Please Embed Bibliographic Data in Online Documents
When I teach, I assign a lot of primary sources—technical papers, but also (especially in courses like Computers and Society) news stories. And when I assign something, I have to do laborious copying and pasting: I ask my students to use complete bibligraphy entries, rather than just URLs, so I do the same. Why? Among other things, "link rot": URLs are rarely good for more than a few years, save at places that have seriously thought through their naming scheme and made a commitment to stick to it.
Being the sort of person I am, I use scripts to generate my class syllabus pages. Since I already have copious BibTeX files, I use bibtex2html to generate (most of) the readings for each class. And therein lies the rub: I want all "archival" files—journal or conference paper PDFs, articles from major newspapers (e.g., the New York Times), etc., to include machine-readable metadata. The HTML file should, by itself, be self-identifying to scholars (or at least to scholars with the right tools….). I don’t care about the format chosen; I just one want single one that I can parse with a rational Python script.
This isn’t a new concept. Most books published in recent years in the US contain Library of Congress cataloging information. Web pages and academic papers should, too. And there are plenty of standards to choose from; ideally, pick one.
For now, I’ve written scripts for two of the sites I cite the most, the New York Times and Ars Technica. They have most of the right information, but it’s not in the same format. Ars Technica, for example, puts the interesting stuff in a single HTML tag, but in JSON format inside the tag. The New York Times uses a bunch of separate tags. I tried writing a variant for the Washington Post; as best I can tell, most of the information I need is there, but the reporters’ names are in some JavaScript assignment statements.
I’m trying to do my part. My own web site has .bib entries for all of my papers, and I’m rewriting my blog software to generate similar files for each blog post. (Not, I think, that anyone but me has ever formally cited my blog…)
I’m not a librarian or archivist, but if I’m seeing this problem, I suspect that the pros are seeing it even more. And maybe I’m wrong, and there are standards that the New York Times is following—but in that case, can others please follow suit? The future will thank you.
Ed Felten to be Named as a PCLOB Board Member
Today, the White House announced that Ed Felten would be named as a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. That’s wonderful news, for many reasons.
First, Ed is superbly qualified for the job. He not only has deep knowledge of technology, he understands policy and how Washington works. Second, there really are important technical issues in PCLOB’s work—that’s why I spent a year there as their first Technology Scholar.
But more importantly, Ed’s appointment is a sign that computer science technical expertise is finally being valued in Washington at the policy level. My role was very explicitly not to set or opine on policy; rather, I looked at the technical aspects and explained to the staff and the Board what I thought they implied. The Board, though, made the policy decisions.
Ed will now have a voice at that level. That’s good, partly because he is, as I said, so very well qualified, but also because he will likely be the first of many technologists in such roles. For years, I and many others have been calling for such appointments. I’m glad that one has finally happened.
Crypto War III: Assurance
For decades, academics and technologists have sparred with the government over access to cryptographic technology. In the 1970s, when crypto started to become an academic discipline, the NSA was worried, fearing that they’d lose the ability to read other countries’ traffic. And they acted. For example, they exerted pressure to weaken DES. From a declassified NSA document (Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989: Book III: Retrenchment and Reform, 1972-1980, p. 232):
(For my take on other activity during the 1970s, see some class slides.)
The Second Crypto War, in the 1990s, is better known today, with the battles over the Clipper Chip, export rules, etc. I joined a group of cryptographers in criticizing the idea of key escrow as insecure. When the Clinton administration dropped the idea and drastically restricted the scope of export restrictions on cryptographic technology, we thought the issue was settled. We were wrong.
In the last several years, the issue has heated up again. A news report today says that the FBI is resuming the push for access:
F.B.I. and Justice Department officials have been quietly meeting with security researchers who have been working on approaches to provide such "extraordinary access" to encrypted devices, according to people familiar with the talks.I’m as convinced as ever that "exceptional access"—a neutral term, as opposed to "back doors", "GAK" (government access to keys), or "golden keys", and first used in a National Academies report—is a bad idea. Why? Why do I think that the three well-resepcted computer scientists mentioned in the NY Times article (Stefan Savage, Ernie Brickell, and Ray Ozzie) who have proposed schemes are wrong?Based on that research, Justice Department officials are convinced that mechanisms allowing access to the data can be engineered without intolerably weakening the devices’ security against hacking.
I can give my answer in one word: assurance. When you design a security system, you want to know that it will work correctly, despite everything adversaries can do. In my view, cryptographic mechanisms are so complex and so fragile that tinkering with them to add exceptional access seriously lowers their assurance level, enough so that we should not have confidence that they will work correctly. I am not saying that these modified mechanisms will be insecure; rather, I am saying that we should not be surprised if and when that happens.
History bears me out. Some years ago, a version of the Pretty Good Privacy system that was modified to support exceptional access could instead give access to attackers. The TLS protocol, which is at the heart of web encryption, had a flaw that is directly traceable to the 1990s requirement for weaker, export grade cryptography. That’s right: a 1994 legal mandate—one that was abolished in 2000—led to a weakness that was still present in 2015. And that’s another problem: cryptographic mechanisms have a very long lifetime. In this case, the issue was something known technically as a "downgrade attack", where an intruder in the conversation forces both sides to fall back to a less secure variant. We no longer need export ciphers and hence have no need to even negotiate the issue—but the protocol still has it, and in an insecure fashion. Bear in mind that TLS has been proven secure mathematically—and it still had this flaw.
There are thus many reasons to be skeptical about not just the new proposals mentioned in the NY Times article but about the entire concept of exceptional access. In fact, a serious flaw has been found in one of the three. Many cryptographers, including myself, had seen the proposal—but someone else, after hearing a presentation about it for the first time, found a problem in about 15 minutes. This particular flaw may be fixable, but will the fix be correct? I don’t think we have any way of knowing: cryptography is a subtle discipline.
So: the risk we take by mandating exceptional access is that we may never know if there’s a problem lurking. Perhaps the scheme will be secure. Perhaps it will be attackable by a major intelligence agency. Or perhaps a street criminal who has stolen the phone or a spouse or partner will be able to exploit it, with the help of easily downloadable software from the Internet. We can’t know for sure, and the history of the field tells us that we should not be sanguine. Exceptional access may create far more problems than it solves.
