I hear all @BuzzFeed journalists have the ability to send encrypted emails. Wonder when we'll see this in other newsrooms.

— Runa A. Sandvik (@runasand) September 15, 2015

I am far from the first to compare digital security practices to safer sex practices; Jillian York even rapped about it on stage at re:publica in 2014 (direct link removed as the video also includes a known abuser).

Talking about software and trust gets both very boring and very depressing quickly. Let's instead move on to the juicy sex-ed part!

Talking about software and trust gets both very boring and very depressing quickly. Let's instead move on to the juicy sex-ed part!

A quick disclaimer: First, apologies for the at-times male and/or heteronormative point of view; I'd welcome more inclusive language, especially around the HTTPS section. Second, I am unabashedly pro-Tor, a user of the tor network, and am even lucky enough to get to collaborate with them on occasion. The garlic condom photo comes from The Stinking Rose..

Super-duper Unsafe Surfing

Using the Internet without any protection is a very bad idea. The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center tracks "survival time" - the time a completely unprotected computer facing the raw Internet can survive before becoming compromised by a virus - in minutes. Not days, not even hours. This is so off the charts, that with a safer sex metaphor, using no protection is more akin to just injecting yourself with an STD than engaging in a risky behavior.

Barely less unsafe surfing

Adding in a constantly-updated anti-virus tool, and a firewall, and making sure that your operating system is up to date is akin to being healthy. You have a basically operational immune system - congrats!. You'll be fine if the person you're sleeping with has the common cold, but anything more serious than that and you're in trouble.

Using HTTPS - visiting websites which show up with a green lock icon - is also a good practice. You can even install some browser plugins like HTTPS Everywhere and CertPatrol that help you out.

HTTPS is kind of like birth control. You may successfully prevent *ahem* the unauthorized spread of your information, but you're still relying on a significant amount of trust in your partner (to have taken the pill, to withdraw), and there are things out of your knowledge that can go wrong - the pharmacist provided fake pills, or you have a withdrawal failure (please note this is about digital security advice, and not at all giving good safer sex advice - a quick visit to wikipedia is a good start for effective -- and non effective birth control methods!). With SSL Certificates, you are still trusting that the website has good practices to protect your information (insert the constant litany of password reset links you've had to deal with this year here), and there have been cases of stolen SSL certificates) and are tools to help an attacker try and intercept your encrypted traffic.

Slightly Safer Surfing

With digital security, a lot like with safer sex, some methods can be combined for a greater effect, but layering other methods can be a horrible idea. Adding using anti-virus tools, firewalls, system updates, and HTTPS on top of any other method here is a universally Good Thing.

Using a VPN is like using a condom, provided by your partner for this encounter, and given to them by a source neither of you have any real trust in. Asking the manufacturer for information about exactly how it's made, or what its expiration date is will often result in grand claims (but no hard evidence). Requests to see the factory floor and verify these claims are presumed to be jokes. The VPN-brand condom generally works, and is definitely fast and easy, but you're placing a lot of trust in a random company you found while searching the Internet, and probably also the cheapest one you found. On top of that, you're also still trusting your partner to not have poked any holes in the condom.

Overall, It's still much better to be using the VPN than not, and if you trust your partner (i.e. the website or service you're going to), and you trust the VPN provider for whatever reason - perhaps a widely trusted company has given an independent audit of the VPN, or you or your workplace has set it up yourself - then for most situations you're pretty safe. Layering a VPN on top of the above tools is good, but layering VPNs on VPNs or on other networks is actually not dissimilar to layering condoms - it actually makes failure in very weird (and, lets face it, awkward) ways /more/ likely.

Safer Surfing

Still, though, wouldn't it be better if you could rely even less on trust, and have that trust backed up with evidence that you yourself can look at?

Using Tor is like using a condom which you not only know has gone through extensive testing, you can even visit the factory floor, look at the business' finances, and talk with the engineers and factory staff. It's /still/ not 100% safe, but it is a heck of a lot safer, and you can verify each and every claim made about what it does and does not do.

And to be clear here, if you're logging in to a website over Tor, that website now knows who you are (you're no longer anonymous to them, and possibly others watching you do this along the wire), and that website is storing your password and may fail to protect it at some point. That website can still turn out to be malicious and attack you, and very powerful adversaries can even specifically try and intercept traffic coming from a website and going into the super-secret Tor network, change it, and include an attack they know works well against out of date versions of the browser you're using. An out of date Tor browser is like an expired condom - it's best not to bet your life on it.

To really (over-)extend the analogy, the Tor-branded condom business happens to be heavily funded by a religious organization that is strongly against birth control (and indeed has an entire project that tries to undermine birth control methods, to the point of installing secret hole-punchers in condom factories). This same organization (it's large!) does have a different and vocal component that strongly supports safer sex, and not only funds giving away condoms, but also the production of them. It's not, seemingly, the most logical set up, but hey, we're talking religion, politics and sex - logic doesn't always come in to play here.

