Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Long Odds: 7,975 to 1 Against

Commentary::Statistics
Audience::Entry
UUID: df96273e-2da9-4d92-9b6d-cbdfdfb9b5c8

What went wrong by noon. So that you can say, "I am doing way better than that guy."

Waking up at 0430

That's 4:30AM to an unfortunate majority of my fellow citizens. Side note: we are one of a very few countries to use this system, and I hate it. It's harder to parse in software, etc. But leaving the side note firmly aside, waking up at 0430 sucks, unless you have some good reason for it. Which I did not. It just happened, so it sucked.

My month-old coffee maker decided to not make coffee

If I am up at 0430, a cup of coffee will usually sound like a truly fine idea. Grrr, and dig out the drip pot I use when I'm camping. It makes very good coffee, though not good enough to wade through warranty hassles. Because nothing is that good.

Discovered that it had not rained

You might think that no rain is a Good Thing, but then you might not be living in western Oregon, in a year that has set records for number of days above 90° F (I don't mind the Fahrenheit scale, because of better resolution). and an ongoing drought. There was rain in the forecast, but NOAA, as usual, blew it. I had been hoping to prep the ground for a new herb garden this evening, but that ground remains hard as stone.

The clothes dryer does not dry clothes

Forgot to toss wet laundry in last night, when I was working late (I work at least 90% from home), so I did it this morning. Motor runs, and it heats up. But the drum doesn't spin, unless you spin it by hand, which you should not be able to do. Great. Probably a belt has broken, or somehow come off of a pulley. Deal with it tomorrow, since I'm driving into town anyway, for another coffee maker. Because screw waiting for some random warranty process to complete: I'll donate the replacement to some worthy group.

Retreat to data analysis fails

The work projects were all well ahead of schedule, except for one new project that I didn't know the extent of. Fine. The sample is a series of small (all under 4 MB) flat files, and the usual approach for this sort of thing, under Linux, is to poke them with bash shell tools, before loading them into an iPython notebook, and doing the real analysis with the Pandas data analysis library. I went a bit too far in the bash stage, binning some things out with regular expressions in GNU grep. How many results are in a single-digit bin, versus a 10-19 bin?

It turned out that in the first file I examined the numbers were equal, which was, to put it mildly, unlikely. Of course, the now you have two problems RegEx issue came to mind, so I did a bit of staring at code, which revealed no bug. I checked the result three different ways, and found it to be accurate.

Then I did what I should have done to start with, given the way the day had gone far. I checked the other files, and found that this was the only file that generated equal numbers. Given the way the day had gone so far, I was biased toward looking for something else that had gone Badly Wrong, however unlikely, and I wasted time.

7,975 to 1 against

Those were the odds (calculated after the fact) against running into that particular scenario. What are the odds of the day, overall, having gone so incalculably wrong? I have no idea. Because incalculable. Duh. We lack crucial numbers on coffee maker (by manufacturer and model number) failure rates...

There's a well-known example of unlikely things happening on a daily basis. If you have a data source, look at how many cars are registered in your state/province/whatever. Then, next time you are doing some random drive, pick a license plate number, and calculate the odds of having seen it.

There are probably very long odds against it. If not, congratulations may be in order: you may have just had an opportunity to discover, in day-to-day life, how difficult randomness (the source of much cryptography) really is. Consider sources of error e.g. picking a plate close to home, at a time many of your neighbors leave for work, is going to skew your result.

A double-plus-good would arise from seeing such a failure of randomness, and gaining an insight into the power, for good or ill, of data mining.

Monday, September 14, 2015

Risk Transfer Failure: a Possible Example

Commentary::Risk
Audience::Intermediate
UUID: 2f7d104e-1066-4735-a1a7-c1c0f39882f4

In classic risk analysis, if such a thing can be said to exist, there are four categories of risk response.

1. Mitigate
2. Avoid
3. Transfer
4. Accept

where Transfer means transfer part or all of the risk by e.g. insurance, hedging, outsourcing, or partnering. This category is sometimes split into Transfer and Share, giving us five categories.

