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17 January 2011

“’To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,’ said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. ‘The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.’”

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19 November 2010

“Stuxnet targets only frequency drives from these two companies that are running at high speeds — between 807 Hz and 1210 Hz. Such high speeds are used only for select applications. Symantec is careful not to say definitively that Stuxnet was targeting a nuclear facility, but notes that “frequency converter drives that output over 600 Hz are regulated for export in the United States by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as they can be used for uranium enrichment.”

Making progress towards finding “a set of floating point calculations [that] can uniquely identify any processor…They can’t yet spot specific processors but they can use this technique to identify families of them…this kind of approach would allow much more specific cyberattacks than are possible today.”

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Galrahn has an interesting take on Stuxnet: “Welcome to the future of warfare, where simply planting doubt in the reliability of a system due to a cyberwarfare based malware payload infection is enough to achieve a mission kill against an enemy system.”

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1 June 2010

There’s been some buzz (see here and here) over the deputy SECDEF’s comments last week:

“Individual users who do not want to enroll could stay in the ‘wild, wild west’ of the unprotected internet…I think it’s gonna have to be voluntary…People could opt into protection – or choose to stay out. Individual users may well choose to stay out…But it’s the vulnerability of certain critical infrastructure – power, transportation, finance. This starts to give you an angle at doing that.”

The idea that deploying Einstein more widely is anything more than a step towards a government-sponsored security monoculture escapes me. There is no way that this will get any real traction because it’s not like the USG can credibly claim that its own networks are secure. If Einstein is free, then companies might use it. But that’s about as far as that goes.

Other stuff:

“the vast majority of vulnerabilities, both client-side and server-side, are being sold for less than $5,000″

Point: “some of the most alluring approaches to assuring information security [and] why they fail to make a difference to regular users and businesses alike”

Counterpoint: “blaming security engineering for the impact of targeted attacks is a herring as red as they come”

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19 May 2010

“like-sign dimuon charge asymmetry…in disagreement with the prediction of the standard model by 3.2 standard deviations”

OK, now VMs are totally safe! No need to worry about escape attacks or rootkits…but seriously, it’s good that not everyone takes hypervisor security for granted.

“there is now a significant body of work showing how to break conventional quantum cryptography systems based on various practical weaknesses in the way they are set up…while the known loopholes can be papered over, it’s the unknown ones that represent threats in the future…[researchers have shown that it's easy] with a little malicious intent to bend the assumptions behind perfect quantum cryptography.”

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Random bits

7 May 2010

Principles of Robust Timing Over the Internet

“[An IPv4 address space] black market already exists, albeit on a small scale…[currently] IPv4 addresses are still relatively easy to get…[some believe] that regional registries such as ARIN should head off a potentially deleterious black market by creating a “white market” with established rules for trading IPv4 addresses at market-established costs…But the opportunity to cleanly switch from IPv4 to IPv6 passed many years ago. The current transition strategy, called “dual stack,” requires businesses to remain connected to both IPv4 and IPv6 networks until most of the Internet gets to “the other side” — a process expected to take at least five years.”

“Frosted windows may never be private again”

“a fundamental limit to the level of privacy that is possible when social networks are mined for recommendations”

“The 605-page [NSA IAD] PDF document reads like a listing of the pros and cons for a huge array of defensive and counterintelligence approaches and technologies that an entity might adopt in defending its networks…[one] section delves into the challenges of attributing the true origin(s) of a computer network attack”

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30 April 2010

“Who can do a better job of protecting us from cyberthreats: private companies like Google, or Uncle Sam?”

Cyberwings. That’ll raise morale. Or not.

Computer security on the Death Star was a joke

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23 April 2010

“in [Richard Clarke's] Cyberwar, like in real war, truth is the first casualty”

Cyberdeterrence through tattlling? This is ridiculous. Not bloody likely that will work against serious hackers. And not bloody likely that it would be done in cases where potentially state-sponsored hackers were caught.

Cybersecurity and National Policy

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