MINI-SERIES EVENT! Over the course of Quarter 4, I will be posting a series of videos giving an overview of what are increasingly grouped together as "privacy-enhancing technologies" or PETs. (This will include homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proof, differential privacy, synthetic data, and maybe a little bit on trusted execution environments.) I will take special care both to point out why the business side might decide to care about these things and to clarify the rather problematic and messy nomenclature in my last sentence's parenthetical word salad.
This video is a whirlwind tour of what is to come. A specific schedule is coming soon.
#DataScience #Privacy #Cybersecurity
Uber's 2016 Incident and Joe Sullivan's Criminal Liability
It's very unusual these days that an executive face criminal liability related to corporate wrongdoing so the story of ex-Uber CISO Joe Sullivan is a notable one. I discuss the relevant 2016 ransomware incident, the key legal role played by notification of law enforcement (or the lack thereof in this case), the gray zone around bug bounty programs, and the broader debate about when criminal liability is appropriate. I think this story has many interesting angles and I will also digress a little into executive compensation, the Theranos trials, and the legal meaning of the "O" in your favorite "C?O" title.
Uber's unpleasantly classic trainwreck of a data breach
Uber's recent breach is about as classic as it gets. I talk about what is classic in it including the role of social engineering, lateral movement and using some access to get more, and the sad predictability about who it is that got taken. I also discuss some unique wrinkles including the announcement of the breach by the hacker in an internal company chat only to receive jeering and disbelief.
Reading into Huobi's Privacy Coin Delistings
I talk about Huobi's recent decision to delist privacy coins like Zcash and Monero, contextualize it within broader conflicts between law enforcement and digital privacy, and talk in detail about enforcement goals vs. business incentives on both sides.
Fun Ghost PII demonstration: encrypted search for emojis
Like #emojis?
Since you have said yes, you can definitely spare ~2 minutes to spend with Jack Phillips and I checking out a fun encrypted search & basic sentiment analysis demonstration using Ghost PII.
Goodies for the cool kids
Today I have a goodie bag of test drive toys for the cool kids that are actually watching and listening in detail... #Python #DataScience #CyberSecurity
The downfall of Ethereum's Tornado Cash transaction mixer
In this video I fill in some of the details about how Federal law enforcement has shut down the Tornado Cash transaction mixer because of its involvement in money laundering by North Korean hackers and then backtrack to answer questions like "What is a transaction mixer?" and "Why might you use it for money laundering?"
Yowza! Data Breaches: Public Sector Edition
The government loses your data, too, and when it does it probably does it in a way that intersects something else you were nervous about. In this video I discuss the recent thefts of 1) name and address for ALL concealed carry permit holders in California stolen from a misbegotten Department of Justice portal, and 2) billions of records of comprehensive personal information probably describing more or less everyone in China and probably stolen from the Shanghai National Police database. Both stories are evolving...
The (uniquely flexible) Ghost PII permissions system
You share data with someone or you don't, right? Wrong!
In this video I continue my mini-series on how Ghost PII provides encrypted data-in-use techniques and a flexible permissions system so you can allow a partner to compute just what you want to let them compute and just how you want them to compute it. It's a great way to regulate risk, maintain auditability into how partners use your data, and escape from the either / or of wholesale sharing or not will allow you to get some exciting things done you might not have otherwise. #DataScience #Python #DataPrivacy #CyberSecurity
Restricted analytics on encrypted data with no decryption
Have you ever felt like you had a good reason to put data someplace but ran into too much static regarding data privacy or cybersecurity? Maybe you had a prototype that was only allowed on a test environment, but your ideal test data was only allowed on prod. Maybe you wanted to share data with an external partner, but one that compliance felt couldn't maintain cybersecurity standards to your own. If you have run into these kinds of headaches, maybe we can help. In this example, we encrypt some data, pool it while encrypted, and show how the owners can give a third-party analyst the ability to do some computations (mean, stdev) on that pooled, encrypted data but not others (decryption). #Cybersecurity #DataScience #Python
Ghost PII applied to location data for contact tracing
Don't like that Google knows when you go to the bathroom? I know a better way. Check out this demonstration of Ghost PII on location data for contract tracing. It minimizes data exposure to the bare minimum needed for the real-life activity that these analytics are meant to enable.
Potential financial contagion in crypto
Financial contagion explained via the 2008 crash, similar exploration of the fallout of Luna's collapse via the Luna Foundation Guard, and just how financial contagion could potentially spread after another stablecoin implosion.
Stablecoin Implosions!
"Even if you don't care about the crypto world, this is the kind of disaster where the crypto world could come to see you."
