Slashdot Mirror
Australian PLAID Crypto, ISO Conspiracies, and German Tanks
New submitter Gaglia writes: PLAID, the Australian 'unbreakable' smart card identification protocol has been recently analyzed in this scientific paper (disclaimer: I am one of the authors, and this is a personal statement.)
Technically, the protocol is a disaster. In addition to many questionable design choices, we found ways for tracing user identities and recover card access capabilities. The attacks are efficient (few seconds on 'home' hardware in some cases), and involve funny techniques such as RSA moduli fingerprinting and... German tanks. See this entry on Matt Green's crypto blog for a pleasant-to-read explanation.
But the story behind PLAID's standardization is possibly even more disturbing. PLAID was pushed into ISO with a so-called "fast track" procedure. Technical loopholes made it possible to cut off from any discussion the ISO groups responsible for crypto and security analysis. Concerns from tech-savvy experts in the other national panels were dismissed or ignored. We contacted ISO and CERT Australia before going public with our paper, but all we got was a questionable and somewhat irate response (PDF) by PLAID's project editor (our reply here). Despite every possible evidence of bad design, PLAID is now approved as ISO standard, and is coming to you very soon inside security products which will advertise non-existing privacy capabilities.
The detailed story of PLAID in the paper is worth a read, and casts many doubts on the efficacy of the most important standardizing body in the world. It is interesting to see how a "cryptography" product can be approved at ISO without undergoing any real security scrutiny.
On a related note, the enthusiastic comments to PLAID's design made by a few readers in the old Slashdot story reminds us as a cautionary tale that you need cryptographers to assess the security of cryptography. Quoting Bruce Schneier: amateurs produce amateur cryptography.
Technically, the protocol is a disaster. In addition to many questionable design choices, we found ways for tracing user identities and recover card access capabilities. The attacks are efficient (few seconds on 'home' hardware in some cases), and involve funny techniques such as RSA moduli fingerprinting and... German tanks. See this entry on Matt Green's crypto blog for a pleasant-to-read explanation.
But the story behind PLAID's standardization is possibly even more disturbing. PLAID was pushed into ISO with a so-called "fast track" procedure. Technical loopholes made it possible to cut off from any discussion the ISO groups responsible for crypto and security analysis. Concerns from tech-savvy experts in the other national panels were dismissed or ignored. We contacted ISO and CERT Australia before going public with our paper, but all we got was a questionable and somewhat irate response (PDF) by PLAID's project editor (our reply here). Despite every possible evidence of bad design, PLAID is now approved as ISO standard, and is coming to you very soon inside security products which will advertise non-existing privacy capabilities.
The detailed story of PLAID in the paper is worth a read, and casts many doubts on the efficacy of the most important standardizing body in the world. It is interesting to see how a "cryptography" product can be approved at ISO without undergoing any real security scrutiny.
On a related note, the enthusiastic comments to PLAID's design made by a few readers in the old Slashdot story reminds us as a cautionary tale that you need cryptographers to assess the security of cryptography. Quoting Bruce Schneier: amateurs produce amateur cryptography.
Even faster than LUDICROUS.
The detailed story of PLAID in the paper is worth a read, and casts many doubts on the efficacy of the most important standardizing body in the world. It is interesting to see how a "cryptography" product can be approved at ISO without undergoing any real security scrutiny.
Not really surprising given the Microsoft OOXML standard controversy a few years ago. I suppose the ISO could always have been susceptible to influence peddling in the past, but the OOXML thing was the first time I, and a lot of others, became aware of it.
Now we know that anything with PLAID insecurity (ISO/IEC 25185-1) should be automatically removed from consideration. I suspect as many new products will come out with this as there will be with MD5 and SHA-1 over the next few years. It's a dead standard before it was even published.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Australians have been selling their freedom for security for years. Socialized society, insane gun control, and their crypto attitude is just horrible.
