Learning Ally: Books I've Narrated

Working with Learning Ally, I record textbooks and novels for the blind and dyslexic, along with others that learn differently.

I've been keeping this list on LinkedIn, but hit the LinkedIn character maximum. I didn't always keep track, so there may be a few more books. I started volunteering at Learning Ally in Palo Alto in August 2012, followed them to Menlo Park and am preparing to start volunteering from home.

When I started, we had physical books we read from and we've since moved to VoiceText (scanned texts) and PDF books. This makes it easier to start recording at home!

Here are the books that I've narrated over the years. I'll continue to add to this post as I complete more books.  The hours listed are total length of the finished narration. It takes usually 3 times as long recording and correcting to get that finished product.

Recorded in 2020

• The Toll (Book 3 in Arc of the Scythe Series, Neal Shusterman) (625 pages, 17:53 hours)
• One Safe Place (Tania Unsworth) (296 pages, 6.82 hours)
• Follow the Moon Home: A Tale of One Idea, Twenty Kids, and a Hundred Sea Turtles (Philippe Cousteau) (48 pages, 35 minutes)
• A Perfect Score (Bob Buyea) (370 pages, multiple narrators. I narrated Randi.)

Recorded in 2018

• Court of Fives (Kate Elliot) (432 pages, 10.71 hours)
  
• Still Life with Tornado (A.S. King) (296 pages, 8:48 hours)
• Some Kind of Happiness (Claire Legrand) (374 pages, 10.80 hours)
• Caraval (Stephanie Garber) (407 pages, 10.13 hours)

Recorded in 2017

• Tales from a Not-So-Friendly Frenemy (Dork Diaries #11) (Rachel Renee Russell) (248 pages, 2.17 hours)
• Tales from a Not-So-Fabulous Life (Dork Diaries #1) (Rachel Renee Russell) (282 pages, 3.08 hours)
• The San Francisco Earthquake (I Survived #5) (Lauren Tarshis) (98 pages, 1.27 hours)
• Shadows of Sherwood (Robyn Hoodlum #1) (Kekla Magoon) (356 pages, 7.48 hours)
• Mythology (Edith Hamilton) (475 pages, 11.35 hours)
• Carve the Mark (Veronica Roth) (467 pages, 12.14 hours)
• Goosebumps Book 8: The Girl Who Cried Monster (138 pages, 2.50 hours)
• Goosebumps Book 3: Monster Blood (R. L. Stine)

Recorded in 2016

• Ink and Bone (Rachel Caine) (354 pages, 10.97 hours)
• Dragons of Winter (James A. Owen) (389 pages, 9.38 hours)
• Tru & Nelle (G. Neri) (328 pages, 4.70 hours)
• City of Ice (Ken Yep) (362 pages, 8:47 hours)
• Winter: The Lunar Chronicles (Marissa Meyer) (828 Pages, 20 hours)

Recorded in 2015

• If You Could Be Mine (Sara Farizan) (248 Pages, 4:59 hours)
• The Vanishing Game (Kate Kae Myers) (356 pages, 7:45 hours)
• A Northern Light (Jennifer Donnely) (396 pages, 8:57 hours)
• Liar Temptress Soldier Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War (Karen Abbott) (513 pages, 12:20 hours)
• The Spiritglass Charade (Collean Gleason) (360 pages)
• Wicked Girls (Stephanie Hemphill) (389 pages)

Recorded in 2014

• The Wicked and the Just (J. Anderson Coats) (342 pages, 7:30 hours)
• The Spy Catchers of Maple Hill (311 pages)
• California Driver Manual (106 pages, 4:15 hours) (Yes, DRIVER, not Driver's ... )
• Unbroken: A Ruined Novel (Paula Morris) (295 pages)
• Froi of the Exiles (Marlena Marchetta) (598 pages, 16:53 hours)
• The Amazing Monty  (Johanna Hurwitz)

Recorded in 2013

• Every Other Day (Jennifer Lynn Barnes)
• The Last Dragonslayer (Jasper Fford)
• The Red Convertible
• Michael's Mystery
• Inkheart

BH20: The Dark Side of the Cloud - How a Lack of EMR Security Controls Helped Amplify the Opioid Crisis

Mitchell Parker, CISO, Indiana University Health

The Opioid crisis has caused mass addiction and broken up families and support systems. Why is this of interest to Black Hat? A major root cause of the crisis was due to underhanded manipulation of an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system.

Practice Fusion, now a division of Allscripts. They had advertisements in their EMR, which seemed like a violation of the Stark Act.   Many smaller practices used them, because they couldn't afford better systems. Had over 100K customers at their peak.

Many hospitals and small practices are losing money or barely staying afloat - so they were using this system, as it was 'free'.

EMRs are digital version of paper records.  They can be on mobile, desktop, browser or application - often with remote access, as physicians are overworked, too, and would rather complete their charting from home.

EMRs need to be certified to be eligible for federal reimbursement, and are meant to be kept up to date. Lots of HIPAA violations are caught in the big EMR companies, so it's hard to say what's happening in the smaller providers. 

These systems tend to be lacking 2 factor authentication for system access, which means you can even get system administrator access this way.   The physicians are overworked and focused on spending time with patients, not spending time on IT and compliance.

Most of the revenue for Practice Fusion came from advertisements, even though it was a violation for Anti-Kickback Statute. They additionally marketed themselves to drug manufacturers as willing to customize clinical decision support alerts - Pharma Co. X paid $1M to add custom alerts to recommend extended release opioids.  They were able to prove that doctors that saw this alert prescribed at a higher rate than those who did not.

Death and Opioid abuse is not new, was impacting parts of our  America as far back as the late 1990s.

People died and became drug addicts because of a marketing department.

To help stem this type of abuse, there are proposed changes to the Department of Health and human services regulations.  Additionally, Mitchel would like to see diversion monitoring software and privacy monitoring. 

