IOT Devices Provide Comcast A Wonderful New Opportunity To Spy On You

from the monitor-and-monetize-ALL-the-things! dept

For some time now we've noted how poorly secured IOT devices provide a myriad of opportunities for hackers looking for new attack vectors into homes and businesses. That's of course when these devices aren't just coughing up your personal data voluntarily. Whether it's your smart fridge leaking your Gmail credentials or your internet-connected TV transmitting your personal conversations over the internet unencrypted, we've noted time and time again how IOT manufacturers consistently make privacy and security an afterthought -- one that's going to ultimately cost us more than some minor inconvenience.

But in addition to the internet of broken things being a privacy and security dumpster fire, these devices are providing a wonderful new opportunity for larger ISPs looking to monetize the data you feed into their networks on a daily basis. A new study out of Princeton recently constructed a fake home, filled it with real IOT devices, and then monitored just how much additional data an ISP could collect on you based in these devices' network traffic. Their findings? It's relatively trivial for ISPs to build even deeper behavior profiles on you based on everything from your internet-connected baby monitor to your not so smart vibrator.

We've long noted that while encryption and VPNs are wonderful tools for privacy, they're not some kind of panacea -- and the researchers found the same thing here:

"...encryption doesn’t stop ISPs from knowing which internet-of-things devices their users have, nor does it stop them seeing when we use those devices. In the Princeton study, ISPs could track a user’s sleep patterns by detecting when a sleep tracker was connecting to the internet. It also revealed that ISPs could identify when a home security camera detected movement and when someone was watching a live stream from their security camera."

Similar concerns have been raised (and promptly ignored in most areas) regarding information collected from smart energy meters by your power utility, since power usage can similarly provide all manner of monetizeable insight into your daily behavior. The researchers do note that more sophisticated users could use a VPN to confuse their ISP, but the full study indicates there will be some impact on network performance that could be a problem on slower connections:

"The authors say there might be ways to cut down the snooping abilities of ISPs. One possible defence involves deliberately filling a network with small amounts of traffic. This could be done by running all your internet traffic through a VPN and then programming the VPN to record and play back that traffic even when the IOT device is not in use, making it tricky for ISPs to work out when a particular device is actually being used. However, this would probably slow down the network, making it a somewhat impractical defence against network observations."

Aren't you glad Congress recently voted to kill consumer broadband privacy protections solely for the financial benefit of Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and Charter (Spectrum)? Those fairly basic rules required that ISPs be entirely transparent about what data they're collecting and who they're selling it to. The rules, proposed after Verizon was caught modifying user data packets to track online behavior (without telling anyone), also would have required customers opt in to more sensitive financial data collection. Without them, oversight of ISP data collection is sketchy at best, no matter what large ISPs and their friends claim.

While the lack of ISP transparency as to what's being collected and sold is one problem, so too is the fact that most of these devices offer little to no insight or control over what kind of data and information they're transmitting. That leaves the onus entirely on the consumer to try and cobble together an imperfect array of technical solutions to minimize ISP snooping and protect themselves (often impossible for your average grandparent or Luddite), or to take the smarter path in the smart home era and resort to older, dumber technologies whenever and wherever possible.

Filed Under: encryption, iot, privacy, security, smart devices, spying, surveillance
Companies: comcast

Company Storing Families' Personal Data Blocks Users/Researchers Informing It Of A Security Flaw

from the blockchain,-but-for-ignoring-your-problems dept

It must be repeated over and over: people who discover security flaws and report them are not the enemy. And yet, company after company after company treat security researchers and concerned users like criminals, threatening them with lawsuits and arrests rather than thanking them for bringing the issue to their attention.

Kids Pass -- a UK company providing discounts for families attending restaurants, theaters, and amusement parks -- had a problem. Any user could access any other user's personal information just by altering numbers linked to user IDs in the URL. A concerned user told security researcher Troy Hunt about the flaw. (via Boing Boing)

[J]ust this weekend I had a Twitter follower reach out via DM looking for advice on how to proceed with a risk he'd discovered when signing up to Kids Pass in the UK, a service designed to give families discounts in various locations across the country. What he'd found was the simplest of issues and one which is very well known - insecure direct object references. In fact, that link shows it's number 4 in the top 10 web application security risks and it's so high because it's easy to detect and easy to exploit. How easy? Well, can you count? Good, you can hack! Because that's all it amounted to, simply changing a short number in the URL.

