Interoperable Telesurgery Protocol Plaintext Unauthenticated MitM Hijacking • Hacker News Board

Re: Interoperable Telesurgery Protocol Plaintext Unauthenticated MitM Hijacking

#31

Post by gliese1337 » Fri, May 22, 2015, 7:43 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #28

virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #23

Did some digging on this. Basically: 1) Some researchers wrote a paper called "Preliminary protocol for interoperable telesurgery" in 2009. ( http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.160... ) 2) At the end of the paper, they write: "Also, security is an obvious requirement for real world adoption of this kind of service." 3) Last month, some other people showed that you could hax0r this unprotected pr…

> And video encryption probably isn’t practical over the kind of network links envisaged for remote surgery in extreme locations. That may not be a security concern but it does raise important issues of privacy. That's a curious statement. How does encrypting video increase its bandwidth requirements?

Typical block ciphers generally require adding padding, which increases the number of bytes that need to be transmitted. But that's negligible for any significant amount of data. I don't think it would ever noticeably increase bandwidth requirements.

Re: Interoperable Telesurgery Protocol Plaintext Unauthenticated MitM Hijacking

#32

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC » Fri, May 22, 2015, 8:01 PM UTC

gliese1337 wrote: post #31

tedunangst wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And video encryption probably isn’t practical over the kind of network links envisaged for remote surgery in extreme locations. That may not be a security concern but it does raise important issues of privacy. That's a curious statement. How does encrypting video increase its bandwidth requirements?

Typical block ciphers generally require adding padding, which increases the number of bytes that need to be transmitted. But that's negligible for any significant amount of data. I don't think it would ever noticeably increase bandwidth requirements.

Well, counter mode is probably a better idea anyhow--but neither 16 bytes of padding per frame nor the same amount of MAC will be an actual bandwidth problem.

Re: Interoperable Telesurgery Protocol Plaintext Unauthenticated MitM Hijacking

#33

Post by jasonjei » Sat, May 23, 2015, 12:48 AM UTC

jauer wrote: post #30

jasonjei wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm afraid I don't see the connection between the decision not to implement encryption and the presence of death causing defects. That's fine. Everyone is entitled to his/her opinion. I view the failure to implement encryption as a fatal error and an indication the code audit hasn't been thorough. Given that this is a telesurgery product, I'm quite confident encryption, trust, and authenticity are central to safe m…

We bother with TLS for accessing online banking because we don't manually build site-to-site VPNs between our house and our bank, unlike hospitals which have dedicated IT staff, a ton of security appliances of all types and, if they are in the same metro, often have dedicated waves or dark fiber between them.

The very problems that plague the unprotected networks to the site-to-site VPNs are the same: all it takes is one piece of malware. In fact, the complacency is the alarm. Just because you are in a "protected" network doesn't mean there aren't bad actors. The bad actors can get in, all they need is to find where your walls have a crack. There's a reason we call it Computer Insecurity.