With a firearm related homicide rate 1/30th that of the USA (and firearm related deaths due to all causes about 1/12th that of the USA), maybe their gun control isn't so insane.
ISO JTC1/SC27 is meeting right now in Jaipur India. I'm one of the US delegates, but screw ups leading to no visa meant I didn't go.
I imagine they might be having some discussions in the corridors about this.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Here's the meat of the "questionable and somewhat irate" response:
The following are factual and editorial errors in the document:
1. Abstract – States that for AS 5185-2010 "we show that the privacy properties of PLAID are significantly weaker than claimed" but in fact the report shows that the privacy properties of PLAID are unbroken by the attack and in fact unbreakable by the attack. The report actually shows that the "ID Leakage" properties of the protocol (as defined in AS 5185-2010) could be better implemented in the 2010 version of the reference implementation by implementing the fake "ShillKey" better - see further discussion in section 6.2.
2. Abstract – states that it will be ...." reporting a number of undesirable cryptographic features
of the protocol" This is however unargued and not actualised. The reference appears to
logically means section 5.3 of the Unpicking PLAID paper however, as shown in section 7 of
this discussion these are either not claims of the protocol or are not shown to be weaknesses
by any argument presented by the Researchers - see further discussion in section 7.
3. History in Introduction is not 100% correct – the Public Consultation process included additional workshops and stages – see section 4 "History" above
4. P3, Last paragraph, the words "added for privacy reasons" is incorrect, the ShillKey was added to delay and distract an atacker, privacy was never an issue and is not stated as a design requirement.
5. P4, last paragraph, P5 first paragraph – Not clear what point is being made – OPACITY is a completely different protocol based on Eliptic Curve technology. Last sentence seems to mix this Paper on PLAID up with a completely seperate report on OPACITY.
6. P3 2nd last paragraph the Researchers state "Even though the encryption key in RSA is usually public, in PLAID it is kept secret to enhance privacy". This is an incorrect representation of PLAID, the reason for both keys being kept secret is in fact to prevent any leakage to an attacker of the AES diversification seed in order to enhance security. Note that PLAID is not a PKI, and the use of public and private key concepts is not relevant, ALL keys are secured in (preferably) hardware crypto devices.
I'm no crypto expert - can anyone explain to me why these points aren't valid? Especially points 1 and 4.
Australia is at about 1 homicide per 100,000 inhabitants per year. The rate has been steadily declining since 1990. In the US it's at around 4.5 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year.
Robberies are at around half the rate of what they are in the US. Sexual assault is about equivalent, though it used to be higher before the new gun legislation.
This is so unlike the trustworthy NSA and their rock-solid, shenanigan-free encryption wares.
Here, now you know how to fish.
Australia's robbery rate is about half (55%) that of the US, overall murder rate is about 1/4.
http://www.nationmaster.com/co...
And I'll just throw this out there, last night in my town, someone not only managed to shoot himself in the foot, but the same bullet seriously injured a 9 year old neighbor:
http://abc7news.com/news/san-j...
Entertainment value set to 2048 bits.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
It's irrelevant to the core logic of the issue, but misspellings and grammar errors are a pretty good indicator of the quality of a piece of work.
A "mute" item would be "(1) refraining from making sound or (2) silent" -- one that does not make an actual audible sound.
A "moot" item is one that is "(1) of no importance or (2) merely hypothetical."
There are many other errors that seem to indicate this whole document was whipped up in a hurry by a pissed off individual without review, but the high-school-level error "mute point" sticks out like a sore thumb.
Seeing this kind of minor but highly-visible mistake in the headings and TOC of a formal document... does not lend credibility to the whole.
I think not...(*poof*)
With a firearm related homicide rate 1/30th that of the USA (and firearm related deaths due to all causes about 1/12th that of the USA), maybe their gun control isn't so insane.
Who cares how people are being murdered? Do victims or family and friends of victims give two shits about your arbitrary selectors or do they care about not being murdered?
