Yesterday, DAn Kaminsky said “There should be a yearly award for Best Security Data, for the best collection and disbursement of hard data and cogent analysis in infosec.” I think it’s a fascinating idea, but think that a yearly award may be premature. However, what I think is sorta irrelevant, absent data. So I’m looking [...]
I wanted to share an article from the November issue of the Public Library of Science, both because it’s interesting reading and because of what it tells us about the state of security research. The paper is “Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting [...]
The security of modern password expiration: an algorithmic framework and empirical analysis, by Yingian Zhang, Fabian Monrose and Michael Reiter. (ACM DOI link) This paper presents the first large-scale study of the success of password expiration in meeting its intended purpose, namely revoking access to an account by an attacker who has captured the account’s [...]
In “Close Look at a Flu Outbreak Upends Some Common Wisdom,” Nicholas Bakalar writes: If you or your child came down with influenza during the H1N1, or swine flu, outbreak in 2009, it may not have happened the way you thought it did. A new study of a 2009 epidemic at a school in Pennsylvania [...]
I haven’t read the paper yet, but Schneier has a post up which points to a paper “Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications: a Reality Today, a Challenge Tomorrow,” by Shuo Chen, Rui Wang, XiaoFeng Wang, and Kehuan Zhang.about a new side-channel attack which allows an eavesdropper to infer information about the contents of an SSL [...]
There has been a disconnect between the primary research sectors and a lack of appropriate funding in each is leading to decreased technological progress, exposing a huge gap in security that is happily being exploited by cybercriminals. No one seems to be able to mobilize any signficant research into breakthrough cyber security solutions. It’s been very frustrating to see so much talk and so little action. This post proposes one possible solution: Information Security Pioneers Fellowship Program (ISPFP), similar to Gene Spafford’s proposal for a Information Security and Privacy Extended Grant (ISPEG) for academic researchers.
In his ongoing role of “person who finds things that I will find interesting,” Adam recently sent me a link to a paper titled “THE HUMAN FACTORS ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM–HFACS,” which discusses the role of people in aviation accidents. From the abstract: Human error has been implicated in 70 to 80% of all civil [...]
I’ve recently read “Quantified Security is a Weak Hypothesis,” a paper which Vilhelm Verendel published at NSPW09. We’re discussing it in email, and I think it deserves some broader attention. My initial note was along these lines: I think the paper’s key hypothesis “securtity can be correctly represented with quantitative information” is overly broad. Can [...]