Open Wifi. Free game?

 An Illinois Judge recently ruled that accessing and sniffing traffic over an open wifi network is not illegal. (Lee, 2012) While this was a preliminary judgment, and in direct contradiction with one made in 2011 against Google, who was accused of sniffing traffic from open networks around its Street View vehicles, this could open the door to abuse of open wireless networks in places such as restaurants, cafés, and public areas around the nation.

Sniffing is a term used by security professionals to describe the process of copying or analyzing data that is being transmitted over a network. Traditionally, an intruder would require physical access to network equipment to be able to sniff data, but with the advent of 802.11 wireless networking equipment, it is a trivial matter to crack the encryption code and gain access to a wireless network. Open Wifi networks do not even have encryption enabled, making it extremely easy to take advantage of other clients on the network.

But wait! Don’t most website use their own SSL encryption now? Unfortunately, several attacks can be used against local clients on the network such as ARP cache poisoning, sslstrip, and other man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) enabling an intruder to intercept your data, decrypt it, and gain access to whatever you are sending over the internet (including passwords).

By now it should be obvious that this ruling is a mistake. Not every wireless implementation can use encryption to protect accessibility, as the goal is to make the network accessible to everyone. While users should practice good security while they are on insecure wireless networks, the law shouldn’t give  a green light to malicious users looking to spy on others.

 

Lee, T. B. (2012, September 7 2012). Sniffing open Wifi networks is not wiretapping, judge says. Retrieved from Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/sniffing-open-wifi-networks-is-not-wiretapping-judge-says/

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DPI, NSA, and Your Privacy

Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology has emerged as key feature and innovative advancement in firewall technology. Firewalls in the past have only been able to monitor and control traffic based on the destination, source, and state information that packets contain. More modern firewalls are implementing DPI as a base feature, allowing network administrators to take an extremely close look at the data segments of IP packets and perform complex analysis on what exactly is traversing across their networks. (Porter, 2010) While this feature evolved as a way to combat malware, it is quickly turning into a surveillance tool, which if abused, can have significant negative impacts on our privacy.

                A perfect example of this abuse can be found in tumultuous Libya. The infamous dictator Muammar Gaddafi implemented technology supplied by French firm Bull to track internet traffic for the entire country. (Gallgher, 2012) More examples of internet tracking and filtering are surfacing in countries such as China, North Korea, and Iran. While these methods to deter western influence on extremely conservative countries seem like radical ideas to our American free world ideals, to eastern viewpoints, our western ideals seem radical. Americans would consider this huge breach of privacy an unethical abuse of government technology and power.

                Unfortunately, Americans may be surprised to know that the National Security Agency (NSA) may be guilty of these same monitoring and surveillance practices, which is illegal in the United States. The EFF was issued evidence by AT&T employee Mark Klein that the broadband megacorp was working in conjunction with the NSA to direct an entire fibre optic line to a special analysis location controlled by the NSA. (Electronic Frontier Foundation) As the saying goes “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”, there is sufficient reason to believe the NSA conducts other clandestine monitoring of the nation’s citizens.

                Is networking analysis and monitoring unethical? In cases such as the aforementioned fibre splitter, copying citizen’s internet data without warrant is illegal. In countries where monitoring and filtering is widely acknowledged and practiced, should global organizations make efforts to combat the abuse of technology to subvert privacy? One must look at the context of these two drastically different implementations. In America where privacy is greatly protected by law, actions such as the NSA’s are extremely unethical, regardless of cause. In eastern countries where culture, religion, and tradition are paramount, internet access control and monitoring may be seen as a necessary precaution to the ruling body.  It is difficult to determine whether internet traffic monitoring is strictly unethical, but in the United States, the law slims down this shady area of grey.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. (n.d.). AT&T's Role in Dragnet Surveillance of Millions of Its Customers. Retrieved September 3, 2012, from www.eff.org: https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/presskit/ATT_onepager.pdf

Gallgher, S. (2012, August 29). Big Brother on a budget: How Internet surveillance got so cheap. Retrieved September 3, 2012, from Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/big-brother-meets-big-data-the-next-wave-in-net-surveillance-tech/

Porter, T. (2010, October 19). The Perils of Deep Packet Inspection. Retrieved September 3, 2012, from Symantec Connect: http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/perils-deep-packet-inspection

Hello W0rld

Welcome to the Black Tie Security blog, a commentary and collection of Information Security related topics that I will be discussing for my Fall 2012 Emerging Issues in InfoSec course at Kennesaw State University. I am Austin Schoen, part time Quality Assurance intern for nCircle Network Security and senior undergraduate student. I do testing on Purecloud, a cloud based network vulnerability scanner. I also frequently work on web development projects and IT support for people in the metro Atlanta area.

Since I won't have a formal post for another few days I'll just go ahead and include some of my favorite sites on the web where I glean the latest security news.

My all time favorite is ArsTechnica. They have awesome in depth articles on everything IT, security included. Its usually the first site I hit when I sit down to read and check out what's going on.

http:///www.arstechnica.com

Some other good sites I visit frequently are:
http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec (user revers3TCP for fellow redditors!)
http://www.zdnet.com
http://www.anandtech.com
http://packetstormsecurity.org/

I also follow several great sources on Twitter for the latest security happenings. If you aren't a fan of Twitter, or have any desire to tweet, I would encourage everyone to at least create an account and find great sources to follow. Twitter is most valuable as a real time news feed, (not just a long list of when everyone stops by Starbucks). I will be sure to compile a list of my favorite people on Twitter to follow in a future post.

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