When the “Apple Encryption Issue” reached Piers Morgan

How can we have an intelligent and reasoned debate about mobile device forensics?

I woke up early this morning after getting back late from this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It has been a long week and I’ve been moderating and speaking at various events on cyber security and encryption throughout the week. It won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the “Apple encryption issue” as everyone seems to have referred to it, has been at the top of the news and I have been asked what I think pretty much every day this week. Late last night, I’d seen a twitter spat kicking off between comedy writer and director Graham Linehan and Piers Morgan on the topic, but went to bed, exhausted from the week.

It was still being talked about this morning. My friend Pat Walshe who is one of the world’s leading mobile industry privacy specialists, had quoted a tweet from Piers Morgan:

Ironically, Piers Morgan himself has been accused of overseeing the hacking of phones, something which he has repeatedly denied, despite Mirror Group Newspapers admitting that some stories may have been obtained by illegal means during his tenure and having recently paid compensation to victims of phone (voicemail) hacking, a topic about which I have written in the past.

This week I’ll be up at York St John University where they’ve asked me to teach cyber security to their undergraduate computer scientists. The reason I agreed to teach there was because they highly value ethical concerns, something which I will be weaving into all our discussions this week. The biggest question these students will have this week will be the “what would you do?” scenario in relation to the San Bernadino case.

The truth is, this is not a question of technology engineering and encryption, it is a question of policy and what we as a society want and expect.

The moral aspects have been widely debated with Apple’s Tim Cook bringing, in my view, the debate to a distasteful low by somehow linking the issue to cancer. I’ve tried to stay out of the debate up until now because it has become a circus of people who don’t understand the technical aspects pontificating about how easy it is to break into devices versus encryption activists who won’t accept anything less than “encrypt all the things” (some of whom also don’t understand the technical bits). I sincerely hope that there isn’t a backlash on me here from either side for just voicing an opinion, some friends of mine have deliberately stayed quiet because of this – I’m exercising my right to free speech and I hope people respect that.

The truth is, this is not a question of technology engineering and encryption, it is a question of policy and what we as a society want and expect. If a member of my family is murdered do I expect the police to be able to do their job and investigate everything that was on that person’s phone? Absolutely. Conversely, if I was accused of a crime that I didn’t commit and I wasn’t in a position to handover the password (see Matthew Green’s muddy puddle test), would I also want them to do it? Of course. It is called justice.

Dealing with the world as it is

The mobile phones and digital devices of today replace all of our previous scraps of notepaper, letters, diaries, pictures etc that would have been left around our lives. If someone is murdered or something horrific happens to someone, this information could be used to enable the lawful investigation of a crime. The Scenes of Crime Officer of the past and defence team would have examined all of these items and ultimately present the evidence in court, contributing to a case for or against. Now consider today’s world. Everything is on our phone – our diaries and notes are digital, our pictures are on our phones, our letters are emails or WhatsApp messages. So in the case of the scene of a crime, the police may literally be faced with a body and a phone. How is the crime solved and how is justice done? The digital forensic data is the case.

Remember, someone who has actually committed a crime is probably going to say they didn’t do it. The phone data itself is usually more reliable than witnesses and defendant testimony in telling the story of what actually happened and criminals know that. I’ve been involved with digital forensics for mobile devices in the past and have seen first-hand the conviction of criminals who continually denied having committed a serious crime, despite their phone data stating otherwise. This has brought redress to their victim’s families and brought justice for someone who can no longer speak.

There is no easy answer

On the other side of course, we’re carrying these objects around with us every day and the information can be intensely private. We don’t want criminals or strangers to steal that information. The counter-argument is that the mechanisms and methods to facilitate access to encrypted material would fall into the hands of the bad guys. And this is the challenge we face – there is absolutely no easy answer to this. People are also worried that authoritarian regimes will use the same tools to help further oppress their citizens and make it easier for the state to set people up. Sadly I think that is going to happen anyway in some of those places, with or without this issue being in play.

