A spate of recent articles describes the proliferation of back doors in systems.  There are so many such back doors in so many systems, it claims, that the idea of a completely secure and invulnerable system is, at best, a fallacy.  These back doors may be as result of the system software or even designed into the hardware.  Some back doors are designed in to the systems to facilitate remote update, diagnosis, debug and the like – usually never with the intention of being a security hole.  Some are inserted with subterfuge and espionage in mind by foreign-controlled entities keen on gaining access to otherwise secure systems.  Some may serve both purposes, as well. And some, are just design or specification errors.  This suggests that once you connect a system to a network, some one, some how will be able to access.  As if to provide an extreme example, a recent break-in at the United States Chamber of Commerce was traced to an internet-connected thermostat.

That’s hardware.  What about software?  Despite the abundance of anti-virus software and firewalls, a little social engineering is all you really need to get through to any system. I have written previously about the experiment in which USB memory sticks seeded in a parking lot were inserted in corporate laptops by more than half of employees who found them without any prompting. Email written as if sent from a superior is often utilized to get employees to open attached infected applications that install themselves and open a hole in a firewall for external communications and control.

The problem is actually designed in.  The Internet was built for sharing. The sharing was originally limited to trusted sources. A network of academics. The idea that someone would try to do something awful to you – except as some sort of prank – was inconceivable.

That was then.

Now we are in a place where the Internet is omnipresent.  It is used for sharing and viewing cat videos and for financial transactions.  It is used for the transmission of top secret information and buying cheese.  It connected to servers containing huge volumes of sensitive and personal customer data: social security numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, addresses, health information, etc.  And now, not a day goes by without reports of another breach.  Sometimes attributed to Anonymous, the Chinese, organized crime or kids with more time than sense, these break-ins are relentless and everyone is susceptible

So what to do?

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that, at the height of the cold war, when the United States captured a Soviet fighter jet and were examining it, they discovered that there was no solid state electronics in it.  The entire jet was designed using vacuum tubes.  That set the investigators thinking.  Were the Soviets merely backward or did they design using tubes to guard against EMP attacks?

Backward to the future?

Are we headed to a place where the most secure organizations will go offline.  They will revert to paper documents, file folders and heavy cabinets stored in underground vaults?  Of course such systems are not completely secure, as no system actually is.  On the other hand, a break in requires physical presence, carting away tons of documents requires physical strength and effort.  Paper is a material object that cannot be easily spirited away as a stream of electrons. Maybe that’s the solution. But what of all the information infrastructure built up for convenience, cost effectiveness, space savings and general efficiency? Do organizations spend more money going back to paper, staples, binders and hanging folders? And then purchase vast secure spaces to stow these materials?

Will there instead a technological fix in designing a parallel Internet infrastructure from the ground up redesigned so that it incorporates authentication, encryption and verifiable sender identification? Then all secure transactions and information could move to that newer, safer Internet? Is that newer, safer Internet just a .secure domain? Won’t that just be a bigger, better and more value laden target for evil-doers? And what about back-doors – even in a secure infrastructure, an open door or even a door with a breakable window ruins even the finest advanced security infrastructure.  And, of course, there is always social engineering of people that provides access more easily that any other technique. Or spies. Or people thinking they are “doing good”.

The real solution may not yet even be defined or known.  Is it Quantum Computing (which is really just a parallel environment of a differently-developed computing infrastructure)? Or is it really nothing – in that there is no solution and we are stuck with tactical solutions?  It’s an interesting question but for now, it is clear as it was some 20 years ago when Scott McNeally said it “The future of the Internet is security”.

Scott McNealy, the former CEO of the former Sun Microsystems, in the late 1990s, in an address to the Commonwealth Club said that the future of the Internet is in security. Indeed, it seems that there has been much effort and capital invested in addressing security matters. Encryption, authentication, secure transaction processing, secure processors, code scanners, code verifiers and host of other approaches to make your system and its software and hardware components into a veritable Fort Knox. And it’s all very expensive and quite time consuming (both in development and actual processing). And yet we still hear of routine security breeches, data and identity theft, on-line fraud and other crimes. Why is that? Is security impossible? Unlikely? Too expensive? Misused? Abused? A fiction?