Additionally, recommending that doctors use the larger providers - those have already been set up to limit opioid prescriptions.

Going forward, EMRs should have 2-factor auth, limited access and configuration change reporting. 

We tell our doctors everything about our lives, so this information must be protected. When that trust is broken, it is tragic.

BH20: A Framework for Evaluating and Patching the Human Factor in Cybersecurity

Ron Bitton, Principal Research Manager, Cyber Security Research Centre at Ben Gurion University

Social engineering attacks go beyond just phishing and no longer limited to PCs, but most solutions don't distinguish between different types of attacks or platforms.

The existing methods are based around self-reported measures, attack simulations,  and training (with some mitigation).

But the self-reported method is biased and resource intensive, so cannot be done continuously.  The attack simulations are typically limited to classic phishing, and cannot be used to evaluate users vulnerability to other attack vectors.   The training workshops are great, but unlikely to reflect the users normal behaviour - as they know they are in training.  Additionally, employees are not big fans of forced training, and may not be engaged.

Most technological mitigations are limited to specific environments (like the office, specific browser).

The researchers have created a new toolkit: SafeMind.   The researchers looked into specific areas of awareness models, and worked with other security researchers to help rate the importance of the criteria, which helped them narrow down the most  critical areas to measure.

Created an endpoint solution, attack simulator and network solution. The endpoint solution looks at a lot of things on the endpoint - sensors on social media activity, security settings, certificate management - to create a profile of the user.  Using this profile, could target attack simulations for that user. 

Over 7 weeks they experimented on 162 subjects. They could see that those users with lower security knowledge were less successful at mitigating some attacks.  Users self-reported behaviour may differ significantly from their actual behaviour, whereas their research could predict more accurately their actual behaviour.

BH20: Keynote: Hacking Public Opinion

Renée DiResta, Research Manager, Stanford Internet Observatory

Vocab background: Misinformation, the sharer thinks the information is true, and sharing out of trying to help people. Disinformation, the sharer knows the information is false.  Propoganda is information that is created to make you feel and act a certain way (not always false). Finally, there's an agent of influence - someone acting on behalf of someone else (Nation State, etc). 

Dissemination is an important part of sharing information. In the past, someone would have to physically hand out flyers.  This got easier with tv and radio, but still restricted.  Then, we got zero-cost publishing with blogging - but attracting the audience was still tricky.  Now we have social media - the feeds are designed for engagement and dissemination. 

Now we have a glut of material, no editors, no gatekeepers - just an algorithm that rates, ranks and disseminates.  These algorithms are gameable, and the systems are open to everyone.

We are now going beyond influencing public opinion to hacking public opinion.  It's easy and cheap to create fake media companies and personas, it's how the platform was designed.

We see distraction, persuasion, entrenchment (to highlight and exacerbate existing divisions), and then divide.

Now our broadcast media feeds into social media - and it also flows in the reverse! Both of these can be easily influenced by bad actors.

Renee then walked through a few examples from China - obvious government propaganda, less obvious and then "news" coming from a fabricated news company on twitter to make China look good.  In addition, many Chinese news agencies have facebook pages - even though Facebook is banned in China.  Why? To influence China's image in countries that do have access to Facebook, used recently to discredit Hong Kong protestors.

She did a great breakdown, as well, on creation of twitter bots and figuring out their purposes - and also how effective they were (engagement, number of retweets, etc.)

Memes are properties created for social media, and are easily digestible, identity focused. Often created by state actors to create more division - on both sides of the political spectrum.

Great deep dive into the Russian interference in the 2016 election, with lots of great graphics.

Well researched state agents will exploit divisions in our society using vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. They will likely target voting machines again and to infiltrate groups. But most of all, they will aim to reduce trust in the US elections.

The more these images and stories are spread, they start to influence and impact people, though direct measurement of impact on each individual is more difficult and will be part of further research. They can see disinformation jumping from one group to another, which seems to demonstrate people are believing it and feel strongly enough to reshare.

An excellent talk - I highly recommend you catch it on YouTube when posted!

BH20: Hacking the Voter: Lessons from a Decade of Russian Military Operations

Nate Beach-Westmoreland, Head of Strategic Cyber Threat Intelligence, Booz Allen Hamilton

Nate has been involved in elections since a youth.  For background, read Russian's Military Doctrine that explains tactics, targets & timing of GRU operations.  Long story short: they've been doing what they said they would do!

This is not a new thing - been doing this at least since the 1970s.  Many of the strategies haven't changed, either. what has changed is the technology and who is doing it. In the 1980s, it was the KGB and the Propaganda department.

In the late 1990s, Russia switched to the tactic of Information Confrontation - the continuous competition over beliefs, opinions, perceptions and feelings to enable the furthering of states' agendas.  This has been adopted by the Russian Military and is even documented on their website!

The Information Confrontation has two sides: informational-psychological and informational-technical capabilities.  These are used for more than just swaying an election.  Moscow's preferred candidates have rarely won, but they did succeed at undermining the winner - making them weaker, less able to oppose Russia. 

Information conflict is both offensive and defensive - can demonstrate that "fair, free and democratic" societies are not desirable nor obtainable - So, Russians should stick with the status quo.

Look at what happened in the Ukraine in 2014.  Attacks against the Ukrainian election started a few days in advance, trying to destroy the vote counting system.   They took over websites of officials, creating fake announcements that the system had been breached and then attacked the vote reporting site to show a fringe candidate as winning - all to delegitimize the actual election results.

Similarly in Bulgaria, the GRU launched an DDOS on voter registrar sites, so voters could not find their polling place.

In France (2017), the GRU started phishing Macron's campaign, and started blasting Macron with all sorts of falsehoods about Macron's character.  Even though they were easy to debunk, they built a story that Macron may be a seedy character.  France has a ban on campaigning and commentary within 48 hours of the election, and released more falsehoods and private campaign documents right before.

Similar things happened in Montenegro in 2016.

