Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • August 15, 2020 2:00 PM

@ Jon,

Amateur radio operators have paid attention to “Space Weather” for decades.

Mostly those working the bands below 100MHz, though you do get some sporadic E etc in higher bands. I once had the fun of working Auroral-E but that was when I was fitter younger and my blood thick enough to withstand being in the very high latitudes.

But people also sometimes forget it’s the earths tilt and the weather that causes gives Tropo and Ducting in the VHF and UHF bands, working very long distances at UHF is fun when normally being heard across town can be hard.

But I miss “misty mornings” and “foggy days” where you realy did get oddities in the VHF and UHF spectrum.

But some fun can be had with those lumps of out of space muck that burn up in the atmosphere a couple of times a year creating short lived ionization trails that reflect RF inmuch the same way aircraft contrails reflect sunlight at the ends of the day.

But whilst bouncing off the moon can be fun, bouncing off of Venus via a borrowed radio telescope was a day to remember.

For some it’s the technical side of the hobby that is the best bit, and a Nobel Laureate agrees 😉

I’m still trying to get permission to send broad band DSSS through QO-100…

Clive Robinson • August 16, 2020 12:26 AM

@ Anders,

The “Russian SIMs” article might be new to some people but it’s kind of “old hat”.

The article also has some mistakes in it…

A mobile phone in use effectively has two electronic serial numbers one each for the phone it’s self and one for the SIM.

As many are aware you can go into quite a few phone shops and buy a phone with cash.

Some phones have “dual SIMs” as standard others have other interesting featurs as well via the likes of “test mode codes” put in to make re-manufacturing costs lower etc. So if you know which brand to buy you can change the phones electronic serial number from the keyboard amongst other things… This has been long known by “phone thieves” who change the phone serial number to get around the anti theft “number blocking” that you used to hear about, then they ship the phones abroad and sell them very profitably to locals. Obviously changing the phone serial number is also known to terrorist organisations as well and they have used it in the past to avoid drone strikes etc.

There are “sideways load” apps that will do it for you along with keeping a little databse of numbers like a reverse “phone book”. Whilst this is not illegal to do most places in some it is certainly frowned upon for a whole host of reasons some of which are technical only. Thus some phone service providers “lock” a SIM and Phone serial number pair together for “security reasons” whilst others do not (it is after all not a crime to use a SIM in a new phone, at best it’s a breach of contract).

Thus quite a few “Chinese phones” are like those old NE2000 10bT network cards you could set the MAC address to what ever you liked (BADBEEF being popular in technical books, How-Tos etc). Eventually this ability got used for nefarious purposes such as spoofing thus getting around “idiot designed” security protocols that assumed MAC addresses were “indelibly fixed”. It became a standard “Pen-Tester” technique. Well some of the more knowledgable Pen-Testers know all about “spoofing” phones as well to get around “idiot designed” security protocols. It can even “amplify” social engineering after all “This is mike in tech support, Bill’s told me to use his phone to call you” kind of works like a charm…

What these Russian cards are realy doing is no more than people running call centers do which is changing the “Caller ID”… Well there are already lots of ways to do that… There are Internet VoIP to POTS bridging sites that do that for you and they’ve been around for getting on for two decades. There are also “Virtual Office” companies that do similar in that they provide a “receptionist” who takes incoming calls and redirects them to your mobile phone, but also when you dial in will forward the call to any number you ask for, they’ve been around since the 1980’s to my knowledge and probably a lot longer. You can also set up PABXs to do dialin-dialout which back in the days of “Phone Phreeking” in the 70’s/80’s used to get charities and such like huge phone bills. Similar tricks could be done with those “Dial Cards” back in the 1970s/80s for traveling business men to get around expensive hotel phone bills or use phones where international calls were bared. You would dial a local number belonging to your chosen service provider give them your ID and PIN number and they would forward your call and bill you at the end of the month. There are even 0800 numbers or fixed rate numbers now whereby some operators will use the complicated inter operator tarrifs to route a call internationaly and still make a profit…

But there was one thing in the article that did make me smile,

You can’t just tell a device not to connect to a strong tower. That’s what the device is designed to do. Find a strong signal. Latch on and use mobile data,” the source added.

