Making BadUSB Work For You – DerbyCon
Last week Brandon Wilson and I were honored to speak at DerbyCon, on the work we’ve been doing on the Phison controller found in many USB thumb drives. This was my first time speaking at DerbyCon – it’s a great event, with a fantastic team making the magic happen. Slides: Video (which I’ve haven’t been able to bring myself to watch): Now that the dust has settled, I would like to provide some updates, thoughts, and extra information – and maybe correct an error I made during the presentation.
Read more…IETF Action on Secure Email
Early last week I emailed a group of IETF Area Directors, for the Security and Applications areas, asking them to start the process of creating a new Working Group to address the issues around email security. (Thanks Adrian Farrel for the prodding!) Today, the first result of the effort has been completed – the new endymail mailing list. An IETF venue to discuss how these issues can be addressed, hopefully laying the groundwork updated standards to improve email as we know it today, and eventually standardizing a replacement to SMTP and related protocols.
Read more…SMIMP at the DEFCON Crypto Village
Last week I gave a lighting talk at the DEFCON CryptoVillage on SMIMP. The talk went over the basics of why the project is needed, and how the specification works. Here are the slides: Here is a rough transcript of the talk: Slide 1: I’m Adam Caudill, I’m a developer and security researcher; I work on a number of different things, but my recent work has been around privacy and secure messaging.
Read more…On Strong Identity Management
Alice wants to send an encrypted message to Bob; she knows his address, but doesn’t know the public key that goes with that address. Using GPG, Alice would look up his address on a key server, the issue is of course that anyone can upload a key associated with Bob’s address. Using the “web of trust” model, Alice would look at the different keys and see which ones are signed, and if any of them are signed by people she knows.
Read more…Jumping through hoops…
There are two ways to implement security: Real security, based on empirical evidence and analysis. Checklist security, based on the latest checklist somebody says is important. When security is based on real evidence and analysis, policies are enacted based on real gain and measured against the business impact. Risks are considered, and the costs versus benefits are well understood so that policy choices are based on real, useful information. On the other hand there’s security by checklist.
Read more…The Sinking Ship of E-Mail Security
E-Mail, the venerable old standard for internet text messages, dating back to the early 1980s – and back to the early 1970s in other forms, has long been the “killer app” of the internet. While so many companies try to make the next great thing that’ll capture users around the world – none of these compare to the success of e-mail. It is likely the single most entrenched application-layer protocol used today.
Read more…phpMyID: Fixing Abandoned OSS Software
phpMyID is a simple solution for those that want to run their own OpenID endpoint – the problem is that its author stopped maintaining the project in 2008. Despite this, there’s still quite a few people that use it, because it’s the easiest single-user OpenID option available. Unfortunately, the author didn’t follow best practices when building the software, and as a result multiple security flaws were introduced. In 2008, a XSS was identified and never fixed (CVE-2008-4730), in the years since then it seems the software has been below the radar.
Read more…Security By Buzzword – Why I don’t support Ensafer
Update: I had a call with Ensafer’s CTO, Trygve Hardersen to discuss the issues I brought up, and what they can do about it. First, they updated the site so that downloads are now over HTTPS. He stated that the infrastructure that powers their service is separate from the website, and everything is over HTTPS. They are working on making documentation available, and hope to have the first documents available soon.
Read more…HTTP Considered Harmful – The Need For Negative Feedback
We all know, and well understand what this means when we see it in a browser: It means that the connection is encrypted, and that some degree of validation has occurred to verify that the server is who it claims to be. Through the years, users have been taught to trust sites when they see that, or the all too familiar ’lock’ icon – when users see it, they assume their data is safe.
Read more…On Opportunistic Encryption
Opportunistic encryption has become quite a hot topic recently, and blew up in a big way thanks to an Internet Draft that was published on February 14th for what amounts to sanctioned man-in-the-middle. Privacy advocates were quickly up in arms – but it’s not that simple (see here). As pointed out by Brad Hill, this isn’t about HTTPS traffic, but HTTP traffic using unauthenticated TLS; thanks to poor wording in the document, it’s easy to miss that fact if you just skim it.
Read more…
About Me
Security Architect at 1Password. Security researcher, engineer and software developer with more than 20 years of experience.
Work: I primarily focus on application security, usable security, secure communications, and cryptography. I build and lead strong and dynamic teams, who cover all facets of security and privacy.
Writing: I write about my research, security in general, development and software design, and leadership through my blog, essays, and various publications. I also engage in some creating writing when I can.
Photography: I am a purist fine art photographer, working primarily in black & white, and focused on sharing new perspectives of the world. Limited edition prints of my work are available on my online gallery. I also have a background in photojournalism, and volunteer in this field when I can.