I would argue that in both cases the initial lapse of judgement did not explicitly damage the United States. In both cases, however, the subsequent brouhaha may have leaked classified information. I personally doubt that the country will suffer much from either leak, though that is based on my own assessment of national threats (a political opinion).
I sympathize with developers who throw up their hands and say, “I don’t do security stuff.” No matter what you choose, there’s a trade off that could go wrong. It’s especially troublesome if one deploys a “security website.” I’ve deployed security education websites in many environments over the past 20 years, and I rarely achieve the security level I’d like.
I wanted to watch a security webinar today. But the webinar requires Adobe Flash, in which security researchers seem to uncover 1 or 2 vulnerabilities a month. I discarded Flash when upgrading my OS a couple years ago. It’s ironic that a security webinar might tempt it back onto my machine.
Here are a couple of short videos that describe the basic cryptographic mechanisms used in DVDs. These don’t quite fit into my Cryptosmith series, at least, not right now.
They’re short and interesting, so I went ahead and posted them.
The Cryptosmith video series uses animation to explain well-known crypto techniques. This should help more people understand crypto technology. This is particularly important as people rely more and more on mobile and Internet security mechanisms. Aside from protecting online commerce and financial activities, many professionals are realizing that their daily activities require strong protection.
[UPDATE: See the latest post to summarize the video series.]
After publishing three books on cybersecurity and cryptography I’m looking for a different medium for explaining technical concepts. While there are many online tutorial videos, most are narrated slide presentations. I’m trying something else.
Emails are notoriously hard to validate. Emails are like typed, signed contracts with no section or page numbers: you can take out or add whatever pages you want as long as you keep the signatures.
I searched recent news reports highlighting specific Podesta emails. I looked at about a dozen of those emails, plus similar “unimportant” emails. I checked the email delivery data for tampering or forgery. The email headers look correct. Thus there are no “obvious forgeries.”
I’m not often a fan of conspiracy theories, except for entertainment value. This one is interesting because it combines international intrigue, the elections, and our world of notoriously poor email security.
The conspiracy arises from foreigners trying to influence the United States election. They spy on unprotected emails and leak the contents to influence US public opinion. This isn’t limited to attacks on the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Some suggest that Fox News and the Trump campaign have also been attacked this way.
We could be blocking this threat, except that pressure groups within the government want to leave as much information unprotected as possible, notably law enforcement and intelligence agencies. I think we face a greater threat from foreign exploitation of our unprotected emails than we face from impeded investigations or even a few terrorist bombs.
Symantec is one of the companies that holds the keys to the Internet: they are a trusted certificate authority for authenticating major web sites. All major browsers recognize Symantec as a trustworthy source of SSL/TLS authentication certificates. Symantec (also known by its subsidiary name Verisign) is part of a chain of trust that keeps our Internet traffic safe.
Recent reports suggest that they have broken their trust with the Internet community. Symantec has apparently delegated some of its authentication authority to Blue Coat software, a company that makes and sells network snooping gear. A 2013 report by Reporters Without Borders contains 2 pages highlighting Blue Coat’s role in helping repressive regimes monitor encrypted web traffic.
Symantec has issued Blue Coat its own authority certificate. Blue Coat can use this to create and distribute bogus certificates that allow its gear to decrypt encrypted web traffic.
The trouble reported earlier with Apple Music seems to have attracted high level attention. James Pinkstone had reported that Apple Music deleted countless unique tracks he had stored in iTunes, and that an Apple service rep assured him this was correct behavior.
As he describes in a later blog post, Apple contacted him promptly. They assured him that file deletion is not an intended feature of Apple Music, and they sent engineers to try to figure it out.
This doesn’t change my own conclusion: the only way to ensure ownership of electronic media is to remove copy protection. This requires a bit of geeking around on a desktop. If your ebooks and music reside exclusively in proprietary apps, like Kindle or the Apple products, then the vendor can delete them at will. It happened on the Kindle.
This is perhaps the worst example of entertainment engineering I’ve ever heard. Blogger and musician jamespinkstone claims that Apple Music deleted countless unusual tracks in his music collection. It “matched” the tracks with entries in its library. Then it deleted the matched ones from his hard drive. When he tried to play a rare piano version of “Sister Jack” he instead heard a common demo version. Apple Music apparently decided the tracks were similar enough to treat as identical.
This is worse than Sony planting malware on PCs to as a sort of copy protection. I’m no musician, but I appreciate the differences in my 3 or 4 versions of early Bonnie Raitt songs.
This is why I don’t trust the big vendors like Apple or Google to host my private ebook library.
The University of Minnesota’s HR department send me an email in January telling me that I had to submit to a background check. The good news: I do them all the time.
The bad news: the background check company can only complete the check if you follow a URL embedded in an email.
This is how phishing emails work. The email comes from a convincing-sounding source, like the University’s HR department, or some third-party on their behalf. You respond to it, only to find that it really wasn’t the HR department collecting the information.
Bottom line: you can’t trust email. No matter how many times it says “This isn’t a spam email,” or “This isn’t a phishing email,” you can’t trust email.
As I said in an earlier post, no crime is committed if the appropriate official leaks sensitive classified information. This applies to both Secretary Clinton’s email server and President Trump’s unfortunate meeting with Russian diplomats. Both carried the authority to disclose what they disclosed. One question remains: what damage might have ensued from each leak?
I sympathize with developers who throw up their hands and say, “I don’t do security stuff.” No matter what you choose, there’s a trade off that could go wrong. It’s especially troublesome if one deploys a “security website.” I’ve deployed security education websites in many environments over the past 20 years, and I rarely achieve the security level I’d like.
I’m not often a fan of conspiracy theories, except for entertainment value. This one is interesting because it combines international intrigue, the elections, and our world of notoriously poor email security.
[UPDATE: Apple now claims this was a bug; 
The University of Minnesota’s HR department send me an email in January telling me that I had to submit to a background check. The good news: I do them all the time.