If the yearly gun murder rate went down by 1000 and the yearly knife murder rate went up by 1000 to compensate for lack of guns your policies have in fact solved nothing even though cherry picked statistics would fool all who wanted to believe in a much different outcome.
I have no insights into Australian politics or crime statistics or what the optimal policy is or should be. I only know that propagating selection bias is unlikely to help anyone. I also know this is way off topic so I'm posting as AC to keep it under the radar.
The overall muder rate in Australia is about 1/4 that of the USA, so apparently taking away the guns doesn't make killers kill their victims with knives (which is a lot harder to do -- much easier to shoot someone from across the room than get within arms reach so you can stab them, giving the victim a chance to fight back.)
Well, wrong. A bigger country has more murders, but no need to have a higher murder rate.
Australia is at about 1 homicide per 100,000 inhabitants per year. The rate has been steadily declining since 1990. In the US it's at around 4.5 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year.
Robberies are at around half the rate of what they are in the US. Sexual assault is about equivalent, though it used to be higher before the new gun legislation.
The rates of all violent crime have been steadily declining since the early 1990s in the US as well, even though gun ownership has been increasing. Violent crime in the US is due to localized cultural problems and is not uniformly distributed across the country (or even across an individual state or city). The numbers per inhabitant may be higher, but few American inhabitants are ever really exposed to violent crime. We have a relatively small subset of the population that are continually killing each other and make up the bulk of those numbers.
If you're not involved in quasi-gang related activity in a large urban area, your chances of being murdered are not that high. I lived in the "murder capital of the US" for several decades and I've not known a single person who's been murdered or even knows anyone who has been murdered.
Incorrect. It has gone down.
What has increased is imbeciles harping on the interweb echo chamber about some shit they've read in 'the media'. A media that will report and hype anything and everything that seems even remotely 'shocking'.
"Man hit and killed by meteorite!" would remain a headline for two weeks because they can't find anything else to report about. Then some dipshits see this and think it's going to happen to them and start a "Sky is falling" panic, and start taking out shares in the underground bunker industry.
Hi, as someone who also worked for a company which was working for Centrelink at the time (Not involved in PLAID) I have to admit that I admire the development of PLAID because the commercial products available were rubbish and "Security agencies" such as NSA and DSD were not helpful in this regard. A significant gap in the way that smart-cards which were being used for access control such as building security worked was found and an attempt was made to re-mediate this.
Protocols evolve over time to either become better or reveal the fact that they are fundamentally flawed. SSL was not written by cryptographic experts it was created by Netscape and it has evolved over time to secure a significant percentage of Internet transactions. PLAID exists because all of the available security products in this space were fundamentally broken and PLAID was an attempted to fix this problem. During the time since this protocol was created I've watch the various debacles with a number of propriety commercial smart card products used in public transport. I would hope that PLAID will evolve over time with the assistance of interested parties to be an open protocol which provides a solution in this problem space.
One criticism of this appears to be that a department which spends billions of dollars on ICT infrastructure should engage in the development of a product when there is an identified gap identified in the market. The spend in total was in the hundred thousand dollars so in reality the project was done on a shoestring is it's not surprising that there are flaws.
Hilarious! But also very sad because it's quite true.
Only I can judge you.
If by 'lost' you mean 'won' then yes you are right.
4 cities in the top 10 worldwide for liveability. Maybe your definition of winning needs to be reconsidered?
The insane and ex-cons with a violent record have trouble getting guns - so insane gun control :)
I'm the author of the original submission. There was a mistake in the story, as we never contacted AusCERT, but CERT Australia instead. The similarity of the names was a bit unfortunate. I apologize for this error. Could some moderator please edit the submission? Thank you!
Or maybe it was the murder rate in USA that went down for unrelated reasons so the relations between USA and other countries changed.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I know. You probably misunderstood what I have written.
The murder rate in the states is so high that if it goes down, the relationship to other countries will change far stronger than when the murder rate goes down in a more civilised place.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Nice :D
Requiem for the American Dream