Category: Privacy & Security
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How the Nokia Browser Decrypts SSL Traffic: A "Man in the Client"
Over the past couple of days there has been some press coverage over security researcher Guarang Pandya’s report that the browser on his Nokia phone was sending all of his traffic to Nokia proxy servers, including his HTTPS traffic. The disturbing part of his report was evidence that Nokia is not just proxying, but actually…
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Predictions for 2013
After a year’s hiatus, our annual predictions post is back! As usual, these predictions reflect the results of brainstorming among many affiliates and friends of the blog, so you should not attribute any prediction to any individual (including me–I’m just the scribe). Without further ado, the tech policy predictions for 2013:
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Turktrust Certificate Authority Errors Demonstrate The Risk of "Subordinate" Certificates
Update: More details have continued to come out, and I think that they generally support the less-paranoid version of events. There continues to be discussion on the mozilla.dev.security.policy list, Turktrust has given more details, and Mozilla has just opened up for public viewing their own detailed internal response documentation (including copies of all of the…
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Report on the NSF "Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace" PI meeting
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) Principal Investigator Meeting (whew!) took place Nov. 27-29, 2012, at the Gaylord Hotel just outside Washington, DC. The SaTC program is NSF’s flagship for cybersecurity research, although it certainly isn’t the only NSF funding in this area. The purpose of this blog posting is to…
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End-to-End Encrypted GMail? Not So Easy
Last week Julian Sanchez urged Google to offer end-to-end encryption for GMail, so that your messages would be known to you and your browser (and your email correspondents) but not to Google itself. Julian explained why this would be a positive step for users and, arguably, for Google itself. Let’s talk about what would be…
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You found a security hole. Now what?
The recent conviction of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer for identity theft and conspiracy has renewed interest in the question of what researchers should do when they find security vulnerabilities in popular products. See, for example, Matt Blaze’s op-ed on how the research community views these matters, and Weev’s own response. Weev and associates discovered a flaw…
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What happens when responsible disclosure fails?
The topic of how to handle security vulnerabilities has been discussed for years. Wikipedia defines responsible disclosure as: Responsible disclosure is a computer security term describing a vulnerability disclosure model. It is like full disclosure, with the addition that all stakeholders agree to allow a period of time for the vulnerability to be patched before…
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When Technology Sanctions Backfire: The Syria Blackout
American policymakers face an increasingly complex set of choices about whether to permit commerce with “repressive regimes” for core internet technologies. The more straightforward cases involve prohibitions on US import of critical network technology from states that we suspect may include surveillance backdoors. For example, fears of “cyber espionage” have fueled a push for import…
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No Longer Bit Players: Internet Governance & Economic Growth in Developing Countries
The 200 sovereign state members of the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will gather in Dubai this week for the World Conference of International Telecommunications (WCIT). The WCIT is a treaty developed to facilitate global interconnection and interoperability between telecommunications carriers. The treaty was last reviewed in 1988, an era where the majority of telecommunications networks…
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Smart Campaigns, Meet Smart Voters
Zeynep pointed to her New York Times op-ed, “Beware the Smart Campaign,” about political campaigns collecting and exploiting detailed information about individual voters. Given the emerging conventional wisdom that the Obama campaign’s technological superiority played an important role in the President’s re-election, we should expect more aggressive attempts to micro-target voters by both parties in…