Category: risks
A Cybersecurity Policy Agenda
The Aspen Institute’s Aspen Cybersecurity Group — I’m a member — has released its cybersecurity policy agenda for the next four years.
The next administration and Congress cannot simultaneously address the wide array of cybersecurity risks confronting modern society. Policymakers in the White House, federal agencies, and Congress should zero in on the most important and solvable problems. To that end, this report covers five priority areas where we believe cybersecurity policymakers should focus their attention and resources as they contend with a presidential transition, a new Congress, and massive staff turnover across our nation’s capital.
- Education and Workforce Development
- Public Core Resilience
- Supply Chain Security
- Measuring Cybersecurity
- Promoting Operational Collaboration
Lots of detail in the 70-page report.
The Legal Risks of Security Research
The Legal Risks of Security Research
Sunoo Park and Kendra Albert have published “A Researcher’s Guide to Some Legal Risks of Security Research.”
From a summary:
Such risk extends beyond anti-hacking laws, implicating copyright law and anti-circumvention provisions (DMCA §1201), electronic privacy law (ECPA), and cryptography export controls, as well as broader legal areas such as contract and trade secret law.
Our Guide gives the most comprehensive presentation to date of this landscape of legal risks, with an eye to both legal and technical nuance. Aimed at researchers, the public, and technology lawyers alike, its aims both to provide pragmatic guidance to those navigating today’s uncertain legal landscape, and to provoke public debate towards future reform.
Comprehensive, and well worth reading.
Here’s a Twitter thread by Kendra.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
On Risk-Based Authentication
On Risk-Based Authentication
Interesting usability study: “More Than Just Good Passwords? A Study on Usability and Security Perceptions of Risk-based Authentication“:
Abstract: Risk-based Authentication (RBA) is an adaptive security measure to strengthen password-based authentication. RBA monitors additional features during login, and when observed feature values differ significantly from previously seen ones, users have to provide additional authentication factors such as a verification code. RBA has the potential to offer more usable authentication, but the usability and the security perceptions of RBA are not studied well.
We present the results of a between-group lab study (n=65) to evaluate usability and security perceptions of two RBA variants, one 2FA variant, and password-only authentication. Our study shows with significant results that RBA is considered to be more usable than the studied 2FA variants, while it is perceived as more secure than password-only authentication in general and comparably se-cure to 2FA in a variety of application types. We also observed RBA usability problems and provide recommendations for mitigation.Our contribution provides a first deeper understanding of the users’perception of RBA and helps to improve RBA implementations for a broader user acceptance.
Paper’s website. I’ve blogged about risk-based authentication before.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Privacy Analysis of Ambient Light Sensors
Privacy Analysis of Ambient Light Sensors
Interesting privacy analysis of the Ambient Light Sensor API. And a blog post. Especially note the “Lessons Learned” section.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.