Re: Threats in real life - what are we worried about?

[Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>]

I wrote:
>	
>	Given existing crypto tools (PGP, etc), what are the top ten
>	practical attacks against the privacy of stored data and
>	electronic mail?  Who are the bad guys? What tools do we need
>	to limit these threats?
>
>I'll post my own thoughts later.
>


Matt's Top Ten Underappreciated Threats to Privacy on the Internet
==================================================================

1.  The sorry state of software.  Everyone knows that nobody knows how
to write software.  Modern systems give hundreds of thousands of lines
of code the chance to violate security policy.  How can we be sure
that the software we trust does the right thing?  How can we reduce
the opportunities for problems?

2.  Ineffective protection against denial of service attacks.  While
not a direct threat to privacy, the ease with which almost anyone can
mount effective denial of service attacks threatens the ability to
deploy anonymous services.  You'll note that no one worries very much
about the millions of anonymous entry points to more robust networks
like the telephone system or the postal service, where it's relatively
hard (and expensive) for an individual to cause large-scale service
disruption.  How can we make the 'net robust enough to withstand
mailbombs and newsgroup spamming?

3.  Poor secret storage on networked computers.  Cryptosystems allow
you to manage large secrets by protecting smaller ones (keys).
Unfortunately, modern computers are awful at protecting even the
smallest secrets.  Multi-user networked workstations can be broken
into and their memories compromised.  Standalone, single-user
machines can be stolen or compromised through viruses that leak
secrets asynchronously.  What are the right mechanisms for storing
and managing keys on various platforms?  Remote servers, where there
may be no user available to enter a passphrase (but see threat #5,
below), are an especially hard problem.

4.  Poorly understood random number generation techniques.  Keys and
session variables need good sources of unpredictable bits.  Currently
used techniques (like event inter-arrival times) are only marginally
well understood and depend to a great deal on low-level
characteristics of the platforms on which they are run.  We need a
wider range of techniques (especially ones that work without relying
on user input), and to better understand their risks and failure
modes.  Some interesting ideas have been proposed that deserve further
study.  At CRYPTO '94 there was an interesting paper on using disk
airflow variation to get random bits.  Another interesting technique,
first proposed by Don Mitchell, involves exploiting clock skew.  Here's
a C program that seems to produce one pretty random bit per second on
most platforms.  How good are the bits?  Can we get more bandwidth out
of it?

#include <stdio.h>
#include <signal.h>
int count=0;
void printbit()
{
	signal(SIGALRM,printbit);
	alarm(1);
	printf("%1d",count&01);
	fflush(stdout);
}
main()
{
	signal(SIGALRM,printbit);
	alarm(1);
	while (1)
		count++;
}

5.  Weak passphrases.  Most crypto software addresses the key storage
and key generation problems by relying on user-generated passphrase
strings, which are presumed to contain enough entropy to produce good
key material and are also easy enough to remember that they do not
require secure storage.  While dictionary attacks are a well known
problem with short passwords, much less is known about lines of attack
against user- selected passphrase-based keys.  Shannon tells us that
English text has just over 1 bit of entropy per character, which would
seem to leave most passphrases well within reach of brute-force
search.  Less is known, however, about good techniques for enumerating
passphrases in order to exploit low entropy.  Until we have a better
understanding of how to attack passphrases, we really have no idea how
weak or strong they are.

6.  Limited support for remote trusted agents.  Almost all currently
available cryptographic software assumes that the user is in direct
control over the systems on which they run and has a secure path to
it.  For example, the interfaces to programs like PGP and CFS assume
that their input is comes from the user over a secure path like the
local console.  This is not always the case, of course; consider the
problem of reading your mail remotely when logged in over the
Internet.  We need better mechanisms for transferring the trusted
operations to the local trusted machine while keeping the logical
operations (like where the mail is) where they logically belong.

7.  Poorly understood protocol and service interactions.  Features
frequently come back to bite us, and its hard to know even where to
look.  The Internet worm was propagated via an obscure and
innocent-looking feature in sendmail; how many more features in how
many more programs have unexpected consequences just waiting to be
discovered?  Is the conventional wisdom of hiding behind firewalls
and turning off services really the only answer?

8.  Lack of scalable security infrastructure.  No comment...

9.  Poorly understood "out of band" attack risks.  Security people
tend to focus on what's easy to model.  Unfortunately, attackers focus
on what's easy to exploit.  We need a better understanding of just how
easy some non-traditional attacks are.  Most of the answers are
probably too scary to think about.  How long do our keys need to be in
the face of electromagnetic radiation, physical monitoring, Trojan
horses, social engineering, and so on and so on?

10. No broad-based demand for security.  This is a well-known problem
among almost everyone who has tied his or her fortune to selling
security products and services.  Until there is widespread demand for
transparent security, the tools and infrastructure needed to support
it will be expensive and inaccessible to many applications.  This is
partly a problem of understanding the threats and risks in real
applications, and of building systems that include security as a basic
feature rather than as a later "add on".

There's a lot missing from this list, and a lot you can disagree with
among the things that are on it.

Flame away...

-matt