_/_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
_/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/_/
_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
_/_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/_/ _/ _/
============================================================================
Newsletter of the IEEE Computer Society's TC on Security and Privacy
Electronic Issue 84 May 24, 2008
Hilarie Orman, Editor Sven Dietrich, Assoc. Editor
cipher-editor @ ieee-security.org cipher-assoc-editor @ ieee-security.org
Yong Guan
Book Review Editor Calendar Editor
cipher-bookrev @ ieee-security.org cipher-cfp @ ieee-security.org
============================================================================
The newsletter is also at http://www.ieee-security.org/cipher.html
Cipher is published 6 times per year
Contents:
* Letter from the Editor
* Commentary and Opinion
o Hilarie Orman and Richard Schroeppel's review of
"The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 0"
by Donald E. Knuth
o Richard Austin's review of "The New School of Information Security"
by A. Shostack, and A. Stewart
o Richard Austin's review of "The Black Swan: The Impact of the
Highly Improbable" by N. N. Taleb
o Review of selected talks from the Security and Privacy
(Berkeley/Oakland, CA, May 19-22, 2008) by Matt Fredrikson
* News
o May 2, 2008, CERIAS on podcast
o May 2, 2008, NIST Requests comments on "Recommendation for Key
Derivation Using Pseudorandom Functions"
o Book reviews, Conference Reports and Commentary and News items
from past Cipher issues are available at the Cipher website
* Conference and Workshop Announcements
o Calendar of Security Events
* List of Computer Security Academic Positions, by Cynthia Irvine
o SRI Postdoc
o University of Regina Postdoc
* Staying in Touch
o Information for subscribers and contributors
o Recent address changes
* Links for the IEEE Computer Society TC on Security and Privacy
o Becoming a member of the TC
o TC Officers
o TC publications for sale
====================================================================
Letter from the Editor
====================================================================
Dear Readers:
The Security and Privacy Symposium was held May 18-21, as usual at the
Claremont Hotel in Berkeley/Oakland, California. This was a great
meeting in terms of the variety of papers and number of attendees.
The Program Chairs, Patrick McDaniel and Avi Rubin, put together a
program to please any technical palate, be it applications or theory,
and the General Chair, Yong Guan, assisted by David Du and David
Shambroom, drew in unprecedented corporate and government sponsorship
that helped make it an affordable and high quality event for a
near-record crowd.
In fact, the SP attendees were packed in rather tightly in the
refurbished Claremont Ballroom. If next year sees a further increase
in attendance numbers, the organizers will have to go to extraordinary
means to cope. That will either using a video link to accommodate
some attendees in an extra meeting room, or else they will be limiting
registration on a first-come-first-served basis. If this is deja vu
to you, you've earned the moniker of "old-timer".
Matt Fredrikson's fine report on the Monday and Tuesday talks at the
Symposium gives the highlights of the presentations and audience
questions.
Next year will be the 30th anniversary of the conference, and the
Technical Committee hopes to put together a special event to celebrate
the remarkable history of the event.
This month's Cipher has three book reviews, two of them straying a bit
from our central topic of computer security. Knuth's peek at Volume 4
in a "fascicle" was too tempting to pass up, and Richard Austin has
reviewed a book about extreme probabilities. He also reviewed a
traditional information security book.
All your datum are belong to us,
Hilarie Orman
cipher-editor @ ieee-security.org
====================================================================
Commentary and Opinion
====================================================================
Book reviews from past issues of Cipher are archived at
http://www.ieee-security.org/Cipher/BookReviews.html, and conference reports
are archived at http://www.ieee-security.org/Cipher/ConfReports.html
____________________________________________________________________
Book Review By Hilarie Orman and Richard Schroeppel
May 23, 2008
____________________________________________________________________
The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4, Fascicle 0,
Introduction to Combinatorial Algorithms and Boolean Functions
by Donald E. Knuth
Addison-Wesley, Pearson Education 2008.
ISBN 978-0-321-53496-5. 216 pages, index and Answers to Exercises
If you have ever written computer software or talked to a programmer,
you've heard of Donald Knuth's book series, "The Art of Computer
Programming". Everyone of a certain age, and many more, have the
first three volumes. They are legendary. Even more legendary is the
fourth volume, "Combinatorial Algorithms". Legendary because it has
been an elusive goal for the author. It has been 35 years since
Volume 3, "Sorting and Searching", was printed. We had all but given
up on ever seeing Volume 4. That was why, when we were contacted by a
Pearson representative about reviewing a portion of Volume 4 for
Cipher, we did not even bother to ask ourselves, "what has this got to
do with computer security?" We jumped at the chance.
What we've been perusing for a few weeks a booklet that is the tip of
the iceberg that will be Volume 4. Knuth calls this 216 page gem a
"fascicle", a part of a book. It introduces Chapter 7 of the book
series, the subject of the chapter being combinatorial searching.
This is a big topic, a huge topic, it outgrew the bounds of what one
could call "a book", so Knuth plans to have it published as three
books, Volumes 4A, 4B, and 4C.
If you loved volumes 1 through 3, you'll not be disappointed by this
booklet. The font and typesetting are superb, the quotations at the
start of each chapter are witty and apt, the exercises plentiful and
difficult. The text draws you in with its cogent questions and
accessible examples, but then hits you with the deep puzzles at the
heart of the combinatorial matter. It's a minefield for the brain.
The booklet known as as Fascicle 0 contains 216 pages, the merest
appetizer to the banquet promised as Volume 4. It has the
introduction to chapter 7 and section 7.1. Section 7.1 is about
variables and functions with only two values. There are two
subsections: Boolean basics and Boolean evaluation.
If you haven't read Knuth previously, you might have some hurdles to
master. This isn't a textbook, it is a tour through the workings of
mathematical structures and the algorithms that answer questions about
them. Although everything is interesting, accessible, and backed up
by detailed references, this book does not pander to the casual
reader. Be prepared to exercise your mind and find something new even
in material you thought you mastered long ago.
The introduction to Chapter 7 begins with a one sentence definition of
combinatorics. The next sentence introduces "Langford pairs" and
launches into an explication of the five fundamental combinatoric
questions as illustrated by Langford pairs.
The next topic is orthogonal Latin squares. Did you know that the
great mathematician Euler worked on the problem near the end of his
life, leaving behind him a conjecture that was not resolved until the
modern computing era? Before you reach the end of this chapter
introduction you will know all about it, and many other things,
including the existence of the Stanford Graph Database.
There are the usual delightful exercises before the the Boolean
basics. This has the history of two-valued logic, DeMorgan's Laws,
definitions of normal forms, Horn and Krom clauses, and several other
things that might together constitute an undergraduate logic course
before even reaching the halfway point in the section. It rolls on
through median labels, theshold functions, and canalizing functions.
Then there are 133 tastefully chosen exercises.
The last section discusses the methods and the difficulty of
evaluating Boolean functions in general. Knuth notes that thousands
of papers have been written about them. It was his task to select a
few topics that are of interest to computer programmers. The overview
is good, and after working on any of the 88 exercises you might be
tempted to peek at the answers at the back.
Readers may wonder why there are so few "cookbook" algorithms (only
one per section). That might be because of the odd state of knowledge
about evaluating Boolean functions. After all the thousands of
papers, there is no real "killer algorithm" for evaluation and there
is no set of explicit functions that has provable nonlinear cost. In
some special cases there are shortcuts over the straightforward
exponential time evaluation method, but true optimum is an elusive
goal for any explicit function family.
Yes, there is a finder's reward of $2.56 for typos or other errors
reported to the author, and 32 cents for suggested improvements, plus
the possibility of Your Name in Print in the final work.
This tiny taste of Volume 4 is a delight, and we wait in respectful
anticipation for Fascicle 1.