US companies are also fighting hard to sell products globally and they need to recover their export position following the Snowden revelations. It is in their business interests to be seen to fight these orders in order to s
ell product. It appears that Tim Cook wants to reinforce Apple’s privacy marketing message through this fight. Other less scrupulous countries are probably rubbing their hands in glee watching this show, whilst locally banning encryption, knowing that they’ll continue doing that and attempting to block US-made technology whatever the outcome of the case.

Hacking around

Even now, I have seen tweets from iPhone hackers who are more than capable of an attempt to solve this current case and no doubt they would gain significant amounts financially from doing so – because the method that they develop could potentially be transferable.

This is the same battle that my colleagues in the mobile world fight on a daily basis – a hole is found and exploited and we fix it; a continual technological arms race to see who can do the better job. Piers Morgan has a point, just badly put – given enough time, effort and money the San Bernadino device and encryption could be broken into – it will just be a hell of a lot. It won’t be broken by a guy in a shop on Tottenham Court Road (see my talk on the history of mobile phone hacking to understand this a bit more).

Something that has not been discussed is that we also have a ludicrous situation now whereby private forensic companies seem to be ‘developing’ methods to get into mobile handsets when in actual fact many of them will either re-package hacking and rooting tools and pass them off as their own solutions, as well as purchasing from black and grey markets for exploits, at premium prices. This is very frustrating for the mobile industry as it contributes to security problems. Meanwhile, the Police are being forced to try and do their jobs with not just one hand tied behind their back, it now seems like two. So what should we do about that? What do we consider to be “forensically certified” if the tools are based on fairly dirty hacks?

How do we solve the problem?

We as democratic societies ask and expect our Police forces to be able to investigate crimes under a legal framework that we all accept via the people we elect to Parliament or Senate. If the law needs to be tested, then that should happen through a court – which is exactly what is happening now in the US. What we’re seeing is democracy in action, it’s just messy but at least people in the US and the UK have that option. Many people around the world do not.

On the technical side, we will need to also consider that there are also a multitude of connected devices coming to the market for smart homes, connected cars and things we haven’t even thought of yet as part of the rapidly increasing “Internet of Things”. I hate to say it, but in the future, digital forensics is going to become ever more complex and perhaps the privacy issues for individuals will centre on what a few large technology companies are doing behind your back with your own data rather than the Police trying to do their job with a legal warrant. Other companies need to be ready to step up to ensure consumers are not the product.

I don’t have a clear solution to the overall issue of encrypted devices and I don’t think you’ll thank me for writing another thousand words on the topic of key escrow. Most of the time I respond to people by saying it is significantly complex. The issues we are wrestling with now do need to be debated, but that debate needs to be intellectually sound and unfortunately we are hearing a lot from people with loud voices, but less from the people who really understand. The students I’m meeting next week will be not only our future engineers, but possibly future leaders of companies and even politicians so it is important that they understand every angle. It will also be their future and every other young person’s that matters in the final decision over San Bernadino.

Personally, I just hope that I don’t keep getting angry and end up sat in my dressing gown until lunchtime writing about tweets I saw at breakfast time.

Exploring Threats to IoT Security

I was recently invited to give a talk on the threat landscape of IoT at Bletchley Park on IoT Security as part of NMI’s IoT Security Summit. Of course you can only touch the surface in 30 minutes, but the idea was to give people a flavour of the situation and to point to some potential solutions to avoid future badness. My company, Copper Horse is doing a lot of work on this topic right now and it is pretty exciting for us to be involved in helping to secure the future for everyone and every thing, right across the world.

If you’re thinking about developing an IoT product or service and need some help with securing it, do feel free to get in touch with us.

Updating the Future

Later today I’ll be speaking at B-Sides London about software updates and how they are probably the only effective mechanism that can defend users against the malicious use of discovered, exploitable vulnerabilities. Despite that, we still have a long way to go and the rush towards everything being connected could leave users more exposed than they are now.

The recent “effective power” SMS bug in iOS really showed that even with a relatively minor user interface bug, there can be widespread disruption caused and in that case mainly because people thought it would be funny to send it to their friends.