There are many things that can go wrong in assigning the probability/consequence numbers that drive which response category is chosen. But let us make the completely unwarranted assumption that those are all solved problems, and apply our imperfect solution to the risk of the loss of medical records. The choice to transfer risk is usually made when that risk is evaluated as low probability, but high consequence.

One assumes that this what Cottage Healthcare System did when they chose transfer the risk, via insurance, to Columbia Casualty Company in the form of a "NetProtect360" policy, as they are subject to HIPPA regulation, which amongst other things, requires a risk analysis.

Then, in 2013 32,500 records were stolen, and in a class action, they were sued by their customers for $4.125 million, which Columbia paid. Risk transferred, job done, mission accomplished, right? Well, no.

It turns out that when Columbia paid off on the policy, they reserved all rights, including the right to seek reimbursement. There was an ongoing Department of Justice investigation, which was entirely appropriate, as HIPPA is federal law, and it turns out that Cottage had done some things that were perhaps unwise, to put it mildly, such as placing those records on an Internet-facing anonymous FTP server. Given the current state of network scanning, which is best described as 'constant', this made the actual risk high probability, not low. It also became visible to Google, which made the breach a virtual certainty.

In applying for the policy, Columbia required a "Risk Control Self Assessment", which included such questions as "Do you have a way to detect unauthorized access or attempts to access sensitive information?" and "Do you control and track all changes to your network to ensure it remains secure?", to which Cottage ticked "Yes", and which then became part of the terms of the policy. Access via anonymous FTP is obviously not compatible with either of these.

HIPPA Bites Again

And now we are back to the DoJ investigation. The risk analysis required by HIPAA contains questions such as the following.

  • §164.312(a)(1) Standard Does your practice identify the security settings for each of its information systems and electronic devices that control access?
  • §164.312(a)(2)(i) Required Does your practice have policies and procedures for the assignment of a unique identifier for each authorized user?
  • §164.312(a)(2)(i) Required Does your practice require that each user enter a unique user identifier prior to obtaining access to ePHI?

where ePHI means electronic Protected Health Information. Access via anonymous FTP is obviously a complete non-starter, and Cottage would seem to have violated Code of Federal Regulations Title 45. See 45 CFR 164.312 -Technical safeguards.

We Now Have a Partial Risk Transfer Failure

At the very least, legal fees are mounting. Columbia sought reimbursement in United States District Court, Central District of California. The case was dismissed without prejudice (meaning the issue can reappear) in July, because the policy also allows for resolution by mediation, and both parties have decided to pursue that approach first.

We may never know the degree to which risk transfer failed. Cottage is a not-for-profit, so some information may turn up in financials - a Form 990, or it may fail, and reappear in the courts. But mediation might drag on for quite a while, and I could miss the resolution.

I'm curious because at the moment public information on examples of risk transfer failure is rare. I expect that to change: insurance companies moved into this market some time ago, and they are growing tired of paying out potentially large (Target had $50 million in coverage, which may be insufficient) settlements, particularly where failures on the part of the insured seem provably fundamental and complete.

Takeaways

It seems possible, even likely, that was a rogue server installation. It happens: I've found an Internet-facing rogue myself, which contained sensitive information on a new product. The cause seems to generally be that there was some sort of perceived business emergency, it was supposed to be temporary, and there was a disconnect between operations and security. 

1- Compliance with the terms of an insurance policy must be included in security operations.
2- Whether you have transferred risk or not, pay attention to the fundamentals. Scan your network, and analyze traffic logs.

Also, while it isn't a takeaway from this specific example, be aware of the possible existence of so-called 'Shadow IT' within your organization. The server that bites may exist not in your DMZ, but in the cloud, funded by credit card. Administrative controls fail at least as often as technical controls.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Don't Roll Your Own Crypto: Examples

Commentary::Crypto
Audience::Entry
UUID: bb828445-8bfc-4ccf-835b-5fdfa181ffc6

The usual reason given for asking software developers to not roll their own crypto is that anyone can build a cryptosystem that they cannot themselves break. That is perfectly true, but there don't seem to be many concrete examples that might convince the unwary. I'd like to provide a couple.

