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Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

bbc.co.uk

21–30 of 239 posts

Re: Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

#21
post #19

This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Some countries are getting close-ish - Denmark's NemID system, for example, is used by a lot of financial institutions. However, there remains no easy way to make ad-hoc verifiable statements like 'I am John Smith and I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org'. Governments, please solve this problem! Es…

Sweden's BankID is quite good too.

Re: Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

#22
post #19

This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Some countries are getting close-ish - Denmark's NemID system, for example, is used by a lot of financial institutions. However, there remains no easy way to make ad-hoc verifiable statements like 'I am John Smith and I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org'. Governments, please solve this problem! Es…

Hasn't Estonia solved this with their national ID smart card?

Re: Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

#23
post #11
post #4

> Mr Pavur says he believes he did not break the law himself while conducting the trial This is a bit odd. I know his partner consented to this, but this doesn't seem like it should be enough to make this not identity fraud. Obviously the research Pavur carried out is extremely valuable and the mid-sized companies failing to follow proper procedure are the real problem here, but it still seems like it would be techni…

Regardless it would then be a bad law since almost all criminal law looks at intent and reasonable expectations of how a citizen should act. We don’t need to keep replaying the vilification of security researcher game just because it involves the flawed gov systems imposed on technology itself instead of just technology. The end goal is the same, the privacy and security of end users.

Agreed. I hope any jury would nullify such a law. AKA "perverse verdict" in the UK?

Re: Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

#24
post #19

This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Some countries are getting close-ish - Denmark's NemID system, for example, is used by a lot of financial institutions. However, there remains no easy way to make ad-hoc verifiable statements like 'I am John Smith and I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org'. Governments, please solve this problem! Es…

> Governments, please solve this problem! I would prefer governments to solve it with competent Software Engineers in the mix and maybe other professionals from the finances and IT security industries, but never one single large entity.

Of course. There are plenty of different ways to build such a platform (or contract it out) - I'm not advocating any in particular.

The UK has a rather interesting example in the GOV.UK Verify service, which federates the identity verification and authentication out to third parties. The user can then choose which provider (e.g. Barclays, Post Office) they want to prove their identity through. Experian is also one of the providers, which perhaps illustrates some of the flaws with this design...

Re: Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

#25
post #19

This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Some countries are getting close-ish - Denmark's NemID system, for example, is used by a lot of financial institutions. However, there remains no easy way to make ad-hoc verifiable statements like 'I am John Smith and I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org'. Governments, please solve this problem! Es…

Italy's "PEC"[1] (Posta Elettronica Certificata, or Certified Electronic Mail) comes pretty close.

There's even an RFC[2] for it.

In order to get one, an individual has to prove their identity via a government-issued ID (ID card or passport), and that email address can henceforth be used to send emails for all official correspondence as if it were certified/verified mail, with the added bonus that both parties "know" the identity of the other party (i.e. the company knows it was very likely me who sent it, as they trust that the people in charge of having verified my ID did their job) and with the added bonus of the _contents_ of the email also being certified to have been sent from that recipient to that destination address, and not to have been tampered with (great thing to have for lawsuit reasons), unlike "standard" registered mail, who only certified that a letter has been sent and picked up.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_email#Italy [2]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6109

Re: Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

#26
post #19

This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Some countries are getting close-ish - Denmark's NemID system, for example, is used by a lot of financial institutions. However, there remains no easy way to make ad-hoc verifiable statements like 'I am John Smith and I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org'. Governments, please solve this problem! Es…

> Governments, please solve this problem! I would prefer governments to solve it with competent Software Engineers in the mix and maybe other professionals from the finances and IT security industries, but never one single large entity.

I didn't take that as he wanted legislative representatives and the like to solve it, so much as to make it a matter of focus to enlist the kinds of people you're recommending to provide a solution like this.

Personally, I really feel we need a private/public-key kind of system in place for certain things like Social Security Numbers (SSNs) in the US. Such that if a leak also includes an SSN (essentially a public key), it could then be regenerated and some apparatus to manage filtering it to the parties it was assigned to prevent needing to redistribute it manually as a consumer/user (like using your Google, Facebook, or whatever OpenID as credentials for another site and it is stored in the account showing that it is being used as such). If they could automatically detect said public keys being exposed and automate the resetting and distribution process, even better (users should still be able to manually do it if they feel it is compromised though).

Re: Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

#28
post #19

This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Some countries are getting close-ish - Denmark's NemID system, for example, is used by a lot of financial institutions. However, there remains no easy way to make ad-hoc verifiable statements like 'I am John Smith and I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org'. Governments, please solve this problem! Es…

Hasn't Estonia solved this with their national ID smart card?

I have never used it, but I do get the impression that Estonia is pretty far ahead of everyone else. I don't know if this particular use case is natively supported (but would be interested to know). I suppose it would be possible for a third party to build it.

Re: Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

#29
post #2

This is pretty appalling, really: "Overall, of the 83 firms known to have held data... 24% supplied personal information without verifying the requester's identity." Want someone else's personal data? No need to "hack into" any systems; just ask for it!

This was actually one of the risks we identified when looking at GDPR for my own businesses last year. Given that in some cases all we have is an online account with minimal personal details, how can we possibly verify their identity to an acceptable standard if someone does send us a GDPR subject access request of any kind? If they have some sort of account with us already and that has associated ID and security che…

One option would be to evaluate if it would be safe to delete the data.

In that case you could offer to delete the data. Countries typically have some expensive way to proof identity. So, delete or actually proof who you are. Of course, sending a message to, say, a know email address that to intent to do that helps avoiding angry customers.

If you cannot delete the data because it is valuable to the customer, then just to offer the service you already have to figure out have to give people access to their accounts if they lost the password.

Re: Black Hat: GDPR privacy law exploited to reveal personal data

#30
post #19

This is a reflection of the fact that we have no good way for someone to digitally prove their identity. Some countries are getting close-ish - Denmark's NemID system, for example, is used by a lot of financial institutions. However, there remains no easy way to make ad-hoc verifiable statements like 'I am John Smith and I authorise you to send this data to xyz@example.org'. Governments, please solve this problem! Es…

Shameless plug: https://www.yoti.com/

We're trying to do exactly that.

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