Here's the example the user passed on to Hunt:

Hunt told the user to stop doing anything -- including accessing other users' information -- and immediately inform the company. The user did as instructed, contacting the company via Twitter direct message. Shortly thereafter, the user informed Hunt Kids Pass had blocked him on Twitter.

Hunt then made an attempt to speak to someone at Kids Pass… only to find out he had been blocked as well, most likely for having the gall to retweet the concerned user's message about the security flaw.

The responsible, ethical approach -- notifying a company of a security flaw as soon as possible -- was being treated like some sort of trollish attack on Kids Pass' Twitter account. From all appearances, the company simply wanted everyone to shut up about the flaw, rather than address the concerns raised by userw.

It was only after Hunt asked his followers to contact the company on his behalf that Kids Pass finally unblocked him and told everyone the "IT department was looking at it."

The belated reaction doesn't make up for the initial reaction. And Kids Pass has shown it has little interest in addressing security flaws until the problem becomes too public to ignore. Hunt points to a blog post by another security researcher who informed Kids Pass last December about its insecure system -- including the fact it sent forgotten passwords in plaintext via email to users. He heard nothing back, finally publishing his discoveries in July.

If you want people to be good web citizens and report breaches and flaws, you can't treat them like irritants or criminals when they do. Securing users' personal info is extremely important, but some companies seem to feel they should be able to handle it however they want and mute/sue/arrest those who point out how badly-flawed their systems are.

Filed Under: security, shooting the messenger, troy hunt, uk, vulnerability
Companies: kids pass

US Senators Unveil Their Attempt To Secure The Internet Of Very Broken Things

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Over the last few years we've documented in painstaking detail how the lack of any real security and privacy standards in "internet of things" devices is leading us down a path to some serious trouble. That shouldn't be particularly surprising if you've paid attention to how your refrigerator can now leak your Gmail credentials, your "smart" thermostat is now vulnerable to ransomeware attacks, your smart car could be hacked in order to kill you, your power outlets can be hacked and used to launch DDOS attacks, or how your vibrator is now busy collecting data on your daily behavior.

There's one root cause: companies that prioritized making a quick buck over implementing anything resembling sane security or privacy standards.

And despite this dysfunction now being the butt of endless jokes, things really haven't changed all that much, since actually giving a damn about the problem would erode profit margins for WiFi-enabled widget makers. The end result is the daily introduction of millions of new attack vectors for both homes and businesses on a global scale. As such, there's more than a few security experts that, no hyperbole intended, believe it's inevitable that this problem will impact core infrastructure leading to significant human casualties.

Given this is a global problem, and many of these companies are Chinese, legislating the problem away via U.S. law is likely going to be a steep uphill climb. That apparently doesn't seem to concern Congress, which this week introduced a new bill they hope will help secure the internet of very broken things:

"The new bill would require vendors that provide internet-connected equipment to the U.S. government to ensure their products are patchable and conform to industry security standards. It would also prohibit vendors from supplying devices that have unchangeable passwords or possess known security vulnerabilities. Republicans Cory Gardner and Steve Daines and Democrats Mark Warner and Ron Wyden are sponsoring the legislation, which was drafted with input from technology experts at the Atlantic Council and Harvard University. A Senate aide who helped write the bill said that companion legislation in the House was expected soon."

While IOT legislation may be well-intentioned, many of these devices (like the security cameras and DVRs that contributed to the historically massive DDOS attack on Dyn last year) are made in China, where manufacturers will laugh off foreign legislative band aids. And while there's very legitimate concerns that legislation crafted by a Luddite Congress could stifle innovation and experimentation in the space, this particular proposal does at least apply some standards to the IOT devices purchased and used by the federal government, injecting at least a layer of sanity and reflection to the rapid expansion of poorly-secured IOT devices.