The state of mobile phone updates

In vertical supply chains that are generally wholly owned by the vendor (as in the Apple case), it is relatively straightforward to deploy fixes to users. The device’s security architecture supports all the mechanisms to authenticate itself correctly, pick up a secure update and unpack it, verify and deliver it to the user. The internal processes for software testing and approval are streamlined and consistent so users can get updates quickly. This is not the case for other operating systems. Android users have a very complicated supply chain to deal with unless they have a Google supplied device. Mobile network interoperability issues can also cause problems, so network operators have to drive test every device and approve the updates that come through. Security updates are often bundled with other system updates, meaning that critical security issues can stay open because users just don’t get them fixed for months on end.

That’s if they get an update at all. Some manufacturers have a very chequered history when it comes to supporting devices after they’ve left the factory. If users are not updated and they’re continually exposed to serious internet security flaws such as those experienced with SSL, who is responsible? At the moment it seems nobody is. There is no regulation that says that users must be updated. There seems to be a shift in the mobile industry towards longer software support lifecycles – Microsoft has committed to 36 months support and Google at least 18 months, but there is still a long way to go in terms of ensuring that patch teams at manufacturers remain available to fix security issues and ensuring that an ‘adequate’ end-of-life for products is achieved and communicated properly to users.

The internet of abandoned devices

A lot of IoT devices have no ability to be updated, let alone securely. The foundations are simply not there. There is no secure boot ROM, a secure anchor of trust from which to start from, there is no secure booting mechanism to carefully build up trust as the device starts and web update mechanisms are often not even secured using SSL. Software builds are often as not unencrypted and certainly not digitally signed.

So with this starting point for our future, it appears that many of the hard lessons of the mobile phone world have not seen transference to the IoT world. Even then, we have a lot of future challenges. Many IoT devices or elements of the automotive space are ‘headless’ – they have no user display or interface, so the user themselves has no inkling of what is going on, good or bad. What is often termed “cyber-physical” can rapidly become real issues for people. A problem with an update to a connected health device can really harm a lot of people. Shortly before Google’s acquisition of Nest, a user had tweeted complaining that his pipes had burst. Understanding that certain services cannot just be turned off to allow for an update is key to engineering in this space.

Many of the devices that are planned to be deployed are severely constrained. Updating a device with memory and battery limitations is going to be possible only in limited circumstances. Many of these devices are going to be physically inaccessible too, but still need to be trusted. It’s not simply a question of replacement of obsolete devices – digging a vibration sensor out of the concrete of a bridge is going to be pretty cumbersome. Some of this space will require systems architecture re-thinking and mechanisms to be able to live with the risk. It may be that is simply impossible to have end-to-end security that can be trusted for any real length of time. As engineers if we start from the point that we can’t trust anything that has been deployed in the field and that some of it can’t be updated at all, we might avoid some serious future issues.

Cyber Security in the Mobile World: MWC Lunchtime Seminar Series

I’ve been running a cyber session on behalf of UKTI and BIS for the past few years. The event has been an increasing draw as a hub for security and privacy discussion at Mobile World Congress. We have an absolutely stellar line-up this year, across three days of lunchtime sessions and I’m really looking forward to MCing! If you’re around at MWC, come along to the UKTI stand in Hall 7 (7C40) at the times below.

#MWC15

Cyber Security in the Mobile World: MWC Lunchtime Seminar Series

In the fourth year of our MWC Cyber Security in the Mobile World event, the topic remains at the top of the headlines. 2014 saw a large number of attacks which were both news-grabbing and serious. Are things getting better or are they going to get worse?

Securing the Internet of Things
Mon 2nd March
12:00 to 12:40
Location: Hall 7, UKTI stand 7C40

The Internet of Things (IoT) has exploded in the last year. Many machine-to-machine (M2M) and IoT devices being purchased by consumers and being implemented within technology from cars to chemical plants, are we adequately prepared to handle the increased cyber risk?