Not at all true, it’s at best a 20,000ft view of how mobile phone services work.

More correctly the behaviour “the source” from the article describes is driven by software in the baseband unit under control of the SIM which is “default behaviour” but obviously the software “default behaviour” can be changed etc, often it’s built into the phone as part of the user interface if you know where to look… Sony for instance has had it on android phones for over a decade.

If you know you can buy “dual SIM” phones that can use a choice of service providers “towers” after a moments thought it’s obvious that one tower may be stronger than the other but it does not stop you chosing which one to use. Likewise you can go on line and find lists of “prepaid” SIMs and who’s network they run on so you can make a choice of one that works well in your area. Such lists are also made by people who do a lot of outdoor activities like walking and mountain climbing so they can have a number of prepaid SIMs for their “Emergancy Phone” and even “Preppers” of all flavours have such lists. There are also apps you can now get for Smart Phones that not only produce an “on screen map” of all the towers in range of the phones along with their relative strengths and who the operator ID’s are but also which tower you are connected to. Some you can use to build up a “waystations” NEMA database like those fitness trackers for runners and cyclists, which is a great tool if you do any kind of comms engineering or are a Pen-Tester. But also if you run the same route every day, you can write a fairly simple Python script to look for daily differences or new cell towers etc which could be a lot of use in certain security efforts such as “close support detail” etc. I’m sure that some apps which can show DRTboxen, ISMI catchers and similar up for what they are is purely an incidental side effect (oh there is an app writen in Java that runs on a laptop or SBC like a Raspberry Pi with an SDR card that also shows the ID’s of phones as they communicate with towers if the encryption is turned off, kind of usefull if you are looking for people following you and you use a little lateral thinking with other SDR tools that make femto-cells and the like 😉

If you are sufficiently technically minded you can also build a “Test SIM” or aquire one for next to nothing, these enable the user to see all towers in range, and specifically select and use a chosen tower even if there is one 70db (10,000,000 times) or more stronger.

None of this informarion is in any way “secret” and is known by lots of people even if they do not know the value of it.

Remember a lot of those covert IC, Federal and even LEO flights with DRTboxes aboard got found out by people using easily available SDR devices and antennas and ADS-B decoding and display software. Their darn peculiar flight paths atracted attention and thir take of and landing fields made it almost certain, a little sluthing in public records gave up the names of the shell companies they were run through and thus “the gaff blown”.

All of this is what “Open Source Intelligence” is all about and what the likes of investigative journalists and intelligence analysts have been doing for decades, it’s just got a lot easier now these things are “On Line”. Some IC organisations are getting a little angsty, as they are starting to realise that those “collect it all” drag nets they are running is based on agnostic technology, and that their “assets” are the “small fry” that also get caught in the net… But it’s now a little to late to try to get it back in the bottle, because even one man band hobbyists are becoming “Inteligence Sources” that other individuals aggregate and then “publish” their findings.

I think it was Al Gore who first tried to raise the issue of aggregating unclasified (open source) information into actionable inteligence many years ago when he was vice president back in the 1980’s, but got ignored by the legislators etc. I know he certainly found legislators to be “sleepy” when he warned about Artificial Inteligence and Fiber Optic networks which gave us the Internet. Funnily enough he’s lived to see all three warnings come to fruition, along with one or two others as well.

Clive Robinson • August 16, 2020 6:44 AM

More on NZ COVID cluster.

As I understand it there are now thirty six cases two of which are 200kM from Aukland but are epidemiologicaly related so it is in effect a single cluster.

Apparently –I’ve only a single source of info currently– NZ has carried out philogenetic analysis with the following out come,

1, Not related to previous cases so not something that has been hiding in the community.

2, Not related to any people that have come into NZ and have been or still are in quarantine.

