UW Computer Security Research and Course Blog

University of Washington CSE PhD student Dan Halperin et al.’s paper on the security and privacy for pacemakers and implantable defibrillators just received the Best Paper Award at the annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (a.k.a. the “Oakland” conference).

Dan and the rest of the team from UW, UMass Amherst, and Harvard Medical School found that an implantable cardioverter defibrillator can leak private information and can allow unauthorized parties to modify settings that control, among other things, shock therapies.  

You can read Dan’s full paper and the FAQ, as well as his earlier work on the topic of medical device security.  You can also read summaries of Dan’s work in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and the Associated Press.  Bruce Schneier also provides excellent commentary.

Congratulations Dan!

I’m not sure if many people read this blog, but I recently noticed that the UW project Phalanx (slides, paper, and poster available from Colin Dixon’s site, recently featured on Slashdot) brought up the idea of countering botnets by setting up neutral (’white-hat’ was tossed around in the /. comments) botnets to negate the adverse effects.

Any thoughts on this? It’s a curiously fun conceptualization, but could this potentially be just digging a bigger grave for the internet?

Our research group (Charlie Reis, Yoshi Kohno, and Steve Gribble from UW CSE, and Nick Weaver from ICSI) has just presented a measurement study showing that many users are receiving web pages that have been modified in-flight.  The pages are changed between the web server and the user’s browser, either by ISPs injecting advertisements, enterprise firewalls injecting script code, or client-side proxies that block popups and ads.  These changes are often unwanted by either publishers or users, and they can also be dangerous: we found that several types of changes introduced bugs and security vulnerabilities into otherwise safe and functional pages.

To study this, we measured how often our own web page, http://vancouver.cs.washington.edu, was modified when users visited it.  A piece of JavaScript code that we call a “web tripwire” detected such modifications, allowing us to record the change and notify the user.  Our study found that about 1% of the 50,000 visitors to our page received a modified version.  While 70% of these changes were caused by client-side proxies, we did see many changes caused by ISPs and firewalls as well.

For more information on our study and our results, you can read our analysis at Detecting In-Flight Page Changes with Web Tripwires, as well as our recent NSDI 2008 paper (PDF).  Our results have also been covered recently in the news media here, here, and here.

If you would like to add a web tripwire to your own page, we have an open source toolkit that you can download and host on your web server.  We also have a web tripwire service that is hosted by our server, which you can add to your page with a single line of JavaScript code.

Have a great spring break everyone!

To readers of this blog: Please expect low activity for a while. The University of Washington is on the quarter system, and our quarter just ended. Everyone in the class is, of course, encouraged to still contribute articles to this blog. And we’ll continue using this blog (or more sophisticated forum environments) in future courses.  Stay tuned for more information .

The IMA is a rather public place where students, faculty, and spouses can take fitness classes, lift weights, or use an expansive cardio room.

The assests include fitness machines, sports equipement, and simply the space, which when occupied by a unwelcome visitor, makes it unusable to a valid ima-goer. In addition, there is wifi access, as well as internet ready terminals. (Read on …)

The Husky Union Building is the center of life on campus. It is home to the Associated Students of the University of Washington, hundreds of student clubs and organizations, the university bookstore, food vendors, university employee payroll and accounting, information services, games area, campus-wide lost & found, US Bank, bike shop, hair salon, newsstand, event services, and many more departments.

(Read on …)

Summary:Home automation systems in general attempt to enable home owners to have a “smart” house. Instead of light switches you have integrated panels that control everything from your lights, to your shades, to your entertainment system, climate control, alarm system, motorized locks, etc. Some specific examples of such systems like those offered by Control4 use wireless communications between the panels and devices they control. Some also have integration with cell phone applications. One of the selling points for these systems is that they improve security.

(Read on …)

This blog post on freedom-to-tinker came up in my feed reader today: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1265

The post is an e-mail from a company that makes e-voting machines that is threatening legal action if their voting machine is analyzed and the results published.

What does everyone think of this?

Overview

This is a security review of “Smart Guns,” a general class of locking/use prevention mechanisms for firearms that rely on biometrics or other authentication indicators (such as “smart” chips embedded in the gun and in rings or other tokens worn by the intended user) to identify a person who is authorized to use the firearm, while preventing unauthorized persons from discharging the weapon. The Wikipedia article has some further broad overview information regarding the subject.

(Read on …)

In a recent interview with “Condé Nast Portfolio”, Google CEO Eric Schmidt warns us all that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger might “break the internet” due to the consolidation of web-mail, instant messaging, and other services that would follow as a result. This relates to a still on the table 40+ billion dollar offer that Microsoft has proposed to Yahoo. While the deal is not cemented yet, representatives for the respective companies have reportedly had frequent rendezvous at Mayflower conference rooms to “feel things out” before big money exchanges hands.

The big issue at hand is the oncoming breaking of the Internet, which clearly has broad reaching implications, particularly for Google. The search giant has bet its entire business model on the premise that the Internet be categorically unbroken, at least most of the time, and has a vested interest in ensuring the continued heartbeat of the web. This is in contrast with Microsoft, which could deal with an Internet breakage without all that much worry for its bottom line. This fact should alarm anyone with perceptive eyes; perhaps “breaking the Internet” is the first gunshot in a drawn out war of attrition Microsoft has planned.

According to Schmidt, Microsoft’s previous antitrust trial was about breaking interoperable open systems. Thus, we should all be wondering what level of nefariousness currently runs through Microsoft’s veins that it would embark on a conquest to contort the consolidation of Yahoo’s web offerings in someway as to weaponize open systems into a torrent of Internet pain and disruptiveness. One can only grimace at the proverbial ring of power Microsoft will be able to wield when it is able commit such acts as merging its MSN messenger userbase with that of the wildly popular Yahoo Messenger.

The Internet using public should assess the risk for Internet breakage and policy makers should react accordingly. But we should also keep in mind that if a Microsoft Yahoo merger could break the Internet, smaller deals might lead to some sort of fractures or cracks in the Internet. For example, Microsoft recently invested several hundred million dollars into Facebook, which caused observable tremors in the Internet’s various tubes. Caveat emptor.

Source: http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/03/14/Google-CEO-Eric-Schmidt-Interview