____________________________________________________________________
Book Review By Richard Austin
May 23, 2008
____________________________________________________________________
"The New School of Information Security"
by A. Shostack, and A. Stewart
Upper Saddle River:Addison-Wesley, 2008.
ISBN 978-0-321-50278-0. Upper Saddle River:Addison-Wesley
amazon.com 19.79(USD) bookpool.com 19.50(USD).
It seems that air travel is one of those "unbearable necessities" of
modern life with its associated delays and idle times. The two books
in this review are excellent candidates for "airplane books" to fill
those empty hours and possible learn something along the way.
Many people feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with the
way we approach information security and harbor doubts as to whether
our current security programs are really optimal in providing maximum
benefit for the investments made. This book explores this sense of
"wrongness" and suggests a path forward.
At the conclusion of the introduction, the authors summarize the core
tenets of the New School in three simple bullets:
* Learn new approaches from professions such as psychology and economics
* Share objective data and findings
* Embrace the scientific method for solving security problems
The remainder of the book is devoted to fleshing out the support for
why these ideas will make a difference in how we view and practice
information security.
The first chapter is a brief overview of the security situation and
covers the usual suspects of SPAM, malware, security breaches and
identity theft. They articulate what will become a consistent theme -
we need real, empirical data to underpin our decisions and investments
when dealing with security problems.
The second chapter administers a pretty sound drubbing to the security
industry but tempers it with the observation that we've really got the
security industry we want (the security industry sells what we want to
buy). It finishes with the note that the antidote to the world of
anecdotes, threat reports and best practices is really objective data
to support our decisions.
The third chapter is appropriately titled "On Evidence" and discusses
problems with collecting objective data ranging from the almost
universal secrecy surrounding security incidents to the perplexing
problem of measuring how many incidents were prevented by security
measures (as they point out on p. 44, "success is often silent,
invisible or boring").
Chapter 4 explores the one area where objective data is available -
the security breach. Since organizations are increasing required by
legal mandates to report both the occurrence and severity of data
breaches, the authors suggest that this is the best objective source
of information we have on the state of computer security.
The fifth chapter shifts gears a bit with the provocative title
"Amateurs Study Cryptography; Professionals Study Economics". Its
main thrust is that information security is in many cases becoming
quite insular and narrowly focused on technology. Lessons drawn from
fields such as economics (understanding the incentives that influence
behavior, concepts such as externalities, etc), and psychology (e.g.,
how people estimate and respond to perceptions of risk) can offer
helpful insights in addressing important components of the information
security problem.
The sixth chapter on "Spending" offers some notable insights such as
"Spending is where decisions become concrete" (p. 105) which
underlines the point that organizations invest in what they believe to
be important. The issue lies in what really underlies that belief
(real loss prevention or just "security theater"). Security awareness
training comes in for its share of criticism as "security theater"
with some excellent observations such as the fact that breaking
security policy usually makes things work easier and better (though
only temporarily) and that policies are often written in clean,
abstract language that seems far removed from the behaviors they
should guide.
Chapter 7, "Life in the New School", summarizes the thrust of the book
around the points presented in the introduction and is followed in the
final chapter with a "Call to Action" as three points: "Gather Good
Data", "Analyze Good Data" and "Seek New Perspectives".
I do have some quibbles with the book - the authors chose to forego
footnotes and references in the interest of not breaking up the
presentation but this approach requires the reader to flip back and
forth between the text and the 50 pages of end notes to see if there
is more detail on particular points.
The authors also try to resurrect the old hacker/cracker distinction.
Your humble correspondent has enough grey hair to remember when
hacking was the honorable profession of figuring out how a piece of
software (or hardware as far as that goes) worked and then making it
do things beyond where it was intended to bravely go but this
distinction has been lost in popular culture, and it's time to let it
go.
However, such quibbles aside, this is a worthwhile book that points
out that we do need to make changes in the way we do information
security. While I'm not sure that it necessarily qualifies as a "new
school", the ideas of using empirical data, evaluating approaches
through observation and experiment and looking outside our own field
for useful concepts are good directions in our search for the way
forward.
It's an accepted truism that security is mostly about risk management
and given the number of papers at various security conferences
suggesting that we need to more closely align our risk management
practices with those in the financial community, it might come as a
surprise that those risk management practices might not be quite as
much of an exemplar as we thought.
____________________________________________________________________
Book Review By Richard Austin
May 23, 2008
____________________________________________________________________
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
by N. N. Taleb
Random House, New York 2008.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2 amazon.com 16.17(USD)
This is not a book about information security; it is a charming romp
through the world of risk assessment (guided by a successful trader
from the "Chicago Pits"). Taleb's writing style is pithy, whimsical
and full of quotable barbs. The core concept is that of the "Black
Swan", an event that is so rare as to be unpredictable, has high
consequences when it occurs but, in retrospect, will be explainable
("retroactive explainability"). That final point deserves some
emphasis: after a Black Swan occurs, it will be easy to look
backward and see all the signs of its approach NOW THAT YOU KNOW WHAT
IS GOING TO HAPPEN. Taleb calls this the problem of "silent evidence"
- there were actually many signs of what could have become other Black
Swans but our search narrows to those that only predict the one that
happened and thus render the other indications silent. The message is
that this "retroactive explanation" may be of limited use in
predicting any future occurrences of Black Swans.
He provides a very useful distinction between the two types of events
that are encountered in real life: those that are fairly predictable
and those which tend to come as a big (sometimes unpleasant) surprise.
He likens the predictable events to the mythical land of Mediocristan,
a place where probability distributions are largely Gaussian (I refuse
to say "normal"), the mean is a good predictor of most of the time
reality and deviations follow a nice decay off into the tails of the
distribution, and the much less predictable Extremistan where the mean
is largely meaningless and the tails of the distribution are fat. He
makes the very valid point that much of the real world lives on the
frontier between the two and that humans are notoriously bad at
recognizing when they've left the fringes of Mediocristan and wandered
into the wilds of Extremistan.
Being somewhat of an academic, I was amused (and stung) by his
definitions of the "Ludic Fallacy" as "the attributes of uncertainty
we face in real life have little connection to the sterilized ones we
encounter in exams and games" (p, 127). Most information security
professionals can definitely identify with the "Nerd effect" as
"mental elimination of off-model risks or focusing on what you know"
(p.151).
Taleb suggests that rather than attempting to imitate the risk
assessment processes of the financial markets, we might want to take a
closer look at how military planners assess and manage risks (e.g.,
invest in preparedness rather than prediction).
This book is a good read that will challenge quite a few of our
assumptions about how one should approach the process of assessing and
managing risk. While there may not be a lot of "solution advice",
there are plenty of broad hints as to where the way forward might lie.
--------------
Before retiring, Richard Austin was the storage network security
architect at a Fortune 25 company and currently earns his bread and
cheese as an itinerant university instructor and cybersecurity
consultant. He welcomes your thoughts and comments at rda7838 at
Kennesaw dot edu
____________________________________________________________________
Review of Selected Talks from
Security and Privacy Symposium
Berkeley/Oakland, CA, May 19-22, 2008
by Matt Fredrikson
____________________________________________________________________
[Editor's note: the reviewer was unable to review all the talks due
to his schedule; our apologies to authors whose work was not covered
in this report.]
Opening Remarks
--------------------
The conference began on Monday with a few remarks from the program
chair. These remarks were given by Avi Rubin, as Patrick McDaniel was
still in route to the conference. He started out speaking about the
review process for the conference. Papers were assigned to members of
the program committee by area, avoiding conflicts of interest. Each PC
member received about twenty papers, and each paper was reviewed by
three members of the committee. In general, to gain acceptance into
the conference, a paper had to have at least one high-confidence
review. Once all of the papers had been reviewed by the committee,
lengthy deliberations ensued -- two weeks of email conversations and a
lengthy meeting review to come to final decisions regarding the
papers.