Security researcher Brian Krebs highlights another good part of the bill, namely the portion that expands legal protections for cyber researchers working in "good faith" to hack equipment to find vulnerabilities so manufacturers can patch previously unknown flaws:

"Those advocates were no doubt involved in shaping other aspects of this legislation, including one that exempts cybersecurity researchers engaging in good-faith research from liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a dated anti-cybercrime law that many critics say has been abused by government prosecutors and companies to intimidate and silence security researchers. Perhaps the most infamous example of prosecutorial overreach under the CFAA comes in Aaron Swartz, a Harvard research fellow who committed suicide after being hounded by multiple CFAA fraud charges by state and federal prosecutors for downloading a large number of academic journals.

All of that said, the legislation isn't going to do enough to prevent major, looming problems. Between 20 billion and 30 billion "IOT" devices are expected to be connected to the internet by 2020 worldwide. And as Bruce Schneier has noted on occasion, the origins of this market failure begin with an apathetic cycle of dysfunction between both hardware vendors and consumers, something that the market alone has shown it's not capable of -- or seriously interested in -- fixing:

"The market can't fix this because neither the buyer nor the seller cares. The owners of the webcams and DVRs used in the denial-of-service attacks don't care. Their devices were cheap to buy, they still work, and they don't know any of the victims of the attacks. The sellers of those devices don't care: They're now selling newer and better models, and the original buyers only cared about price and features. There is no market solution, because the insecurity is what economists call an externality: It's an effect of the purchasing decision that affects other people. Think of it kind of like invisible pollution."

So while this law may be a start, it's going to take a lot more than U.S.-specific legislation to fix this particular market failure, assuming such laws don't actually manage to make the problem worse. Smart networks, smarter engineers, better routers, better code, and better communications between companies, governments, activists, and other stakeholders are all essential to get ahead of this particular threat. Fixing the internet of broken things requires a massive, over-arching, holistic effort, one that doesn't exist yet, and unfortunately isn't likely to gain serious momentum until after the internet of broken things check comes due.

Filed Under: cfaa, congress, iot, mandates, researchers, security

Russia Has Banned VPNs

from the who-needs-privacy-anyway dept

We've noted for some time that Russia has been engaged in a slow but steady assault on privacy tools like VPNs. As with most countries that have an adversarial relationship with the truth, the entire effort has been couched as necessary to protect national security and cultural morality, though the real agenda is to help prop up the country's domestic surveillance efforts and Putin's ham-fisted internet filters. This push accelerated with a new surveillance bill last year that not only mandated new encryption backdoors, but also imposed harsh new data-retention requirements on ISPs and VPN providers.

But that was only the opening salvo in Russia's assault on citizen privacy. The country has since accelerated efforts to ban anonymity on messaging apps, while simultaneously pushing new legislation that would make operating as a VPN provider in Russia all but impossible. The legislation, which would require that ISPs ban the use of VPNs sailed through the Russian Parliament:

The State Duma on Friday unanimously passed a bill that would oblige Internet providers to block websites that offer VPN services. Many Russians use VPNs to access blocked content by routing connections through servers outside the country. The lawmakers behind the bill argued that the move could help to enforce Russia's ban on disseminating extremist content online. The bill has to be approved at the upper chamber of parliament and signed by the president before it comes into effect.

Over the weekend, Putin signed the bill into law, and that story notes this bizarre "explanation" of the bill:

Leonid Levin, the head of Duma's information policy committee, has said the law is not intended to impose restrictions on law-abiding citizens but is meant only to block access to "unlawful content," RIA news agency said.

Needless to say, this wasn't received particularly well by Russian citizens that enjoy having something vaguely-resembling privacy, with 1,000 or so protesting in Moscow last weekend over the looming law:

Pavel Rassudov, 34, the former head of the Pirate Party campaign group, said at the march that "restrictions on the internet began in 2011," as the opposition to Putin held mass rallies in Moscow. "The authorities realised the Internet was a tool for mobilisation, that it brings people out onto the streets," Rassudov said. Another marcher, Lyudmila Toporova, 56, said she came to the rally because "Freedom is the most important thing in life. That's why I'm here."