Then in the US in 2016, similar tactics again: leaking internal campaign - time released to maximally inflame divisiveness. They started spreading fear about election infrastructure and threats of large scale fraud/vote rigging.

When Russia is caught, they go on a "whataboutism" campaign - 'So, what, our athletes were doping, your athletes have done the same thing - what about those athletes?" How can you be angry about us trying to interfere in your election, when US does it to other countries? 

As we've already seen Russia attack power grids, what would happen if they did it on an election day?  Either in the US or other nations?

BH20: We Went to Iowa and All We Got were These Felony Arrest Records

Justin Wynn, Senior Security Consultant, Coalfire Systems

Gary Demercurio, Senior Manager, Coalfire Systems

Client asked them to come on sight and test physical penetration and plantation of drone device.  They were requested by the client to do the work at night/after hours.  What was said later to the press by the client was very different.  Originally it was night only, but they changed the contract later to add social engineering during the day.  It wasn't just the pentesters on the phone with the client, but also their project manager, manager and another pen tester. 

They also received a letter of authorization that also asked them to begin on Sunday (when the court house is closed), so for the client later said they only wanted it to happen during business hours (courthouses are closed on weekends).  The pentesters were given restrictions for each of the 5 buildings, like which floors are off limits, which data centers are in scope/out of scope. This was worked out building by building.  The contract was more generic, and the scoping call was more detail (lesson learned: record your scoping call)!

Charges were filed against each of them independently.

Spent the day on Sunday scoping locations, during business hours they got tours (some public/free access, some with escorted tour).

Started out Monday night at Judicial branch - a State Trooper came by (as expected), who said this was common practice and asked for a business card.  They did get inside, got into the IT department and left a card on his desk. The contact from client sent a "can't wait to see how this was done", reviewed the overnight footage, and didn't say anything.  Everything was seeming fine to the researchers.

Started again on Tuesday night, breached 3 more buildings with no alarms. They knew the last building had an alarm, and were hoping they would set it off.   they arrived at 11:30PM on Tuesday, did a brief walk around - could see the sheriff department across the street.  They found an open door when they arrived - wow.  They closed it, and then re-breached the door.  they tried the default codes for the alarm, didn't work - so they decided to hang out and wait for the police to arrive. 

They wanted to make sure they did not scare the police, or get surprised, so they called out regularly as they were moving down to the ground floor. 

Then we got to watch the body cam footage from first officer on scene, and can hear the police talking, seemed fine with the researchers and they were told they were good to go.

then the sheriff arrived.....and the police officers turn off their body cams.  Suddenly sheriff said the client didn't have the authority to authorize the pen test (state vs county property), and decides to arrest them for burglary. 

Up until when the sheriff arrives, everyone was very professional, then suddenly everyone's attitude changes. Suddenly, the fact that they are penetrating with commonly available tools, they couldn't possibly be professionals (!?!?!?).

Now being questioned about whether or not one of the testers was an actual marine, took a lot of pushing to get them to say they were under arrest.  Finally got ahold of the client, to let them know they were in jail. Asked for help.   "Andrew" was supposed to talk to the sheriff, but the sheriff won't budge because it's a county building - "nothing" can be done.

Judge at arraignment was not pleased that they had been arrested breaking into her courthouse... thought their client would come and protect them, but instead noted they were a flight risk - set their bail at $50,000 (same as people are given for murders).

This led into jurisdictional infighting. Client removed documents from Coalfire portal.

They want someone to be responsible for this.  Polk County DA was not going to charge the speakers, as he was aware that it was the three contacts from the client were at fault, but Polk County Sheriff was defensive of Dallas County Sheriff and threatens Coalfire CEO.

While things are moving forward, in their favor, the Chief Justice dies and everything dies with them.

Now they both have permanent felony records.  Cannot get firearms.

They have laws in the state that are more concerned with liability and less about the security of their infrastructure.  Based on this, all offensive security has stopped in Iowa. 

They would like to get laws passed to prevent this from happening again - if you can help, reach out!

[Q&A]

Do you still have a felony record? Yes.

Was the sheriff of Dallas County ever reprimanded? No.

BH20: Election Security: Securing America's Future

Chris Krebs, Director, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

About this time in 2016, it became very clear that Russia was intent on disrupting our election in several ways, including information disruption, election tampering, etc.   There was an ad-hoc response pulled together, as it hadn't been clear this was going to happen in advance.  The Russians did research and targeted attacks on all 50 states, but did not seem to be able to impact a vote via cyber means.

Why was it an ad-hoc response? there was no dedicated approach on election security.  The security research community was aware, but there was nothing dedicated at the federal level. Pulled it together last minute and provided a successful defense from a cyber security standpoint.  Then a playbook was brought out now that others can study.

What are the implications of what happened in 2016? it was a Sputnik type moment - for the first time, the Soviets had a way to reach out and touch us, geographic isolation was no longer in our favor.  Now they could use cyber techniques to destabilize and election. gave the US heads up that we had a lot at stake in 2018 and 2020.  

We have 3 distinct advantages now: vibrant election security community, better understanding of risks, better visibility of what is happening with elections.   Federal gov't is here to support state and local governments run their elections.  Since 2016, pulled together and information sharing infrastructure. sharing threats, strategic and defense tactics. Been providing services / tech capabilities to partners in local government.   Been working together to analyze trends and issues, helping others to buy-down risk with the tools & techniques that have been developed. 

We have a much better understanding now than we did in 2016 how different states and counties are running elections - we are listening to them about what their risks and issues are.  One of the best risk management technique: paper.  We are asking states to switch to a system that has a paper record. for 2020, we may hit 92% or higher with a paper trail.  The paper trail is needed for audibility.

We now have a much better understanding & visibility of what is happening in the election space and worked hard to develop trust with state & local election authorities.  We've been able to provide tools, like intrusion detection, deployed across all 50 states (not necessarily all counties). 

Even with all these preparations, still more work to do - there could be more disruptions, we have Covid-19, and we need voters to be informed.