The end result of this process can be summarized with the following
statistics. Out of 249 submissions, twenty-eight papers were accepted
(11.2%). This is comparable to last year's program, in which twenty
regular submissions were accepted out of 246 submissions
(8.1%). However, there were no short papers accepted for this year's
conference. Avi concluded by observing that this acceptance rate is
beneficial for the speakers and authors, as tenure committees and
managers look favorably on such numbers.
Awards
-----------
This year, three awards were given to select contributors. The best
student paper, including a cash prize, was given to Francis David,
Ellick Chan, Jeffrey Carlyle, and Roy Campbell for their paper
"Cloaker: Hardware Supported Rootkit Concealment". The best paper
award was given to Daniel Halperin and his colleagues from the
University of Massachussetts - Amherst for their paper "Pacemakers and
Implantible Cardiac Defibrillators: Software Radio Attacks and
Zero-Power Defenses". Finally, the IEEE Security and Privacy award was
given to Saar Drimer, Steven J. Murdoch, and Ross Anderson for their
paper "Thinking Inside the Box: System-Level Failures of Tamper
Proofing".
First Session: Peering
Chair: Patrick McDaniel
----------------------------
The first presentation in this session was given by Haifeng Yu
regarding their work with defense of social networks against sybil
attacks. The title of the talk was "SybilLimit: A Near-Optimal Social
Network Defense Against Sybil Attacks". Haifeng began by describing
their motivating problem, which is that sybil attacks are particularly
troublesome in a decentralized environment, pointing to results that
indicate the impossibility of perfect defense without a central
authority to tie identities to human beings. He goes on to present
SybilLimit, a protocol that leverages a key insight about social
networks to place a bound on the number of accepted sybil nodes. He
shows that for a network with one million nodes, SybilLimit reduces
the number of accepted sybil nodes by approximately 200
times. Furthermore, in fast-mixing networks, the bounds provided by
SybilLimit fall within a logarithmic factor of the optimal
solution. Finally, the Haifeng concludes his talk by presenting
empirical evidence that real-world social networks are fast-mixing,
making them ideal candidates for use with SybilLimit.
The first question regarded the real-world datasets used by the
authors for experimental validation. An audience member asked Haifeng
how many nodes were removed while pre-processing the real-world
datasets. Haifeng responded by saying that only nodes with extremely
high incidence were removed from the datasets, so the total number
removed depended on the dataset. It tended to vary between ten and
fifty percent of the nodes. He then pointed out that removing edges
from the graphs would not reduce the mixing time.
The next question was whether it would be possible to take a snapshot
of a network, and all of the nodes that were suspected to be sybil, in
order to verify the correctness of the solution. Haifeng said that
such an exercise assumes that an authority is capable of correctly
identifying which nodes are sybil. Assuming that this could be
accomplished accurately, it would be an interesting experiment.
The second presentation was given by Parv Venkitasubramaniam, titled
"Anonymous Networking with Minimum Latency in Ad-Hoc Networks. Parv
opened up by observing a trend toward ubiquitous wireless networks
composed of self-configuring devices, and discussed the need for
security and anonymity in such an environment. He proceeded to discuss
the inherent tradeoff between resilience to timing-based traffic
analysis attacks and the quality of service as measured by latency. He
then described the way in which anonymity is quantified in his work,
and presented scheduling strategies that maximize this notion of
anonymity, as well as a characterization of the performance penalties
incurred. Parv concluded by hypothesizing that a more realistic model
for the adversary might result in improved performance, and briefly
talked about some future work in this area.
One of the audience members asked whether the proposed approach might
increase brittleness with respect to forged packet attacks. Parv
responded, acknowledging that this is indeed a concern, and that some
of his previous work has addressed such attacks.
Second Session: Communications Security
Chair: Matt Blaze
-----------------------------------------------
The first talk of the communications session, titled "Spot me if you
can: Uncovering spoken phrases in encrypted VoIP", was given by
Charles Wright of Johns Hopkins. Charles began by stating that VoIP
offers comparable quality and better security than typical land lines,
although it may be possible to deduce some information from encrypted
traffic by sampling certain characteristics. If the attacker's goal is
to recover information about the word content of a VoIP stream, then
there are considerable challenges that must be surmounted; most
notable are the large potential vocabulary and natural variability of
human speech. Charles proceeded with the claim that despite these
challenges, such information can be deduced due to the fact that the
efficient variable bitrate encoding used by VoIP encodes different
phonemes at distinct bitrates. He then showed how a hidden markov
model can be used to recover spoken word content at recall rates of
approximately 50% for reasonable precision rates. He concluded by
pointing out that VoIP packets can be padded with null content to
thwart such an attack.
Vern Paxson asked if one could order packets randomly to defend
against such an attack. Charles agreed that such a defense would work,
but would increase latency. Another conference attendee asked if the
attack could be thwarted using non-technological measures, such as
intentional voice modulation. Charles responded by saying that such a
defense would probably work, and adding background noise to the VoIP
payload would probably be effective as well. The last question from an
attendee was about the effectiveness of the technique for pure word
recall. Charles said that this problem was more challenging, and that
his technique is not sufficient for it at the current time.
The next talk was also about VoIP, titled "Preserving Caller Anonymity
in VoIP Networks". It was given by Mudhakar Srivasta from the IBM
T.J. Watson Research Center. Looking at anonymity networks using VoIP
as an application, Mudhakar showed how timing-based analysis attacks
can be perpetrated to infer the source of a route with high
probability when only a small portion of the network is malicious. He
then continued to show that it is impossible to preserve the shortest
path property of such a network while preserving caller anonymity,
thus revealing a fundamental tradeoff between privacy and quality of
service. The last part of his talk proposed random-walk techniques for
establishing routes that preserve caller anonymity, and can be
customized to achieve varying quality of service guarantees.
After the talk, Paul Syverson observed that when researching onion
routing for the Tor anonymizing network, they looked at several
alternatives to shortest path and random walk protocols, some of them
similar to what Mudhakar presented in his talk. He expressed interest
in discussing this further at a later time, as the similarities may be
interesting.
The final presentation of the communications session was given by
Mario Strasser, and it dealt with key establishment protocols over
wireless networks that are resistant to radio jamming techniques.Mario
began by presenting the fundamental difficulty of establishing a
shared secret key between two devices that do not share secrets over a
wireless link. While current key establishment protocols depend on
jamming-resistant communications, current anti-jamming techniques
depend on the presence of established secret keys. Mario proposed the
use of frequency hopping to counter jamming attacks in this problem
setting, and named the technique "uncoordinated frequency
hopping". The technique uses an ECC-based, station-to-station
Diffie-Hellman key establishment protocol, and Mario presented numbers
that demonstrate its feasibility in terms of both security and
execution time.
One of the conference attendees asked what would happen were the
attacker to follow the frequency hopping protocol, mimicking one of
the parties. Mario responded by stating that they did not consider
this type of attack for the current work.
Third Session: Data
Session Chair: Fabian Monrose
----------------------------------
The first talk of the data session, titled "Casting out Demons:
Sanitizing Training Data for Anomaly Sensors", was given by Gabriela
Cretu. The talk addressed the problem of contaminated training data
for anomaly-based intrusion detectors. More specifically, if real
network or host event data is used to train an anomaly detector, and
the data contains events corresponding to an attack, then the anomaly
detector produced as a result of the training may fail to detect certain
attacks. Gabriela proposed the addition of a sanitization phase to the
anomaly detector training regimen, to remove these troublesome events
from the training data. The proposed phase breaks the training data
into several distinct slices that are then used to train a set of
anomaly detectors. A voting scheme among the new detectors is then
used to label certain parts of the training data as "attack data". She
proceeded to show that the technique produces favorable results when
existing sensors incorporate such a sanitization phase. Finally,
Gabriela discussed the idea of distributed sanitization, where data
from external networks and hosts is used to produce a better local
model.
