Don’t take photos you don’t want people to see
According to E!Online, Scarlet Johansson is “fighting mad” over some nude pics of her that ended up online. Let me offer some simple security advice:
If you don’t want people to see something, don’t photograph it.
If you have a look at the pics (Links: photo1 photo2) you’ll note that she appears to have taken them herself using her mobile phone. While I certainly don’t have any inside knowledge of the case, my bet would be that the sender or recipient’s email account was compromised, not the phone itself. Of course for that to be the case, she would have had to email the images to someone, which bring us to my next bit of advice:
Don’t email photos that you don’t want people to see.
Of course there’s always the publicity angle. Leak nude pics of yourself. Benefit from the exposure, but deny intent. Then play up the victim angle, collect some sympathy votes, and keep the story alive. Ah, Hollywood.
Added 2011-09-20: I linked to the photos in the original article because of their relevance to the story — they showed her holding the camera herself. I did not copy the images to avoid a copyright infringement. It appears that they have been taken offline or access blocked.
Skype encryption flawed
University of North Carolina researchers have demonstrated that the encryption system used by Skype – and presumably other VoIP products – is flawed and leaks data. In summary, patterns in packet sizes appear to be sufficient to perform linguistic analysis. According to New Scientist, the researchers were able to decrypt 2.3 percent of conversations and accuracy is expected to increase.
There is good reason that high-end cryptographic devices offer features such as maintaining a constant data rate independent of the data being encrypted. It sounds like Skype might want to also incorporate some of those features.
Apple responds on location data
There has been a lot of discussion and speculation lately about the iPhone, how it uses location information, and the privacy implications. Apple released this information today — I’m presenting it verbatim to preserve the context. I found the bit about collecting anonymous traffic data quite interesting!
April 27, 2011
Apple Q&A on Location Data
Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices.
1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.
2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.
3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.
4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?
The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).
5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.
6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?
This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.
7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database?
It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below).
8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.
9. Does Apple currently provide any data collected from iPhones to third parties?
We provide anonymous crash logs from users that have opted in to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).
10. Does Apple believe that personal information security and privacy are important?
Yes, we strongly do. For example, iPhone was the first to ask users to give their permission for each and every app that wanted to use location. Apple will continue to be one of the leaders in strengthening personal information security and privacy.
Software Update
Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:
• reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
• ceases backing up this cache, and
• deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.
In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.
Evidence Eliminator is a bad idea
By now most of us know that when we delete a file from our computer it isn’t really gone – the space is merely marked as being available for reuse. Unlike in the physical world, where we can easily shred or burn documents we wish to dispose of (and put the others out in the same trash bag as the kitchen waste and used kitty litter) it’s relatively hard to do the same on our PCs.
If our operating systems and applications were designed with privacy in mind, we could simply tell them that we don’t want to retain any browsing history, that our web cache and cookies should be deleted when we close our browser, that we aren’t interested in being presented with a list of our most recently used files, and that the last date/time a file was read isn’t necessary information. We could also tell it to overwrite disk space when it’s done with it.
The technical reasons behind some of these issues were originally performance related, but given the speed of computers these days, there is no good reason that our computer needs to keep notes on what we’ve been using it for.
Of course when one brings up these issues, there are those who ask, “What do you have to hide?” Child pornography is an often-quoted example of why computer forensics is a good thing, and I certainly agree that child pornographers should receive an express ticket to jail (or worse). But I’m not willing to give up fundamental privacy rights and live in digital glass houses in order to make it easier to catch criminals.
I’ve written before about hard drive encryption, and full drive encryption remains the best way to safeguard your privacy. The enhanced BitLocker functionality in Windows 7 combined with the TPG chip in many new computers are a move in the right direction. The open source TrueCrypt project is great, but they need to quick adapt to new realities in Windows 7.
Self-encrypting hard drives appear to be a promising technology, but while vendors brag about them, they aren’t readily available and technical information remains marginal at best. If — as a security professional and writer — I can’t get my hands on one to test, I have to conclude that they’re not a viable option at this time.
Then there are software products that perform tasks such as wiping free space and deleting unwanted browser histories. From a functional security perspective, products like Evidence Eliminator can perform a nice clean-up of your computer, deleting temporary files, browser artefacts, and wiping unused hard drive space to eliminate ‘deleted’ data. But “Evidence Eliminator” is a really bad idea.
From a security perspective, this product (and to be fair many others in the same category) often creates a bigger problem than it solves: While they do a good job of removing unwanted data, they also do a fantastic job of creating evidence that you ran “Evidence Eliminator”. It quite amusing to read of people attempting to explain in court that they didn’t delete data pertaining to the matter in front of the court when they ran “Evidence Eliminator”. By definition, if you’re eliminating evidence, you look guilty.