Of course the end result of this kind of ridiculous policy is that encryption itself is undermined, and everybody winds up less secure. And while you'd like to think this sort of thing wouldn't happen here in the States, if you've watched the endless efforts to undermine encryption and demonize VPNs, the last five years or so, we're probably only a domestic terrorist attack or two away from voters being scared into supporting similar idiotic policy for the "safety and security" of the republic.

Filed Under: bans, dumas, encryption, privacy, russia, security, vladimir putin, vpns

Teenager Reports Laughable Flaw In Budapest Transit Authority's Ticketing System And Is Promptly Arrested

from the that's-just-mean dept

For some reason, this keeps happening and I will never understand why. For years, we have covered incidents where security researchers benignly report security flaws in the technology used by companies and governments, doing what can be characterized as a service to both the public and those entities providing the flawed tools, only to find themselves threatened, bullied, detained, or otherwise dicked with as a result. It's an incredibly frustrating trend to witness, with law enforcement groups and companies that should want to know about these flaws instead shooting the messenger in what tends to look like a fit of embarrassment.

And so the trend continues, with a teenager in Hungary being arrested after pointing out a flaw in the ticketing website for the group that acts as the Budapest public transportation authority, the BKK.

The young man discovered that he could access BKK's website, press F12 to enter the browser's developer tools mode, and modify the page's source code to alter a ticket's price. Because there was no client or server-side validation put in place, the BKK system accepted the operation and issued a ticket at a smaller price. As a demo, the young man says he bought a ticket initially priced at 9459 Hungarian forints ($35) for 50 Hungarian forints (20 US cents).

The teenager — who didn't want his name revealed — reported the issue to BKK, but the organization chose to contact the police and file a complaint, accusing the young man of hacking their systems. Police arrested the teenager in the middle of the night shortly after, even if the young man didn't live in Budapest, nor did he ever use the fraudulently obtained ticket.

Teenager discovers flaw, reports it directly to the group affected by that flaw, and subsequently gets arrested? And not only that, actually, as the BKK then held a press conference essentially to brag about the arrest before stomping its metaphorical feet and declaring that its systems were now "secure." Shortly after the press conference, an outraged internet did its thing and all of the sudden all kinds of security flaws in BKK sites began to emerge from Twitter users. On top of that, the IT company BKK contracted to put all of this "security" in place had itself sponsored "ethical hacking" contests in the past. If there is a more ethical version of hacking than finding exploits in public systems and reporting them immediately, I'm having trouble thinking of what that could possibly be.

Meanwhile, the Hungarian public got immediately pissed.

In the meantime, tens of thousands of Hungarians have shown their solidarity and support for the teenager by going on Facebook and leaving one-star reviews on BKK's page. While initially, reviews came from Hungarians, international users started leaving their own thoughts on BKK's page after the incident become a trending topic on Reddit.

"You should partner with better companies managing the security and reliability of your online purchase systems! Shame on you BKK!," said one user.

I would say this was something of a Streisand Effect except that much of it was kicked off by BKK's boasting press conference, so unless it is attempting to Streisand itself, this is more along the lines of an agency simply being as dickish as it possibly could after receiving what should have been deemed a gift from a security researcher and now getting slapped around publicly for it. All, mind you, while new security exploits are exposed by an angry internet.

Great job all around, guys.

Filed Under: arrest, blame the messenger, budapest, hungary, reporting, security, security flaws, vulnerabilities
Companies: bkk

Private Data Of 6 Million Verizon Users Left Openly Accessible On The Internet

from the Whoops-a-Daisy dept

Yet another company has been caught leaving personal customer data just sitting on an openly-accessible server for anybody to obtain and abuse. According to Upguard and security researcher Chris Vickery, the data was being stored by Nice Systems, a Ra'anana, Israel-based company employed by Verizon to store and analyze the data for an "unknown purpose." The data, left unprotected on an Amazon S3 storage server by the company, included information on six million subscribers that had called Verizon support in the last six months, including customer names, phone numbers and the account pins used to access their accounts.

Vickery notes that the ability to abuse these pin numbers was particularly problematic:

"Beyond the risks of exposed names, addresses, and account information being made accessible via the S3 bucket’s URL, the exposure of Verizon account PIN codes used to verify customers, listed alongside their associated phone numbers, is particularly concerning. Possession of these account PIN codes could allow scammers to successfully pose as customers in calls to Verizon, enabling them to gain access to accounts—an especially threatening prospect, given the increasing reliance upon mobile communications for purposes of two-factor authentication."

