Monthly Archives: January 2012

Energy, Food, Security

Breaking Human Limits

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Radiolab has a humorous hour of interviews about how humans can exceed their own limits by studying them and then breaking through (e.g. hacking the body, mind and knowledge)

On this hour of Radiolab: a journey to the edge of human limits.

How much can you jam into a human brain? How far can you push yourself past feelings of exhaustion? We test physical endurance with a bike race that makes the Tour de France look like child’s play, and mental capacity with a mind-stretching memory competition. And we ask if robots–for better or worse–may be forging beyond the limits of human understanding.

Security

Technology and the Workplace: BYOD

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The latest buzz word or acronym around the water cooler is BYOD or bring your own device. Use of mobile devices has sky rocketed over the last year with the iPhone, iPad, tablets, Android, etc. Everyone wants the latest and the greatest. But, who wants to carry around two devices, the company’s and your own? Even if you don’t mind carrying the extra device, how many man-hours do employers lose when employees are exploring and surfing their new mobile devices at work?

It may be better, depending on the business, to just allow employees to use their personal devices for work. This issue is similar to the controversy over whether to allow employees to use social media. On that one, cat’s out of the bag. They are. So put a policy in place to set parameters to benefit and protect the company. But BYOD, whoa, how many privacy, security and legal issues does this generate? A lot!

As an employer, what can you do? Again, put a policy in place and do it now. Don’t just throw something together piece meal as you go along, do it right.

Now, this may sound a little self-serving, but, commonsense dictates having it drafted by a lawyer who is familiar with the technology, privacy, and other issues to ensure your company is protected, and consequently so is the employee.

The policy or policies need to address questions such as can you monitor the personal device; implement encryption; require anti-virus; tracking, secure wipe; use of passwords; etc.? The answers, by the way, are yes, yes, and yes.

Best plan is to have a monitoring policy and a mobile device use policy, or BYOD policy, and give employees the option: “if you wish to use your personal device at work you must agree to the terms of the policy.” The alternative would be to use the company device, aka “the brick”, if they are not willing to accept the terms.

Bottom line: a well thought out and well drafted policy or policies are the key! Watch for the next installment of “Technology and the Workplace.”

Security

UCLA Breach of Encrypted Drive

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Here’s an interesting breach notification case from 2011.

The UCLA Health System is notifying thousands of patients by mail that on Sept. 6, 2011, an external computer hard drive that contained some personal information on 16,288 patients was among a number of items stolen during a home invasion. Although this information was encrypted, the password necessary to unscramble the information was written on a piece of paper near the hard drive and cannot be located. There is no evidence suggesting that the information has been accessed or misused.

And now for the punch-line:

The individual whose hard drive was stolen, left employment at UCLA in July 2011.

It was their own personal hard drive with three years of data. Not sure if it’s worse to know that a current employee/user is so careless with a password to the encrypted data or that a former employee has retained encrypted data and a password to still decrypt it.

Kudos to UCLA for their reporting (a better response now than what we saw from them in 2008, which resulted in AB 211 and SB 541).

I suspect they will be looking at whether large data sets really need to be on personal removable equipment instead of remotely accessed on virtual desktops and how they should rotate/expire encryption keys. My guess is the user was given the encryption capability for the data so their key should have been revoked (rendering the password paper useless) when they left employment.

Security

Rooting the Samsung Infuse: Change a File Permission

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One of my favorite projects last year, I have to confess, was rooting the Motorola Defy. It came bundled with all kinds of crazy software that tries to force the owner to link their email accounts and data into “Blur”, Facebook, Gmail, yada, yada before you can even power on and use the phone for the first time. Instead, I shut it down, connected it to my computer and fifteen minutes later I had Cyanogenmod running on a beautiful new machine.

Liberating the phone felt like going to the gym and in no time turning 40 pounds of fat into pure muscle…a bit like what installing Linux used to feel like.

I wasn’t going to mention my joy tinkering with the Motorola. It felt like a Rubik’s cube solution story. I mean taking it over for fun to install a more open system seemed like what you’re supposed to do with one (for real phone use I’m still loving my N9).

Michael Coppola drives that point home in a beautifully written and well documented case of how much joy he found in finding a simple file permission change to root the Samsung Infuse, and how you can do it too.

The interesting thing here is that the .wmdrm directory is also 0777, so we have full control over its contents. Let’s create a symlink to /data where sample.hds is supposed to be and reboot…Success!

[…]

A one-click root script for Linux is available here: http://www.poppopret.org/dl/Infuse4G-root.tgz . If this exploit works for other phones, contact me and I’ll update the post.

On the one hand we could say Samsung should have caught such a simple, known issue. Their security review is suspect. On the other hand, it is so obvious it could be argued they must have put it in place to be found by those who are curious and want to get the most out of their hardware. Rooting a phone is not illegal in most cases, as stated by the U.S. Congress.

…where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset.

All that being said, if you’re not into playing games, the N9 just gives you a radio button for root access.