Steve Bellovin, Columbia computer science professor and security researcher, writes on network security, Usenet history, and how old systems were designed.
HN links it for first-hand Usenet history and for his papers on topics like age verification and wiretapping systems, cited in discussions of those subjects.
This is a piece by On the Media's Brooke Gladstone from before the AM database leak, June 24, intervewing Paul Ford (of "What is Code" fame).
There's audio if you prefer here:
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/what-can-we-learn-ashley-madison/
It's an intelligent piece and hits on many of the themes revealed since:
Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that at it's heart, this problem with protecting our data stems from, essentially, a conflict between the centralized and decentralized Internet, and that we've always been at one end or the other, swinging like a pendulum
...
Paul Ford: See, I read this book in 2002 called Translucent Databases by a guy named Peter Wayner. It's a short book and it just describes an approach to obscuring data inside of a data base so that it's still useful in some ways. You might know the zip code but not know the street address and so on. The user of the website, they might have full access to it. They can update their name, they can change their address, whatever. They can make decisions about how they want that information to be used as well, but what it really does is scramble the eggs. It's an approach to just hiding and obscuring as much by default as possible, adding lots of garbage and then hashing that all together into a big mess.
B: So this idea has been around for a while but these big centralized sites have not picked up on it, I assume because it runs counter to their desire to market the information they've assembled or to market to…
This is an ingenious idea, one that becomes obvious only in retrospect.
To me this feels like a merger of the ideas in projects like magic-wormhole, Wormhole.app, and the (defunct) Mozilla Send. But then it adds a kind of sharchive twist using the browser as a runtime.
The original paper I saw called it Password Authenticated Key Exchange.
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/neke.pdf
But I think the general form is now called something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agreement?wprov=sfti1
Anyway I’m posting all this not to show my erudition (I’m really stupid about cryptography) but that there’s lots of precedent for this kind of tool and maybe with a few tweaks can even be made standards-compliant. (RFC 8188 seems to contemplate some ideas like this, but the file isn’t “self-expanding”.)
Some obvious issues: sitting on a thumb drive, the file is vulnerable to unlimited attacks. And since the decryptor is in “plaintext” it could be MITMed in a way, since the decryption code can be tampered with, and a browser environment with localhost access can be tricked into doing lots of things, including sending decrypted contents to the attacker. In a SaaS there’s no MITM given transport security, and you can notice you’re getting attacked, or expire links after a number of tries / some amount of time.
But so what; the whole point here is to provide really good security with a different channel.
Before the introduction of permissive action links (PAL), nuclear weapons could be operated and detonated by almost anyone.
> The exact details are hazy, but the broad contours are clear: the inspection team found the control of the forward-based nuclear weapons inadequate and possibly illegal. In Germany and Turkey they viewed scenes that were particularly distressing. On the runway stood a German (or Turkish) quick-reaction alert airplane (QRA) loaded with nuclear weapons and with a foreign pilot in the cockpit. The QRA airplane was ready to take off at the earliest warning, and the nuclear weapons were fully operational. The only evidence of U.S. control was a lonely 18-year-old sentry armed with a carbine and standing on the tarmac. When the sentry at the German airfield was asked how he intended to maintain control of the nuclear weapons should the pilot suddenly decide to scramble (either through personal caprice or through an order from the German command circumventing U.S. command), the sentry replied that he would shoot the pilot; Agnew directed him to shoot the bomb.
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html
The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were a wild time. Tens of thousands of deadly devices in the hands of two superpowers armed to the teeth, and not a single rogue general. Not one single device sold to terrorists on the black market. It's a miracle we made it out alive.
>For one thing, a /64 issued to a house is a pretty daunting search space for the scanning worms of yesterday.
Eh...
-----
We have outlined a number of techniques that scanning worms can use in
an IPv6 Internet to locate potential targets. These techniques are equally
applicable to the current IPv4 Internet, albeit not as efficient as random
scanning. Although “conventional” address-space scanning is prohibitively
expensive in that environment, we believe that the diversity of sources we
discussed (which is by no means exhaustive) guarantees a rich target set
for worms.
---
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/v6worms.pdf
A lot of them do rely on getting that first host infected though, but that's not exactly dissimilar to IPv4 networks as well.
>Finally, having remote desktop shouldn't be a problem if people don't know your password, no? It's not like there is a firewall stopping baddies from guessing your Gmail password.
That actually begs an interesting point. IPv4 allows for services to block use IP profiling to limit an attacker's attempts to brute-force / semi-brute-force a password or other attacks like a DDoS. What would be IT / Security processionals response when an attacker can just jump to another IPv6 address and resume the attack?
The core material is the important part if you are, say, Iran or North Korea. However, if you are in a cave with a box of scraps and no Tony Stark, there's a lot more to it.
Exactly how PALs work is not really well known. A lot of well-informed speculation can be found here:
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html
The most plausible mechanism for how they work is lots of crypto, plus physical-level crypto-like mechanisms wherein detonation requires setting off the various explosives in the bomb at precise and different times, and those times are not stored in the bomb itself, but rather extracted from the PAL code.
It's possible to build simple nuclear weapons that don't require a lot of complicated steps to explode. But they're tremendously inefficient, and nobody bothers with them today. A stolen nuke will be an implosion design requiring a virtuoso performance of nanosecond-level timing to detonate properly, and those timings will not be easy to reverse engineer. Build a new weapon using the fissile material from the original bomb would likewise be a massive undertaking (only "easy" if you're Iran etc., not al Qaeda), and really would no longer qualify as a "stolen" weapon as proposed.
More consenting adults being arrested for consenting. More taxpayer dollars being spent on imprisonment and enforcement than less expensive treatment, not to mention the opportunity cost of lost profits from taxation.
When are we going to realize that the drug war for most drugs is fucking bullshit?
DPR may have gone away but if the law doesn't change eventually, the nerds WILL figure this problem out. You say the weakness this time was the postal system? Well here comes APOD, Anonymous Physical Object Delivery https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/APOD_PETS09.pdf
And lest we forget, here's a statement from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Commission_on_Drug_Policy :
In June 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a critical report on the War on Drugs, declaring "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and years after President Nixon launched the US government's war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed."