Wednesday 20 August 2014

Design by Contract and Security

I've worked with design-by-contract for a long while; in fact its use as an essential programming concept was brought to my attention by one of my professors who didn't just teach it but demanded it as a fundamental part of any design or program. It remains today an integral technique in my toolbox of programming and design techniques. As an aside, Eiffel supports DbC as part of its programming model; it makes it one of the most elegant and easy languages not just to program in but to develop in.

DbC of course is related to the validation that one should make on web page forms and various concepts in strong typing of functions etc. Generalising DbC into other areas such as security, privacy should be an obvious step, but one seemingly not taken.

Via Schneier's brilliant security blog is a link to an article entitled Security As A Class Of Interface Guarantee. It is a long read but one more than worthwhile for software developers certainly; and maybe for any security and privacy engineers too. Actually if there's one article on security and development you read today it must be this one! Here's small sample:
Security Is Part Of Every Interface 
I prefer to think of security as a class of interface guarantee. In particular, security guarantees are a kind of correctness guarantee. At every interface of every kind — user interface, programming language syntax and semantics, in-process APIs, kernel APIs, RPC and network protocols, ceremonies — explicit and implicit design guarantees(promises, contracts) are in place, and determine the degree of “security” (however defined) the system can possibly achieve. 
Design guarantees might or might not actually hold in the implementation — software tends to have bugs, after all. Callers and callees can sometimes (but not always) defend themselves against untrustworthy callees and callers (respectively) in various ways that depend on the circumstances and on the nature of caller and callee. In this sense an interface is an attack surface — but properly constructed, it can also be a defense surface.

At the end of the article is a suprise link to a tweet :-)

Obvious isn't it...?!

Friday 8 August 2014

Loyalty Cards

Tangentially related to privacy which I'll discuss later regarding information asymmetry, but first I wanted to comment on this article that appeared on LinkedIn: Business Travelers Are Saying "Buh-bye" to Loyalty Programs - Here's Why by Christopher Elliott, a "Reader advocate" for National Geographic Traveler

"After years of putting up with blackout dates, broken promises and bait-and-switch games, American travellers — particularly air travellers — are saying “Enough!”
They’re refusing to play the loyalty-program game, jettisoning blind brand allegiance in favor of a more pragmatic view of travel. Price and convenience are trumping mindless devotion to an airline, a car rental company or a hotel."

This applies equally to European travellers to I suspect. But let's look at the price-quality-customer service dimensions. I did as the article states a few years ago and switched allegiance from one to another, despite accumulating a sizeable amount of points and occasionally using them to upgrade it actually became too difficult to actually use those points.

I remember a few cases clearly. The first was trying to enter a business lounge at Helsinki Airport - according to the "loyalty" scheme terms and conditions I had enough flights to qualify for an upgrade to the next tier, thus allowing me access to the business lounge. Except that there was a mistranslation between the English translation and the "correct" terms and conditions. The airline customer service basically stated it wasn't their fault. Given that the lounge at the time was empty, but staffed by no less than three "customer representatives" make it all a little too surreal.

The second was at Heathrow when lounge entry was not just dependent on the card but on the airline that issued to card, despite both airlines being part of the same alliance. It worked like this: if you gained the second tier on airline A you could enter business lounges run by the alliance that A was a member of, except, if the lounges were at an airport where airline B, also of the same alliance, was the major carrier.

The third was when trying to book a flight with air miles. For my selected flight I had enough miles and successfully made the booking until it came to select my seats, where upon the whole process failed and I was unceremoniously ditched out of the booking process with a terse error about the flight no longer being available to points holders. It turns out this was an artefact of the internal IT systems and actually you had to call the customers service department to book the flights - after a long hold where you were constantly told that all of the customer service representatives were busy, but you really are valued by the company you're trying to spend you money with.

After a few flights across the Atlantic I switched to Lufthansa - Frankfurt and Munich are clean, efficient and as pleasant as airports go. Lufthansa may not have good economy seating on long haul but the crews are some of the most professional (and smiling!) I've had the pleasure to be on an aircraft with.