The first question from a conference attendee was about periodic
events, and whether or not they would be outvoted in such a scheme and
therefor not part of the anomaly detector's model. Gabriela responded
by affirming that such events would indeed be counted as false
positives. The next question was about the origins of the attack
dataset, to which Gabriela informed us that the data came from the
Columbia University network. The final question was about the true
positive rate of anomaly detectors using the sanitization scheme,
which was reported to be 100%. The attendee pointed out that it may be
misleading to report such a true positive rate, as it implies that the
detector is capable of catching all attacks. Gabriela responded by
saying that the reported figure represents attacks that she could
manually identify, which is really only one particular class of
attack, and that she could not speak for the general case.
The next talk was given by Mythili Vutukuru, titled "Efficient and
Robust TCP Stream Normalization". Mythili presented the problem of
NIDS evasion using inconsistent TCP segment retransmissions. An
attacker can transmit multiple packets with the same TCP segment
number and differing payloads. Mythili describes current solutions,
broadly characterized as stream normalizers, and discusses the
limitations of each solution. Her solution, called RoboNorm, achieves
memory efficiency and resilience to overlapped transmissions using hash
values to store previously seen packets, but breaking segments into
smaller chunks and holding back results until an entire
re-transmission is observed. She points out that RoboNorm was designed
for ease of implementation in hardware, with a memory footprint
configurable to fit comfortably on standard FPGA hardware.
The first audience question was about the necessity of such a device
in front of a typical IDS. If the IDS already has to reconstruct
streams, then why not just configure and IDS to do what RobotNorm
does. Mythili responded by saying that the idea is to remove the
necessity of maintaining a large amount of stream state from the IDS,
thus simplifying its function and design. The next attendee asked what
would happen if ACK packets are spoofed from within the
network. Mythili said that in the attack model used for this work, one
side of the stream must be honest. If both sides collude, then the
problem changes entirely, and this is a topic for separate work.
The final talk of the data session was given by Arvind Narayanan, and
addressed the problem of de-anonymization of high-dimensional
datasets. Arvind attacked the problem by presenting a formal model for
privacy breaches in anonymized data, and then poses a motivating
question: combining data with background knowledge, what can an
adversary learn? He then presents a general class of de-anonymization
algorithms. The algorithms are based on a scoring function that
evaluates how well a record matches the given background knowledge, a
matching criterion, and record selection. Arvind then showed that,
using the internet movie database as background knowledge and the
Netflix prize dataset as an anonymized dataset, his algorithm is
capable identifying several Netflix users.
The first question came from Somesh Jha, who asked why similar
research doesn't make use of background knowledge to the extent that
his own algorithm does. Arvind stated that one potential reason for
this condition is that it makes the problem substantially more
complex, but that at this point it is becoming a necessity. The next
attendee asked whether any of his "identified" Netflix customers might
have been a fluke. Arvind replied that the next highest match was 28
standard deviations apart in the worst case, so the probability of
this being true is extremely low. One attendee observed that if we
want to protect our privacy in such datasets, then we can inject our
own randomness. Arvind pointed out that this severely reduces the
utility of the services that are based on the data.
Fourth Session: Attacks
Session Chair: Niels Provos
--------------------------------
This session began with a talk about the security of implantable
pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators presented by Ben Ransford. He
described several possible attacks on these devices, then pointed to a
fundamental difficulty that allows for these attacks. The issue is
that authentication on these devices is difficult, as there are a large
number of potential accessors of the devices, and it is not acceptable
to react to authentication failure by denying access. This is true
because a doctor or paramedic may not possess the key to such a
device, but it is imperative that they have access. Lastly, key
distribution would be an immensely difficult task due to the fact that
the owner of such a device can travel to arbitrary locations, and
there is no way to know a priori who will need the key. Ben finishes
by presenting a "defensive direction" - a mechanism that defends the
device without using a battery. His proposed solution, termed
"WISPer", notifies the owner of the implanted device of attempted
access using physical sensation.
Jon Giffin asked Ben how he discovered the protocol for the
device. Ben responded that they did not parse the protocol, but simply
replayed transactions that they had previously observed. Another
attendee was curious as to the willingness of the medical community to
collaborate with such an endeavor. Ben reported that their group
received an overwhelmingly positive response from the medical
community. The final question from an attendee was whether a more
blunt attack could be perpetrated against the implantible devices. Ben
remarked that there are always more blunt attacks available, but as
the devices become more sophisticated, he sees it as important that
the security community consider correspondingly sophisticated attacks
and defenses.
The next talk was given by David Brumley, titled "Automatic
Patch-Based Exploit Generation is Possible: Techniques and
Implications". David presented a method for generating exploit strings
for a vulnerable application given nothing more than the original
binary application code and a binary patch for the application. His
technique is based on binary differencing between the application and
the patch, as well as the use of a constraint solver to generate the
exploit string. As a case study, David demonstrated his technique over
the comctl32 vulnerability of Internet Explorer 6. He also pointed out
related problems for his technique. First, loops in the binary
application code can pose a problem when constructing path
constraints, and may prevent the system from successfully creating an
exploit string. Second, in some cases the path constraint may simply
be too large for the constraint solver to handle. David concluded by
discussing the implications of such a technique, namely that patch
distribution schemes must be re-hashed.
Somesh Jha asked David what would happen if he obfuscated a patch just
enough to fool the binary differencer, but not enough to introduce
significant runtime overhead. David stated that this might be more
difficult than Somesh thinks, as the binary differencer he used is
relatively sophisticated. Peter Chen asked if there were any
differences between the exploits he generated, and those that are
publicly released. David confirmed that this was the case. Another
attendee pointed out that this could lead to a war of escalation,
where patch distributors test a patch against all blackhat generation
techniques, so that attackers must rely on manual analysis to generate
an exploit. David then agreed that this may be the case, and observed
that in the past the security community has not done a great job
estimating the capabilities of the attacker.
The third talk of the attack session was given by Michael
Backes. Michael talked about a series of experiments he conducted,
where he attempted to read the contents of a computer screen from its
reflection off of various objects located near the computer. In the
end, he was able to concluded that it is feasible to read the
reflection of a computer screen off the surface of a human eyeball,
given a large enough telescope. As defensive measures, he proposed
that people not compute in areas in which it is likely that a large
telescope might be concealed, that people should remove reflective
objects from their computing area, and that people close their
curtains.
One of the attendees asked Michael whether it might be possible to
read reflections that bounce off of two surfaces. Michael replied that
before this work he would have said that it was impossible, whereas
now he will only say that it is unlikely. Louis Kruger asked about the
possibility of observing moving figures, to which Michael responded
that motion blur poses a significant difficulty to this type of
work. Crispin Cowan suggested vibrating the screen lightly, to bring
the problem of motion blur back into the equation. Michael remarked
that this was certainly a creative idea, and may work in some
situations. One of the attendees asked Michael whether his bald head
might pose a security risk, to which Michael responded that is almost
certainly would.
