Wired reports on a move by the Japanese government to ask websites to block users who “abuse” TOR. 

I assume that TOR is being used as an example, and it would apply to any secure privacy tool.

The interesting question is whether this is simply a foot in the door on the way to banning anonymity, or at least making its use evidence of evil intent.

Currently, public privacy services make little effort to hide themselves. Traffic from them is easily detected as being from an anonymity system. If blocking becomes common, many systems may start implementing more effective stealth systems, which would make filtering anonymity for security reasons even harder.

anonymity · censorship · international · internet · japan

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Welcome to episode 7 of The Privacy Blog Podcast.

In April’s episode, we’ll be looking at the blacklisting of SSL certificate authorities by Mozilla Firefox – Specifically, what this complex issue means and why Mozilla chose to start doing this.

In more breaking online privacy news, I will be discussing the security implications of relying on social media following the hacking of the Associated Press Twitter account earlier this week.

Next, I’ll chat about the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet, which hinges on the struggle between online privacy and free speech rights. In a closely related topic and following Google’s release of the new “Inactive Account Manager,” I will discuss what happens to our social media presence and cloud data when we die. It’s a topic none of us likes to dwell on, but it’s worth taking the time to think about our digital afterlife.

firefox · free speech · google · hacking · internet · online privacy · personal privacy · security · security breaches · social media · surveillance

For years I have been telling people to be especially careful when they venture into the dark back alleys of the Internet. My thinking was that these more “wild west” areas would be home to most of the malware and other attacks.

Dark Reading analyzes a Cisco report which says that online shopping sites and search engines are over 20 times more likely to deliver malware than counterfeit software sites. Advertisers are 182 times more dangerous than pornography sites.

So, I guess I need to change my tune. Be careful when you are going about your daily business, and have fun in those dark alleys!

internet · malware · web

Gigaom reports on a major security issue at Nokia, first announced in the “Treasure Hunt” blog.

Their Asha and Lumia phones come with something they call the “Xpress Browser”. To improve the browser experience, the web traffic is proxies and cached. That is a fairly common and accepted practice.

Where Nokia has stepped into questionable territory is when it does this for secure web traffic (URLs starting with HTTPS://). Ordinarily it is impossible to cache secure web pages because the encryption key is unique and used only for a single session, and is negotiated directly between the browser and the target website. If it was cached no one would be able to read the cached data.

Nokia is doing a “man in the middle attack” on the user’s secure browser traffic. Nokia does this by having all web traffic sent to their proxy servers. The proxy then impersonate the intended website to the phone, and set up a new secure connection between the proxy and the real website.

Ordinarily this would generate security alerts because the proxy would not have the real website’s cryptographic Certificate. Nokia gets around this by creating new certificates which are signed by a certificate authority they control and which is pre-installed and automatically trusted by the phone.

So, you try to go to Gmail. The proxy intercepts that connection, and gives you a fake Gmail certificate signed by the Nokia certificate authority. Your phone trusts that so everything goes smoothly. The proxy then securely connects to Gmail using the real certificate. Nokia can cache the data, and the user gets a faster experience.

All good right?

The fly in the ointment is that Nokia now has access to all of your secure browser traffic in the clear, including email, banking, etc.

They claim that they don’t look at this information, and I think that is probably true. The problem is that you can’t really rely on that. What if Nokia gets a subpoena? What about hackers? What about accidental storage or logging?

This is a significant breaking of the HTTPS security model without any warning to end users.

cryptography · internet · man-in-the-middle · mobile · security · web

It looks like Syria is back on the Internet again.
I have not seen any indications of unusual atrocities the, so why the short outage?

censorship · Intemational · internet · Syria