Similarly problematic was the fact that Verizon and Nice were notified of the breach on June 13th, but the data wasn't secured until June 22:

"This exposure is a potent example of the risks of third-party vendors handling sensitive data. The long duration of time between the initial June 13th notification to Verizon by UpGuard of this data exposure, and the ultimate closure of the breach on June 22nd, is troubling. Third-party vendor risk is business risk; sharing access to sensitive business data does not offload this risk, but merely extends it to the contracted partner, enabling cloud leaks to stretch across several continents and involve multiple enterprises."

For its part, Verizon tried to downplay the breach to ZDNet, laying the entirety of the blame on Nice while trying to insist that most of the data had no real value:

"Verizon provided the vendor with certain data to perform this work and authorized the vendor to set up AWS storage as part of this project," said a spokesperson. "Unfortunately, the vendor's employee incorrectly set their AWS storage to allow external access."...The phone giant said that the "overwhelming majority of information in the data set has no external value."

Yeah, not comforting. The timing is ironic given that Verizon was one of several ISPs that just got done lobbying Congress and the Trump administration to kill new FCC broadband privacy protections that would have taken effect back in March. Those rules (pdf) would have not only required that ISPs be transparent about what third party data vendors obtain and store customer information, but required ISPs adhere to basic private data storage and protection standards, and quickly notify subscribers when their data is exposed (impacted users in this instance do not appear to have been notified yet).

Verizon had long argued that telecom privacy protections aren't necessary because the industry could "self regulate," something quickly disproven when Verizon was busted a few years ago covertly modifying wireless user data packets to track their behavior around the internet. At one point the company insisted that privacy protections aren't necessary because "public shame," would keep the company honest -- something that's a bit difficult when customers have absolutely no idea who's collecting, reviewing, or storing (poorly) their personal information in the first place.

Filed Under: chris vickery, data, security
Companies: nice systems, verizon

Former Head Of GCHQ Says Don't Backdoor End-To-End Encryption, Attack The End Points

from the putting-an-end-to-the-end-to-end-debate dept

When he was head of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan said some pretty clueless things about the Internet and encryption. For example, in 2014, he accused tech companies of 'facilitating murder', and joined in the general demonization of strong crypto. Last year, he called for technical experts to work more closely with governments to come up with some unspecified way around encryption. Nobody really knew what he meant when he said:

"I am not in favor of banning encryption. Nor am I asking for mandatory back doors. … Not everything is a back door, still less a door which can be exploited outside a legal framework."

Now, speaking to the BBC, he has clarified those remarks, and revealed how he thinks governments should be dealing with the issue of end-to-end encryption. As he admits:

"You can't uninvent end-to-end encryption, which is the thing that has particularly annoyed people, and rightly, in recent months. You can't just do away it, you can't legislate it away. The best that you can do with end-to-end encryption is work with the companies in a cooperative way, to find ways around it frankly."

He emphasized that backdoors are not the answer:

"I absolutely don't advocate that. Building in backdoors is a threat to everybody, and it's not a good idea to weaken security for everybody in order to tackle a minority."

So what is the solution? This:

"It's cooperation to target the people who are using it. So obviously the way around encryption is to get to the end point -- a smartphone, or a laptop -- that somebody who is abusing encryption is using. That's the way to do it."

As Techdirt reported earlier this year, this is very much the approach advocated by top security experts Bruce Schneier and Orin Kerr. They published a paper describing ways to circumvent even the strongest encryption. It seems that Hannigan has got the message that methods other than crypto backdoors exist, some of which require cooperation from tech companies, which may or may not be forthcoming. It's a pity that he's no longer head of GCHQ -- he left for "personal reasons" at the beginning of this year. But maybe that has given him a new freedom to speak out against stupid approaches. We just need to hope the UK government still listens to him.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: encryption, gchq, going dark, hacking, robert hannigan, security

