Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • October 26, 2018 3:03 PM

@ Bruce,

I don’t know who will win this arms race, if there ever will be a winner.

There is a way a potential victim can avoid being a victim, but it carries a price, quite a high one.

If you decide for some reason you might become a victim, you can fairly simply arange these days for your entire life to be recorded 25×365.25 and archived for future use as counter evidence.

The price is little or no social life, no private moments and never ever doing wrong even by accident.

The question is how much of your life do you need to record and release?

We already know that excercise recorders have already been used by prosecution teams to obtain convictions, the question is could the recordings of excercise or cardiac rate alone be enough?

With the secondary question being if an attacker obtained a copy of your excercise recording could they make a fake video to match?

With the equivalent of crypto chaining the ability of an attacker to just deleate portions of the excercise recording as might once have happened become moot.

On analysis the advantage lies not with the attacker but the well prepared target because the attacker does not know when they play their card if the target has one or more trumps to play.

This has actually happened in a way. In the UK a woman accused a conservative former politician Neil Hamilton and his wife Christine of kidnapping and assulting her. The accuser went to a well known media to the stars publicist Max Clifford, who pushed the story out in great detail into the UK MSM mainly for the salacious asspect but including the alleged time and place. After Mr & Mrs Hamilton obtained their cell phone records to show they were at a meal somewhere else entirely it fairly quickly killed the story, and police investigation. However Max Clifford kept flapping his gums which ended up costing him £100,000 in damages in court.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/aug/16/pressandpublishing.conservativeparty

Clive Robinson • October 26, 2018 5:39 PM

@ Guest,

To all appearances, you have no audit trail for your life.

Yes and no, it depends on what abilities the attacker has, and what precautions you take.

If you use any service outside of the perimiter you 100% control then you will leak information in various side channels. This can now be fairly easily analyzed with automated AI these days, look on it as being “traffic analysis on steroids”.

Thus any traffic that goes outside your 100% control can be used to paint a picture of your activities thus sending “life data” or even hashes of it to an external service such as a public ledger or other form of electronic notary will get seen and noted.

Not much is talked about when it comes to the use of AI on your externaly available signals, but it is something I’ve given some thought to over the years.

The old issues that prevented this in the past were, lack of computer power, lack of algorithmic knowledge and the cost of resources especially when it comes to gathering source data.

The first two are fairly obviously “solved problems” these days, which leaves the cost of resources.

Technology has steadily brought the price down or if you prefere effectively doubled the value of your buck year on year. Worse technology has become more or less “totally invasive” not just via IoT but by the various “Smart” grids and systems and the desire of some to extract the maximum information possible to gain extra value. That is they view not collecting everything they can as “leaving money on the table” which is not good business practice.

Few realise that the chips and signalling being used to put in utility supply “Smart Meters” are sufficient that AI driven Signal Processing can match your power consumption to activities. Especially as the devices in use become more efficient and the bulk of their power signiture is function related.

As an example if I can see the power signiture of your fridge and oven when in use, it’s quite possible to determin the ambient temprature in your kitchen, which in turn will give an indication of other factors such as the level of sun light through the kitchen window…

A power signiture for any kind of entertainment unit that has speakers will due to high efficiency audio amplifiers put the low frequency envelope of the audio being played onto the mains power which the smart meter can then measure. Like songs and broadcast audio dynamic images in films and similar will have a fairly unique power signiture that can also be matched to a database entry. These can then be checked against external sources to see wher and when you got them. Such systems are a desired “wish list” item for licencing organisations thus will no doubt appear in the future when money can be made from it.

The problem with connection to an external data network is very similar. Traffic signitures are meta-meta-data in that you do not need to see the content (data) or routing information (meta-data) to make valid assumptions about what an individual network packet is about.

For instance a request to a DNS service has a time/envelope signiture, the process of resolving the parts of the domain name give a fairly clear indication as to what level of resolving is required. If a new data stream signiture indicative of audio or video starts the fact a DNS request does or does not preceade it tells you various pieces of information.

If enough points on a network are monitered, which is what “collect it all” is all about, then a database search will fill in just by the various recorded meta-meta-data signals where your traffic has gone to or originated from. It’s the sort of basic search with self modifing rules that AI systems are a very good match for.

The question then becomes who would build such systems and who would get access to them.

Put simply level three adversaries such as SigInt agencies and major Corporates already are already doing so in what ever way they can. Level two adversaries who are technically sophisticated or well funded can get access to level three data or they can these days build sufficient systems. Thus it will only be a couple of years before even level one attackers such as the dreaded “300lb teenager in his bedroom in his parents house” gets the capability, thus amplifies their ability to dox etc.

Simply because the corporates who make these data gathering devices and build the databases don’t spend the money to make them secure to stop any levels of attacker above basic “script kiddy”. But even if they did, the script kiddy will no doubt be able to rent access to tools made by those who are slightly more adept. Because based on what is currently known about how “dark net” activities are currently monetized, it’s a fairly safe assumption that is the model that will appear.

Which means I can fairly safely predict that the cost of privacy within half a decade to a decade will be to much for the majority to afford if they are to remain part of what society will become thus demand of them.

It’s actually a war out there and what exists behind your privacy is the resource they are all seeking to obtain to commoditize you at best price so no money is left on the table. The problem is the freeloaders who get access for their own purposes.

It’s one of the reasons why I talk about what is involved with “energy-gapping” and “compartmentalizing” not just your computers but also other parts of your life. Because if people made simple changes now to make the cost of collecting their private data to high then it would not be cost effective for corporates to do and their share holders would insist they stop…