The final talk of the attacks session was given by Marco Cova, and was
titled "ClearShot: Eavesdropping on Keyboard Input from Video". Marco
described how it is possible to eavesdrop on someone's communication
by analyzing a video recording of them typing on a keyboard, citing
the movie Sneakers as inspiration. For this work, Marco assumed
control of the camera position and parameters, and a fixed keyboard
position. Marco's stated goal was as much automation as possible in
the process of reconstructing text from video. The process can be
broken down into two phases, the vision phase and the text analysis
phase. In the vision phase, each frame is analyzed, and key presses
are tracked and recorded. In the text analysis phase, the results of
the vision phase are used to suggest possible sequences of words. A
character model is used to express constraints on which letters can
occupy which positions in a word. After the character models have been
determined, they are expressed as an acyclic word model graph, each
path in the graph corresponding to a weighted regular expression, and
a dictionary is used to find the best words that match the regular
expressions. Marco then presented results for his technique.
Hao Chen asked Marco if he had considered techniques similar to those
used in speech recognition, such as hidden markov models. Marco
confirmed that his group had considered these techniques, but the
imprecisions from the vision phase hindered them. Several attendees
asked questions about the experiments presented by Marco, to which
Marco pointed out that his current results are preliminary, and there
was still future work to be done on the problem.
Tuesday, May 19
Fifth Session: Miscellaneous
Session Chair: Andrew Meyers
----------------------------------
The first talk of the miscellaneous session was given by Randy Smith
from the University of Wisconsin on the problem of matching regular
expression signatures on high-speed network links. Randy presented a
technique, dubbed "Extended Finite State Automata", that makes use of
a small amount of auxiliary memory to match regular languages at
nearly the speed of deterministic finite state automatons, and
requiring approximately as much memory as non-deterministic finite
state automatons. He demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique
on real network data.
One of the attendees asked Randy what would happen if NIDS could no
longer keep track of all possible offending patterns, but instead had
to whitelist good patterns. Randy replied that deep packet inspection
might be a possible solution to this problem, as more sophisticated
characteristics of the packet are being considered. Another attendee
asked Randy if his technique might be capable of recognizing languages
that are more complex than regular. Randy replied that he had not yet
looked into this.
The last talk of the miscellaneous session was given by Louis Kruger,
and was titled "Practical Privacy for Genomic Computation". Louis
presented three protocols for computing edit distance in a
privacy-preserving manner, so that each party can obtain the desired
results without revealing sensitive data, and informed the audience
that computing edit distance is simply a generalization of the
Smith-Waterman computation relevant to genetics research. The
innovation behind Louis' work is that rather than developing
privacy-preserving evaluation protocols for specific problems, or
completely general protocols, efficiency can be gained by developing
protocols that work for entire classes of problems.
One of the attendees asked Louis whether his protocols are susceptible
to covert timing attacks. Louis replied that he did not see this as a
problem. Another attendee asked Louis how his algorithms compare with
non privacy-preserving algorithms in terms of performance, to which he
responded that there was no comparison - his algorithms perform much
more slowly.
Sixth Session: Defenses
Session Chair: Tadayoshi Kohno
-----------------------------------
Bryan Pane started this session off with his talk entitled "Lares: An
Architecture for Secure Active Monitoring Using Virtualization". Bryan
pointed out that active monitoring is critical to modern systems
security analysis, but malware might tamper with the hooks on which
active monitoring systems rely. To address this problem, Bryan
proposed moving the active monitoring infrastructure further out of
reach of malware, to the virtualization layer. Bryan presented his
system, Lares, which does precisely this. Lares resides in a separate
hypervisor, and installs hook in the guest VM to perform active
monitoring. Memory protection using page-granularity write permissions
with additional byte-granularity checks are used to achieve memory
protection, and therefore ensure that malware does not overwrite the
hooks placed by Lares. He goes on to claim that Lares hooks perform
withing ten microseconds of a typical kernel hook in a traditional
active monitoring system.
Crispin Cowan asked Bryan what he does to prevent an attacker from
trojanizing the whole system? Bryan replied that one of his base
assumptions is that Lares is installed from a clean boot. Francis
David then asked why all of the monitoring infrastructure resides in
the virtualization layer, to which Bryan responded that placing it in
this layer makes things easier and cleaner, so it is a good design
decision.
The second talk of this session was given by R. Sekar and Weiqing
Sun. Sekar started off by stating that the only correct way to deal
with malware is to consider information flow-based integrity. This is
based on the assumption that system integrity is preserved if critical
subjects are never influenced by untrustworthy objects, essentially
making the common programmer assumption that the execution environment
is benign valid. He then discusses a method for automating the
construction of policies based on this principle can be realized by
mapping entries in an access log to a set of policy choices. Weiqing
Sun then provided the details of their policy enforcement framework,
and presented numbers regarding the effectiveness of their system.
One of the attendees pointed out that there exists an asymmetry in the
manner in which violations of read-down and write-up policies are
handled. Sekar pointed out that in one case, high-integrity
applications are performing the violation, so it's generally OK to let
them continue. In the other case, untrusted low-integrity apps are the
problem, and are dealt with in a more conservative manner.
The last talk of the defenses session was given by Periklis Akritidis,
titled "Preventing memory error exploits with WIT". Periklis presented
a compiler-based system for preventing memory corruption attacks,
where instructions are broken into equivalence classes based on which
memory regions they access. These equivalence classes are determined
using static information, and runtime checks are inserted into key
locations to ensure that instructions from a particular equivalence
class only touch the corresponding memory. Periklis claimed that the
technique is backward compatible, detects a number of memory
corruption attacks, and does not result in substantial performance
overhead.
One attendee noted that the analysis is only as powerful as the static
points-to analysis on which it depends. Periklis acknowledged this
remark, and pointed out that his evaluation provided promising
results.
Seventh Session: Attacks II
Session Chair: Wenke Lee
--------------------------------
The first talk of this session was given by Steven Murdoch, on the
Chip-and-PIN technology that is finding widespread use in Europe and
Canada. Steven first presented the protection mechanisms present in
standard Chip-and-PIN technology, gave a broad overview of the
successful attack that his group perpetrated on Chip-and-PIN technology,
and presented video evidence of the financial industry's unwillingness
to acknowledge the serious vulnerabilities present in these
systems. Crispin Cowan pointed out that in North America, the burden
of liability for financial fraud falls squarely on the bank, and asked
how Canada will be affected with the adoption of Chip-and-PIN. An
attendee from Canada who had recently received a Chip-and-PIN enabled
card informed the audience that the cards come with a new customer
agreement, which requires the customer to sign his rights away.
The second talk of the Attacks II session was given by Francis David,
titled "Cloaker: Hardware Supported Rootkit Concealment". Francis
began with a description of the intrusion workflow, and observed that
evolution in rootkit technology has been driven by an arms race in
recent years. He then presents Cloaker, a rootkit system that utilizes
hardware support to conceal itself, representing the logical next step
in the rootkit arms race. He then presents a few case study payloads
that utilize Cloaker. He finishes with a take-home point that the
problem of system integrity cannot be solved without considering the
hardware, as Cloaker is only one example of a system that exploits a
gap between software systems and architecture. One of the attendees
asked Francis if he thought attackers were capable of devising ways to
hijack control flows faster than defenders can find ways of checking
for subversion. Francis admitted that it is indeed an easier task to
write checks than to come up with new subversion techniques.
The final talk of the session, titled "Predictable Design of
Network-Based Covert Communication Systems", was given by Ron
Smith. Ron started off with the hypothesis that covert communications
systems based upon exploitable low-bandwidth covert channels can be
designed with mathematical predictability and precision. He presented
three quantifiable properties of a network-based covert channel -
probability of detection, system efficiency, and communication
reliability expressed as a bit error rate. He then gave a formal
characterization of covert channel detectability and an expression for
covert channel efficiency.
John Nolan asked Ron if there is any hope of calculating channel
capacity. Ron responded that he had attempted to do this in his
thesis, but it is actually a considerably difficult problem. Another
attendee noted that the adversarial model selected for this work was
perhaps unrealistically powerful, to which Ron replied that they had
made paranoid assumptions due to conservative principles of network
security.