3, There have been more cases linked ti the cold store.

What has not been mentioned but is still a posibility all be it quite a small one is human-animal-human transmission, with a disease reservoir in the animal population

We know this is possible from mink farms in other countries and it’s the one that realy worries the heck out of me.

Because most CoV diseases in animals are not respiratory in nature but gastrointestinal. Which makes it more likely the animals will survive as well as pass it on to other creatures through their scat.

We know that felines and rodents can and have become infected with COVID but I’ve seen very little information about the progress and outcomes in cats and rodents. This is because the little information there is has been about test subjects that get euthanized soon after infection so that results can be collected.

So, bad as it might sound to some, lets hope it is the cold store at the center of this cluster. Because bad as it sounds that is controlable, where as infection in an animal population especially a wild animal population is very difficult to impossible to deal with.

Clive Robinson • August 17, 2020 4:42 AM

@ Singapore Noodles,

With regards,

seaweed extract outperforms remdesivir in blocking-covid-19 virus in cell studies

Remdesivir at best shortens your recovery tims, but at a price a very high price for the majority of people, who thus have the “death or eternal debt” choice.

An already existant drug Interferon Beta used for MS sufferers has gone through an early stage trial at Southampton hospital, works far better. Also it costs only around 150-200USD based for a course of treatment based on current UK pricing… But importantly it frees up ICU/ITU more quickly with a six day average not nine day average. Thus alowing around a 50% increase in patient through put which is important when you want to save as many lives as possible. But also the cost savings of which way more than easily ofset the drug cost even if it was only half a day saved in ITU.

As for heperin, it’s a drug with an even lower price and is already used in the UK, to try and stop the early blood clotting which necesitates oxygen therapy.

So if heperin does “double duty” and is already an “on book” medication, using it prophylacticaly as patients enter into the healthcare system may make one of the greatest savings not just in money but lives.

Clive Robinson • August 17, 2020 5:06 PM

@ echo,

With regards “Chlorinated Chicken” there is actually no need for the use of chlorine near any live stock alive or dead. A safer and more easily available disinfectant which breaks down in the environment safely is hydrogen peroxide (the waste of which is oxygen and water and what’s left of the pathogens etc it’s oxidized).

But there is also a major difference in hens eggs…

In the UK the eggs are “wiped not washed” in the US they are “Washed and god alone knows what else”.

The upshot is there is a protective layer on a hens egg put there by the hen which keeps the nasties from going through the porous shell. In the UK it remains in tact with the result that eggs do not need to be refrigerated (in fact you should never refrigerate eggs[1]) and they are still safe to eat after a week or more neither of which is true for US “washed eggs”.

In the US there are two ways you can preserve shop purchased eggs,

1, Powder them.
2, Freeze them[2].

Both require you to expose the contents of the egg to what is growing on the egg or what chemicals you’ve used to kill the pathogens on the egg. Oh if you do go down the freezing route, check your freezer because the old “star rating” before it got userped for energy efficiency told you what temprature it got down to you realy need it to be below -18C if you want to keep eggs frozen for more than three months.

In the UK we have both of those options and quite a few more, including wet preserving in “water glass” and dry preserving in “salted sand”, straw etc. This is simply because in the UK and other places we do not wash away that protective layer…

Oh and folks remember the way to tell a good egg from a bad egg is to pop the uncooked egg in a bowl of cold water. Like a witch is supposed to float if bad and sink if good the egg only floats when gas builds up in it (ever seen a hard boiled egg with a bit missing at the pointy end? Well that’s where the gas was. Whilst you can boil turning eggs they are the ones that crack most easily. If it’s a US “washed” egg I’d chuck it in the trash as it’s probably got lots of lovely little pathogens in it, UK etc “wiped” eggs are probably still safe to eat if you are healthy as the gas is due to natural break down rather than being infected with pathogens.