Well, in my mind, there are two issues and they are the weak links in any security endeavour. The two actually have one common root. That common root, as Pogo might say, “is us”. The first one that has been in the press very much of late and always is the reliance on password. When you let the customers in and provide them security using passwords, they sign up using passwords like ‘12345’ or ‘welcome’ or ‘password’. That is usually combated through the introduction of password rules. Rules usually indicate that passwords must meet some minimum level of complexity. This would usually be something like requiring that each password must have a letter and a number and a punctuation mark and be at least 6 characters long. This might cause some customers to get so aggravated because they can’t use their favorite password that they don’t both signing up at all. Other end users get upset but change their passwords to “a12345!” or “passw0rd!” or “welc0me!”. And worst of all, they write the password down and put it in a sticky note on their computer.

Of course, ordinary users are not the only ones to blame, administrators are human, too, and equally as fallible. Even though they should know better, they are equally likely to have the root or administrator password left at the default “admin” or even nothing at all.

The second issue is directly the fault of the administrator – but it is wholly understandable. Getting a system, well a complete network of systems, working and functional is quite an achievement. It is not something to be toyed around with once things are set. When your OS supplier or application software provider delivers a security update, you will think many times over before risking system and network stability to apply it. The choice must be made. The administrator thinks: “Do I wreak havoc on the system – even theoretical havoc – to plug a security hole no matter how potentially damaging?” And considers that: “Maybe I can rely on my firewall…maybe I rely on the fact that our company isn’t much of a target…or I think it isn’t.” And rationalizes: “Then I can defer the application of the patch for now (and likely forever) in the name of stability.”

The bulk of hackers aren’t evil geniuses that stay up late at night doing forensic research and decompilation to find flaws, gaffes, leaks and holes in software and systems. No they are much more likely to be people who read a little about the latest flaws and the most popular passwords and spend their nights just trying stuff to see what they can see. A few of them even specialize in social engineering in which they simply guess or trick you into divulging your password – maybe by examining your online social media presence.

The notorious stuxnet malware worm may be a complex piece of software engineering but it would have done nothing were it not for the peril of human curiosity. The virus allegedly made its way into secure facilities on USB memory sticks. Those memory sticks were carried in human hands and inserted into the targeted computers by those same hands. How did they get into those human hands? A few USB sticks with the virus were probably sprinkled in the parking lot outside the facility. Studies have determined that people will pick up USB memory sticks they find and insert them in their PCs about 60% of the time. The interesting thing is that the likelihood of grabbing and using those USB devices goes up to over 90% if the device has a logo on it.

You can have all the firewalls and scanners and access badges and encryption and SecureIDs and retinal scans you want. In the end, one of your best and most talented employees grabbing a random USB stick and using it on his PC can be the root cause of devastation that could cost you staff years of time to undo.

So what do you do? Fire your employees? Institute policies so onerous that no work can be done at all? As is usual, the best thing to do is apply common sense. If you are not a prime target like a government, a security company or a repository of reams of valuable personal data – don’t go overboard. Keep your systems up-to-date. The time spent now will definitely pay off in the future. Use a firewall. A good one. Finally, be honest with your employees. Educate them helpfully. None of the scare tactics, no “Loose Lips Sink Ships”, just straight talk and a little humor to help guide and modify behavior over time.

In the famous Aardman Animations short film “Creature Comforts“, a variety of zoo animals discuss their lives in the zoo.  A Brazilian Lion speaks at length about the virtue of the great outdoors (cf. a zoo) recalling that in Brazil “We have space“.  While space might be a great thing for Brazilian Lions, it turns out that space is a dangerous and difficult reality in path names for computer applications.

In a recent contract, one portion of the work involved running an existing Windows application under Cygwin. Cygwin, for the uninitiated, is an emulation of the bash shell and most standard Unix commands. It provides this functionality so you can experience Unix under Windows. The Windows application I was working on had been abandoned for several years and customer pressure finally reached a level at which maintenance and updates were required – nay, demanded. Cygwin support was required primarily for internal infrastructure reasons. The infrastructure was a testing framework – primarily comprising bash shell scripts – that ran successfully on Linux (for other applications). My job was to get the Windows application re-animated and running under the shell scripts on Cygwin.

It turns out that the Windows application had a variety of issues with spaces in path names. Actually, it had one big issue – it just didn’t work when the path names had spaces. The shell scripts had a variety of issues with spaces. Well, one big issue – they, too, just didn’t work when the path names had spaces. And it turns out that some applications and operations in Cygwin have issues with spaces, too. Well, that one big issue – they don’t like spaces.