====================================================================
News Briefs
====================================================================
May 2, 2008, from Gene Spafford
CERIAS Available in Podcast
We have completed another year of security seminars at CERIAS. These
are all recorded and made available for FREE as streaming media and
"podcasts." We now have four years of these available, on a variety
of topics related to cyber security, privacy, policy, and cybercrime.
Speakers come from industry, academia, and government.
The seminars are available via many of the usual outlets, including
iTunes and Miro. You can also view them at our WWW site, and find
links to download sites. Visit http://peek.snipurl.com/secsem (a
"peek" shortened URL).
The seminar has been running since 1992, and we are seeking sponsors
to help cover the cost of putting older videos online, and to help
cover the expense of bringing speakers in. Interested potential
sponsors should contact info@cerias.purdue.edu.
Individuals interested in speaking in the seminar can also contact
info@cerias.purdue.edu .
Note that we have been told that individuals *may* be able to watch
these seminars and claim some CE credit towards professional
certification. We also know that some companies and universities use
these in their own classes and teaching. We would love to hear about
how *you* might find them useful, or any suggestions. Please send
your feedback to info@cerias.purdue.edu .
_____________________________________________________________________
May 2, 2008, NIST Press Release
Request for Comments on Recommendation for Key Derivation Using
Pseudorandom Functions
NIST announces the release of draft Special Publication 800-108,
Recommendation for Key Derivation Using Pseudorandom Functions. This
Recommendation specifies techniques for key derivation from a secret
key using pseudorandom functions (PRF). Please submit email comments
to draft-SP800-108-comment@nist.gov with "Comments on SP800-108" in
the subject line. The comment period closes on June 28, 2008.
You can access the draft at
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/800-108/Draft_SP-800-108_April-2008.pdf
_____________________________________________________________________
News briefs from past issues of Cipher are archived at
http://www.ieee-security.org/Cipher/NewsBriefs.html
====================================================================
Conference and Workshop Announcements
Upcoming Calls-For-Papers and Events
====================================================================
The complete Cipher Calls-for-Papers is located at
http://www.ieee-security.org/CFP/Cipher-Call-for-Papers.html
The Cipher event Calendar is at
http://www.ieee-security.org/Calendar/cipher-hypercalendar.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Call For Participation
21st IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)
Pittsburgh, PA, USA, June 23-25, 2008
The registration is now open. Early registration ends on June 1.
Online late registration is open June 2-10.
The specialty of this year is co-location with IEEE LICS 2008. There
are a few joint CSF/LICS activities to look forward to, including a
joint invited talk by David Basin, joint regular- and short-talk
sessions and 8 workshops related to security foundations and
logic. Further information (including a detailed program) is on the
CSF 2008 web site:
http://www.cylab.cmu.edu/CSF2008/
Hope to see you in Pittsburgh!
Anupam Datta (General Chair) and Andrei Sabelfeld (Program Chair)
____________________________________________________________________
Cipher Event Calendar
____________________________________________________________________
Calendar of Security and Privacy Related Events
maintained by Hilarie Orman
NP = No proceedings
AO = Proceedings are distributed to attendees only
BP = Only "best papers" will be published
No notation means that the proceedings will be
published for distribution outside the conference.
5/25/08- 5/28/08: Service, Security and its Data management
technologies in Ubi-comp (SSDU), Kunming, China;
http://grid.hust.edu.cn/gpc2008/
5/26/08: Security Issues in Concurrency (SecCo) Toronto, Canada;
Submissions are due; , http://www.lsv.ens-cachan.fr/SecCo08/
5/30/08: New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS) Tangier, Morocco;
Submissions are due; , http://www.ntms-conference.org/
---------
6/ 1/08: Mobile Wireless Networks (SoftCOM) Split-Dubrovnik (CROATIA);
Submissions are due; info: mario.deblasi@unile.it
http://www.fesb.hr/SoftCOM/2008/CfP_DeBlasi_2008.pdf
6/ 2/08: Workshop on Virtual Machine Security (VMSEC) Fairfax, VA;
Submissions are due; NP, http://csis.gmu.edu/VMSec/
6/ 3/08- 6/ 6/08: Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS),
Columbia University, New York City, NY; http://acns2008.cs.columbia.edu/
6/ 3/08- 6/ 6/08: Workshop on Security and High Performance Computing
Systems (SHPCS), Nicosia, Cyprus; proceedings to attendees only (AO);
info: guha@eecs.ucf.edu, http://www.diiga.univpm.it/~spalazzi/nicosia/
6/ 3/08- 6/ 4/08: Applications of Pairing-Based Cryptography: IBE and
Beyond (NIST-IBE), Gaithersburg, MD; info: ibe@nist.gov,
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/IBE/index.html
6/ 4/08- 6/ 5/08: Symposium on Information Assurance (IASymp),
Albany, NY; AO, http://www.albany.edu/iasymposium
6/ 6/08: Secure Network Protocols (NPSec) Orlando, Florida; ;
Submissions are due; info: npsec08 @ netsec.colorado.edu; AO?;
http://www.netsec.colostate.edu/npsec08/
6/ 8/08: Information Security (IS) Monterrey, Mexico; Abstracts are
due; info: parkjnghyuk1@hotmail.com, http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf
6/13/08: Workshop on Security and Privacy in Enterprise Computing
(Inspec) Munich, Germany; Submissions are due;
http://ra.crema.unimi.it/inspec2008/; NP
6/14/08: School on Foundations of Security Analysis and Design (FOSAD),
Bertinoro, Italy; Applications are due;
http://www.sti.uniurb.it/events/fosad08/
6/15/08: Symposium on Trusted Computing (TrustCom), Zhang Jia Jie, China;
Submissions are due; info: csgjwang AT gmail.com,
http://trust.csu.edu.cn/conference/trustcom2008
6/16/08- 6/17/08: Workshop on Security and Trust Management (STM),
Trondheim, Norway; AO, BP, http://www.isac.uma.es/stm08
6/16/08: Workshop on Scalable Computing (STC) Fairfax, Virginia;
Submissions are due, http://www.sisa.samsung.com/innovation/stc08
6/20/08: Workshop on Wireless Security and Privacy (WISP), Beijing, China
info: zjiang@wcupa.edu,
http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/pubs/transactions/stylesheets.html
6/20/08: Computer Security Architecture Workshop (CSAW), Fairfax, Virginia
Submissions are due; http://www.rites.uic.edu/csaw, NP
6/21/08: Web 2.0 Trust (W2Trust), Trondheim, Norway; , NP,
http://www.sis.uncc.edu/~mshehab/W2Trust/index.html
6/22/08- 6/27/08: USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX), Boston, MA;
info: conference@usenix.org
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/
6/22/08: Workshop on Proof-Carrying Code (PCC), CMU, Pittsburgh, PA;
info: pcc08@easychair.org, http://workshops.inf.ed.ac.uk/pcc08
6/23/08- 6/25/08: Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF),
Pittsburgh, PA, http://www.cylab.cmu.edu/CSF2008/
6/25/08- 6/27/08: Workshop on the Economics of Information Security
(WEIS), Hanover, New Hampshire; ; proceedings to attendees only
(AO), http://weis2008.econinfosec.org
6/25/08: Formal Aspects in Security and Trust (FAST) Malaga, Spain;
Submissions are due, http://www.iit.cnr.it/FAST2008/
6/26/08: Workshop on Formal and Computational Cryptography (FCC),
Pittsburgh, PA; info: fcc2008@di.ens.fr NP,
http://www.di.ens.fr/~blanchet/fcc08/
---------
7/ 7/08: (or 7/8/08) IWACO, Paphos, Cyprus;
info: mueller@microsoft.com; BP,
7/ 7/08: Security in Opportunistic and SOCial Networks (SOSOC),
Istanbul, Turkey; http://www.sosoc.org; NP
7/ 8/08- 7/18/08: Human Aspects of Information Security & Assurance
(HAISA), Plymouth, UK; info: info@haisa.org, http://www.haisa.org
7/10/08- 7/11/08: Detection of Intrusions and Malware and
Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA), Paris, France,
http://www.dimva.org/dimva2008/
7/10/08- 7/11/08: Advances in Computer Security and Forensics (ACSF),
Liverpool, UK; info: J.Haggerty@ljmu.ac.uk,
AO, http://www.cms.livjm.ac.uk/acsf3/
7/14/08- 7/16/08: Australasian Conference on Information Security and
