{"id":9781,"date":"2014-12-11T17:25:43","date_gmt":"2014-12-12T01:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=9781"},"modified":"2014-12-11T17:25:43","modified_gmt":"2014-12-12T01:25:43","slug":"a-week-of-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=9781","title":{"rendered":"A Week of Security"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-5030\" src=\"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/userpicsecurity.jpg\" alt=\"userpic=security\" width=\"95\" height=\"74\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"5\" vspace=\"5\" \/>I&#8217;ve been at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acsac.org\">ACSAC<\/a> all week, and it has been a great conference. The committee and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www3.hilton.com\/en\/hotels\/california\/hilton-los-angeles-universal-city-BURUCHF\/index.html\">Universal Hilton<\/a> have a lot of work to do to top this year&#8217;s conference at the <a href=\"http:\/\/frenchquarter.hyatt.com\/en\/hotel\/home.html\">Hyatt French Quarter<\/a>. But I&#8217;m confident they\/we will. So what is more appropriate than some security-related articles:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Remember Benford&#8217;s Law<\/strong>. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/web.kennesaw.edu\/news\/stories\/accountants-increasingly-use-data-analysis-catch-fraud\">an interesting summary of an article about how accountants are using Benford&#8217;s Law to fight fraud<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Benford%27s_law\">Benford&#8217;s Law<\/a>, for those that don&#8217;t recall it, refers to the frequency distribution of digits in many (but not all) real-life sources of data. In this distribution, 1 occurs as the leading digit about 30% of the time, while larger digits occur in that position less frequently: 9 as the first digit less than 5% of the time. Benford&#8217;s Law also concerns the expected distribution for digits beyond the first, which approach a uniform distribution. The accountants looked at a log of financial ATM transactions for an ATM with a limit of $50, and saw an abnormal number of first digits that were 4. This led them to find financial fraud. Think about this for analysis of audit trails&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><strong>Two-Factor Authentication.<\/strong> One point that has been continually made this conference relates to the value of two-factor authentication. We even heard from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acsac.org\/2014\/openconf\/modules\/request.php?module=oc_program&amp;action=page.php&amp;id=42\">Avi Rubin on how to use two-factor in online poker<\/a>. However, there is a major problem with two factor: what happens if you lose the second factor. <a href=\"http:\/\/lifehacker.com\/what-do-i-do-if-i-use-two-factor-authentication-and-los-1668727532\">Here&#8217;s an article that explains what to do<\/a>. Now that you know what to do, you have no excuse. Enable two factor authentication.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Cyberphysical Attacks<\/strong>. One major theme of the conference has been cyberphysical security. You probably think it was Stuxnet. Wrong. A recent article points to <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/security\/2014\/12\/hack-said-to-cause-fiery-pipeline-blast-could-rewrite-history-of-cyberwar\/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29\">a 2008 Turkish pipeline explosion, which was caused by a cyberattack that overloaded the pressure on the pipe<\/a>. As Avi pointed out, as we get more and more devices in our houses and lives that are network connected, how susceptible will <em>we<\/em> be to cyberattacks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Want to learn more about these problems? Come to the 2015 ACSAC, December 7-11 2015 at the Universal Hilton. Paper submissions, training submissions, workshop submissions, and similar stuff are all due around June 1, 2015. As Local Arrangements and Tutorial Chair, I look forward to seeing you for what will be my 25th ACSAC on the Conference Committee!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been at ACSAC all week, and it has been a great conference. The committee and the Universal Hilton have a lot of work to do to top this year&#8217;s conference at the Hyatt French Quarter. But I&#8217;m confident they\/we will. So what is more appropriate than some security-related articles: Remember Benford&#8217;s Law. Here&#8217;s an <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=9781\">Read More &#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acsac","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9782,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9781\/revisions\/9782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}