An invisible quantum tripwire

Aspects of CNCI declassified

IPv6 thoughts from Arbor

“Hackers who breached Google and other companies in January targeted source-code management systems”

The Washington Post gave [former DIRNSA and DNI] McConnell free space to declare that we are losing some sort of cyberwar…But that’s not warfare. That’s espionage…Those enamored with the idea of “cyberwar” aren’t dissuaded by fact-checking…[if the DoS attack on Estonia] was cyberwar, it’s pretty clear the net will be just fine. In fact, none of [the commonly cited examples] demonstrate the existence of a cyberwar, let alone that we are losing it. But this battle isn’t about truth. It’s about power…

the problem with developing cyberweapons…is that you need to know where to point them…The military needs targets…Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race. And it’s waging a psychological warfare campaign on the American people to make that so. The military industrial complex is backed by sensationalism, and a gullible and pageview-hungry media…

There is no cyberwar and we are not losing it. The only war going on is one for the soul of the internet. But if…self-interested exaggerators dominate our nation’s discourse about online security, we will lose that war — and the open internet will be its biggest casualty.

On the opposite end of the nuance spectrum: more than 41% of the zeros of the zeta function are on the critical line.

“Instead of running your websites through the gauntlet, risking downtime from intrusive scans, only to discover you have vulnerabilities just like everyone else — how about making the vendor eat their own dog food. Ask the sales rep for a trial license and permission to scan THEIR production commerce website(s).”

“IT security has evolved into a classic broken windows business. It exists to repair things that shouldn’t break in the first place. Furthermore, every dollar that a business spends on Security subtracts a dollar from expenditure on more worthwhile alternatives—product innovation, improved public services, higher salaries, dividends to investors, etc.”

“US analysts believe they have identified the Chinese author of the critical programming code used in the alleged state-sponsored hacking attacks on Google and other western companies, making it far harder for the Chinese government to deny involvement.”

“[Researchers have designed] a true random number generator that uses an extra layer of randomness by making a computer memory element, a flip-flop, twitch randomly between its two states 1 or 0. Immediately prior to the switch, the flip-flop is in a “metastable state” where its behaviour cannot be predicted. At the end of the metastable state, the contents of the memory are purely random.”

“Cyber ShockWave…featured a number of former US government officials who played the part of senior members of the NSC. The exercise sought to examine how the NSC would react to a major cyber attack in real time…the source of the attack remained unclear during the event…The mock NSC even discussed potentially nationalizing power companies and service providers if they failed to act in the national interest. Ultimately, in the several hours that the war game lasted, the US was increasingly beset by attack with little knowledge of who perpetrated it.” More reaction from Richard Bejtlich.

The question for now is, once you’ve got a finite Markov process, what do you do with it? There are some obvious things. For example, you could apply a Chebyshev-type inequality to detect when the traffic parameters change or the underlying assumptions break down (which, if the model is halfway decent, by definition indicates something interesting is going on–even if it’s not malicious). This idea has been around in network security at least since Denning’s 1986-7 intrusion detection article, though, so it’s not likely to bear any more fruit (assuming it ever did). A better idea is to construct and exploit martingales. One way to do this to advantage starting with an inhomogeneous Poisson process (or in principle, at least, more general one-dimensional point processes) was outlined here and here.

Probably the most well-known general technique for constructing martingales from Markov processes is the Dynkin formula. Although we don’t use this formula at present (after having done a lot of tinkering and evaluation), a more general result similar to it will help us introduce the Girsanov theorem for finite Markov processes and thereby one of the tools we’ve developed for detecting changes in network traffic patterns.

The sketch below of a fairly general version of this formula for finite processes is adapted from a preprint of Ford (see Rogers and Williams IV.20 for a more sophisticated treatment).

Consider a time-inhomogeneous Markov process on a finite state space. Let denote the generator, and let denote the corresponding transition kernel, i.e. where the Markov propagator is

and indicates the formal adjoint or reverse time-ordering operator. Thus, e.g., an initial distribution is propagated as (NB. Kleinrock’s queueing theory book omits the time-ordering, which is a no-no.)

Let be bounded and such that the map is Write and Now

and the Markov property gives that

The notation just indicates the history of the process (i.e., its natural filtration) at time The transition kernel satisfies a generalization of the time-homogeneous formula

so the RHS of the previous equation is times

plus a term that vanishes in the limit of vanishing mesh. The fact that the row sums of a generator are identically zero has been used to simplify the result.

Summing over and taking the limit as the mesh of the the partition goes to zero shows that

That is,

is a local martingale, or if is well behaved, a martingale.

This can be generalized (see Rogers and Williams IV.21 and note that the extension to inhomogeneous processes is trivial): if is an inhomogeneous Markov process on a finite state space and is such that is locally bounded and previsible and for all then given by

is a local martingale. Conversely, any local martingale null at 0 can be represented in this form for some satisfying the conditions above (except possibly local boundedness).

To reiterate, this result will be used to help introduce the Girsanov theorem for finite Markov processes in a future post, and later on we’ll also show how Girsanov can be used to arrive at a genuinely simple, scalable likelihood ratio test for identifying changes in network traffic patterns.

Network attack game

“Most U.S. federal government agencies are expected to meet cybersecurity defense requirements by buying managed security services from carriers”

PRC busts a hacker ring…convenient timing for a PR-friendly move. But don’t look too soon…

Verizon blocks 4chan

Phishing .gov and .mil

Mobile phone communication patterns

Graphene superconducting at 90 K

Apparently some people think steganography is nontrivial

Hackers steal $4M in carbon credits

Botnet vs. botnet

Iran’s big day: Thursday

Google + NSA Information Assurance Directorate

“Every user in the world is convinced they need security features, not security procedures.”

Advanced Persistent Threat highlighted by DNI; Mandiant report gives details. Mandiant have coined the APT term, and it’s probably because they deal with that sort of thing constantly: they’re very good at what they do. We hired them for internal test and eval work as well as usability input as our software began taking shape, and I came away impressed. It’s not surprising to see them tackling high-profile events.

Quantum energy teleportation

Congressional Research Service overview of cybersecurity legislation, executive initiatives, and options (PDF)

National Ignition Facility success