Ironically, by calling the product “Evidence Eliminator”, the vendor has made performing clean-up tasks that may be quite reasonable in many circumstances look like a criminal act.
Imagine you’re at work and someone you know emails a URL. You download a file you expect contains something humours and end up with porn on your work computer. Sure we can discuss why you shouldn’t have downloaded it in the first place, but there are countless scenarios that could result in you having some type of data on your drive that you don’t want.
In the physical world, you could toss it in the shredder bin, take it home and put it in the fireplace, or otherwise dispose of it. We should have the same ability with data. But it’s just real deletion that we want, not evidence elimination.
On the off chance that enterprising developers are reading, there are two products missing from the market – or at least I can’t find them!
The first is a clean-up product that runs entirely from a USB stick and does not require installation on the PC. Running it would clean up the hard drive, overwrite browser artefacts, temporary files, wipe free hard drive space, etc. In fact, it would do most of the things that Evidence Eliminator does – except the purpose would be to clean up the computer and protect privacy – not destroy evidence.
The second is an installable package that monitors system use and cleans up after the user automatically. In short, it would protect privacy by doing what the operating system and applications should offer to do by itself really deleting stuff.
Thoughts? Questions? Ideas?
Let’s hear ‘em!
Anonymity and Privacy
Some of the most interesting security debates involve anonymity and privacy. Everyone seems to have a different idea about what those words mean. For example, some people think anonymity is a binary thing – you’re either anonymous or you’re not. But when I think of anonymity I think of two axis.
The first is how much or little someone knows about you. For example, if you know what I look like, I don’t feel completely anonymous. But I feel more anonymous than if you also know my name. Perhaps that’s because I’m a 6’7” bald guy and if you went around Ottawa asking security professionals if they knew a tall bald security/writer/photographer guy chances are that my name would come up pretty quick. Or, perhaps, it’s because my name is only part of my identity.
The other axis is how difficult it is to breach someone’s anonymity. For example, it might not be too hard to get the clerk at a small-town store to tell you the name of the customer that was in front of you in line. But getting information from other sources is more difficult.
So, when I think of anonymity, I picture a quadrant. In the upper right corner you know nothing about me and it would be really hard to find out who I am. In the lower left corner my name, address, telephone number and photo are on the front page of the Ottawa Sun.
Privacy is even more complex because it is hard to define. For example, it has been defined as:
- The right to be left alone;
- The right to exercise control over one’s personal information; and,
- A set of conditions necessary to protect our individual dignity and autonomy.
When it comes to telemarketers, the right to be left alone appeals to me. I’d also like to stop businesses from selling my name to other businesses (or telemarketers). And I’d prefer some privacy when I’m in the washroom too, thank you very much!
Anonymity and privacy are obviously related. But the interesting debate is whether anonymity is required to achieve privacy. In some cases it certainly helps: When I buy a coffee from Starbucks and pay cash, I have a relatively high level of anonymity, at least until they install cameras with face recognition software that links back to that one time I pulled out my debit card. (Of course if it expedited my mocachino with an extra shot of espresso I might not feel too violated.) But other privacy controls exist, including legislation, corporate policy and the desire to avoid negative publicity.
The problem with such privacy mechanisms is that they are outside the control of the individual. When I surf the net, I have no way of knowing what companies do with that data. I don’t know for a fact that Google isn’t building a database of every search request from my IP address and that some point in the future they’re not going to acquire (or be acquired by) companies and link my IP address to my credit card information or Facebook profile. And there are online advertising companies that make it their business to track users across multiple Web sites using cookies of the not-so-tasty variety.
Whether this matters to you or not really depends on who you are and what you do online. You may not care and it might not matter. Or, you might prefer that the only people who have your personal information are those you give it to.
As more people understand these issues, the anonymous Web surfing services will continue to gain popularity. For example, one of the best known is Anonymizer, started by astrophysicist Lance Cottrell in 1995. He was concerned about online privacy and as an early Internet user saw first-hand how much information could be captured. And his company was recently acquired by a larger firm that provides anonymous Internet access to corporations, governments and law enforcement agencies.
But before you rush out and buy, it’s important to consider the big picture. Anonymous proxies hide your real IP address, and are a great first-line defense of your online privacy. But, to be effective, you also must control cookies and carefully consider what personal information you give to businesses, including social networking sites. Remaining anonymous on the Internet to protect your privacy requires much more than hiding your IP address. It requires that you also think before you type.
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