[Cryptography] cryptography Digest, Vol 12, Issue 9

[ianG]

> iang wrote:
> 
> - start quote -
> While everyone's madly rushing around to fix their bits&bobs, I'd
> encouraged you all to be alert to any evidence of *damages* either
> anecdotally or more firm.  By damages, I mean (a) rework needed to
> secure, and (b) actual breach into sites and theft of secrets, etc,
> leading to (c) theft of property/money/value etc.
> 
> In risk analysis, we lean very heavily on firm indications of actual,
> tangible damages, because risk analysis is an uncertain tool and the
> security industry is a FUD-driven sector.  Where we have actual
> experiences of lost money, time, destruction of property or whatever,
> this puts us in a much better position to predict what is worth spending
> money to protect.
> - end quote -
> 
> There are now suggestions that Heartbleed has been exploited in the
> wild:
> 
> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/wild-heart-were-intelligence-agencies-using-heartbleed-november-2013


Excellent article.  Somebody at EFF is actually thinking about what we
can learn.  Tracking exploits leads us to hints of damage.


> Even if this is not the case, I reject iang's (facetious, I know :-)
> suggestion.


I don't recall writing any such facetious suggestion, but hey, I'd love
to be precise about an apology!


> Security flaws aren't the same as tsunamis. Reporting a power station's
> possible vulnerability to the former doesn't make tsunamis more likely.
> However, the wide dissemination of a previously unknown security
> flaw *does* make its future attempted exploitation a near certainty.


OK, so you raise a good point -- in the byzantine security world,
knowledge of an exploit changes the equation, where as in the
statistical reliability/safety world, knowledge of risks should not
presumably change the likelihood of risks.

(leaving aside insurance, FUD and homeland security for now).

However I'd question your claim of near-certainty.  Seriously, and
non-facetiously.  Near-certainty predicts that there were damages/losses
for the other recent events:

   BEAST,
   the debian random bungle,
   renegotiation,
   512 bit keys,
   apple goto fail,
   gnutls goto confusion,
   (any others?)

Right?  Or have I misunderstood?

I'd really like to see it.  Precisely one of the above has some form of
reported damages of a real attack (*).  Otherwise on

Just because this is shoot the messenger week, I will specify why as
basically as I can:  I collect this evidence -- claims of damages -- so
we can build up some history of damages to ground future thinking in
some plausible imitation of scientific method.

It's either we get serious about the science of security, or we go back
to wondering why they call us Henny Penny all the time.

Fire away.



iang


(*) just to revise, damages are about people having money stolen or
similar attack of real aggression.  They are not "demonstrations" as per
the Twitter renegotiation hack.