Like sex, there is no truly "safe" way to play on the Internet, and it's unrealistic to expect that abstinence from the Internet is realistic. So, be careful out there, adopt safer practices, and keep your wits about you. Good luck!

There's a point here about heartbleed and security — I promise. Keep with me.

As I am wont to once the weather finally begins to coöperate, I've been trying a few new things out on the grill. When I'm in this exploratory phase, I love digging through the infinitely interesting BBQ blogs of the Internet - they're full of hard-won knowledge about fire and smoke, but often lack a certain level of technical polish.

Case in point, my reference blog for this week's experiment was a well-seasoned old blog, but they'd lost every single comment from years of discussions. Why? No technical glitch, but simply because they'd chosen a private company to manage their comments - and it went out of business, leaving them not only without a commenting tool, but without those years of educational clarifications and discussions.

Ownership and control matter. This is true when you're talking about your possessions, your house, your comments on a BBQ blog, and with your software. I've railed against app-ification before, but I want to make a slightly deeper point here. If you bought a house, but with the condition that any repair, no matter how minor, you had to contract the previous owner (and only them) to make at a cost of their choosing - would you feel you really owned or controlled that house? Would you buy a car where the hood was locked shut, accessible only to the specific dealership where you bought it?

These cases are very much the situation with the vast majority of software you run on your computer. From Microsoft Word to Apple's iTunes, and even more insidiously, OSX and Microsoft Windows themselves - are all locked away from you. You've been forced to pay hundreds of dollars for them with the purchase of any computer - but you have no control or real ownership over them.

Open Source

The alternative is what's called "free" or "open source" software (people get into fierce debates on the terminology here, which I'm ignoring for the time being). All software starts with instructions that are more-or-less understandable by humans; commands like if (this thing) then (do this other thing). Generally speaking, this "language" is then turned into something that's closer the more basic tools that computers understand. Imagine a particularly skilled dog with a great memory - by stringing together enough fetches, play deads, stops, roll overs and so on, you could eventually come up with a sequence of commands that would have this dog go out and buy a beer for you at the corner store, and bring in back.

"Closed source" software only gives you the computer-understandable version, and it's surprisingly difficult to turn that back into a simple, human-understandable chunk of logic. "Open source" software, on the other hand, always provides you with the original, understandable language.

This means a lot of things - one, you can tweak it. If you don't like the beer that your dog fetched, you can find the human-speak parts of the commands where it's selected, and make sure your preference for hoppy beer is respected, and then turn it back into the commands your computer can do.

This ability to change how your own tools work itself has many additional benefits - you can share that change, and if it's useful enough, that change itself will be included in the next version of the "core" software that everyone uses.

And finally, Heartbleed

This openness also means anyone can look at the logic that is driving their tool. This means that when you start talking about trusting software, there's a heavy preference towards the software that you can look at the source code of, and even more preference towards software where a lot of people have been looking at this same code.

So, that failed with heartbleed. The team behind OpenSSL is tiny compared to their impact. Two out of every three secure servers in the world are running the software that this four-person team manages. And on New Years Eve 2011, one of their developers committed a very, very subtle piece of code that basically didn't make sure that all the doors were closed behind it, and no one else at the time (or anyone who'd taken a look the in two years and chance since) noticed.

So obviously the whole open source thing is broken, right? The bug is out in the open for anyone to figure out, but no one fixed it!

It's not quite so simple. Do you really think that a working piece of closed-source code gets a second glance by its development team? They're just as bound by priorities and shipping product releases as an open-source team, but their code gets locked away with not even the chance for a third party to find a bug and lend a hand — but it's no more secure than the open source tools from concentrated probing, and testing for flaws just like heartbleed.

So yes, heartbleed was bad, but it was also a reminder in how powerful the open source software world can be in finding and fixing a bug. Most of us woke up with some updates to install, and that was the end of it. What horrible, dark bugs are lurking, unfindable, in every piece of closed source software? The precise number is unknowable, but the prevalence of viruses and malware that affect deeply closed systems like Windows might be a strong hint.

No more broken hearts

Going forward, I obviously have a long wishlist of things I'd like to see - a public discussion on what trust in software really means, better tools on every platform to guarantee software packages are what they claim to be (Tor is doing amazing work here), a return to inter-operable standards, especially when we're talking security systems... But as a beginning point, simply better support structures for open code development would be nice. We have volunteers building the basic structures of the Internet - which is an absolutely amazing and good thing - but let's make sure they have the time and resources to do it.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts regarding the National Security Agency's surveillance program. Input from fellow Texans significantly informs my decision-making and empowers me to better represent the state. During my time in the Senate, I have consistently reiterated my support of programs that can detect impending threats to our homeland or diplomatic and military facilities abroad. It is imperative, however, that we strike an appropriate balance between remaining vigilant against terrorism and protecting the civil liberties guaranteed to the American people by the Constitution. Unfortunately, the government has eroded the American peoples' trust by the secrecy surrounding these surveillance programs. I will continue working with my Judiciary Committee colleagues and the entire Senate to review existing law and the actions of the Administration to ensure that we protect our Constitutional liberties. In doing so, I hope to guarantee true accountability in these programs so that we protect Americans from the threats of both terrorism and unwarranted government intrusion. Thank you for sharing your views with me. Please feel free to contact me in the future about any issue important to your family. It is an honor to serve you and the people of Texas. For Liberty, Senator Ted Cruz

