privacy

iPhone TouchID Falls To Well-Known Hack

Apple’s Touch ID may be the new thing when it comes to signing on to your iPhone. But the underlying finger print scanning technology proved vulnerable to a very old-school attack, according to information posted by the German hacking crew The Chaos Computer Club (CCC). The group announced late Saturday that it was able to successfully bypass TouchID with a fake fingerprint, lifted from a glass surface. “This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method (sp) and should be avoided,” the group wrote in blog post announcing the compromise. Apple’s Touch ID biometric sign-on was the major new feature in the just-released iPhone 5S (the feature is not offered for the lower-cost 5C, which was also just announced.) The feature makes use of technology Apple acquired in July 2012 with the firm AuthenTec, and its addition to the iPhone line was no surprise. But […]

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Podcast: Securing The Internet of Things

One of the most vexing problems created by the fast-evolving Internet of Things is how to secure the massive trove of data that is transmitted and then stored by smart devices such as automobiles, consumer and household electronics and personal devices. As we’ve seen, private sector firms have been aggressive in leveraging new technology to connect their products to the Internet. But less thought has been given to the security and privacy implications of doing so. Now people are starting to take notice. In recent weeks,  the FTC settled a case with a California firm, TRENDNet over balky home surveillance cameras they sold – cameras that were discovered to be easily discoverable and hackable from the public Internet. But, with so many cooks in the IoT kitchen (so to speak), where does responsibility for securing technology lie? Recently, I chatted with an expert on security and the Internet of Things. […]

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Internet of Things Demands New Social Contract To Protect Privacy

Changes brought about by the Internet of Things demands the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and “control.” That, according to an opinion piece penned by the head of the European Commission’s Knowledge Sharing Unit. Gérald Santucci, in an essay written for the web site privacysurgeon.org, argues that technology advances, including the advent of wearable technology and the combination of inexpensive, remote sensors and Big Data analytics threaten to undermine long-held notions like personal privacy and the rights of individuals. The essays says that current approaches to data protection are “largely inadequate” to the task of reigning in the asymmetrical changes wrought by new technology. “Data collection and video surveillance will continue to grow as ubiquitous computing pervades almost all areas of our […]

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iPhone’s Touch ID Gives A Big Boost To Biometrics

Apple Corp. introduced the latest versions of its iPhone mobile phone yesterday to great fanfare, though the fever pitch that was common during the reign of Steve Jobs was noticeably absent. There were a flurry of articles and opinion pieces like this one, wondering whether Apple had lost its mojo, were common. And it goes without saying that if the headline is wondering whether you’ve lost your mojo, then you most certainly have. Still, Apple didn’t disappoint with its iPhone and iOS updates, particularly in the security arena. Indeed, the long-rumored addition of a finger print reader may have been the most prominent new feature in an update where the most prominent changes (a faster, 64-bit processor, higher resolution camera, etc. ) were transparent to the user. So what do you need to know about the new iPhone and its biometric authentication feature? And how will the new iPhone 5S […]

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BitSight: A Equifax For Security Risk?

I’ve opined in these pages and elsewhere that one of the big problems in the IT security space is the absence of actionable data. After all, problems like denial of service attacks, network compromises and inadvertent data leaks are all just risks that organizations and individuals must grapple with in our increasingly wired world. True – they’re new kinds of risks, but otherwise they’re not fundamentally different from problems like auto accidents, property crime or illness – things  that we do a good job accounting for. The difference, as I see it, is an absence of accepted and independent means of assessing the relative security posture of any organization. IT security is still so much dark magic: we rely on organizations to tell us about how secure they are. Organizations, in turn, rely on a complex and patchy network of security monitoring and detection tools, then try to read the […]

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