Tim Berners-Lee Sells Out His Creation: Officially Supports DRM In HTML

from the this-is-bad dept

For years now, we've discussed the various problems with the push (led by the MPAA, but with some help from Netflix) to officially add DRM to the HTML 5 standard. Now, some will quibble with even that description, as supporters of this proposal insist that it's not actually adding DRM, but rather this "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME) is merely just a system by which DRM might be implemented, but that's a bunch of semantic hogwash. EME is bringing DRM directly into HTML and killing the dream of a truly open internet. Instead, we get a functionally broken internet. Despite widespread protests and concerns about this, W3C boss (and inventor of the Web), Tim Berners-Lee, has signed off on the proposal. Of course, given the years of criticism over this, that signoff has come with a long and detailed defense of the decision... along with a tiny opening to stop it.

There are many issues underlying this decision, but there are two key ones that we want to discuss here: whether EME is necessary at all and whether or not the W3C should have included a special protection for security researchers.

First, the question of whether or not EME even needs to be in HTML at all. Many -- even those who dislike DRM -- have argued that it was kind of necessary. The underlying argument here is that certain content producers would effectively abandon the web without EME being in HTML5. However, this argument rests on the assumption that the web needs those content producers more than those content producers need the web -- and I'm not convinced that's an accurate portrayal of reality. It is fair to note that, especially with the rise of smart devices from phones to tablets to TVs, you could envision a world in which the big content producers "abandoned" the web and only put their content in proprietary DRM'd apps. And maybe that does happen. But my response to that is... so what? Let them make that decision and perhaps the web itself is a better place. And plenty of other, smarter, more innovative content producers can jump in and fill the gaps, providing all sorts of cool content that doesn't require DRM, until those with outdated views realize they're missing out. Separately, I tend to agree with Cory Doctorow's long-held view that DRM is an attack on basic computing principles -- one that sets up the user as a threat, rather than the person who owns the computer in question. That twisted setup leads to bad outcomes that create harm. That view, however, is clearly not in the majority, and many people admitted it was a foregone conclusion that some form of EME would move forward.

The second issue is much more problematic. A bunch of W3C members had made a clear proposal that if EME is included, there should be a covenant that W3C members will not sue security researchers under Section 1201 of the DMCA should they crack any DRM. There is no reason not to support this. Security researchers should be encouraged to be searching for vulnerabilities in DRM and encryption in order to better protect us all. And, yet, for reasons that no one can quite understand, the W3C has rejected multiple versions of this proposal, often with little discussion or explanation. The final decision from Tim Berners-Lee on this is basically "sure a covenant not to sue would have been nice, and we think companies shouldn't sue, but... since this wasn't raised at the very beginning, we're not supporting it":

We recommend organizations involved in DRM and EME implementations ensure proper security and privacy protection of their users. We also recommend that such organizations not use the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and similar laws around the world to prevent security and privacy research on the specification or on implementations. We invite them to adopt the proposed best practices for security guidelines [7] (or some variation), intended to protect security and privacy researchers. Others might advocate for protection in public policy fora – an area that is outside the scope of W3C which is a technical standards organization. In addition, the prohibition on "circumvention" of technical measures to protect copyright is broader than copyright law's protections against infringement, and it is not our intent to provide a technical hook for those paracopyright provisions.

Given that there was strong support to initially charter this work (without any mention of a covenant) and continued support to successfully provide a specification that meets the technical requirements that were presented, the Director did not feel it appropriate that the request for a covenant from a minority of Members should block the work the Working Group did to develop the specification that they were chartered to develop. Accordingly the Director overruled these objections.

This is unfortunate. What's bizarre is that the supporters of DRM basically refuse to discuss any of this. Even just a few days ago, the Center for Democracy and Technology proposed a last-ditch "very narrow" compromise to protect a limited set of security and privacy researchers (just those examining implementations of w3C specifications for privacy and security flaws.) Netflix flat out rejected this compromise saying that it's "similar to the proposal" that was made a year ago. Even though it's not. It was more narrowly focused and designed to respond to whatever concerns Netflix and others had.

The problem here seemed to be that Netflix and the MPAA realized that they had enough power to push this through without needing to protect security researchers, and just decided "we can do it, so fuck it, let's do it." And Tim Berners-Lee -- who had the ability to block it -- caved in and let it happen. The whole thing is a travesty.

