Adverse Effects of a Security Measure: the Example of French Speedometers

As far as analogies might go, I find the example of French speedometers a revealing example of security failure.

Automated speedometers have been installed in many places along motorways and also in town centers or in rural areas. Those devices take a picture of every car going 5% or 10% above the speed limit. The driver is fined a high penalty and even gets points removed from his driving license. The license is invalidated once 12 points have been removed.

That sounds good, but there are all kinds of problems. To name just a few design problems:

• People brake a lot when they see one ahead of them. They risk provoking an accident on a motorway just because of that.
• Whether they were "shot" or not, they' re angry about it and they then speed up a lot, knowing there won't be another speedometer in the next few miles.

People started knowing the exact locations of the speedometers or even invested detectors, bundled in iPhones, Androids or other specific devices. So the government sent the policemen roam the country with "mobile" speedometers.
And then came the social problems:

• Tax money is used to put fines on the taxpayers. If that's only in case of danger, that's good. But if it goes into fussiness, that's parasitic!
• After a short drop in the death rates of road accidents, the system reached its limit and the death rates started stagnating again. So the government intensified the pressure on policemen. They are now accountable for the number of fines given in their area. That measures the efficiency of the system on an irrelevant variable.
  
• Additionally, citizens are exasperated by this overpressure, clearly conscious that it's not an efficient security measure anymore.
• In a significant number of cases, policemen start to put fines in places where they can do it easily, whether there is a real danger or not.
• All that of course leads to a vicious circle where citizens are angry about policemen and about the government and where the "measure" of efficiency becomes more and more irrelevant.
  
• Eventually, the policemen are so pressured to put speedometer fines that they forget to put fines for other -actually efficient- reasons. For example, you'll find more cars in poor conditions (no light, flat tyres...) than a few years ago.

There's also the border effect:

• Foreigners are "shot" by the speedometers, but the French state doesn't know to whom the fine must be sent. In the end, they dont' have to pay and they don't risk to have their license removed. And they often profit from our beautiful roads at speeds higher than 180kmph. So citizens feel as if foreigners are better treated than themselves.
  

There's the implementation problem:

• In their rush to put fines, policemen just park anywhere, including dangerous locations! They are a factor of accident sometimes.

And finally, there are the typical VIP exceptions that plague any security measure:

• Police cars themselves are not subject to these fines, so currently the worst drivers you can find anywhere whether in town or on motorways are: policemen!

All in all, I'm impressed if the government behind that ever gets re-elected.

Been doing some reverse engineering

I've been reversing a Win32 PE executable lately, something I haven't been doing since I was 15. I found it quite easy. Much easier, indeed, than a few years ago. What's changed since then?

• The tools have changed. At the time, I used to master WinDASM and SoftICE, which are no more fashionable. It even seems that WinDASM has disappeared from the market. This time, I used HeavenTools' PE Explorer, which is a clear improvement on the latter.
• The PE format has not changed. Or, at least, nothing that matters in debugging.
• Windows is more stable than at the time, saving you many reboots ^^
• The compilers have not changed much. It seems that I could learn to recognize compilation styles of various compilers in very little time.
• Most of all, I've not changed. I can now remember very precisely why I quit reverse engineering software back then: because I prefer working with the source code and I prefer working in design or implementation modes rather than in debugging mode. I can now remember that I quit reverse engineering software approximately the same time as I started using GNU/Linux on my desktop.
  

I can clearly validate this view years later: though I'm happy to be able to reverse a binary, I think programming is more rewarding.

Smartcard and PIN or the Increased Security of Just 4 Digits

The French government is currently enforcing the use of what they call strong authentication, for all access to people medical data: smartcards protected by a PIN code, containing an authority-approved certificate. The PIN code sums up to just 4 numbers and the question came to me:

Why should I trust 4 little digits with my users' security? (when my password has 12?)

There are many subtle technical points within that question, but the main answer holds to only one key view of the problem: the reduction of possibilities, helping for the enforcement of good processes.

Compared to a password-based authentication, smartcards and PIN codes enforce the following:

1. Just one mechanism to integrate passwords and content on the card: that of the card itself.
2. Just one mechanism to ask for authentication: challenge. That removes the danger of "password comparison" mechanisms where you just have to look into computer's memory to get the cleartext password.
3. Just one administrator code capable of resetting the PIN: the SOPIN. That removes the danger of old, "unused" administrator accounts you find in most company directories.
4. Just numbers in the PIN code, no letters. Though this may seem like a weakness in the case of brute-force, that's on the contrary a strength, because that prevents people from setting their given name as password, or that of their son.
5. Additionally, users tend to remember numbers better. As a typical human being, you could name tens of likely alphabetic strings for your own password. But you remember only a few sequences of 4 numbers. So when you know one, that's for good.
6. Just three attempts, you can't easily brute-force it by usual means.
7. Just one logical place to deliver a smartcard: inside the company. You may send a password or even a PIN by mail, but you need to deliver a token, you can only do it physically and the only logical location to do it when you have dozens or thousands of users is inside the company's walls. That reduces the number of intermediates between the administrator and the user, and most of the time replaces external intermediates with internal ones.
8. Just one smartcard. 1/ If it gets stolen, you'll notice it. 2/ You can't share it with friends and still benefit from it at the same time. So you'll (at least) make sure you get it back.
9. Just one attempt to build the cards. I mean that the cost of a recall would be huge to change just a few security settings. For instance, if you choose to allow unlimited attempts instead of just three, changing it back to three will cost you a return of all cards back to the HelpDesk. This means that most smartcard-based project try to do the things right from the beginning, whereas many password-based projects start with "lower-level" security and try to improve on it and eventually give up about it.

All in all, PIN codes and smartcards seem a good choice.