Posted by Craig H on 29 May 2013
I had fun presenting at the DC4420 security meetup in London yesterday. The topic was “Security Lessons from Bletchley Park and Enigma” and the slides are now up on SlideShare.
We covered how the Enigma machine works, how Bletchley Park exploited German mistakes, and the five lessons I picked out were:
Posted in Cryptography, Enigma | 3 Comments »
Posted by Craig H on 10 April 2013
Last month I was pleased to attend the BSIMM Europe Open Forum. BSIMM is a model for assessing software security activities within an organisation; I have been following it since its first release in 2009, and over the last several months I’ve been able to use it in earnest at Visa Europe.
For me, the most interesting discussion at the forum was on presenting BSIMM assessment results in a visually compelling way. The BSIMM document uses spider charts, which hide potentially valuable information about activities at lower maturity levels. Sammy Migues presented a format he uses at Cigital, called “equalizer diagrams”, which reveal that information but lack the comparison with a benchmark.
I decided to ask Louise (the other half of Franklin Heath) about this, as data visualisation is one of her principal skills. We’ve come up with something I like to call a “DIP switch diagram”, which I will explain in this post. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Software Security, Visualisations | 1 Comment »
Posted by Louise H on 8 December 2012
…The madness being a visualisation of Open University module results between 2007 and 2011.
For the last 18 months, I have been studying for a degree with the Open University. I’ve successfully completed the equivalent of the first year of full-time study – composed of 120 Level One points, split over modules in both Business and IT. The result of this is that I now have letters after my name – Cert Computing and IT, and Cert Bus Stud. (I especially like the latter). I am now studying two second Level modules in programming. And like many students, I am easily distracted by displacement activities.
Last week, someone posted a breakdown of 2011 results to one of the OU Facebook groups. This document contained percentage breakdowns of results by module codes, and straightaway some numbers caught my eye. For instance, why did only 29.9% of students complete module B190?
Curious, I loaded this pdf document into an excel spreadsheet to muck about with it some more. I quickly realised I needed some more context around this information. What was module B190? What level was it? How many credits did it provide?
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Data, Visualisations | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Craig H on 3 April 2012
I was privileged to present our Enigma simulator app at the Mobile Monday London Demo Night last night; it was pretty nerve-racking, doing a live demo in front of a vocal crowd of 200 knowledgable people with a strict time limit of 3 minutes, but happily the response was enthusiastic and positive!
Apart from giving everyone a quick lesson in how to use an Enigma machine, the main aim was to share the progress so far of our experiment, using in-app advertising and in-app billing for charity fund-raising. This chart shows the numbers of downloads in the few weeks following the app’s release on Google Play (green line) and the revenue breakdown between adverts (dark blue) and donations (light blue):
Posted in Applications, Enigma | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Craig H on 4 February 2012
This started when I was asked to do some prototyping work on Android by a client last November; I hadn’t done any programming on Android before, but I was familiar with Java from my time working on Enhydra Enterprise at Lutris Technologies. When I joined Lutris in 2000 I was new to Java (after 15 or so years working with C on UNIX™) so I wrote an Enigma simulator in Java as a learning project (it was related to security, a good way of getting to grips with object orientation, and fun!) I hadn’t used the code in over 10 years since, but I dusted it off and got it running on Android to get familiar with the new environment.
Having spent a couple of days on it, I had it running with a rudimentary UI and was familiar enough with the Android SDK to put the Enigma project aside and concentrate on the paid work, but I did still wonder if something useful could be done with the code. Back when I first wrote the logic of the simulator, there was a real Enigma machine out on a table at Bletchley Park that you could physically use and experience what the real operators in World War II had to do. These days, with auction prices of the machines topping $200,000, they’re all locked away behind glass. Given the touch UI of Android, it occurred to me that a good enough simulation could be a useful educational tool, perhaps put alongside museum displays on a tablet computer to give people something of the real feel of the machine.
