Smart Grid, Dumb Government

Now, what could possibly go wrong with this?

The government has announced the results of its consultation with the public and other interested parties on plans for "smart" energy meters to be installed in all British homes and businesses. The most controversial aspects of the devices - the fact that they will effectively allow remote control of a home by energy companies and/or the grid authority - have apparently passed unchallenged.

More specifically:

But this pales into insignificance compared to the more radical ideas. The smart meter is also supposed to enable remote cut off or restoration of supplies - though there has been a row over the cut-off valve which would be required in the case of gas, and the government says it will have another think before deciding on that.

Apart from being able to turn a house off and on remotely, however, the unspecified people who control the "meters" from afar will also have other capabilities. Specifically, the boxes will have "load management capability to deliver demand side management - ability to remotely control electricity load for more sophisticated control of devices in the home".

These are fairly complex operations that will need to be carried out across millions of homes; so, inevitably, the smart meters will be controlled by computers. And, equally inevitably, those computers will be part of the supplier's network, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to monitor and control *them*.

And, of course, those computers controlling the computers will be accessible - and vulnerable - from the Internet. Which means that at some point terrorists will have the perfect way to take down an entire city from the comfort of their own homes on the other side of the world.

Smart thinking, lads. Not.

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Cracking the GNU/Linux Security Cliché

One of the jibes about GNU/Linux from the closed-source crowd is that the only reason there so few security exploits against it is that its market share is too small for crackers to care. Against that background, the following development must represent some kind of milestone....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Security by Obscurity? I Don't Think So

Great post by Ed Felten about the complete mess the Dutch authorities have made of their new $2 billion transit card system, which, it seems, is wide open to cracking:

Why?

Kerckhoffs’s Principle, one of the bedrock maxims of cryptography, says that security should never rely on keeping an algorithm secret. It’s okay to have a secret key, if the key is randomly chosen and can be changed when needed, but you should never bank on an algorithm remaining secret.

Unfortunately the designers of Mifare Classic did not follow this principle. Instead, they chose to combine a secret algorithm with a relatively short 48-bit key. This is a problem because once you know the algorithm it’s possible for an attacker to search the entire 48-bit key space, and therefore to forge cards, in a matter or days or weeks.

More generally:

Now the Dutch authorities have a mess on their hands. About $2 billion have been invested in this project, but serious fraud seems likely if it is deployed as designed. This kind of disaster would have been more likely had the design process been more open. Secrecy was not only an engineering mistake (violating Kerckhoffs’s Principle) but also a policy mistake, as it allowed the project to get so far along before independent analysts had a chance to critique it. A more open process, like the one the U.S. government used in choosing the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) would have been safer. Governments seem to have a hard time understanding that openness can make you more secure.

Let's hope other governments are listening...

BeThere? I'd Rather BeSquare

I've sometimes been vaguely tempted by BeThere's promises of "up to 24 Meg download" speeds. No more, if this is how it treats someone pointing out a serious vulnerability in its operations:

A 21-year-old college student in London had his internet service terminated and was threatened with legal action after publishing details of a critical vulnerability that can compromise the security of the ISP's subscribers.

BeThere took the retaliatory action four weeks after subscriber Sid Karunaratne demonstrated how the ISP's broadband routers can be remotely accessed by anyone curious enough to look for several poorly concealed backdoors. The hack makes it trivial to telnet into a modem and sniff users' VPN credentials, modify DNS settings and carry out other nefarious acts.

Here's a simple explanation: if someone exploits your vulnerability, they are crackers and deserve punishing; if someone points out your vulnerability so you can fix it and protect yourself, they are hackers and deserve rewarding. (Via TechDirt.)