[aklug] Re: ACS Google Gateway

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 11:01 PM, Christopher Brown <cbrown@woods.net> wrote:
>
> Wow, out of touch for a few days any everyone has started buying their
> tin foil in bulk.

This may be partially due to the fact that the collection and
correlation is happening in bulk.

Chris, if you're not wearing your tin-foil hat, you're not paying attention.

You know how you read about a clever digital break-in technique, and
think "Wow, I never thought of that, but from now on, we'd better do X
to protect this kind of system"? The "tin-foil hat" reaction is being
triggered because we don't know where the data-correlation
vulnerabilities lie, so we're scrambling to minimize all exposure.

This is actually a valid technique in the hardening world. Known
vulnerabilities in the past with SUID binaries? Strip the setuid bit
from *all* binaries that don't absolutely require it.

Some folks are trying to do the data-leakage version of that. And for
good reason.

And unlike Google and the digital experts, we don't have time to
deeply grok each system that we connect to. So we ask questions --
just like Greg did. I totally support his approach. Just because we
can't think of a reason that it could be exploited doesn't mean that
there isn't one -- one that an army of PhDs outfitted with football
fields full of computers could figure out.

> When you talk to anything in the Internet, they can collect a truly
> ridiculous amount of information.

And if by "they", you mean that single powerful entities or single
attackers can collect information about all of your online (and
indirectly, offline) activity across all Internet services, then yes.

> If you "use their services" (as in have an account with them) they can
> collect even more.

Greg's concern is about reducing the attack surface by minimizing what
is exposed, which I think is very, very reasonable given the
circumstances.

> All in all, it is far more than any reasonable person should be
> comfortable with.
>
> But, it is no different than shopping at the local grocery or bulk store
> with a CC, or with a CC and membership card.

This is incorrect, because search engines (especially Google, due to
its market share) are de-facto single-source providers of information
to users, and acquirers of information about users.

Even just Google knows more about us than has been possible in human
history without hiring a PI to tail you 24/7, and having someone break
into your house.

Location services know where you are, down to a [value less than
100-foot] radius, 24/7.

Google knows that you have the flu before you do:

  http://www.google.org/flutrends/us/

Target knows you're pregnant before you do:

  http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

If you put your friend's unlisted phone number in your phone, anyone
who can access your address book knows their number:

    https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/nsa_harvesting.html

This is a ridiculously truncated list of what's actually happening
that is public knowledge. And that list is very likely a ridiculously
small subset of what's happening that we don't know about.

All of this information is available to your government (regardless of
regime), or to any attacker who can breach the companies (or the
devices).

If big companies or big governments have millions of cores to throw at
neural networks to brute-force scour through their Big Data caches,
looking for new ways to correlate data ... well, individual users are
completely outclassed. By orders of magnitude.

And the data aggregators then become juicy targets:

    http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/09/data-broker-giants-hacked-by-id-theft-service/

I know that NSA has a legitimate mission. We geeks need to figure out
how to create technology that will support good political decisions
and lawmaking, and allow for lawful intercept while at the same time
protecting privacy and minimizing the chances of abuse.

But I assert that minimizing your data-leakage surface is not
tin-foil-hat. Rather, failing to recognize the validity of that
approach is sticking your head in the sand.

Royce
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Received on Thu Oct 17 05:27:49 2013