Now by “like”, I mean that when the path name contains spaces then even using ‘\040’ (instead of the space) or quoting the name (e.g., “Documents and Settings”) does not resolve matters and instead merely yields unusual and unhelpful error messages. The behavior was completely unpredictable, as well. For instance, quoting might get you part way through a section of code but then the same quoted name failed when used to call stat. It would then turn out that stat didn’t like spaces in any form (quoted, escaped, whatever…).

Parenthetically, I would note that the space problem is widespread. I was doing some Android work and having an odd an unhelpful error displayed (“invalid command-line parameter”) when trying to run my application on the emulator under Eclipse. It turns out that a space in the path name to the Android SDK was the cause.  Once the space was removed, all was well.

The solution to my problem turned out to be manifold. It involved a mixture of quoting, clever use of cygpath and the Windows API calls GetLongPathName and GetShortPathName.

When assigning and passing variables around in shell scripts, quoting a space-laden path or a variable containing a space-laden path,  the solution was easy. Just remember to use quotes:

THIS=”${THAT}”

Passing command line options that include path names with spaces tended to be more problematic. The argc/argv parsers don’t like spaces.  They don’t like them quoted and don’t like them escaped.  Or maybe the parser likes them but the application doesn’t. In any event, the specific workaround that used was clever manipulation of the path using the cygpath command. The cygpath -w -s command will translate a path name to the Windows version (with the drive letter and a colon at the beginning) and then shortens the name to the old-style 8+3 limited format thereby removing the spaces. An additional trick is that then, if you need the cygwin style path – without spaces – you get the output of the cygpath -w -s and run it through cygpath -u. Then you get a /cygdrive/ style file name with no spaces. There is no other direct path to generating a cygwin Unix style file name without spaces.

These manipulations allow you to get the sort of input you need to the various Windows programs you are using. It is important to note, however, that a Windows GUI application built using standard file browser widgets and the like always passes fully instantiated, space-laden path names. The browser widgets can’t even correctly parse 8+3 names. Some of the system routines, however, don’t like spaces. Then the trick is how do you manipulate the names once within the sphere of the Windows application? Well, there are a number of things to keep in mind, the solutions I propose will not work with cygwin Unix-style names and they will not work with relative path names.

Basically, I used the 2 windows API calls GetLongPathName and GetShortPathName to manipulate the path. I used GetShortPathName to generate the old-style 8+3 format name that removes all the spaces. This ensured that all system calls worked without a hitch. Then, in order, to display messaging that the end-user would recognize, make sure that the long paths are restored by calling GetLongPathName for all externally shared information. I need to emphasize that these Windows API calls do not appear to work with relative path names. They return an empty string as a result. So you need to watch out for that.

Any combination of all these approaches (in whole or in part) may be helpful to you in resolving any space issues you encounter.

Back at the end of March, I attended O’Reilly‘s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. As usual with the O’Reilly brand of conferences it was a slick, show-bizzy affair. The plenary sessions were fast-paced with generic techno soundtracks, theatrical lighting and spectacular attempts at buzz-generation. Despite their best efforts, the staging seems to overhwelm the Droopy Dog-like presenters who tend to be more at home coding in darkened rooms whilst gorging themselves on Red Bull and cookies. Even the audience seemed to prefer the company of their smartphones or iPads than any actual human interaction with “live tweets” being the preferred method of communication.

In any event, the conference is usually interesting and a few nuggets are typically extracted from the superficial, mostly promotional aspects of the presentations.

What was clear was that every start-up and every business plan was keyed on data collection. Data collection about YOU. The more – the better. The goal was to learn as much about you as possible so as to be able to sell you stuff. Even better – to sell you stuff that was so in tune with your desires that you would be helpless to resist purchasing it.

The trick was – how to get you to cough up that precious data? Some sites just assumed you’d be OK with spending a few days answering questions and volunteering information – apparently just for the sheer joy of it. Others believed that being up-front and admitting that you were going to be sucked into a vortex of unrelenting and irresistable consumption would be reward enough. Still others felt that they ought to offer you some valuable service in return. Most often, this service, oddly enough, was financial planning and retirement saving-based.

The other thing that was interesting (and perhaps obvious) was that data collection is usually pretty easy (at least the basic stuff). Getting details is harder and most folks do expect something in return. And, of course, the hardest part is the data mining to extract the information that would provide the most compelling sales pitch to you.

