Category: CERT

• 2003: RIPE offers to rent out PCMCIA wifi cards to attendees of the RIPE conference.
• 2007: Every attendee has a laptop with built-in wifi.
• 2012: Every attendant brings a Laptop and at least one smartphone, some bring tablets as well.

We have ~500 attendees at #FIRSTCON this week; I wonder how many distinct clients the wifi net has seen.

I’ve given my share of DNSSEC talks over the last three years. I usually explain what exactly DNSSEC provides and what it does not. One of the downsides I tell ISPs about is that other people’s DNSSEC errors will hit your call-center if you’re doing DNSSEC-validation.

This just happened to Comcast.

I really recommend that anyone enabling DNSSEC validation on their resolvers should be prepared for this case. The report from Comcast is instructive, especially the media fallout they had to cope with.

The question Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple should be asking themselves now is:

Which other CA do they trust based on an audit by PwC? Their green light on DigiNotar was so flawed that I have serious doubts about anyone else they certified as a trustworthy CA.

This is a bit like the financial rating agencies at the height of the 2008 banking crisis: why the hell should I trust the audit/rating of someone who is paid by the people they are auditing/rating and who need an “all fine”/AAA result?

The story so far: WikiLeaks posted some secrets, the US governments throws a hissy fit and some spineless companies see it as their “patriotic duty” to withheld service from WikiLeaks. This doesn’t especially endear them to the 4chan/Anonymous crowd which then starts to DDoS the pushovers.

So how is a Civil Libertarian and Network Security guy supposed to react to that?

Two bads don’t make a right. There are better ways to show disgust of and punish those electronic money movers. Attacking their operation cannot be the right answer.

But: I’ve been arguing for years now that one of the few ways to actually shut down some of the real menaces (not the imagined ones like WikiLeadks) of the Internet like Spammers, Fake AV Software scams, Viagra/… sellers, and other frauds would be to deny them the credit card payment option.

Thus, MasterCard and Visa: If you are so eager to distance yourself from WikiLeaks, when nobody can even tell you what actual laws they are supposed to have violated, why are you not able to deny service to the frauds when it is absolutely clear that they violate laws and cost the worldwide economy huge sums of money to clean up their crap?

Sometime the timing is just too perfect.

Yesterday I was trying to book a flight on Brussel Airlines and when I was trying to pay via credit card, they insisted on an on-the-fly enrollment to MasterCard SecureCode. I refused and booked via the AMEX Business Service.

Today a security analysis of the whole scheme was published by British scientists, confirming my reservations.

Money quotes:

“Merchants who use it push liability for fraud back to banks, who in turn push it on to cardholders.”

“So this is yet another case where security economics trumps security engineering, but in a predatory way that leaves cardholders less secure.”