I actually have no idea actually how to redeem the points I've collected with Lufthansa and SAS - they'll probably expire or have expired without my knowledge without me ever receiving any bonus from my loyalty as a customer.

A few years ago a colleague of mine called a major Nordic airline in response to a request for customer feedback. It turns out that they couldn't care why he stopped flying with them. Surely with all the data analytics being applied to our data collected, the airline never stopped for a moment to question why customers suddenly stopped flying with them. 

Now due to primarily economic reasons, I fly with whoever gives me the best deal. Given that the terms and conditions are pretty much the same regardless whether you fly a national carrier or a "cheap" airline, price will always win. 

Given that many established, major airlines decided to compete with the cheap carriers by matching their standards and terms, it is no wonder that the loyalty of the customer to the airline has all but disappeared?

Then, we come to credit cards and store cards...will these go the same way as air miles as customers realise that the deal they get is barely worth the loyalty?

But as a final statement, given that this is all about customer loyalty - has anyone ever been contacted by an airline, shop or other about why they stopped using those products offered?

References:

Thursday 7 August 2014

Privacy and Governance

Actually this is a presentation by Prof. Alastair Scotland of the UK's NHS on governance and, ultimately, patient safety. If you work in governance, privacy, software engineering and any management discipline related with these then this is one video you must watch today.

If it took the NHS 10 years to get this far, then in areas such as privacy which share many of the same characteristics of being a flawed system (in the general sense) with many safety-critical features, we've a huge amount of work to do outside of the mainly philosophical and legal debates about what privacy is.


Alastair Scotland.mp4 from Guy Murray on Vimeo.

Tuesday 5 August 2014

On Finding Reasonable Measures To Bridge the Gap Between Privacy Engineers and Lawyers

This article originally appeared on the Privacy Association website on 29th July 2014.

On Finding Reasonable Measures To Bridge the Gap Between Privacy Engineers and Lawyers


Getting privacy lawyers and software engineers to work together to implement privacy is a perennial problem. Peter Swire, CIPP/US, and Annie Anton's article "Engineers and Lawyers in Privacy Protection: Can We All Just Get Along?" has explored this as has The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto, of which their article is part.

But here's the problem: We cannot keep addressing privacy from a top-down, legally driven perspective. No amount of additional processes and compliance checks is going to change the fact that software itself is so complex. Software engineering is often assumed to be the final stage and by some a mere consequence of many requirements from a large number of often conflicting sources.

Often privacy issues are “solved” by hashing an identifier, encrypting a communications link or anonymizing a data set, for some definition of anonymization. Many of these are piecemeal, ineffective, Band-Aid type solutions—the proverbial rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic. Privacy Theater at its worst … or best.

So how do we address this?

First, maybe we should realize that we don't really understand each other’s disciplines. Very few lawyers are trained software engineers and vice-versa; therefore, constructing a lingua franca between these groups is part of that first step.

Often, understanding ideas that are simple in one domain do not translate to the other. For example, the use of the term “reasonable” means nothing in the software engineering domain. Plus, the simple act of “encryption” to a software engineer hides an enormous complexity of network protocols, key management, performance, encryption libraries and so on. Similarly, the now-ubiquitous use of “app” by lawyers to mean something that runs on your phone means a lot more to the software engineer.

What does “app” really mean to software engineers?

That little piece of code that downloads your news feed each morning and presents it in a friendly way—allowing you the scroll through using your touch screen device and maybe now and again presenting an advert because you didn't want to buy the paid version—is, in fact, not a tiny bit of code at all.

Effectively, what runs on your device is a multi-layered, complex interaction of hundreds of components, each sharing the device's memory, long-term storage, network components, display, keyboard, microphone, camera, speaker, GPS and so on. Each of those individual components interacts with layers underneath the interface, passing messages between components, scheduling when pieces of code must run and which piece of code gets the notification that you've just touched the screen as well as how and where data is stored.