Corry Doctorow has a thorough and detailed response to the W3C's decision that pushes back on many of the claims that the W3C and Berners-Lee have made in support of this decision. Here's just part of it:

We're dismayed to see the W3C literally overrule the concerns of its public interest members, security experts, accessibility members and innovative startup members, putting the institution's thumb on the scales for the large incumbents that dominate the web, ensuring that dominance lasts forever.

This will break people, companies, and projects, and it will be technologists and their lawyers, including the EFF, who will be the ones who'll have to pick up the pieces. We've seen what happens when people and small startups face the wrath of giant corporations whose ire they've aroused. We've seen those people bankrupted, jailed, and personally destroyed.

This was a bad decision done badly, and Tim Berners-Lee, the MPAA and Netflix should be ashamed. The MPAA breaking the open internet I can understand. It's what that organization has wanted to do for over a decade. But Netflix should be a supporter of the open internet, rather than an out and out detractor.

As Cory notes in his post, there is an appeals process, but it's never been used before. The EFF and others are exploring it now, but it's a hail mary process at this point. What a shame.

Filed Under: circumvention, copyright, dmca, drm, eme, html, html 5, research, security, tim berners-lee
Companies: mpaa, netflix, w3c

The Great Firewall Of China Grows Stronger As China Forces App Stores To Remove VPNs

from the total-information-control dept

Like clockwork, governments eager to censor the internet inevitably shift their gaze toward tools like VPNs used to get around restrictions. We've documented rising efforts to ban the tools use in countries like Russia, where VPN providers are being forced out of business for refusing to aid internet censorship. Whether it's to protect VoIP revenue for state-run telecom monopolies, or to prevent users from tap-dancing around state-mandated filters or other restrictions, VPNs have become the bogeyman du jour for oppressive governments looking to crack down on pesky free speech and open communication.

China's great firewall is a sterling example of draconian censorship, and since 2012 or so China has been trying to curtail both encryption and VPN use. Earlier this year China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology declared that all VPN providers now needed prior government approval to operate, a move generally seen as the opening salvo of an outright ban. These new restrictions will last until July 2021, impose fines up to $2000 on companies offering unsanctioned VPNs (read: all of them), and feature government warnings sent to users consistently caught using the tools.

But in some areas, the pretense has washed away and VPN usage has been simply banned entirely. And as of July, VPN services began disappearing from both the Android and iOS app stores, with popular VPN providers like Green informing their customers the government has forced them to shut down completely:

"Dear respected Green customers,

We have received notice from the higher authorities. We regret to inform you that Green will cease our service on July 1st, 2017. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.

We will start processing our users’ refund request after service stopped (the amount will be calculated based on the remaining days in your plan). If you need a refund, please make sure to submit your refund request by August 31, 2017. We won’t be able to process any refund request submitted after that date. Since the workload of processing the requests, information verification and money transfer would be huge, we won’t be able to set an exact date for the refund. We plan to process the refund soon after August 31, please wait patiently.

Originally, statements made by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology seemed to suggest the country's VPN ban wouldn't be fully implemented until March 2018. But these recent reports indicate that the Chinese government has grown tired of the pretense and has expedited its VPN crackdown dramatically. Since around 1-3% of China's 731 million internet users use tools like VPNs to tap dance around internet filters, even with this crackdown this will be a long, difficult, expensive game of Whack-a-Mole for the Chinese government all the same.

While VPNs are not a panacea for our endlessly eroded privacy rights, they remain an incredibly useful tool for those living under repressive regimes. Most legislative VPN bans are of the "death by a thousand cuts" variety, where lawmakers go out of their way to pretend they're not trying to kill VPNs, even if the end goal always remains the same: the elimination of any tool that might let citizens peek through the curtain of draconian efforts at information control.