Posted in Applications, Enigma, Payment | Tagged: enigma simulator, world war ii | 3 Comments »
Posted by Craig H on 15 January 2012
You can’t work in software product security for as long as I have and not learn something about export controls, like it or not! Historically, many governments regarded encryption as military technology and defined and controlled it as such in their regulations. These days, pretty much anyone who uses the Internet or a mobile phone (and that’s more than 2/3 of the world’s entire population) uses encryption every day, for shopping on the web, logging in to social networks, or simply to call their friends. Nevertheless, export control regulations for encryption are still on the statute books of most countries around the world, and could still be enforced. The UK records of export control prosecutions and fines don’t include any relating to encryption technology in recent years; I would be interested to know if there have been any elsewhere.
Although I have sat in many export control meetings with lawyers over the last twenty-some years, I have to point out that I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. I just thought it might interest others if I share my thinking on the current regimes of export controls, as I’m now in the situation of needing to consider it (again) as we want to publish an Android app that contains cryptographic technology (a simulation of a World War II Enigma machine, more on this soon…)
The main things I’ve learned about export controls on cryptography are that common sense often doesn’t apply and nothing is ever simple.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Applications, Cryptography, Enigma, Export Control | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Craig H on 9 February 2011
McAfee put out a press release this week which has been picked up by many news outlets, leading with two statements that are factually correct but blatantly misleading:
That is clearly intended to make people think 46 is bigger than 36, so the bad guys must be concentrating more on mobile malware now, and that’s what most of the news outlets are reporting, but that conclusion is ABSOLUTELY WRONG.
You can either say that mobile malware increased by 46% and overall malware increased by 56% (36/64), or you can say that 32% (46/146) of total mobile malware was written in 2010 and 36% of total overall malware was written in 2010. Mixing the frames of reference is obvious misdirection, and that’s even before pointing out that total mobile malware, according to their own statistics, is less than 1000, whereas total non-mobile malware is nearly 55 million!
McAfee’s full report is here.
Posted in Malware | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Craig H on 22 January 2011
There was a thought-provoking post yesterday from Chris Palmer, Technology Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He specifically calls out Google Android, for being an open source platform but not being open about security fixes. I agree this looks bad – I’ve been following a couple of threads on the Android Security Discussions group on this topic, waiting for an answer from Google staff, but none has been forthcoming.
I don’t really blame Google for not announcing the details of fixed security vulnerabilities though; the reasons are clear, and pointed out in the EFF post (inability to patch operator-customised ROMs). The Symbian Foundation faced the same dilemma, but didn’t recklessly say they were going to announce fixed security vulnerabilities in the first place! Google should at least be honest about their policy.
That said, I disagree with the EFF on two points: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Open Source, Vulnerabilities | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Craig H on 30 December 2010
It’s nearly New Year, so it’s time for the usual “Next year will be the year of mobile malware” posts from companies trying to sell you PC-style anti-virus products. They’ve been saying this every year for 5 years now, and it still hasn’t happened because, very simply, phones aren’t PCs.
There are many control points which exist for phone software but not for PCs: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Malware | 2 Comments »
Posted by Craig H on 19 December 2010
I was the lead author for the book Symbian OS Platform Security published in 2006, at the time that the first Symbian OS v9 phones with platform security came out. The Symbian Foundation put a wiki version of the book online earlier this year, so that the content would be freely available to the community and people could contribute corrections and additions. The foundation wiki closed last week, but Wiley has kindly agreed to us hosting the book wiki here to keep the resource available. Our MediaWiki is now up and running, and the book wiki is available there.
I’ve been thinking for some time that we co-authors of the book should put together an article covering the lessons learned from nearly 5 years of the Symbian platform security architecture in the field; there are certainly some things that, in hindsight, I would choose to do differently. Maybe we can use this wiki to make that a living document!
Posted in Announcement | Leave a Comment »
