides them all as yet. Full disclosure: I once proposed this to a device manufacturer, who thought no-one would ever need it.
Sorry, it still is a fable.
E. Nothing to do with the NSA, and not a fable. His company's security sucked, they got hacked, the improved their security. That's TFA.
Actually, it does derive directly from the NSA. Specifically, it comes from the NSA's research on Mandatory Access Control, which is the theory underlying all that discussion of "labels". MAC doesn't necessarily use encryption; in its original design it was intended that the operating system enforce the access controls, but it actually matches quite neatly with the capabilities of labels which correspond to private keys.
So the fable (I agree that it's not a fable) is about using NSA-developed ideas to secure your data. All of the security technologies used in the story also had their roots in NSA work -- and in the past that meant that it was almost certainly good work, in fact among the best in the world. It's only recently that the NSA has apparently forgotten the part of their mission statement that involves keeping US security technologies strong.
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