Today, in 2020, the focused mission of NSA, Intelligence, etc - watching out for Russia, China, and other state actors targeting our infrastructure. Lots of scanning, but not seeing anything at the level we saw in 2016.   But, still seeing too many ransomeware attacks of hospitals and financial institutions - do not want to see this happen to election systems. Helping with tools and techniques to protect these systems.

Looking at the failover mechanisms - analog backups of voter registration databases, etc. we need to make sure that the voters can vote, no matter what.  We also have provisional ballots as a backup.

We have Albert Sensors (IDS), but we also need end point detection, capabilities on individual hosts. We have to continue to improve security at all levels.

In terms of Covid, that's why he's here talking to us today.  Covid will change how we do elections - we realized in February that Covid was going to change the voting process. We are, at the very least, going to need PPE for poll workers, sanitation procedures, etc.   But not just about in-person voting, many states are adopting absentee & mail-in balloting. This takes time & money.  States like New Jersey could not identify budget for doing things like upgrading their machines to have paper audit,  but now they are moving to more mail-in system - so they may get the paper trail this year.

It's quite possible that we won't know on November 3 who won the election. Please be patient. 

We need informed voters - something will change in the way you vote. May be a new polling location: schools & aged homes may not be available. Have a plan for how you will vote.  Take advantage of early voting, absentee or mail-in.   Be a part of the solution.

[Q&A - Live Commentary section]

Under the constitution, states will determine the time, place and manner of an election.  Congress has a role here as well, but local & state has to carry the bulk of the burden.  CISA and the intelligence committee are here to help and support. 

Couple of developments since this was recorded: have set up a vulnerability disclosure guidance, saw University of Chicago is providing free support to state & local election boards, and launching an end-point detection system pilot in 29 states.

We are trying to help with debunking/prebunking of disinformation, in a balanced way. 

Last fall pushed out a state & local disinformation kit, so they can tailor to their local needs, and also leveraged that for Covid related disinformation.  they launched the War on Pineapple campaign, benign and easy to understand. 

Working to help the states adjust and studying the equipment and risk controls, adjusting our approach to do more remote pen testing.

Unfortunately for us, he can't discuss confidential information ;-)

Be prepared, participate - we need 250K poll workers, and be patient!

BH20: Keynote: Stress-Testing Democracy: Election Integrity During a Global Pandemic

Great intro from Dark Tangent (as per usual) - there are people attending from 117 different countries!  Lots of great scholarships this year as well. 

It's strange attending from home - no laser show!

Keynote Speaker: Matt Blaze, Georgetown University

Early elections in the US used little technology - they were literally just in a room and raising hands, but that doesn't scale and it is also not secret.  The earliest technology was simple paper ballots that were hand counted.  As long as the ballot box wasn't tampered with, you could have high confidence your ballot was counted. It was also easy to observe/audit. 

We moved onto machine counted ballots or direct-recorded voting machines, and finally computers. The technology doesn't matter as much as the voters trust the technology and the outcome.

It can be hard to get right - do to some conflicting requirements: secrecy and transparency. How do you audit and make sure everyone's vote was counted in the way they wanted it counted, but w/out disclosing how they voted? 

It is impossible to re-do an election. They need to be certified by a certain date and you cannot really do them again, there's not enough time to do it before transition of power should occur.

The federal government doesn't have as much oversight over each state for a federal election as you might think - they are mostly run by counties, with guidance and standards set federally.  There is no place to change everything nationwide. 

The ballots can (and usually do) vary even within the county - think about school board, city council, local ordinances, etc.  In 2016, there were 178,217 distinct ballots in the US. Sixty percent of eligible voters participated in the election, 17% cast in-person in early voting and 24% was by mail, but the majority were still in person.

In the US, we spend more money campaigning than on running the election itself.

Traditional threats to voting: vote selling, ballot stuffing or mis-counting.  Foreign state adversaries are also a threat, but they may not care about who wins - just that the process is disrupted and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election.

Taking a walk down memory lane: hanging chads!  Florida was using a punch card system (aside: we used the same system in Santa Clara county when I moved here, except we didn't have the "assistance" of the physical ballot - I had to bring in my sample ballot so I'd know which holes to punch.  In that case, since the Supreme Court stopped the count, we ended up with a certified election that nobody (but the winner) was satisfied - they did not feel their votes were counted.

This debacle did lead to HAVA (Help America Vote Act) - mandated every one to change their voting equipment and did provide funding to purchase it.  Unfortunately, improved tech wasn't widely available,  Most common were DRE (Direct Recording) voting machines - it's computerized. This is different than the older model, where we used offline computers to tally the votes.  These new machines are networked, and much more reliant on software.

As you are aware - software is hard to secure.  There are no general techniques to determine if it is correct and secure.  SW is designed to be easily changed - maybe too easy, if you're not authorized and still able to make a change.  This is a problem for these voting machines.

E-voting, in practice, has a huge attack surface: firmware, software, networking protocols, USB drives floating around, non-technical poll workers, accidental deletion of records, viruses....

Every current system that is out there now is terrible in at least one way, if not several.   There is an exception from the DMCA to do security research on voting machines.  This makes the DefCon voting village a lot of fun (and will be available this year as well). 

Some people are suggesting hand count all - but, there are just too many items per ballot.  The amount of work to do a complete hand count is infeasible. 

The other extreme: the blockchain!  But, it makes us much more dependent on the SW and the client (and what it puts in the blockchain). This does address tamper detection, but not prevention/recovery.  Also, civil elections aren't a decentralized consensus process.

There have been two important breakthroughs - first form Ron Rivest on Software Independence: a voting system is software independent if an undetected change or error in its software cannot cause an undetectable change or error in an election outcome. .... but not how to accomplish that.  Stark came up with Risk-Limiting audits: statistical method to sample a subset of voting machines for post-election hand audit to ensure they reported correct results.  if that fails, hand count the rest.