Introduction:

• Richard Parris, Intercede: Introduction to the Cyber Growth Partnership

Keynote speakers:

• Richard Parris, Intercede: The Role of SMEs in Securing IoT
• Marc Canel, Vice President of Security, ARM: Hardware security in IoT
• Svetlana Grant, GSMA: End to End IoT Security

Mobile Cyber Security for Businesses
Tues 3rd March
12:45 to 13:25
Location: Hall 7, UKTI stand 7C40

The Prime Minister recently said that 8 of 10 large businesses in Britain have had some sort of cyber attack against them. With a big increase in the number of mobile devices, how can businesses defend themselves, their data and their employees? What cyber standards are being developed and what enterprise security mechanisms are being put into the devices themselves?

4 person keynote panel, moderated by David Rogers:

• ETSI, Adrian Scrase, CTO
• Samsung, KNOX, Rick Segal, VP KNOX Group
• Good Technologies, Phil Barnett, Head of EMEA
• Adaptive Mobile, Ciaran Bradley

Innovation in Cyber Security: Secure by Default
Wed 4th March
11:40 to 12:20
Location: Hall 7, UKTI stand 7C40

Our speakers will get straight to the point by giving 3 minute lightning talks on a variety of innovations in cyber security.

1. Symantec, IoT Security, Brian Witten
2. W3C, Web Cryptography, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux
3. NCC Group, Innovative Security Assessment Techniques, Andy Davis
4. Plextek, Automotive Security, Paul Martin, CTO
5. SQR Systems, End-to-End Security for Mobile Networks, Nithin Thomas, CEO
6. CSIT, Queens University, Belfast, Philip Mills & David Crozier
7. Trustonic, Your Place or Mine? Trust in Mobile Devices, Jon Geater, CTO
8. NquiringMinds, Picosec: Secure Internet of Things, Nick Allott, CEO
9. Blackphone, Blackphone update, Phil Zimmermann
10. GSMA, The Future of Mobile Privacy, Pat Walshe

Security and Privacy Events at Mobile World Congress 2015

We’ve listed out some interesting Security and Privacy events from 2015’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This year sees a general shift in topic focus to Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) and Internet of Things (IoT). Security still isn’t a ‘core’ part of MWC – it doesn’t have a dedicated zone for example on-site, but as it pervades most topics, it gets mentioned at least once in every session!

Sunday 1st March 
1) Copper Horse Mobile Security Dinner
21:00 – Secret Location in Barcelona

Monday 2nd March
1) UKTI Cyber Security in the Mobile World lunchtime series: Securing the Internet of Things
12:00 – 12:40, Hall 7, Stand 7C40

14:00 – 15:30 Hall 4, Auditorium 3

3) Security and IdM on WebRTC
15:00 – 14:00 Spanish Pavilion (Congress Square)

4) Ensuring User-Centred Privacy in a Connected World
16:00 – 17:30 Hall 4, Auditorium 3

Tuesday 3rd March 
1) GSMA Seminar Series at Mobile World Congress: Mobile Connect – Restoring trust in online services by implementing identity solutions that offer convenience and privacy for consumers and enterprises 
09:00 – 12:00 Theatre 1 CC1.1

2) Mobile Security Forum presented by AVG 
11:45 – 14:00 – Hall 8.0 – Theatre District -Theatre D

3) UKTI Cyber Security in the Mobile World lunchtime series: Mobile Cyber Security for Businesses 12:45 – 13:25 Hall 7, Stand 7C40

4) Mobile, Mobility and Cyber Security
17:00 – 21:00 Happy Rock Bar and Grill, 373-385 Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 08015

5) Wireless and Internet Security B2B Matchmaking Event 
18:30 – 22:00 CTTI Carrer Salvador Espriu, 45-51 08908 L’Hospitalet de Llobregat

Wednesday 4th March 
1) UKTI Cyber Security in the Mobile World lunchtime series: Innovation in Cyber Security: Secure by Default 
11:40 to 12:20 Hall 7, Stand 7C40

2) The Explosion of Imaging 
14:00 – 15:00 Hall 4, Auditorium 5

3) The New Security Challenges: Perspectives from Service Providers
16:30 – 17:30 Hall 4, Auditorium 4

Thursday 5th March 
1) Everything is Connected: Enabling IoT
11:30 – 13:00 Hall 4, Auditorium 2

If you’d like a meet up with the Copper Horse team to talk mobile security, IoT or drones, please drop us an email or tweet us @copperhorseuk. We’ll also be demonstrating our progress on securing IoT in the Picosec project on the NQuiringMinds stand in Hall 7: 7C70.