Privacy (ACISP), Wollongong, Australia, http://www.uow.edu.au/conferences
7/19/08: Information Systems Security (ICISS) Hyderabad, India; ;
Submissions are due, http://www.seclab.cs.sunysb.edu/iciss08/
7/21/08- 7/25/08: Security and Multimodality in Pervasive
Environments (SMPE), Dublin, Ireland; info: coronato.a@na.ica.cnr.it,
http://www.na.icar.cnr.it/smpe08/
7/23/08- 7/25/08: Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS),
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/SOUPS/
7/23/08: Nordic Workshop on Secure IT Systems (NordSec) Copenhagen, Denmark
Submissions are due, http://lbt.imm.dtu.dk/nsd08/nordsec08/
7/28/08- 8/ 1/08: USENIX Security Symposium (USENIXSec), San Jose, CA;
info: sec08chair@usenix.org, http://www.usenix.org/sec08/cfpa/
---------
8/11/08- 8/13/08: Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS),
Baltimore, MD, http://www.dfrws.org/2008/
8/23/08: Security Issues in Concurrency (SecCo), Toronto, Canada,
http://www.lsv.ens-cachan.fr/SecCo08/
8/25/08- 8/30/08: School on Foundations of Security Analysis and
Design (FOSAD), Bertinoro, Italy, http://www.sti.uniurb.it/events/fosad08/
---------
9/ 4/08: Information Warfare and Security (ICIW) Cape Town, South
Africa; abstracts are due, http://www.jinfowar.com
9/ 8/08- 9/10/08: Information Security Conference (SEC), Milan, Italy,
http://sec2008.dti.unimi.it
9/ 8/08- 9/11/08: Smart Card Research and Advanced Application
Conference (CARDIS), Surrey, UK,
http://www.scc.rhul.ac.uk/CARDIS/index.html
9/15/08- 9/17/08: Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection (RAID),
Cambridge, MA; info: rkc@ll.mit.edu,
http://www.ll.mit.edu/IST/RAID2008/
9/15/08: Workshop on Security and Privacy in Enterprise Computing (Inspec),
Munich, Germany; ; NP, http://ra.crema.unimi.it/inspec2008/
9/15/08: Workshop on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSEC),
Cambridge, MA, http://vizsec.org/workshop2008/
9/22/08- 9/25/08: New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW), Squaw Valley, CA;
http://www.nspw.org
9/22/08: Security in Opportunistic and SOCial Networks (SOSOC),
Istanbul, Turkey; Submissions are due; http://www.sosoc.org; NP
9/22/08- 9/25/08: Security and Privacy for Communication Networks
(Securecomm), Istanbul, Turkey; NP, http://www.securecomm.org
9/22/08- 9/24/08: Workshop on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC),
Utrecht, NL; info: tanja@hyperelliptic.org, NP,
http://www.hyperelliptic.org/tanja/conf/ECC08/
9/25/08- 9/27/08: Mobile Wireless Networks (SoftCOM), Split-Dubrovnik
(CROATIA); info: mario.deblasi@unile.it,
http://www.fesb.hr/SoftCOM/2008/CfP_DeBlasi_2008.pdf
---------
10/ 6/08-10/ 8/08: European Symposium on Research in Computer Security
(ESORICS), Malaga, Spain, http://www.isac.uma.es/esorics08
10/ 9/08: Digital Forensics and Incident Analysis (WDFIA), Malaga, Spain;
info: wdfia08@aegean.gr, http://www.aegean.gr/wdfia08
10/ 9/08-10/10/08: Formal Aspects in Security and Trust (FAST),
Malaga, Spain, http://www.iit.cnr.it/FAST2008/
10/ 9/08-10/10/08: Nordic Workshop on Secure IT Systems (NordSec),
Copenhagen, Denmark, http://lbt.imm.dtu.dk/nsd08/nordsec08/
10/12/08: Workshop on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile
Computing, Networking and Communications (SecPri_WiMob), Avignon, France,
http://www.aegean.gr/SecPri_WiMob_2008
10/14/08-10/17/08: Asia-Pacific Trusted Infrastructure Technologies
Conference (APTC), Yangtze River Cruiser, China,
http://grid.hust.edu.cn/aptc08/
10/18/08-10/19/08: IFIP International Workshop on Network and System
Security (NSS), Shanghai, China; info: wanlei@deakin.edu.au,
http://nss.cqu.edu.au
10/19/08-10/22/08: International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP),
Orlando, Florida; proceedings to attendees only (AO);
info: icnp2008@cs.purdue.edu,
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/fahmy/icnp2008/
10/19/08: Secure Network Protocols (NPSec), Orlando, Florida; ;
info: npsec08 @ netsec.colorado.edu; AO?,
http://www.netsec.colostate.edu/npsec08/
10/20/08-10/22/08: ICICS, Birmingham, UK; http://events.cs.bham.ac.uk/icics08/
10/27/08: Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Security (AISec),
Alexandria, VA, http://www.aisec.info
10/27/08-10/31/08: ACM Conference on Computer and Communications
Security, (CCS), Alexandria, Virginia,
info: http://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2008/contact.html
http://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2008/contact.html
10/27/08: Digital Rights Management Workshop (DRM), Alexandria, VA,
http://www.ece.unm.edu/DRM2008/
10/27/08: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES),
Alexandria, Virginia, http://dais.cs.uiuc.edu/wpes08
10/27/08: Quality of Protection (QoP), Alexandria, VA,
http://qop-workshop.org
10/28/08-10/30/08: Conference on Risks and Security of Internet and Systems
(CRiSIS), Tozeur, Tunisia; NP, http://www.redcad.org/crisis2008/
10/31/08: NIST SHA3 Hash Function Competition (NIST-SHA3);
info: bstein@nist.gov; Submissions are due,
mailto:bstein@nist.gov, http://www.nist.gov/hash-competition
10/31/08: Workshop on Digital Identity Management (DIM), Fairfax, VA;
info: ccs2008-dim_at_lab.ntt.co.jp; NP,
http://www2.pflab.ecl.ntt.co.jp/dim2008
10/31/08: Workshop on Virtual Machine Security (VMSEC), Fairfax, VA;
NP, http://csis.gmu.edu/VMSec/
10/31/08: Workshop on Scalable Computing (STC), Fairfax, Virginia;
http://www.sisa.samsung.com/innovation/stc08
10/31/08: Workshop on Storage Security and Survivability (StorageSS),
George Mason University, http://storagess.org/2008/
10/31/08: Computer Security Architecture Workshop (CSAW), Fairfax, Virginia;
http://www.rites.uic.edu/csaw, NP
---------
11/ 5/08-11/ 7/08: Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys),
Raleigh, NC; HREF=http://sensys.acm.org/2008/
11/ 5/08-11/ 7/08: New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS),
Tangier, Morocco, http://www.ntms-conference.org/
11/10/08-11/11/08: Information Security (IS), Monterrey, Mexico;
info: parkjnghyuk1@hotmail.com, http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/fedconf
11/18/08-11/20/08: Symposium on Trusted Computing (TrustCom), Zhang Jia Jie,
China; info: csgjwang AT gmail.com
http://trust.csu.edu.cn/conference/trustcom2008
11/25/08-11/27/08: Workshop on Security (IWSEC), Kagawa, Japan,
http://www.iwsec.org
11/30/08-12/ 4/08: IEEE Computer and Communications Network Security
Symposium (Globecom), New Orleans, LA;
info: abderrahim.benslimane@univ-avignon.fr,
http://www.IEEE-Globecom.org/2008
---------
12/16/08-12/20/08: Information Systems Security (ICISS), Hyderabad, India,
http://www.seclab.cs.sunysb.edu/iciss08/
---------
3/26/09- 3/27/09: Information Warfare and Security, Cape Town, South Africa;
BP, http://www.jinfowar.com
____________________________________________________________________
Journal, Conference and Workshop Calls-for-Papers
(new since 83)
____________________________________________________________________
(Due to the Security and Privacy Symposium this column is not
available this month; see the online web pages)
====================================================================
Listing of academic positions available
by Cynthia Irvine
====================================================================
* Posted May 2008
SRI International
Menlo Park, California
Postdoctoral Fellow
Open until filled
* Posted April 2008
University of Regina
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
Postdoc Fellow
Open until position is filled
http://cisr.nps.edu/jobscipher.html
--------------
This job listing is maintained as a service to the academic
community. If you have an academic position in computer security and
would like to have in it included on this page, send the following
information:
Institution,
City, State,
Position title,
date position announcement closes, and
URL of position description
to: irvine@cs.nps.navy.mil
====================================================================
Information on the Technical Committee on Security and Privacy
====================================================================
____________________________________________________________________
Information for Subscribers and Contributors
____________________________________________________________________
SUBSCRIPTIONS:
Two options, each with two options:
1. To receive the full ascii CIPHER issues as e-mail, send e-mail to
cipher-admin@ieee-security.org (which is NOT automated) with subject line
"subscribe".