You can learn more in the paper of "Securing the Vote" from the National Academy.

Everything seemed like 2020 was going to go well... until... March.  Who would've expected a global pandemic?

When we think about voter disruption, you might not be able to get to the polling place due to travel or disability - you can get an absentee ballot (including "no excuse" ballot) - but, with the exception of states like Oregon, they are a small percentage.

If there are local or regional emergencies, like an earthquake or hurricane, that may prevent polling places from opening.  There was an election in NYC on September 11, 2001 - it was definitely disrupted and then highly contested. 

Postponing election is a very disruptive thing - have to figure out what that means for the US? Who then becomes president while we wait for the election? Are there other options?

In an emergency, people may not be able to vote in their normal way: there may not be enough poll workers, they may be in the hospital, recently moved, etc. We are seeing increased pressure on the counties for this, in a time of decreased funding.

Matt then did a great walkthrough of vote-by-mail, how signatures are verified and ballot processing. How do we scale this up?  Exception handling can be very labor intensive, and there is high pressure on chain of custody.   it's hard to know how many people will ask for absentee ballots - they may not have enough, and they can't just copy ballots - so there is a necessary lead time.

how can you help? Volunteer as a poll worker, election judge, wherever your county needs assistance with this election.

ICMC19: At the Root of It All: The Cryptographic Underpinnings of Security

Karen Reinhardt, Director, Security Tools, Entrust Datacard
What is security without cryptography? That's how it used to be - we secured our computers with physical access control. That advanced to password files and access control lists, and then once we got on the network we had to advance to things like LDAP. We still relied heavily on routers and firewalls. But now that we are in the cloud... are those still effective?

We know we will have issues - so we must do monitoring and detection (IDS, IPS, logging, log analysis, etc) - but that's only if things have gone wrong.  But, wouldn't it be better to prevent the incident?

We used to secure devices by being in a physically secure environment, then we introduced VPNs - which allowed us to pretend we were in the physically secure environment.... but now we have so many connected devices in our house filled with personal and professional identity information.

Those identities are hot commodities! Ms. Reinhardt has worked many breaches and she notes the attackers are always going after the MS Active Directory.

Now even ambulances are connected to the Internet - but please don't attack them, you could put someone's life at risk.

Think about comparing crypto keys to nuts & bolts in construction. You need to use good quality nuts and bolts, and you need redundancy - our you could have a catastrophic failure (think about the recent crane collapse in Seattle).

If we have a few bad keys here and there - we might still be okay, depending on what is being protected. But, what if we lose an entire algorithm?  What if it happens before quantum computers?   We have nothing to replace RSA and ECC right now - what if something happens to them?  Should we be looking at older algorithms and ideas?

You need to assume your algorithms are going to fail and you will need to get new keys and new algorithms out there. think about this as plumbing - need to be able to replace the pipes.

If we lose RSA, you lose your entire chain of trust.  We can't reasonably replace every device out there - all the thermostats, traffic signals, cars, etc. impossible.

Good crypto alone is still not good enough - the attackers are still going to go after your users, your user directories, your insecure machines on your network, your kerberos golden ticket....We have to slow them down,

ICMC19: HW Equivalence Working Group

Carolyn French, Manager Cryptographic Module Validation Program, Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, Canada; Renaudt Nunez, IT Security Consultant, atsec, United States

The working group will work towards a recommendation in the form ofa  draft Implementation Guidance (IG) to the CMVP..

Vendors often want to submit multiple hardware modules in the same report, and therefore on the same certificate. Under what conditions can the lab perform limited operational testing on the group of modules and still provide assurance that the right testing has happened?

The basic assumption is that IG 1.22 is already met (same crypto), but may have different number of cards, chips, memory config, etc.    For example, if you changed from solid state drive to classic hard disk... did you really need to do more testing?  Same for things like field replaceable and stationary accessories.

The draft IG is out and they are looking for reviewers.

ICMC19: KMIP vs PKCS#11: There is no Contest!

Tony Cox, VP Partners, Alliances and Standards, OASIS, Australia

Tony got a question in ICMC 2018 about "which of these two standards will win?" - the answer is BOTH.

The two standards have different scopes and areas of being useful, but both are standards based and should mean that they are vendor independent. Both standards have informative and normative documents updated by the technical committees.

Tony gave a good overview of the specifications, including goals and documents, explaining it all - like what are profiles and what do they mean? Profiles help prove interoperability and do some baseline testing.

KMIP 2.0 is full of loads of new features - hashed passwords, OTP, delegated login, Re-Encrypt (looking forward to post quantum crypto) and PKSC#11 operation... In addition to new features, lots of improvements as well.

PKCS#11 3.0 - out for public review any day now... also has loads of new things! New algorithms, support for Login of a user and AEAD, better functionality support for interaction with KMIP (Like Unique Identifiers). This started from V2.40 errata 1.

Key Manager uses KMIP and HSMs leverage PKCS#11... they work together. Key Manager is higher volume key management, key sharing. An HSM wants to keep the keys locked in.

PKCS#11 over KMIP is essentially giving a standardized way to do PKSC#11 over a network.

The two standards are quite complementary and have many of the same individuals or companies working on both. In the end, by following the standards we are giving the market freedom of choice.

ICMC2019: Intel SGX's Open Source Approach to 3rd Party Attestation

Dan Zimmerman, Security Technologist, Intel, United States

SGX is a set of CPU instructions that enable the creation of memory regions with security features called 'enclaves'. It has encrypted memory with strong access controls, updatable trusted computing base (TCB). Developers can leverage this to relocate sensitive code and data to the enclave, which has a per process trusted execution environment (TEE).

Common use cases are key protection, confidential computing, and crypto module isolation.

SGX Remote Attestation is a demonstration that software has been properly instantiated on a platform in good standing, fully patched and indeed in the enclave. Attestation evidence conveys identity of the software being attested, associated report data and details of the unmeasured state.