You should find ~6 minutes to learn about major recent events around the stablecoin Luna UST notably its recent depegging (and some basic "hey what is that?"), some problematic design features that put it in danger, comparisons to the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the role of the Federal Reserve, and questions about whether the larger and likely more contagious Tether may be next.
Teaser trailer: linear regression with Ghost PII
I do some basic regression modeling encrypted data using Ghost PII's Python client as well as giving some background like why one might want such a model, why one might want to get such a model via a more private method, etc.
Nigeria's National Identity Number (NIN) and the recent massive SIM shutdown
I discuss the recent decision of the Nigerian government to block more than a third of the SIM cards in that country, provide some context on the relation of these events to security issues as well as the unusual importance of cellular infrastructure in much of Africa, and do some compare and contrast of Nigeria's national identity card program with similar events in the US, EU, and Kenya.
North Korea, money laundering, and the ongoing Axie Infinity / Ronin Network story
Spare ~5 minutes for a short update on the frontiers of money laundering in cryptocurrency via new information on the Ronin Network / Axie Infinity hack including revelations the North Korea sponsored Lazarus hacker group is responsible, their use Tornado (a transaction bundler in the Ethereum ecosystem, reactions by law enforcement, similarities to events in Russia, and a TikTok rapper named Razzlekhan.
Backstory for the recent US-EU "agreement in principle" on a new data protection regime
Take 5 minutes to get caught up on recent events in EU v. US data privacy issues including why the recent "agreement in principle" is both important and a sham with important backstory on surveillance a la Snowden, past frameworks struck down a la Schrems, and why we are maybe watching the same movie again. At the end I have some useful advice about why privacy-enhancing technologies might be more fun to deal with than an intercontinental slow-motion legal soap opera.
Axie Infinity, Ronin, and (de)centralization
You might have read in the newspaper lately that $615 million in cryptocurrency was stolen, and that it was related to the popular mobile game Axie Infinity. Beyond these facts, I think it has been a little murky in the coverage just what happened and how it happened to what players. Broadly, "decentralization" is a hot buzzword and while this heist is in the news it might provide a good idea to examine what sort of decentralization existed around Axie Infinity (or not) and whether it provided any real value (or not).
Axie Infinity is a Pokemon-like game that rewards players with cryptocurrency and then the Pokemon-like creatures themselves are non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It is published by a company called Sky Mavis, and this company in turn created a blockchain network called Ronin to handle the activity generated by the game. Ronin is an example of what is called an L2 network, a blockchain network intended to handle the traffic volume of some particular constituency in some specific way. Usually the goal of these L2 networks is greater efficiency and lower cost - perhaps the end user has heard of the Ethereum blockchain and wants to hold Ether for their efforts, yet it would be prohibitively expensive to send all the transactions generated by the game (which lives in regular old-school centralized web infrastructure) directly to the Ethereum blockchain. The L2 network, in our example the Ronin Network, processes the transactions from the game and then sends the information in a condensed form to the Ethereum blockchain via a smart contract called a bridge.
In the recent heist, the cryptocurrency was actually stolen from the Ronin Network via this bridge. Some of the small failures around why this was possible are notable: while Ethereum has a battle-tested global network with multitudes of nodes, the Ronin Network had only 9 nodes with 4 of the 9 operated by Sky Mavis itself. (There is an interesting digression here about how decentralization is in practice quite easy to fake.) Worse, it appears that corners were cut in developing Ronin, as the exploit involved a "gas-free RPC node" they had been using to work on development issues. I don't have space here to unpack that phrase, but I am guessing that readers who recognize these words don't think they are good cybersecurity practice.
To zoom out and see the big picture, Sky Mavis was in a good position to drape themselves in the decentralized cache of the Ethereum blockchain and they did, but maybe this was a little disingenuous. Much of the real action was on the Ronin Network, which in turn had some of the decentralized smell on it, but then in the end it was maybe a bit too much of a Sky Mavis -first jam to really deserve that word. Sky Mavis being able to make a bad decision behind close doors and lose your money is not what decentralization in crypto is supposed to be about.
So... there was an appealing looking decentralized cargo cult but maybe not meaningful decentralization of the full stack... and it went bad in ways true decentralization is supposed to prevent...
Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network hack
There is much to be learned from the recent hack and theft of cryptocurrency from related to Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network, including some standard cyber security lessons about social engineering, distinctions about (de)centralization and what is a layer 1 v. layer 2 network, as well as an imminent experiment in anti money laundering practices around crypto.
Open banking in your day-to-day and API security trends
Open banking - the API miniseries continues! I resume our conversation on API-centric trends by looking at some familiar fintech innovations for plugging your brokerage into your bank, relate this to my simplified API definition and narrative on why these APIs are empowering to both businesses and consumers, and talk a little bit about how this situation is driving yet another trend in the cybersecurity business around API security.