I once rented a part of a house that had been, well, not fully cleaned out from the previous occupants. It was a house full of hackers that had been variously occupied by friends and friends-of-friends for almost a decade as they passed through Austin on their way from or to new lives, which is to say, it had, well, "character".

One of the odder things left behind by the previous inhabitants was a literal pile of Final Fantasy boxes, completely intact save for the all-important registration codes. A bit of digging uncovered a fascinating tale of cross-border, tax- and fee-free value transfer. The former occupant, let's call him "Bob" was engaged in a business proposition with a colleague based in South Korea, let's call her "Alice." Whatever version of the RPG Final Fantasy had just been released in the States (only). This had proved very difficult to pirate, causing a huge untapped demand in Korea. Koreans, however, had been happily hacking away at another RPG game which was only just now catching on Stateside. So, Bob would tear off and destroy these registration codes, emailing the codes themselves to Alice in Korea. Alice, in exchange, would provide Bob powerful and rare in-game items for the newly-popular game - these were of less value to the Korean market, as it was saturated with players and therefore items, but there was no arbitrage market into the States -- before Alice and Bob, at least. Bob could then sell these on online grey markets for such items, effectively creating a way for both Alice and Bob to profit (rather lucratively, from my understanding) from local markets, and transfer value across borders without incurring bank costs, wire fees, or, for that matter, taxes. This setup lasted for as long as both were able to extract value from the arbitrage process, but obviously wasn't able to scale or even easily re-adapt to new opportunities.

With the rise and increasing stability of bitcoin as an actual contender for a digital currency, the global market suddenly starts looking a lot more local.

Google has been making headlines with their shiny Project Shield which wraps PageSpeed with other tools to defend sites against denial of service attacks. The history of the denial of service, however, runs deep, and underlines that no centralized response to it will ever be able to cost-effectively scale against a distributed attack.

Let's rewind back to the 90s. Denial of service was a very, very different thing then - it was a tool for free expression, not one used to mute dissenting opinions as it is today.
In the dot-com boomtimes of the late 90s, I was absolutely fascinated by the digital protests that sprung up in reaction to Mexico's treatment of the Zapatista Movement. Floodnet was an activist art project by the Electronic Disturbance Theater. Floodnet was simply a website you could visit and it would direct your browser to constantly reload pages on the website of the Mexcian government. In addition to overloading the website with thousands of requests from you and our fellow programmers, you could add in a political message with each page load, to force the government's server to fill their log files with messages like "human rights not found."

"The FloodNet application of error log spamming is conceptual Internet art. This is your chance to voice your political concerns on a targeted server. [...] The server may respond to your intentional mistake with a message like: "human_rights not found on this server." So by creatively selecting phases, you can make the server voice your concerns. It may not use the kind of resources that the constant reloading uses (FloodNet automatically does that too), but it is sassy conceptualism and it invites you to play with clever statements while the background applet is running." (via http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ZapTact.html)

Floodnet used DoS attacks to protest the Mexican Government

This original "denial of service" attack was seen as the digital mirror of a classic "sit-in" protest. It was a way for a David to strike back at a Goliath through technology. However, this, ahem, "sassy" political activism began an arms race that today is dominated by Goliaths alone. Instead of a tool of protest, denial of service attacks are today tools of retribution and ways to mute dissenting voices. They are massively automated and distributed, and are run not by rowdy bands of dissidents, but by well-organized for-hire groups (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/05/ragebooter-legit-ddos-service-or-fe…) and even from government infrastructures.

The only defense, so far, has been equally massive, and centralized, commercial services. This is a growing industry with its own round of disruptive innovators all to itself. This current business innovation is helping to move from the monolithic services protecting online infrastructures at high costs to a more scalable model, with services that smaller websites can benefit from. Still, back-end models are the same - providing shelter from DDoS attacks by having sufficient servers and bandwidth to absorb whatever their proprietary tools and filters cannot outright block.

Open source models to fight back have been conspicuous in their absence - until now.

The Deflect Project, created by the eQualit.ie technology collective based out of Montreal and Dublin, is responding to that gap. They focus on providing protection for activists and journalists around the world, who are subject to DDoS attacks from those who disagree with their views all the way to their own governments. Thanks to grant funding, Deflect is able to offer their services for free to independent media sites, NGOs and non-profits -- but the technology model under the hood is the real game-changer.