Likewise if you crack open a good egg the yolk forms a good rise and the white is quite thick, a turning or bad egg will have a flat yolk and the white will be quite thin and watery/runny. Whilst a turning “wiped” egg is likely to be safe to eat a washed one should be heading for the trash. On cooking programs you will see experienced chefs/cooks breaking eggs into a cup before frying etc. Often you get told that is incase a bit of shell gets in. Well whilst that is true it is not the real reason, which is to see how good the egg is. In a dinner or such like if you order sunny side up with a runny yolk, then they can not use a bad or turning egg, if you order scrambled or easy over then you get the bad or turning egg, it’s only if the cook smells sulfer do they chuck the egg. So remember when ordering eggs for breakfast asking for runny yolks will not only get you a good egg, it will give you something to dip your sausage in (many of the nicer creamy sauces are made with egg yolks, which is why dipping your sausage or smoked salmon in them makes them taste oh so much better).

[1] putting eggs in a fridge or taking them out again causes “thermal shock” and it has the same effect on eggs as it does on very thin glass, that is they crack. Such cracks are a “fast route” for pathogens to get in and breed like crazy thus your breakfest egg becomes “salmonella central”…

[2] It’s fairly easy for most people to freeze eggs when they know what they are doing. Simply, you get a load of ice cube trays and steralize them, you then break the eggs one at a time and seperate the yolk from the white. The yolks go in one ice cube tray the whites in another and keeping then level you put them in the freezer. Then when properly frozen glaze the eggs before you put the egg cubes in plastic bags[3]. Often you end up with more whites than yolks so you can make meringues with them that can be stored in air tight containers with oxygen absorbers for upto six months or more.

[3] Ever heard of “freeze drying” well even when frozen harder than wood water will still come out of meat and other foods, whilst still safe to eat[4] it neither looks as good or tastes as good as you might like. It’s why they mention in some books about the “freeze dip/spray freeze” cycle. In essence when you’ve frozen food down to the lowest temprature you can you then “glaze” it either by quickly dipping it in ice cold water or mist spraying it with chilled water. This ice glaze acts as a sacrificial evaperator preserving the look and taste of the food for far longer. So foods that are rated for three months can be made to last six months to a year. Oh one advantage of freezing meat is that it sort of tenderizes so rather than “hang game” you just leave it in the freezer for half a year or more. I used to have two chest freezers that were full of rabbit and other game and even goat (which tastes like realy good “weather mutton”).

[4] Most solid food stuffs are sterile on the inside. Our ancient North European ancestors knew that in the air a leg of deer etc would fairly often rot[5]. However leave the hide on, char the outside at the tops of flames in a fire tie a rock and a length of “rope” to it and chuck it in the bottom of a cold pond, stream or even river and it would still be safe to cook and eat upto two months or more later, longer in winter. Yes when you pulled it up you would have to skin it which as the hide would be a bit unpleasent and slimy/smelly would not be the nicest of things to do, but wash the meat off and then slow roast it next to a fire and you would have a good feed. Wild pigs hogs/boars being high in fat towards the end of autumn would be a prize catch to “put by” this way, to see you through the winter. Although the fat breaks down faster than the muscle[5] the energy content is way higher, at some point somebody discovered that drier berries and nuts if mixed with rendered down fat would last for weeks if not months, thus such mixtures would get put in the likes of cleaned out hides and even entrails.

[5] Fat or it’s abscence is why you can “hang game” for quite some time. However at some point man discovered that hanging a leg of meat in a tree in the right way in autumn it “air cures” as the moisture effectively gets fast evaporated out by the wind. Such curing which can take a while is what gives us the likes of Spanish and Italian hams, few actually realise that those delightfully tasty thin slices are actually uncooked by heat, it’s the air curing process that breakes the protiens down in a similar way that heat or “nitrate curing” does[6]. It’s also why we have hot and cold smoking as a way to preserve meat and fish not only does the smoke add flavour it kills surface pathogens and limits the processes that make things go manky.

