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The Internet of Things will aid criminals and burglars

3 points by chumchum 12y ago

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
This brings a smile to my weary eyes, as it is my most-fervent hope that the Internet of Things will die in a fire. The article didn't discuss what I expected, that being traffic analysis. Among cryptological problems, traffic analysis is one of the more difficult exploits to prevent, as well as the easier to exploit. In the military, you don't need to crack any codes at all. Just look at where all the motorcycle messengers are going to or coming from. Must be the command tent, eh wot? Let's drop a bomb on it, just to see what happens. In the specific case of the Internet of Things, consider that your Things will be chattering over the Internet far more frequently when you are at home then when you are away. That will be the case for your neighbors. So one could stand back at a safe distance, then point a few cantennas in the general direction of each house in an upscale neighborhood. You don't need to decrypt any signals, you just need to see how frequently messages are sent. When all the messages in a general area die down for a little while, you burgle the home in the center of that general area. For extra credit, you also snoop on the cops, so that you can be sure there are no patrol cars that could possibly respond in time, were you to trip an alarm. I learned about traffic analysis in 1989. That same Interop Conference UNIX and Internet Security Tutorial also explained that, in secure facilities, ethernet cables run through modestly pressured metal pipes. There is no real way to tap into the ethernet without drilling into the pipes. When the air pressure drops, men with guns turn up to look into who's holding the drill. Now we have Bradley Manning downloading 800MB of top secret diplomatic cables, because he was searched on the way in to work each day - but not on the way out. While I support Manning's particular effort, suppose that was someone who was not such a nice guy, making off with the recipe for nerve gas, or the detailed design of a guided missile.

3 points by chumchum 12y ago

This brings a smile to my weary eyes, as it is my most-fervent hope that the Internet of Things will die in a fire. The article didn't discuss what I expected, that being traffic analysis. Among cryptological problems, traffic analysis is one of the more difficult exploits to prevent, as well as the easier to exploit. In the military, you don't need to crack any codes at all. Just look at where all the motorcycle messengers are going to or coming from. Must be the command tent, eh wot? Let's drop a bomb on it, just to see what happens. In the specific case of the Internet of Things, consider that your Things will be chattering over the Internet far more frequently when you are at home then when you are away. That will be the case for your neighbors. So one could stand back at a safe distance, then point a few cantennas in the general direction of each house in an upscale neighborhood. You don't need to decrypt any signals, you just need to see how frequently messages are sent. When all the messages in a general area die down for a little while, you burgle the home in the center of that general area. For extra credit, you also snoop on the cops, so that you can be sure there are no patrol cars that could possibly respond in time, were you to trip an alarm. I learned about traffic analysis in 1989. That same Interop Conference UNIX and Internet Security Tutorial also explained that, in secure facilities, ethernet cables run through modestly pressured metal pipes. There is no real way to tap into the ethernet without drilling into the pipes. When the air pressure drops, men with guns turn up to look into who's holding the drill. Now we have Bradley Manning downloading 800MB of top secret diplomatic cables, because he was searched on the way in to work each day - but not on the way out. While I support Manning's particular effort, suppose that was someone who was not such a nice guy, making off with the recipe for nerve gas, or the detailed design of a guided missile.