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Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

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Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#51

Post by ksk »

Buge wrote: post #17
grimskin wrote: post #12

Well, they definitely do fail at the very core. For the non-enterprise Gmail accounts, there is basically no way for account owners to reattain control over an account if it was hijacked. Google product forums full of people blocked from the recovery of their account by sudo-AI recovery form and all the support they get is repeated "use recovery form" from some kind of "google community volunteers" (or something like…

Whenever you make the recovery process easier, you make it easier for attackers to "recover" victims' accounts. Switching from pseudo-AI to humans isn't necessarily better. I had an attacker successfully social engineer a support person into changing the email associated with one of my videogame accounts which had some valuable items. Preventing attackers from getting my password is something I can do myself. Prevent…

>Whenever you make the recovery process easier, you make it easier for attackers to "recover" victims' accounts.

Only if you define easier as 'badly designed process'.

> I had an attacker successfully social engineer a support person into changing the email associated with one of my videogame accounts which had some valuable items.

That is unfortunate, but why do you believe this will always be the case?

>So I prefer services to have difficult recovery.

Maybe this can be an opt-in for the more 'security-minded' minority. There is no reason to have the same process for every user. Both of the positions "Preventing attackers from getting my password is something I can do myself." and ". Preventing attackers from "recovering" my account is not something I can do myself." rely on humans not making mistakes. We can improve on both (service & user) sides to reduce mistakes.

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#52

Post by ksk »

Isn't this just about who 'other than google' can access your data? Its sort of like creating an API and allowing only one person to use that API. The API itself is the problem, not the fact that only one person can access it. But I don't get the pressure on Google here. What do people expect them to do if their entire business model is based on data harvesting. The only way to fix this would be to have a legally mandated opt-in policy on data collection. This will let Google charge money from end users, and maybe make them feel much better about it too.

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#53

Post by sametmax »

UncleMeat wrote: post #49
sametmax wrote: post #15

So no PRISM ? And analytics and google font don't collect my data when I'm not on a google site ? And no scanning of my gmail messages ? And I can install updates for my Android apps easily without linking my personal email to my phone ( and risking cloud contact/photo sync if I didn't do this right) ? And ads don't get personalized to my profile according to all those data ?

Did any company have the legal ability to resist prism?

My Godwin sense is tickling.

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#54

Post by AceJohnny2 »

smt88 wrote: post #43
theDoug wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always ask him directly, rather than work in imagination. He is a friendly person.

> You can always ask him directly, rather than work in imagination He has a lot of professional incentive not to disclose privacy problems at Google...

Exactly.

He is approachable on G+ and Twitter, but plain game theory means I'd doubt any reassuring answer.

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#55

Post by rainbowmverse »

z3t4 wrote: post #40
jacquesm wrote: post #24

Google could easily protect the privacy of their users but it would need to be a directive from the top down and they would have to actually mean it. All this is is an attempt to show themselves as the good guys relative to Facebook whereas Google is in many ways just as bad, just along different axis. At heart both Facebook and Google are advertising scum of the very worst kind that hold the world hostage with some…

I couple of years ago I went to bed with the computer on. I woke up in the middle of the night with hard drives in full rage. My first thought was that Vista is probably doing a defrag, but I was pretty sure I had turned that feature off. So I ran perfmon to see what was going on: googleupdate.exe was scanning all drives, not only the system drive, but all of them. I purged all Google software from the computer (Goog…

I don't know if it's related or even on the right place in the timeline, but at some point Chrome started doing virus scans on Windows.

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#56

Post by Buge »

ksk wrote: post #51
Buge wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever you make the recovery process easier, you make it easier for attackers to "recover" victims' accounts. Switching from pseudo-AI to humans isn't necessarily better. I had an attacker successfully social engineer a support person into changing the email associated with one of my videogame accounts which had some valuable items. Preventing attackers from getting my password is something I can do myself. Prevent…

>Whenever you make the recovery process easier, you make it easier for attackers to "recover" victims' accounts. Only if you define easier as 'badly designed process'. > I had an attacker successfully social engineer a support person into changing the email associated with one of my videogame accounts which had some valuable items. That is unfortunate, but why do you believe this will always be the case? >So I prefer…

>Only if you define easier as 'badly designed process'.