The attestation service is truly verification as a service, using privacy preserving and based on enhanced privacy ID (EPID). This approach does require that you're online and connect to a service.
The newer approach is Datacenter Attestation Primitives (Intel SGX DCAP). It is datacenter and cloud service provider focused. Flexible provisioning and based on ECDSA signatures, a well known verification algorithm. Theses primitives allow for construction of on-prem attestation services. This will leverage flexible launch control on the new Intel SGX enabled platforms. And best of all, it's OpenSource! (that's how it got into the opensource track :-) )

Platform Certification Key (PCK) Retrieval. Intel issues a PCK Certificate for each of its processors at various TCBs. The retrieval tool will extract platform provisioning ID info for Intel PCS service requests. There is also a provisioning certification service and caching service.

There is a quote generation library that has an API for generating attestation evidence for an Intel SGX based enclave, and of course a quote verification library.

SGX Remote Attestation is important as a successful attestation provides increased confidence to Relying Parties prior to deploying secrets to application enclaves. It also allows for policy based decisions based on quote verification outcomes.

ICMC19: IoT TLS: Why is it Hard?

David Brown, Senior SW Engineer, Linaro, United States

For reasons we can't really explain, we now have things like our lightbulbs, toasters and fridges on the Internet... now those devices are vulnerable to attack.

5 worst examples: Jeep Hack, Mirai Botnet, Hackable Cardiac Devices, Owlet WiFi Baby Heart Monitor and Trendnet webcam hack. In the Jeep example, they had a lot of great controls in place, but not on who could update the firmware...

James Mickens was quoted as Saying "IoT Security is not Interesting". It's not interesting, because it's not different. We already know how to secure devices... so we should do it! TLS is great - so let's just use that!

But, we have some really tiny devices out there - smaller than a Raspberry Pi. They have maybe less than 10s of KB of Memory, and 10s MHz of CPU... how can we do TLS there?

TLS has a way of specifying which cipher suites can be used during the handshake. It's hard to change what an IoT device is using, so how can a service just start rejecting something?

One of the problems is that lots of folks do not implement TLS correctly - TLS done incorrectly is worse than not doing it at all.

TLS requires memory, time and randomness - all things that are in short supply on IoT devices!

Some suggestions are to pursue stream abstraction or to put TLS under te socket API, but those don't really work.

Looking at Sockets + TLS now, Zephyr network API changes, JWT, time, MQTT...

ICMC2019: Does Open-Source Cryptographic Software Work Correctly

Daniel J. Bernstein, Research Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago, United States

Discussion on CVE-2018-0733 - an error in CRYPTO_memcmp function, where only the least significant bit of each byte are compared. It allows an attacker to forge messages that are lower than the guaranteed by the security claims. Yes, 2^16 is lower than 2^128.... only impacts PA-RISC

Take a look at CVE-2017-3738 ... It impacts Intel AVX2 montgomery multiplication procedure, but how likely is it to be exploited? According to the CVE - not likely, but where is the proof?

Eric Raymond noted, in 1999, that given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. or less formally, 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'.

But, who are the beta-testers? Unhappy users? That's the model used by most social media companies nowadays....

And "almost every problem" is not "all bugs" ... what about exceptions? can't those be very devastating? How do we really know that we are really looking? Who is looking for the hard bugs?

This seems to assume that developers like reviewing code - but in reality they like to write new code. The theory encourages people to release their code as fast as possible - but isn't that just releasing more bugs more quickly?

So then, does closed source stop attackers from finding bugs? Some certifications seem to award bonus points for not opening your code - but, why? How long does it really take an attacker to extract, disassemble and decompile the code? Sure, they're missing your comments, but they don't care.

Closed source will scare away some "lazy" academics, but not attackers... just takes longer for you as a vendor to find out about the issue.

There is also a belief that closed source makes you more money, but is that still true? Aren't there a lot of companies making money off of support?

Dan sees the only path forward through open source - it will build confidence in what we do. Cryptography is notoriously hard to review. Math makes for subtle bugs.... so do side-channel countermeasures. Don't even get started on post quantum...

A big reason it's hard to review is due to our pursuit of speed, since it's often applied to large volumes of data. This leads to variations in crypto designs. Keccak code package has more than 20 implementations for different platforms - hard to review!

Google added hand written Cortex-A7 ASM to Linux kernel for Speck... even though people said Speck is not safe. Eventually switched to ChaCha... but created more hand written assembly.

You can apply formal verification - code reviewer has to prove correctness. It's tedious, but not impossible - EverCrypt is starting to do this, but for the most simple crypto operations (but still have to worry about what the compiler might do... )

Testing is great - definitely test everything! How can we auto generate inputs, get lots of random inputs going through here - but you still may miss the "right" input that trips a bug. There are symbolic execution tools out there. (angr.io, for example)

ICMC2019: Random Numbers, Entropy Sources, and You

John Kelsey, Computer Scientist, NIST, United States

SP 800-90B - think about how random bits should be generated.

DRBG should always be between entropy source and the attackers. Entropy just gives you bits... with entropy (as per the sources promise).

SP 800-90B is not AIS31... though the two groups are talking.

Noise sources are where the entropy comes from, health tests verify the noise source and and conditioning.

Noise sources must be non-deterministic, often uses ring oscillators. You have to be able to describe this in detail. This is complicated, as many vendors are relying on someone else's noise source. They either don't know or there is an NDA around it - that won't get validated. Submitter also has to provide entropy estimate and a justification for that estimate.

Health tests - need to stay working to verify the entropy source continues to work after deployed in the field.

Conditioning is to improve the entropy. They are deterministic, so cannot add entropy...

IID = Independent and Identically Distributed - sample indepent of all others, independent of position in the sequence of samples. NIST will run statistical tests to try to disprove claim. If we can't disprove it, we assume it is true.