[6] Nitrate curing is fast, but realy bad news as far as human health is concerned. In the US nitrate “pink salt” curing was very nearly baned. But guess what the food industry lied to politicians with a concocted story about “food safety”. Oh and if you read the back of packets in the US looking to avoid “nitrates” the food industry again effectively lie to you, if you see the word “celery” on a cured meat product then guess what, that realy means “nitrates” in quite large quantaties… If you want to see the meat industry perpetuating their lies read one of their hide the truth articles,

http://www.meatmythcrushers.com/myths/the-use-of-celery-powder-to-cure-some-meats-is-misleading.php

The first paragraph is a compleate nonsense “air cured” hams do not need nitrates, and often not even ordinary salt (NaCl). Which should warn you of the bunkum that’s comming next…

The reason for the USDA “cured” lable nonsense is because that is what the food industry lobbied for not as they attempt to portray it as the USDA’s oppresive and incorrect rule making. Oh and the last paragraph repeates the lie that stoped the use of nitrates being baned. That link at the bottom goes of to more bunkum and half truths they have concocted. Science has shown a definate causal link between nitrates and some forms of cancer, and the research papers are not hard to find.

The real reason for this bunkum is that using “nitrate bath/injection” they can cure a ham in less than three days without aby spoilage. Traditional curing takes upto 180days sometimes more and there can be spoilage upto about 30% which is why those genuine air cured “Jamon” are so expensive. Thus the profit of nitrate curing and then hidding it in the labeling is eye wateringly large (oh nitrate injection and baths also add other chemicals that hold water in the meat, there is a product called “York Ham” that is upto 50% injected water by weight similar is true for bacon that “sizzles” when you fry it and it gives of steam and shrinks, traditional dry cure does not, as for smokey bacon don’t ask liquid smoke is used and some of that is just manufactures chemicals).

Clive Robinson • August 17, 2020 7:04 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Entropy, Random, Information, Philosophy, Insanity

It’s not just the quantum world it’s the macro world we live in as well.

I’ve pointed out on a number of occasions that for any observed event there are N+1 “truths” that is each of the N observers see the event from their “Point Of View”(POV) and they are all slightly different. The +1 is what you might call the “real truth” which nobody can see because there is no “Universal POV”.

However if I understand the article –I’ve not read the paper yet– then the +1 is infact not the “Real Truth” but a supposition of “all potential truths” about the event (it sounds in effect like the many universes idea in different clothing).

Clive Robinson • August 18, 2020 3:01 AM

@ JonKnowsNothing, ALL,

This is not the finding from the outbreaks in Europe and Spain where Human – Mink – Human transmission was detected and the cull ordered to prevent further Mink-Human transmission.

One of the things I’ve been woried about since this pandemic was first muted was human-animal-human transmission with the animal not being badly effected by the virus, thus acting as longterm disease reservoirs.

We now know that members of the cat and rodent populations are actually susceptable to the virus and some have suspicions about other animals that come into close contact with humans such as ruminants or porcines.

Whilst the US might turn a blind eye for commercial reasons this is most certainly not true of other nations.

New Zealand which has now got a cluster after 102 clear days is investigating quite intently as to why, and I suspect they will be quite open about the results.

The four options were,

1, Contact with someone from abroad.

2, A slow burn “typhoid mary” type spreader.

3, Contact with frozen virus via food stores etc.

4, Zoonotic transfer from an animal reservoir.

The first two have so far been ruled out via philogenetics. Leaving the posibility of frozen virus which although very bad and known to happen is atleast managable, and an animal disease reservoir which would be catastrophic. In theory a disease reservoir in domesticated (pets) or semi-demesticated (live stock) animals is controlable via culling, but if it is in vermin such as rats then it’s going to be uncontrollable.

So as you can imagine I’m keenly awaiting verified news from New Zealand, more in dred than hope.

Clive Robinson • August 18, 2020 5:17 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

There is another unstated problem: African Swine Fever ASF. This highly contagious and fatal disease to pigs threatens global pork production.

Yes ASF appears to be running riot in Poland and China.