OR
send a note to cipher-request@mailman.xmission.com with the
subject line "subscribe"
(this IS automated - thereafter you can manage your subscription
options, including unsubscribing, yourself)
2. To receive a short e-mail note announcing when a new issue of
CIPHER is available for Web browsing send e-mail to
cipher-admin@ieee-security.org (which is NOT automated) with subject line
"subscribe postcard".
OR
send a note to cipher-postcard-request@mailman.xmission.com with the
subject line "subscribe"
(this IS automated - thereafter you can manage your subscription
options, including unsubscribing, yourself)
To remove yourself from the subscription list, send e-mail to
cipher-admin@ieee-security.org with subject line "unsubscribe" or
"unsubscribe postcard" or, if you have subscribed directly to the
xmission.com mailing list, use your password (sent monthly) to
unsubscribe per the instructions at
http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cipher or
http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cipher-postcard
Those with access to hypertext browsers may prefer to read Cipher
that way. It can be found at URL http://www.ieee-security.org/cipher.html
CONTRIBUTIONS:
to cipher @ ieee-security.org are invited. Cipher is a NEWSletter,
not a bulletin board or forum. It has a fixed set of departments,
defined by the Table of Contents. Please indicate in the
subject line for which department your contribution is intended.
Calendar and Calls-for-Papers entries should be sent to
cipher-cfp @ ieee-security.org
and they will be automatically included in both departments. To
facilitate the semi-automated handling, please send either a text
version of the CFP or a URL from which a text version can be easily
obtained. For Calendar entries, please include a URL and/or e-mail
address for the point-of-contact. For Calls for Papers, please submit
a one paragraph summary. See this and past issues for examples. ALL
CONTRIBUTIONS CONSIDERED AS PERSONAL COMMENTS; USUAL DISCLAIMERS
APPLY. All reuses of Cipher material should respect stated copyright
notices, and should cite the sources explicitly; as a courtesy,
publications using Cipher material should obtain permission from the
contributors.
____________________________________________________________________
Recent Address Changes
____________________________________________________________________
Address changes from past issues of Cipher are archived at
http://www.ieee-security.org/Cipher/AddressChanges.html
_____________________________________________________________________
How to become <> a member of the
IEEE Computer Society's TC on Security and Privacy
_____________________________________________________________________
You may easily join the TC on Security & Privacy by completing
the on-line for at IEEE at http://www.computer.org/TCsignup/index.htm
______________________________________________________________________
TC Publications for Sale
______________________________________________________________________
IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium
The 2007 proceedings are available in hardcopy for $30.00, the
28 year CD is $20.00, plus shipping and handling.
The 2006 Symposium proceedings and 11-year CD are sold out.
The 2005, 2004, and 2003 Symposium proceedings are available for $10
plus shipping and handling.
Shipping is $4.00/volume within the US, overseas surface mail is
$7/volume, and overseas airmail is $11/volume, based on an order of 3
volumes or less. The shipping charge for a CD is $1 per CD (no charge
if included with a hard copy order). Send a check made out to the
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy to the 2007 treasurer (below)
with the order description, including shipping method, and send email
to the 2007 Registration Chair (Yong Guan) (oakland07-registration @
ieee-security.org) with the shipping address, please.
Terry Benzel
Treasurer, IEEE Security and Privacy
USC Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina Del Rey, CA 90292
(310) 822-1511
IEEE CS Press
You may order some back issues from IEEE CS Press at
http://www.computer.org/cspress/catalog/proc9.htm
Computer Security Foundations Symposium
Copies of the proceedings of the Computer Security Foundations
Workshop (now Symposium) are available for $10 each. Copies of
proceedings are available starting with year 10 (1997). Photocopy
versions of year 1 are also $10.
Contact Jonathan Herzog if interested in purchase.
Jonathan Herzog
Department of Computer Science
Naval Postgraduate School
1 University Circle
Monterey, CA 93943
jcherzog@nps.edu
______________________________________________________________________
TC Officer Roster
______________________________________________________________________
Chair: Security and Privacy Chair Emeritus:
Prof. Cynthia Irvine Deborah Shands
U.S. Naval Postgraduate School The Aerospace Corporation
Computer Science Department El Segundo, CA
Code CS/IC oakland07-chair@ieee-security.org
Monterey CA 93943-5118
(831) 656-2461 (voice)
irvine@nps.edu
Vice Chair: Chair, Subcommittee on Academic Affairs:
Hilarie Orman Prof. Cynthia Irvine
Purple Streak, Inc. U.S. Naval Postgraduate School
500 S. Maple Dr. Computer Science Department, Code CS/IC
Salem, UT 84653 Monterey CA 93943-5118
hilarie @purplestreak.com (831) 656-2461 (voice)
irvine@nps.edu
Treasurer: Chair, Subcomm. on Security Conferences:
Terry Benzel Jonathan Millen
USC Information Sciences Intnl The MITRE Corporation, Mail Stop S119
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001 202 Burlington Road Rte. 62
Los Angeles, CA 90292 Bedford, MA 01730-1420
(310) 822-1511 (voice) 781-271-51 (voice)
tbenzel @isi.edu jmillen@mitre.org
Security and Privacy Symposium Newsletter Editor
2008 General Chair: Hilarie Orman
Yong Guan Purple Streak, Inc.
Iowa State University 500 S. Maple Dr.
oakland08-chair@ieee-security.org Salem, UT 84653
cipher-editor@ieee-security.org
________________________________________________________________________
BACK ISSUES:
Cipher is archived at: http://www.ieee-security.org/cipher.html
Cipher is published 6 times per year