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The Insecurity of Secret IT Systems

schneier.com

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Re: The Insecurity of Secret IT Systems

#21

Post by a_b__ »

The fact is that sometimes security through obscurity works. Take Skype for example, it was well known that the US government had for a long time wanted access and, depending on who you ask, failed. After being bought by MS and reconfigured, it could be argued that there are now fewer access problems.

Where obscurity fails is where the product has been poorly designed in the first place - perhaps due to lack of time or manufacture costs - or there is a failure to update when the scenario or environment for which it was built changes.

Obscurity is really a term about confidence and PR of a system (eg. ISO standards compliant?) or company (RSA anyone?). How does the company convince you that it is using best practices without compromising its competitive advantage?

The grumbles about running Windows98 are pointless if the system meets the requirements.

Re: The Insecurity of Secret IT Systems

#22

Post by a_b__ »

stretchwithme wrote: post #10

Regarding voting systems, all we ever needed was open source software. Voters were incorrectly recording their paper ballots. A PC with a punch card machine attached and running open source software could have correctly punched these cards. And we also could have had another system that read the cards right there in the polling place that the voter could use to confirm their ballot was correctly encoded. Or an phone…

Electronic voting systems cannot ever be verifiable by an end-user at the time of voting and so shouldn't be used for important votes.

A person filling out a paper ballot can easily verify the whole system (assuming they can witness the count), where-as an electronic system is almost totally intangible and leaves the voter to rely on unknown persons to verify the system.

Having an open-source code base does not improve electronic voting if the end user (my 80 year old granny) cannot verify that at every step her vote counts.

How can she know that the current, approved code was compiled using the approved compiler, installed by approved persons using proper methods, by a malware free pc, on approved voting hardware, which was handled and stored in an approved manner, and so on.

With a paper ballot all you have to do is check the paper is clean, mark your choice and place it in a box with the others.

Paper ballots are robust to recounts, 3rd party verification and voters are familiar with the system so little instruction is needed, preventing errors by novice users.

In the end voter confidence is what counts, not a drive for technology for the sake of technology.

NB. Hanging chad like problems and choosing the wrong candidate are UI/user error problems and both can occur in both paper and e-voting.

Re: The Insecurity of Secret IT Systems

#23

Post by betterunix »

a_b__ wrote: post #21

The fact is that sometimes security through obscurity works. Take Skype for example, it was well known that the US government had for a long time wanted access and, depending on who you ask, failed. After being bought by MS and reconfigured, it could be argued that there are now fewer access problems. Where obscurity fails is where the product has been poorly designed in the first place - perhaps due to lack of time…

"Take Skype for example, it was well known that the US government had for a long time wanted access and, depending on who you ask, failed. After being bought by MS and reconfigured, it could be argued that there are now fewer access problems."

That is not a security through obscurity success story. The Skype design was changed by Microsoft in a way that made government access easier.

"How does the company convince you that it is using best practices without compromising its competitive advantage?"

Your competitive advantage is not my problem. I need a secure voting machine, a secure ATM, a secure medical database, etc. If you cannot deliver a secure system to me in a way that allows me to verify its security, then you never had a competitive advantage in the first place.

Re: The Insecurity of Secret IT Systems

#24

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #3
danso wrote: post #2

I know that NSA/Snowden continues to be at the top of the news, but it's still worth pointing out again that NSA's internal system is probably one of the most secret of internal IT systems and through Snowden's work, we've found out: 1) NSA employees are easily phished and 2) They probably don't have the same level of deterministic dev ops deployments that modern tech companies depend on, given that it was Snowden's…

I'd not realised that it was the person whose job it was to install the anti-leak system who leaked everything. I guess that's an obvious outcome..

[deleted]

Re: The Insecurity of Secret IT Systems

#25

Post by peterbotond »

security in any application has to start from the beginning and nurtured by all developing this application. security can not be a bolt-on after the fact patch works. when at least these two are not applied all applications will fail miserably. security by obscurity only a make believe.

Re: The Insecurity of Secret IT Systems

#26

Post by catwell »

a_b__ wrote: post #22
stretchwithme wrote: post #10

Regarding voting systems, all we ever needed was open source software. Voters were incorrectly recording their paper ballots. A PC with a punch card machine attached and running open source software could have correctly punched these cards. And we also could have had another system that read the cards right there in the polling place that the voter could use to confirm their ballot was correctly encoded. Or an phone…

Electronic voting systems cannot ever be verifiable by an end-user at the time of voting and so shouldn't be used for important votes. A person filling out a paper ballot can easily verify the whole system (assuming they can witness the count), where-as an electronic system is almost totally intangible and leaves the voter to rely on unknown persons to verify the system. Having an open-source code base does not impro…

Your 80 year old grandmother probably already doesn't verify that her vote conts at every step. Once you have placed the ballot in a box, you have to be there in the evening to actually count the ballots. And then you have to check that at every step until the final result is obtained the sums are computed correctly. The easiest way to cheat (efficiently) at an election is certainly not to fake individual votes.

There has been a lot of FUD on e-voting, mostly as a reaction to the use of very bad, proprietary, unverified technology for that purpose. There are good e-voting systems coming up, like the one used in Estonia (https://github.com/vvk-ehk/evalimine) or Helios (https://vote.heliosvoting.org/, presentation: http://schedule2012.rmll.info/IMG/pdf/slides.pdf).

Those probably shouldn't be used for the most important elections, but they are already way more secure than, say, vote-by-mail.

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