If you don't claim to be IID, NIST will apply many different entropy estimators against sequential datasets. they will look for things like bias after restart. May get you rejected or a lower estimate of entropy, if issues are found. Would rather underestimate than overestimate!

But... black box statistical tests can't reliably measure entropy.... Ideally you need to design it right and document it and share with NIST (where available).

Currently for conditioning you can choose: hash, HMAC, CMAC, CBC-MAC, DFs all from 800-90A. You can also roll your own. Or, just don't use it.

Problems are: we can't impact performance too much, can't expect this level of expertise at the labs...

ICMC19: Emerging Cryptography Trends in the Internet of Things

Charles White, CTO, Fornetix, United States

In a connected world, we need to think about security in new ways. There are a lot of IoT devices out there sensing... reading... waiting....   Cryptography is very similar to IoT! In the IoT landscape, we're starting to hear about Root of Trust, Data-in-Motion Encryption and Data-at-Rest Encryption.

Sensing vs Acting - acting has more requirements for encryption and authentication. Cryptography is Identity, Authentication and Authorization. There aren't users, logins, passwords... these are small devices that have little or no human interaction.  Crypto has to be that user, per se.

It's all about the root of trust. When you are going from factory to someone's livingroom, the consumers need to know the device hasn't been tampered with. But crypto can also be used to establish sessions, exchange information and data securely, etc.

When we talk about IoT, there is a lot of data in motion. Hard drive encryption and radio encryption both use symmetric keys - this is something we should understand how to do. Protection needs to be balanced with other requirements, suhch as bandwidth and battery consumption.

We need to protect data at rest - we need to also allow access. Think about a mechanic trying to access data from the canbus. 

We can look at turning our challenges into opportunities. Can we align disparate technologies? Could we orchestrate utilization and product strategy?  What if we could do device attestation at scale?   And make the orchestration of root of trust widely available?

The next trend is how cryptography can orchestrate control and management. Need to rely on standards and interops, automating and simplifying.

Need to have a way to do key distribution and association for Narrow band IoT sensors, communications infrastructure and device management.

We already have the fundamentals and knowledge - need to apply to IoT in a way that makes sense.

ICMC19: FIPS 140-2 and the Cloud

Alan Halachmi, Sr. Manager, Solutions Architecture, Amazon, United States

FIPS 140-2 came out in May 2001... think about that, that was before Facebook, Gmail, etc - and way before cloud computing.

Right now validating on the cloud is impossible, as level 1 requires single operator mode - not how you will find things set up in the cloud. In fact, an IG on Operational Environment specifically notes that You cannot use things like AWS, MS Azure or Google cloud.... )

But - someone like Amazon can validate one of their services, as they are the sole operator.

The security landscape is in constant flux - making it difficult to keep a module validated. Performance is often impacted in validated modules - which is not tenable for Amazon.

Amazon wanted a framework that would allow real time advancement from validated environment to validated environment. We want to make it clear that it's a multi-party environment, and with that comes shared responsibility, but would require minimal coordination and be applied consistently between different application models. As much as possible, what to leverage existing investments.

There needs to be focus on automation and defining of relationships. Vendors need the ability to run their own FIPS 140 testing, so they can be assured that any changes they are making have not caused issues - then they can also test performance, etc. Fortunately, ACVP is creating a method for doing this automated testing! NIST approved!

We should look to another model for validation. Think about our history - humans used to come up with hypothesis and then prove them. After the 1970s, humans came up with the hypothesis and machines provde them. Could machines do both?

Think about your surface area of your code - the most critcal code is in small areas (hypervisor, kernel, etc). Attackers have more time (OSes and machines deployed for years) and learned history from what worked in the past. Can we use formal methods for verification? Amazon has done one for TLS - it's on github.

ICMC19: Keynote: Mary Ann Davidson

The opening remarks included another great cartoon from Atsec, a tribute to the new ACVP (Automated Certificate Validation Program) - very funny!

Matt Keller gave us an update on the CMUF (Crypto Module User Forum). They have several working groups that are contributing to new implementation guidance from NIST. Their goals are to share information and help move the standards forward. NIST also comes and gives updates, and the forum provides a way to share ideas and suggestions on navigating a validation.

Mary Ann Davidson, Chief Security Officer, Oracle Corp., "Keeping Up with the Joneses". When Ms. Davidson started in security, nobody cared (except PTLGA - Paranoid Three Letter Government Agencies). There was hardly any 3rd party software, except for crypto. Nobody cared, so it was a quiet job - like the Maytag repair man....

But things are changing. SW and HW are ubiquitous - you can even have an Internet connected fridge. 66% of applications code is now open source... need to keep up and understand the landscape.

We need to keep up with new threats, market expectations, latest regulatory FDJ (framework du jour) and changes in the industry.

Hackers are moving towards hardware, so her ethical hacking team is focusing now on HW in addition to their SW work. HW hacking combined with IoT has greatly increased our area of attack.
Regulatory frameworks should not be tied to a specific technology or vendor. ("regulatory capture" - not a good thing).

Looking at market expectations - 3rd party code enables scarce resources to be used on innovation, not "building blocks" (ie cutting down trees to build your own house...). But, this creates a target for a hacker. Everyone loves free code, but nobody wants to invest in making it better.

Vendors need to know what is in their code - beware of 3rd party code that pulls in other code... need to understand it all. Should have fewer instances of 3rd party libraries in their code to minimize attack surfaces and simplify and lower cost of upgrade. That is, don't have 48 copies of one 3rd party library - have a central copy.

Department of Commerce (DoC) is working on a Software Bill of Materials - you will have to know, as a vendor, what is in your SW. But what does that buy you? Customers typically cannot replace third party libraries in code - they have a binary, or license forbids. Also, just having the vulnerable code doesn't mean you are using it in a vulnerable way. Lots of resources spent upgrading, even though it is irrelevant. Veracode noted that 95% of Java vulns in 3rd party code are NOT exploitable in the context of the application...