When the app needs to get the next news item “from the web,” we have a huge interaction of network protocols that marshal the contents of the news feed, check its consistency, perform error-correction, marshal the individual segments of message from the network, manage addressing messages and internal format. There are protocols underneath this that decide on the routing between networks and those that control the electrical pulses over wires or antennae. This itself is repeated many, many times as messages are passed between routing points all over the Internet and includes cell towers, home wireless routers, undersea cables and satellite connections. Even the use of privacy-preserving technologies—encryption, for example—can be rendered virtually meaningless because underneath lies a veritable treasure trove of metadata. And that is just the networking component!

Let's for the moment look at the application's development itself, probably coded in some language such as Java, which itself is a clever beast that theoretically runs anywhere because it runs on top of a virtual machine and can be ported to almost any computing platform. The language contains many features to make a programmer's life easier by abstracting away complex details of the underlying mechanisms of how computers work. These are brought together through a vast library of publicly available libraries for a plethora of tasks—from generating random numbers to big data analytics—in only a 'few' lines of well-chosen code.

Even without diving deep into the code and components of which it’s made, similar complexity awaits in understanding where our content flows. Maybe your smartphone’s news app gets data from a news server and gives you the opportunity to share it through your favorite social network. Where does your data flow after these points? To advertisers, marketers, system administrators and so on? Through what components? And what kinds of processing? How about cross-referencing? Where is that data logged and who has access?

Constructing a full map or data flow of a typical software system—even a simple mobile app—becomes a spider web of interacting information flows, further complicated by layering over the logical and physical architectures, the geographical distribution and concepts such as controller and processor. Not to mention the actual content of the data, its provenance, the details of its collection, the risks, the links with policies and so on. And yet we still have not considered the security, performance and other functional and nonfunctional aspects!

Software engineers have enough of a problem managing this complexity without having to learn and comprehend legal language, too. Indeed, privacy won't get a foothold in software engineering until a path from “reasonable” can be traced through the myriad requirements to those millions of lines of code that actually implement “reasonable.”

Engineers love a challenge, but often when solutions are laid out before them in terms of policy and vague concepts—concepts which to us might be perfectly reasonable (there's that word again!)—then those engineers are just going to ignore or, worse, mis-implement those requirements. Not out of any malicious intent but because those requirements are almost meaningless in their domain. Even concepts such as data minimization can lose much if not all of their meaning as we move through the layers of code and interaction.

Life as a software engineer is hard: juggling a complex framework of requirements, ideas, systems, components and so on without interpreting what a privacy policy actually means across and inside the Internet-wide environment in which we work.

Software isn't a black box protected by a privacy policy and a suite of magic privacy-enhancing technologies but a veritable Pandora's Box of who-knows-what of “things.”

As privacy professionals, we should open that box often to fully comprehend what is really going on when we say “reasonable.” As software engineers, we'll more than make you welcome in our world, and we'd probably relish the chance to explore yours. But until we both get visibility in our respective domains and make the effort to understand each other's languages and how these relate to each other, this isn't going to happen—at least not in any “reasonable” way
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Sunday 3 August 2014

Messenger 10 year Anniversary

One of the first posts I made on this blog was about the Messenger probe to Mercury - at the time it had just made the 3rd fly-by before orbit insertion about 18 months later. On 1st August it celebrated 10 years since its launch.

So a large beer to all involved!

So now we have Messenger at Mercury, Venus Express performing dangerous aerobraking manoeuvres in Venus' atmosphere, a fleet robots trundling over Mars - not forgetting a small fleet of satellites around the planet, Juno on its way to Jupiter and venerable Cassini still going strong around Saturn.

Then there are the three that I'm most anticipating:

and then in just a few days, Rosetta finally arrives at 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenk after 10 years. At this moment she's 3 days away with about 500 km to go! She's caring a lander called Philae which'll deeply later this year. ESA have a good track record of this kind of landings in exotic places with Huygens.

Can't wait!

In the meantime: