12. February 2012 · Comments Off on OAuth – the privacy time bomb · Categories: blog · Tags: , ,

Andy Baio writes in Wired about the privacy dangers of OAuth.

While OAuth enables OAuth Providers to replace passwords with tokens to improve the security of authentication and authorization to third party applications, in many cases it gives those applications access to much more of your personal information than is needed for them to perform their functions. This only increases the risk associated with breaches of personal data at these third party application providers.

Andy focuses on Gmail because the risk of using them as an OAuth Provider is greater. As Andy says:

For Twitter, the consequences are unlikely to be serious since almost all activity is public. For Facebook, a mass leak of private Facebook photos could certainly be embarrassing. But for Gmail, I’m very concerned that it opens a major security flaw that’s begging to be exploited.

“You may trust Google to keep your email safe, but do you trust a three-month-old Y Combinator-funded startup created by three college kids? Or a side project from an engineer working in his 20 percent time? How about a disgruntled or curious employee of one of these third-party services?”

If you are using your GMail (Google) credentials to just authenticate to a third party application, why should the third party application have access to your emails? In the case of Xobni or Unsubscribe, for example, you do need to give them access rights because they are providing specific functions that need access to Gmail content. But why does Unsubscribe need access to message content when all it really needs is access to email senders? When you decided to use Unsubscribe, why can’t you limit them to only your Senders? The bottom line is that by using OAuth you are trusting the third party applications not to abuse the privileges you are giving them and that they have implemented effective security controls.

While Andy provides some good advice to people who use their Google, Twitter, or Facebook credentials for other applications, there is no technical reason for the third party applications to get access to so much personal information. In other words, when you allow a third party application to use one of your primary applications (OAuth Providers) for authentication and/or authorization, you should be able to control the functions and data to which the third party has access. In order for this to happen, the Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters must build in more fine-grained access controls.

At present, the OAuth providers do not seem to be motivated to limit access to user content by third party applications based on the needs of those applications. One reason might be that most users simply don’t realize how much access they are giving to third party applications when they use an OAuth Provider. With no user pressure requesting finer grained access, why would the OAuth Providers bother?

Aside from lack of user pressure, it seems to me that the OAuth Providers are economically motivated to maintain the status quo for two reasons. First, they are competing with each other to become the cornerstone for their users’ online lives and want keep the OAuth user interface as simple as possible. In other words, if authorization is too fine grained, users will have too many choices and will decide not to use that OAuth Provider. Second, the OAuth Providers want to keep things as simple as possible for third party developers to attract them.

I would hate to see the Federal Government get involved to force the OAuth Providers to provide more fine-grained access control. But I am afraid that a few highly publicized breaches will have that affect.

As Enterprises are moving to a Zero Trust Model, so must consumers.

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

10. October 2011 · Comments Off on California Governor Vetoes Bill Requiring Warrant to Search Mobile Phones | Threat Level | Wired.com · Categories: blog · Tags: ,

California Governor Vetoes Bill Requiring Warrant to Search Mobile Phones | Threat Level | Wired.com.

California Gov. Jerry Brown is vetoing legislation requiring police to obtain a court warrant to search the mobile phones of suspects at the time of any arrest.

The Sunday veto means that when police arrest anybody in the Golden State, they may search that person’s mobile phone — which in the digital age likely means the contents of persons’ e-mail, call records, text messages, photos, banking activity, cloud-storage services, and even where the phone has traveled.

My question is, what if you password protect your phone? Must you give the police the password? Would that not be akin to incriminating yourself? In other words, could you refuse to give the police the password to your phone on the grounds of 5th Amendment protection?

23. July 2011 · Comments Off on Lightweight Portable Security LPS-A Linux distro from the US Department of Defense | Unixmen · Categories: blog · Tags: , ,

Lightweight Portable Security LPS-A Linux distro from the US Department of Defense | Unixmen.

Lightweight Portable Security (LPS), created by USA’s Department of Defence, is a small Linux live CD focusing on privacy and security, for  this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and some interesing tools. LPS-Public turns an untrusted system into a trusted network client.

The environment that it offers should be largely resistant to Internet-borne security threats such as viruses and spyware, particularly when launched from read-only media such as a CDROM. The LPS system does not mount the hard drive of the host machine, so no trace of work activity can be written to the local computer.

If you’ve been doing online banking on the same computer which you use for general browsing and social networking, you need to switch your banking activities to this.

10. February 2011 · Comments Off on The Top 10 Security Questions Your CEO Should Ask — CIOUpdate.com · Categories: blog · Tags: , , , ,

The Top 10 Security Questions Your CEO Should Ask — CIOUpdate.com.

From PwC, here are the top 10 questions your CEO should be asking you:

  1. Who is accountable for protecting our critical information?
  2. How do we define our key security objectives to ensure they remain relevant?
  3. How do we evaluate the effectiveness of our security program?
  4. How do we monitor our systems and prevent breaches?
  5. What is our plan for responding to a security breach?
  6. How do we train employees to view security as their responsibility?
  7. How do we take advantage of cloud computing and still protect our information assets?
  8. Are we spending our money on the right things?
  9. How can we ensure that we comply with regulatory requirements and industry standards in the most cost-effective, efficient manner?
  10. How do we meet expectations regarding data privacy?

This article provides a paragraph or two on each one of these questions.

25. January 2011 · Comments Off on SaaS Compliance solution from Navajo Systems · Categories: blog · Tags: , , , , , , ,

While there are many compelling benefits to Software-as-a-Service solutions like Salesforce, SuccessFactors, and Gmail, there are also privacy, security and compliance inhibitors which arise from the fact that SaaS application data is stored in clear text.

For many organizations, encrypting the communication between users and SaaS applications is simply not enough. Some large organizations have resorted to installing SaaS applications in their datacenters to meet privacy, security and compliance requirements. This way they get some of the SaaS application benefits but still must endure the real estate, power, hardware, communications, and associated administrative expenses themselves.

Some organizations have restricted the use of SaaS applications to those where clear-text data does not run afoul of regulatory issues.

The ideal solution would  be to encrypt data on the way into and back out of the SaaS applications. SaaS backup solutions, for example, have been doing this for years. The file metadata stays in clear text but the files themselves are encrypted. However, for data-oriented applications like Salesforce, SuccessFactors, and Gmail, standard data encryption does not work because once the data is encrypted, you cannot search or sort on it.

Finally, a solution has come to market – Navajo Systems – which allows you to meet regulatory compliance requirements for storing, for example, Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) in SaaS applications. Navajo’s breakthrough is an encryption algorithm which allows searching and sorting. In other words, data is encrypted before it leaves your organization and is stored in the SaaS application in that same encrypted form, yet can be searched and sorted in a way that is both transparent to the SaaS application and to the users!!

Only you have the encryption keys. No one at the SaaS vendor can read your data. Full disclosure, Cymbel is partnering with Navajo. We would be glad to show you exactly how this works.

Here are links to more information about SaaS Compliance and Navajo Systems.

13. December 2010 · Comments Off on Jeremiah Grossman: Internet Explorer 9 ad blocking via “Tracing Protection” — no means yes. · Categories: blog · Tags: , , , ,

Jeremiah Grossman: Internet Explorer 9 ad blocking via “Tracing Protection” — no means yes..

Last week, the FTC issued a report recommending Congress implement Do-Not-Track legislation to help protect consumer privacy. This week, Microsoft detailed Do-Not-Track” options in the upcoming Internet Explorer 9. Coincidence? Doubtful.

No way Microsoft slammed out the code from scratch in a few short days because the FTC made some recommendation. The IE team clearly saw ad blocking as a good idea despite what they told us before and had ad blocking, errr I mean Tracking Protection, ready to go. Only they might not have had the juice to include it because of the aforementioned road blocks.

Will Mozilla make AdBlock Plus a standard feature of Firefox? AdBlock Plus is the top download in the Privacy & Security category with overd over 100 million downloads. It has over 8 million daily active users and a 5 star rating with over 2,000 reviews.

Will Mozilla try to match or exceed Microsoft? How will Google react?

Are we going to see a major shift in Internet advertising so it’s more akin to email marketing?

I think we’re witnessing the beginning of a whole new chapter in the ongoing browser war. Now we must ask, when and if Mozilla is going to add the functionality of their #1 extension natively into their browser? How can they now not do so? Can Firefox’s market-share position afford Internet Explorer to be more advanced in privacy protection features? We’ll have to wait and see what they say or do. I’m hopeful they’ll come around as Microsoft did. Even more interesting will be how Google reacts. AdBlock is their most popular add-on as well. The bottom line is these are very good signs for everyone on the Web.

25. October 2010 · Comments Off on Facebook Insecurity as a Microcosm of All The World’s Security Problems · Categories: Privacy · Tags: , ,

Facebook Insecurity as a Microcosm of All The World’s Security Problems.

Gartner’s John Pescatore weighs in on the latest chapter in the ongoing Facebook privacy controversy.

Basically, what you see is Facebook taking several steps to protect its customers – advertisers. If they were trying to protect Facebook users, they would have taken very different steps. Because what you don’t see is any real attention to actually addressing the real vulnerabilities.

So, the key takeaway: make sure that you are the actual customer when you trust your data or your customers’ data to a social network or cloud service provider, or any other 3rd party for that matter. A cloud provider can claim they are better at running a data center than you are, but if they are focusing on protecting their advertising revenue, not your data, that claim is meaningless.

24. October 2010 · Comments Off on Facebook Advertisers Can Glean Private Data – NYTimes.com · Categories: Privacy, Security-Compliance · Tags: , ,

Facebook Advertisers Can Glean Private Data – NYTimes.com.

Privacy vulnerabilities continue to be revealed on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace reports the NYTimes. The Times describes two research papers which discuss how unethical advertisers can game social networks to determine people’s private profile information like sexual orientation.

Facebook counters that it has tools in place to prevent unethical advertiser behavior. However, Facebook realizes it needs to do more. In fact, Facebook announced that it proposing encrypting user IDs as a way to prevent the sharing of IDs with data brokers. But Facebook admits this will only “address the inadvertent sharing of this information on Facebook.”

Mashable weighs in with the obvious question, “Frankly, we think that encrypting the UID parameters within an iFrame is a good idea and a good first step towards accountability. Our big question is: Why is this only happening now?”

If you are looking for a clearer technical explanation of what the fuss is all about and the limited step Facebook is proposing read Ars Technica’s, Facebook touts encryption as solution to security flaw.

13. October 2010 · Comments Off on ‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on the Web – WSJ.com · Categories: Privacy · Tags: ,

‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on the Web – WSJ.com.

Unauthorized, but not illegal, “web scraping” of personal data is big business – $840 million according to an estimate by the Wall St. Journal.

The market for personal data about Internet users is booming, and in the vanguard is the practice of “scraping.” Firms offer to harvest online conversations and collect personal details from social-networking sites, résumé sites and online forums where people might discuss their lives.

The emerging business of web scraping provides some of the raw material for a rapidly expanding data economy. Marketers spent $7.8 billion on online and offline data in 2009, according to the New York management consulting firm Winterberry Group LLC. Spending on data from online sources is set to more than double, to $840 million in 2012 from $410 million in 2009.

The Wall Street Journal’s examination of scraping—a trade that involves personal information as well as many other types of data—is part of the newspaper’s investigation into the business of tracking people’s activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

The fact-filled article is well worth reading its entirety, but it offers no ideas for a solution. At this point, you have to assume that anything you say on the web is public knowledge.

28. August 2010 · Comments Off on MPLS WAN Encryption – It’s time · Categories: Data Loss Prevention · Tags: , , , ,

Is MPLS secure? All the MPLS vendors use the term VPN (Virtual Private Network), implying some level of security. But in reality, MPLS is not encrypted and therefore subject to snooping. But of course, you have no way of knowing one way or the other.

Mike Fratto at Network Computing wrote a nice piece a couple of months ago explaining the situation.

If you talk to the WAN services folks at a carrier, their definition of a VPN will be an overlay network that is carried by another network over shared infrastructure. By the carrier’s definition, a telephone call over a PSTN is a VPN. The carrier definition is very different than the other definition of a VPN as an authenticated and encrypted layer 3 tunnel between two nodes, with one node being a network. The former definition assumes that the carriers employees are trustworthy. The latter definition doesn’t care if they are or aren’t.

In addition, compliance regimes like MA 201 CMR 17 and HIPAA are mandating WAN encryption.

To encrypt MPLS traffic and really all wide area network encryption, we recommend CipherOptics.

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