As my son pointed out to me this evening whilst we were chatting before supper, China is trying to “out source” it’s hog production to the “Americas” and is trying to persuade Argentina or Brazil to take on the work.

However the Argentinian people according to some press releases are “up in arms” about it because of the dangers of ASF[1] and the Brazilian leaders are currently trying for some reason unknown to get in tight with the USA political leadership.

But the point my son was making was that “outsourcing food production” is the first step on a slippery slope that leads to loss of National Sovereignty. Thus the ASF might be seen in fifty to a hundred years as the defining moment that spells the end of the Chinese Communist Party…

But there is one thing that is going to raise issues. As you note ASF hangs around and Chinese farmers know that they won’t be raising hogs for a decade or so. Hog raising tends to be “land efficient” and hogs can do well on “crop waste” that is they can turn the stalks stems and leaves into not just human consumable protien but useful fertilizer way faster than composting etc. Thus raising hogs is effectively a “cash crop” that makes the Chinese farms sufficiently profitable to carry on producing other non meat food stuffs.

So the usual consequence of a process ceasing to be profitable is it either stops or gets subsidised for some reason (see rice production in Japan for example). Whilst China could subsidize farms for a decade, that is a cost they probably do not wish to carry. So it’s likely Chinese internal food production will fall and that they will “out source” more and more of their food production abroad.

The thing is and it’s something the US needs to be acutely aware of as well, is that once farms close the land goes sour and they tend not to reopen again ever. Because even sour land can be profitably be utilized for other things such as home building, in which case the farms are gone for good.

Why does the US need to be acutely aware of this? Well much of the farming in the US is “meat and wheat” or corn. Currently because of rhe very poor working conditions in meat processing plants the disease runs riot thus many are closed, the farmars can not sell their meat products thus are “culling and composting” which means they are heading for bankruptcy as fast as a runaway freight train. But US meat production is not “grass grown” but fed on feed from millers who’s primary feed stock is wheat and corn. Thus with no market the feed millers will go bankrupt as well. At which point raising live stock on the US will cease to be viable to restart…

Thus between COVID and ASF animal protien is likely to get expensive and not that many in the US can raise rabbits or fowl or other livestock on their land because of Home Owner Associations and regional zoning…

Something will have to give both in China and the US and quite a few other places as well.

Otherwise we might find our populations shrinking. It’s no secret that the Western protien and fat rich diet gets humans up in the high end of the hight range, where as vegitarian often low calorific diets give short stature as well as lower fertility. Both Japan and China have a population imbalance with the number of those retired increasing year by year whilst the age people enter the job market is rising due to extended education. Thus the years of “work place” life is falling as is the tax base derived from personal taxation. This also is a detrimental change that will require something has to give…

Which might in part account for why some people welcome COVID as it realy only significantly effects the old or others that are not gainfully employed due to health or other incapacitating reasons.

Most of us would like to live “full happy lives” well in Europe it actually did not take very long for life expectancy to go from a little over sixty to more than eighty. In the US life expectency was likewise rising but over the past decade it has dropped by a couple of years and looks like it is going to continue on that downward trend for the majority of citizens and is unlikely to reverse for obvious reasons.

Clive Robinson • August 19, 2020 1:48 PM

@ Freezing_in_Brazil,

That’s the “sealed orders/book” argument about Spooky Action at a Distance.

There is a counter argument (whixh I can not remember off the top of my head) but many years ago I asked a then well known physicist the following question,

If I created a whole stream of two entangled particles and I sent each of the pair in opposit directions where one went into a suitably placed detector and the other into a black hole what would I see at the detector as the stream went into the black hole?

In effect I was asking if you could do two things, one convey information out of a black hole, and the second effectively image the black hole by sweeping the stream slowly across it like the electron beam in an old fashioned Cathod Ray Tube (CRT) television camera or screen.

The answer that came back was effectively he would get back to me. I did not get to hear anything, however about a degade ago some French researchers anounced they were going to start looking into it, as far as I’m aware there is still not an answer…