 Picosec Project

Feel free to leave a comment with information on any presentations or events we may have missed and we’ll look to add them.

Note: update 13/02/15 to correct Monday time order and add Quobis event.

Master of the House? Who Controls the Home in the Internet of Things?

I had an interesting conversation with an American friend recently about how the AT&T Digital Life product had helped him take control of the temperature in his house…. from his wife!

I’ve experienced air conditioning wars at a company I used to work at – the thermostat was at the end of the office near the door. At various points, certain people would go and turn it up to full heat, whilst others would go and turn it fully down to cold. It was a mess. In the end facilities resolved it by taking control away entirely and nobody was happy.

Whilst slightly amusing, it does raise interesting questions for the future home internet-of-things (IoT) solutions.

Is the administrator or ‘Master’ of the house IoT system de facto the most tech-savvy person in the house? Statistics on technical career choices would dictate that is probably usually a man. Does that put women in an unfair or weak position when it comes to privacy?
What rights do other family members have to privacy and control?
What about visitors?

Rental Homes and Holiday Lets

What about rented homes? In the future home automation, monitoring and other IoT solutions are likely to be built in to new homes. What rights do people who are leasing homes have when it comes to ensuring that the Landlord cannot monitor or control such a system?

Abusive and Controlling Relationships

What happens in cases of domestic violence, controlling behaviour and abuse? Spyware applications are often used by jealous partners so there is nothing to say that such people wouldn’t also use IoT technology as part of their controlling behaviour.

The Good Side

On the flip-side, there are plenty of examples of cameras being used by home owners which have caught thieves, discovered abuse by child minders and by carers for the elderly. For some vulnerable people, door cameras have been helpful to deter and detect cold callers who would take financial advantage of them.

These new social realities are happening now. Whilst home IoT solutions are generally fantastic, for some people, even being at home may become a problem.

Mobile World Congress – RIM Porsche fun

I promised you all that I’d publish an amusing story about the RIM Porsche 911 at Mobile World Congress last week. For those who don’t know about the background, RIM purchased QNX in 2010 who just happen to also do the embedded software for Porsche and others. There is a video explaining all that stuff below:

I was very impressed by this demo by the way. The coolest part is the live map of the Nurburgring giving you the right braking points because of the GPS link-up (if anyone is reading this from Porsche or RIM I would love to take it round the Ring by the way!).

Anyway, so I was standing there, the Porsche was sitting there unattended as was the Blackberry handset that was part of the demo. I can tell you that the password for the Blackberry was not “porsche” ;-). I opened up the glove box and had a quick look inside only to be presented with a Cradlepoint WiFi router filling the entirety of the space inside:

RIM Porsche glove box

Staring at me from the top of the router was a white label on the top. I’ve enhanced this in the picture below so you can see it properly. Yes, that’s right, they had a label with a default password (a reasonably weak one too) stuck to the top of the router! 🙂 Obviously I’ve blanked out the actual password in the pics:

Default password anyone?

Now I just want to say here that if anyone from RIM is reading this, please do not crank this up as a security incident or go mental at the QNX guys, this is just an amusing story. After all, it’s a demo and chances are the default password was not being used, someone had probably changed it.

Security is only as good as its weakest link

However, here is the serious bit – with all the convergence of mobile tech and the emergence of connected homes, cars and cities, it just goes to show that security is often only as good as its weakest link. That may not be the mobile technology itself, just something it’s connected to. Oh yes, another security message here – don’t leave phones unattended on trade show stands and always lock your glove box!