What most people see are references to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's there are known knowns response to a question (much laughter from media pundits), and more scholarly approaches, such as calling it the Dunning–Kruger effect (a cognitive bias) after their widely-quoted Unskilled and Unaware paper.

Lots of people in the security trenches think of it simply as some_random_person who doesn't know that they have no freaking clue. That's a bit unfair, because we all do this, to some degree – that's the nature of a cognitive bias. For example, many people who can actually write would consider my blog posts a prime example. A more appropriate example would be the (several) people I have met who do networking, including quite competent jobs of network architecture, who have never read an RFC, and have only a vague idea of what the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is. In many areas of IT, one can get by perfectly well without deep knowledge. There are fewer such areas in security, and none at all in cryptographic design and implementation.

The IETF are a great example for me to use, because I generally like to make more people aware of their existence, and, in this specific case because I recommend the IETF Crypto Forum Research Group Discussion Archive - Date Index as the first of those concrete examples. Read a few threads, and you will hopefully realize that this is something best left to specialists – those who have a made a career of it.

If that doesn't do it, have a look at Introduction to Modern Cryptography, by Katz and Lindell. You can look inside the second edition on Amazon. The first edition was a game-changer because it widely introduced provable security: the notion that rigorous mathematical proofs of the properties of a cryptosystem were the way forward. Provable security is one of the few means by which cryptography may get past the invent-break-fix stage. Here's a search onBirthday Attack, in the first edition at Google Books. Katz maintains a page on the book linking to reviews, courses where the book is used as a text, and errata, as well as a page on the page on the second edition.

On my shelves, I have only the first edition of Katz and Lindell, from 2007. It impressed me enormously, and now there is a second edition. So why aren't I talking about that edition? Because I am in no way qualified to roll my own crypto, and can't take years to learn the subject. My opinion would be irrelevant, even if I had one. Again, it's a very specialized thing, and unless you are both extremely clever, and willing to devote the better part of a career to it, you really shouldn't go there.

Also, please be aware that provable security is about algorithms. Implementations of those algorithms is a whole different thing, and we as yet have no complete solution to the implement-break-fix cycle. Crypto code is often complex, not least because it needs to defend against things like timing attacks. That famous line about "all bugs being shallow, given enough eyeballs," certainly does not apply here, where the essential requirement are those very few highly qualified eyeballs. Hopefully auditing well-commented code. Let me remind everyone that Heartbleed was an implementation bug, in one of the most widely used protocols (TLS, though also DTLS) crypto libraries (openssl), yet it remained undiscovered for two years.

So, for the third time, don't go there. Because there is already enough suffering in the world. Your time will likely be far better spent along the following lines.

  • understanding what you are trying to secure, and from whom
  • the strengths and weaknesses of various crypto suites and algorithms
  • their applicability to the problem you are currently facing
  • their suitability on your intended deployment platform

About this lack of recent posts

Sorry about that. Well, not really. It's been due to a combination of several things. Some professional stuff that I can't talk about, but mostly because Oregon in the summer. I am pretty outdoors-oriented in my off time, and needed to take advantage of the weather, which will be turning Pacific Northwest bad, which is famously bad, soon enough. 

I expect that now that the long Labor Day weekend is over, the pace will pick up a bit. Standing on the deck sipping coffee at 0530 this morning, with a half moon in the east, and Orion and the Pleiades almost at zenith was great, though I was listening for owls, and didn't hear any. And it wasn't so long ago that sunrise was at 0530, and none of this would have been seen. At the Winter Solstice, when there are less than 9 hours of any light in the sky, and it's likely to be pouring rain during those brief hours, I'll probably be posting a lot more often.