There are all sorts of ways to build the case around your apparent desires. By finding out where you live or where you are, they can suggest things “like” other things you have already that are nearby. (You sure seem to like Lady Gaga, you know there’s a meat dress shoppe around the corner…) By finding out who your friends are and what they like, they can apply peer-pressure-based recommendations (All of your friends are downloading the new Justin Beiber recording. Why aren’t you?). And by finding out about your family and demographic information they can suggest what you need or ought to be needing soon (You son’s 16th birthday is coming up soon, how about a new car for him?).

Of all the sites and ideas, it seems to me that Intuit‘s Mint is the most interesting. Mint is an on-line financial planning and management site. Sort of like Quicken but online. To “hook” you, their key idea is to offer you the tease of the most valuable analysis with the minimum of initial information. It’s almost like given your email and zip code they’ll draw up a basic profile of you and your lifestyle. Give them a bit more and they’ll make it better. And so you get sucked in but you get value for your data. They do claim to keep the data separate from you but they also do collect demographically filtered data and likely geographically filtered data.

This really isn’t news. facebook understood this years ago when their ill-fated Beacon campaign was launched. This probably would have been better accepted had it been rolled out more sensitively. But it is ultimately where everyone is stampeding right now.

The most interesting thing is that there is already a huge amount of personal data on the web. It is protected because it’s all in different places and not associated. facebook has all of your friends and acquaintances. Amazon and eBay have a lot about what you like and what you buy. Google has what you’re interested in (and if you have an Android phone – where you go). Apple has a lot about where you go and who you talk to and also through your app selection what you like and are interested in. LinkedIn has your professional associations. And, of course, twitter has when you go to the bathroom and what kind of muffins you eat.

Each of these giants is trying to expand their reservoir of data about you. Other giants are trying to figure out how to get a piece of that action (Yahoo!, Microsoft). And yet others, are trying to sell missing bits of information to these players. Credit card companies are making their vast purchasing databases available, specialty retailers are trying to cash in, cell phone service providers are muscling in as well. They each have a little piece of your puzzle to make analysis more accurate.

The expectations is that there will be acceptance of diminishing privacy and some sort of belief that the holders of these vast databases will be benevolent and secure and not require government intervention. Technologically, storage and retrieval will need to be addressed and newer, faster algorithms for analysis will need to be developed.

Looking for a job…or a powerful patent? I say look here.

My social network appears to be wide, diverse and technologically savvy enough that I have a large number of friends and acquaintances with large Internet footprints. That includes people with a presence on a variety of social networking sites like facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter and Flickr feeds, multiple email accounts and even blogs.

Having a broad sample of such connections means that life cycle events are not unusual in this group either. That includes death. I have now – several times – had the oddly jarring event of having a message reminding me about a birthday of a friend who passed away or a suggestion to reconnect with a long-dead relative and similar communications from across the chasm – as it were.

There is both joy and sorrow associated with these episodes. The sorrow is obvious but the joy is in spending a few moments reviewing their blog thoughts or their facebook photos and, in essence, celebrating their life in quiet, solitary reflection. And it provides these people with their own little slice of immortality. It bolsters the line from the movie The Social Network saying that “The Internet isn’t written in pencil; it’s written in ink”.

This got me thinking.  In an odd way, this phenomena struck me as an opportunity.  An opportunity for a new Internet application.

I see this opportunity as having at least two possibilities. The first would be a service (or application) that seeks out the Internet footprint of the deceased and expunges and closes all the accounts. This might have to include a password cracking program and some clever manner to deduce or infer login names – for the cases where little is known about the person’s online activities.  It may be the case that after closing the account, the person may live on in the databases hidden behind the websites that are never purged, but they will be gone from public view.

The alternate would serve those who wish to be celebrated and truly immortalized. This would collect the entire presence of a person on the WWW and provide a comprehensive home page to celebrate their life, through their own words and images. This home page would include links to all surviving accounts, photos, posts and comments thereby providing a window into a life lived (albeit online).

In an odd way, this creates an avatar that is a more accurate representation of yourself than anything you could possibly create on Second Life or any similar virtual world. One could certainly imagine, though, taking all that data input and using it to create a sort of stilted avatar driven by the content entered over the course of your life.  It might only have actions based on what was collected about you but a more sophisticated variation would derive behaviors or likely responses based on projections of your “collected works”.

Immortality?  Not exactly.  But an amazing simulation.