What could we do instead? Be honest with your customers. Describe how we use the code. fix the worst issues the fastest. Need to have a way to teach the scanners about usage - ie - not vulnerable as being used.

Changes in industry can be distracting: "On prem/waterfall is so last year...". Need to keep the meaningful aspects as we move on, timelines still matter. We have to think about how long things like validations take - can't do all SW at the same time. Need to do the most relevant and do it as efficiently as possible.

We need cloud agility in certifications. NIST has 2 working groups looking at doing FIPS for crypto in the cloud, but we need to do it faster.

Perfect storm of increased regulatory scrutiny and increased use of technology has led to greater risk management inquiries. Need to asses relevant risk management concerns. You wouldn't want or need to inspect a day care provider's vacation home... not relevant.

People have asked Ms Davidson for things like: "we have the right to pen test any system in your network" "need patching status of every system in your network" ... etc.

This is problematic because it's not germane to her particular risk management concerns. For example, she's often asked about "3 day patching" - even though the person asking knows it's not possible, but they still want it in a contract...

Mary Ann apparently makes a really good rhubarb crisp, but she's not going to force it as a standard... so don't ask her to do a non-standard certification, either. (though you may want to have some of her rhubarb crisp....)

Vendors need to be more public with what they are doing, otherwise customers will assume you're not doing something. Set up clear rules of engagement - makes the questions more relevant and the discussions more fruitful. Keep in mind that anything vague will be misinterpreted - needs to be challenged.

Remember - change is inevitable, embrace it and OWN it. Don't let others own the change agenda, or you won't like the result. Use only globally accepted standards where feasible instead of one-off "wants". Economics rule the world - know it, use it, own it!

BH18: Why so Spurious? How a Highly Error-Prone x86/x64 CPU "Feature" can be Abused to Achieve Local Privilege Escalation on Many Operating Systems

Nemanja Mulasmajic  and Nicolas Peterson are Anti-Cheat Engineers at Riot Games.

This is about a hardware feature available in Intel and ARM chips. The “feature” can be abused to achieve local privilege escalation.

CVE-2018-8897 – this is a local priv escalation – read and write kernel memory from usermode. Execute usermode code with kernel privileges. Affected Windows, Linux, MacOS, FreBSD and some Xen configurations.

To fully understand this, you’ll need to have some good assembly knowledge and privilege models. In the standard model, Ring 1 and 2 are really never used, just Ring 3 (least privileged) to Ring 0 (most) (it is a simplified view).

Hardware breakpoints cannot typically be sent by userland, though there are often ways to do it in syscalls. When an interrupt fires, it transfers execution to an interrupt handler. Lookup is based off of the interrupt descriptor table (IDT), which is registered by the OS.

Segmentation is a vestigial part of the x86 architecture now that everything leverages paging.  You can still set arbitrary base addresses.  The first 2 bits describe if you’re in kernel or user mode. Depending on the mode of execution, the GS base means different things (it holds data structures relevant to the mode of execution). If we’re coming from user mode, we need to call SWAPGS to update to the equiv in kernel mode.

MOV SS and POP SS force the processor to disable external interrupts, NMIs and pending debug exceptions until the boundary of the instruction following the SS load was reached. The intended purpose was to prevent an interrupt from firing immediately after loading SS but before loading a stack pointer.

It was discovered while building a VM detection mechanism, as VMs were being used to attack Anti-Cheat.. They thought – what if VMEXIT occurs during a  “blocking” period? Let’s follow the CPUID… They started thinking about what would happen if they did interrupts at unexpected times.

So, what happens? Why did his machine crash?  Before KiBreakpointTrap executes its first instructions, the pending #DB is fired (which was suppressed by MOV SS) and execution redirects to where KiBreakpointTrap, which sends execution back to where it *thought* it should go – kernel (though it had come from user mode).

Code can be found at github.com/nmulasmajic, if you aren’t passed, system will crash.  Showed demo of 2 lines of assembly code putting a VM into a deadlock.

They can avoid SWAPGS since Windows thinks they are coming from kernelmode.  WRGSBASE writes to the GSBASE address, so use that!

They fired a #DB exception at unexpected location, and then the kernel becomes confused. Handler thinks they are privileged, now they control GSBASE.  Now they just need to find instructions to capitalize on this…

Erroneously assumed there was no encoding for MOV SS, [RAX] only immediate. It doesn’t dereference memory, but POP SS does dereference stack memory. BUT… POP SS is only valid in 32-bit compatibility code segment. On Intel chips, SYSCALL cannot be used in compatibility mode. So… focusing on using INT # only.

With the goal of writing memory, found that if they caused a page fault (KiPageFualt) from kernelmode, they c ould call KeBugCHeckEx again.  This function dereferences GSBASE memory, which is under their control…

It clobbers surrounding memory. Had to make one CPU “stuck” to deal with writing to target location. Chose CPU1 since CPU0 had to service other incoming interrupts from APIC. CPU1 endlessly page faults, goes to the double fault handler when it runs out of stack space.

The goal was to load an unsigned driver. CPU0 does the driver loading. They attempted to send TLB shootdowns, forcing CPU0 to wait on the other CPUs by checking PacketBaerrier variable in its _KPCR. But, CPU1 is in a dead spin… will never respond. But, “luckily” there was a pointer leak in the +KPCR for any CPU, accessible from usermode. (the exploit does require a minimum of 2 CPUS).

It is complicated, and it took the researchers more than a month to make it work. So, they looked into the syscall handler – KiSystemCall64. They registered in the IA32_LSTAR MSR. SYSCALL, unlike INT #, will not immediately swap to kernel – actually made things easier. (Syscall funcions similar to Int 3)

Another cool demo J

A lot of this was patched in May. MS was very quick to respond, and most OSes should be patched by now. You can’t abuse SYSCALL anymore.

Lessons learned – want to make money on bug bounty? You need a cool name and a good graphic for your vuln (pay a designer!), and don’t forget a good soundtrack!