I'd be interested to know what a good process is.

>That is unfortunate, but why do you believe this will always be the case?

I don't believe most (if any) online accounts that I have provide enough profit to the service owner to hire and train employees with enough expertise, time, and resources to properly determine a valid recovery attempt from a fake one.

Social engineering employees just seems so easy from what I've seen. It's so reliable it can be done on stage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SstZAIxl8wk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc7scxvKQOo

It just takes a single slip up and you lose. Whereas attackers can just keep trying.

>Maybe this can be an opt-in for the more 'security-minded' minority.

Yeah I agree it's a good idea. In fact that's what I've done on my primary google account

https://landing.google.com/advancedprotection/

But that implementation isn't perfect, it requires giving up some features and buying U2F keys. Preferably you could opt into exactly the protection you want, so you could get the recovery security without having to buy security keys for example.

I agree there could be better implementations, but they would cost more. I think it's a three way tradeoff between cost, easy recover, and security. When I hear someone advocating for easier recovery without advocating for higher cost, then I immediately think there will be a lowering of security.

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#57

Post by ksk »

Buge wrote: post #56
ksk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Whenever you make the recovery process easier, you make it easier for attackers to "recover" victims' accounts. Only if you define easier as 'badly designed process'. > I had an attacker successfully social engineer a support person into changing the email associated with one of my videogame accounts which had some valuable items. That is unfortunate, but why do you believe this will always be the case? >So I prefer…

>Only if you define easier as 'badly designed process'. I'd be interested to know what a good process is. >That is unfortunate, but why do you believe this will always be the case? I don't believe most (if any) online accounts that I have provide enough profit to the service owner to hire and train employees with enough expertise, time, and resources to properly determine a valid recovery attempt from a fake one. Soc…

>I'd be interested to know what a good process is.

IMHO, A good process would have several tiers, each being more manual, less automated, and more time consuming. The basic tier would be security questions, alternate email, SMS, 2FA, etc. The next tier could be establishing identity and would mean communicating with a real person. You can send a signed affidavit along with a government issued ID and the person would verify it. Then they would have to establish that the account itself belongs a specific person, and that that person is you. This can be done in various ways - billing address, CC info (if applicable to that service), etc, etc. A more real answer would be dependent on the actual service and what information the service captures at signup, etc.

>I don't believe most (if any) online accounts that I have provide enough profit to the service owner to hire and train employees with enough expertise, time, and resources to properly determine a valid recovery attempt from a fake one.

Well, then that is a different argument and I'd agree that it takes time and money to get a good process in place.

But if you think about it your logic can be applied to anything right?? I don't believe most (if any) software companies have enough profit motive to test their software for security bugs or hire people who have expertise in security.

>Social engineering employees just seems so easy from what I've seen. It's so reliable it can be done on stage:

Yeah, that is an example of a bad process.

Re: Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users

#58

Post by Buge »

ksk wrote: post #57
Buge wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Only if you define easier as 'badly designed process'. I'd be interested to know what a good process is. >That is unfortunate, but why do you believe this will always be the case? I don't believe most (if any) online accounts that I have provide enough profit to the service owner to hire and train employees with enough expertise, time, and resources to properly determine a valid recovery attempt from a fake one. Soc…

>I'd be interested to know what a good process is. IMHO, A good process would have several tiers, each being more manual, less automated, and more time consuming. The basic tier would be security questions, alternate email, SMS, 2FA, etc. The next tier could be establishing identity and would mean communicating with a real person. You can send a signed affidavit along with a government issued ID and the person would…

The cost of hiring security engineers and testing for security bugs is constant with regard to number of users. Whether you have 1000 users or 1 billion users, your service has the same security if you spend the same amount on testing an engineers.

But the cost of human intervention in recovery increases linearly with the number of users.

I agree with your ideas for automation. But human intervention has problems.

One solution for human intervention is to charge a non-refundable fee for recovery. This has the advantage of discouraging attackers from trying to recover. The problem is I think this would cause bad PR for the companies. Now instead of blog posts saying "Google locked me out of my account" there would be blog posts saying "Google is charging me $20 to access my own account" or "Google is holding my account hostage for cash".

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