Filed Under: app stores, china, encryption, great firewall, mobile, privacy, security, surveillance, vpns

Copyright Office Realizes The DMCA Fucks With Security Research While The W3C Still Doesn't See It

from the what-a-world dept

Last week, the Copyright Office finally released a report that it had been working on for some time, looking specifically at Section 1201 of the DMCA. In case you're new around here, or have somehow missed all the times we've spoken about DMCA 1201 before, that's the "anti-circumvention" part of the DMCA. It's the part that says it's against copyright law to circumvent (or provide tools to circumvent) any kind of "technological protection measures," by which it means DRM. In short: getting around DRM or selling a tool that gets around DRM -- even if it's not for the purpose of infringing on any copyrights -- is seen as automatically infringing copyright law. This is dumb for a whole host of reasons, many of which we've explored in the past. Not only is the law dumb, it's so dumb that Congress knew that it would create a massive mess for tons of legitimate uses. So it built in an even dumber procedure to try to deal with the fact it passed a dumb law (have you noticed I have opinions on Section 1201?).

Specifically, every three years, people and companies can petition the Copyright Office/Librarian of Congress to "exempt" certain technologies or uses from 1201, saying that it is legal to circumvent the technological protection measures in that case, for the succeeding three years (yes, after three years, the original exemption expires, unless it is renewed). This triennial review process has historically been an (annoying) joke, where people basically have to beg the Copyright Office to let them, say, get around DVD DRM, in order to make documentaries. Or, famously, that time in 2012 when the Librarian of Congress refused to renew the phone unlocking exemption, magically making it illegal to unlock your phone for no clear reason at all. The whole thing is fairly described as a hot mess.

And, it really harms our own security the most.

That's because security researchers often need these exemptions the most, because they don't want to be accused of violating copyright law for doing their jobs in figuring out where there are weaknesses and vulnerabilities in various technologies. So, many of the applied for exemptions tend to come from the security community -- and sometimes they're granted, and other times they are not. A year ago, some security researchers (along with the EFF) sued the US government, arguing that 1201 violates the First Amendment, scaring off security researchers, and providing none of the usual defenses against infringement, such as fair use (which the Supreme Court has argued is a necessary First Amendment valve on copyright). That case is still waiting for a judge to rule on early motions (and it's waiting a long time).

Given all that as background, it's somewhat fascinating (and marginally surprising) to see that the Copyright Office officially agrees that the 1201 setup totally sucks for security researchers, and it would actually like Congress to fix that. The report specifically recommends expanding the existing "permanent exemption" for certain types of "security testing" to make it more applicable to a wider set of security practices:

... the Office recommends that Congress consider expanding the exemption for security testing under section 1201(j). This could include expanding the definition of security testing, easing the requirement that researchers obtain authorization, and abandoning or clarifying the exemption’s multifactor test for eligibility.

There's another section in the law for "encryption research" and, again, the Copyright Office recognizes that should be expanded:

The exemption for encryption research under section 1201(g) may benefit from similar revision, including removal of the requirement to seek authorization and clarification or removal of the multifactor test.

For what it's worth, the report (obviously remembering how it got basically mocked and burned by everyone for removing the cell phone unlocking exemption in 2012) now asks for phone unlocking to be designated a permanent exemption under the law.

These are fairly small changes being sought by the Copyright Office, but it strikes me as somewhat incredible (and very disappointing) that this small bit of enlightenment goes much further than the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) view on DRM and security research. As you may recall, there's this ongoing battle over DRM in HTML 5. When the W3C refused to block it outright, some members came up with a fairly straightforward no-brainer rule: all members had to agree not to go after security researchers for circumventing the DRM in HTML 5. And the W3C rejected that proposal.

In other words, the Copyright Office -- famous for its historically expansionist view of copyright, as well as its general tilt towards supporting Hollywood over everyone else -- is now recognizing that it's obvious that security researchers should have the right to circumvent DRM without violating copyright law, while the W3C -- famous for promoting an open web -- is against this. This is "up is down, night is day, cats & dogs living together" kind of stuff. Maybe someone should let the W3C know that it's position on security researchers and DRM is now more extremist than the Copyright Offices?

Either way, at the very least, Congress should follow up on this report and expand the exemptions for security research. It doesn't just help out those researchers, it helps all of us when security researchers are able to do their jobs and help to protect us all.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, copyright office, dmca, dmca 1201, drm, research, security, triennial review
Companies: w3c