Tag: Data Leak

Breaking through passports

A fairly long time ago, at blackhat (as far as I remember) somebody came on stage with an implementation of some proposed design of an electronic passport and proved its extremely worrying security flaws. I’ll leave the pleasure of researching the event to you.
Back then (maybe around 2001-2003?), the spirit of “blackhat” (or whatever event it was) was free, and if you were following that kind of security events you were consistently exposed to serious security researchers challenging the disastrous security implementations of either mainstream technology providers (such as Microsoft 😉 ) or of the govt digitalization.

What does this have to do with passports today? Well, they are a bit more secured thanks to that kind of involvement. Secured for both their users as well as for their governments.
Well, even if they were not so secured, the biggest looser of a flawed normal passport is its government. The projected user impact is fairly low. Identity theft by means of passport forgery or “torgery” is not a huge phenomenon.

Legitimate concerns for any passport users

From the user security perspective, let’s explore:

  • Who does the passport say that I am ?
  • How do I know I carry a valid (authentic and integral) passport at any time?
  • What does the document scanning say about me ?
    • e.g. it was scanned while passing through customs, ergo anybody that is able to see a record of that scan will know that I was there at a specific point in time

Extrapolating to COVID passes

Well. As far as the ethical concerns, I’ll leave those up to each and every one of you.

But as far as the security goes, I have a few very worrying concerns:

  1. The implementation details are not widely available.
  2. There are alot of security incidents with these documents. And they are not and cannot be hidden even in the mainstream media. (https://www.dw.com/en/security-flaws-uncovered-in-eu-vaccination-passport/a-58129016)
  3. How do I as an owner and user of the pass know WHO and when views or verifies my scans.

    I am not going to continue the list, it is already embarrassing

This last one is a bit concerning.
Here’s why: with a normal passport, once scanned, the person that gains or has access to a list of these scans knows that you went over some border sometime.
However, with COVID passes the same actor that has or gains access to your passport scans, knows where you are kind of right now. Remember, you’ll scan your pass even if you go to a restaurant.

What do I want?

As a COVID pass user I want to have the certainty that no passport scans are stored anywhere. And I do not want anybody except the scanner to be able to see my identity. Because the moment they do, they’ll know where I am and what I’m doing. And this is unacceptable. Mainly because the scanning frequency of such a pass can be daily for some of us.

So, can I get what I want ?

I have tried to get implementation details Both directly, by asking it, legally, and through the security community (both academic and professional). The result ? No result. The public debate(s) prior to implementing and adopting these passes were a complete joke.
How long until XXXX gets a hold of a list of my scans and then follows me around, or worse. Seems far fetched ? Take a look at the latest data leaks 😉

But as the philosophers Jagger and Richards once said: “You can’t always get what you want!”

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef9QnZVpVd8&ab_channel=ABKCOVEVO )

Avoidable privacy happenings

Last time, I tried to brief some of the steps you need to cover before starting to choose tools that will help you achieve compliance. Let’s dig a little deeper into that by using some real life negative examples that I ran into.

Case: The insufficiently authenticated channel.

Disclosure disclaimer: following examples are real. I have chosen to anonymize the data about the bank in this article, although I have no obligation whatsoever to do so. I could disclose the full information to you per request.

At one point, I received an e-mail from a bank in my inbox. I was not, am not, and hopefully will not be a client of that particular bank. Ever. The e-mail seemed (from the subject line) to inform me about some new prices of the services the bank provided. It was not marked as spam, and so it intrigued me. I ran some checks (traces, headers, signatures, specific backtracking magic), got to the conclusion that it is not spam, so I opened it. Surprise, it was directly addressed to me, my full name appeared somewhere inside. Oh’ and of course thanking ME that I chose to be their client. Well. Here’s a snippet (it is in Romanian, but you’ll get it):

Of course I complained to the bank. I was asking then to inform me how they’ve got my personal data, asking them to delete it, and so on. Boring.

About four+ months later (not even close to a compliant time) a response popped up:

Let me brief it for you: It said that I am a client of the bank, that I have a current account opened, where the account was opened. Oh but that is not all. They have also given me a copy of the original contract I supposedly signed. And a copy of the personal data processing document that I also signed and provided to them. Will the full blown personal data. I mean full blown: name, national id numbers, personal address etc. One problem tough: That data was not mine, it was some other guy’s data that had one additional middle name. And thus, a miracle data leak was born. It is small, but it can grow if you nurture it right…

What went wrong?

Well, in short, the guy filled in my e-mail address and nobody checked it, not him, not the bank, nobody. You imagine the rest.

Here’s what I am wondering.

  1. Now, in the 21st century, is it so hard to authenticate a channel of communication with a person? it difficult to implement a solution for e-mail confirmation based on some contract id? Is it really? We could do it for you, bank. Really. We’ll make it integrated with whatever systems you have. Just please, do it yourselves or ask for some help.
  2. Obviously privacy was 100% absent from the process of answering my complaint. Even though I made a privacy complaint 🙂 Is privacy totally absent from all your processes?

In the end, this is a great example of poor legislative compliance, with zero security involved, I mean ZERO security. They have some poor legal compliance: there is a separate document asking for personal data and asking for permission to process it. The document was held, and it was accessible (ok, it was too accessible). They have answered my complaint even though it was not in a timely compliant manner, and I had not received any justification for the delay.

Conclusions?

  1. Have a good privacy program. A global one.
  2. Have exquisite security. OK, not exquisite, but have some information security in place.
  3. When you choose tools, make sure they can support your privacy program.
  4. Don’t be afraid to customize the process, or the tools. Me (and, to be honest, anybody in the business) could easily give you a quote for an authentication / authorization solution of your communication channels with any type of client.

I am sure you can already see for yourself how this is useful in the context of choosing tools that will help you organize your conference event, and still maintain its privacy compliance.