Weakness at the seam: electronic vs physical security

I noticed recently that government security blogger Bob Gourley is updating an article he originally published in 2003 titled “Cyber and Physical Security Unite”.  The article clearly remains relevant today.  In fact we have more to be concerned with today than before, particularly at the seam where electronic data meets the real world.

We need to be more intelligent about protecting electronic assets from physical threats, and not treat the two as separate issues.  Today the practitioners in these two security spheres are usually independent.  As a result, some of the most vulnerable spots are to be found along the seam where the two intersect. 

Computer IT experts focus on protecting data "on the wire" with firewalls, encryption, VPNs, IPS, etc.  This is all good.  Physical experts tend to look at perimeters.  Also good. 

The under-rated risk is where that electronic information enters the real world at the computer monitor.  The logical data protection control ends as the data is handed off to the physical world where it can be viewed by anyone who happens to have physical access.  The rules associated with who can view what in the electronic world are rarely matched with who as has access in the physical world. 

Think about your own work environment.  You have an access card to get into the building, and a password to access the company financials you use to do your job.  However there is nothing to stop other employees from looking at your computer screen.  They have physical access to get into the building, but they don't have a need to see those sensitive financials.  It's a simple example of how physical and electronic protections are not working together.

We put more and more of our lives into electronic assets every day.  The value of protecting our data increases constantly, but social engineering and shoulder surfing are more serious today than ever. Security practitioners need to admit the risks go beyond just electronic, or just physical and make sure they protect information at all points along the way.  If you are a security manager looking to protect computer screens against eavesdroppers I urge you to look at Oculis Labs PrivateEye and Chameleon products.

March Madness, Dilbert, and Boss Mode

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert, blogger and generally interesting guy) wrote a blog post recently that really caught my eye.

He says CBS Sports contacted him to ask him to create a "business-looking" screen that a viewer could quickly pop up using the Boss Mode button built into CBS's video feed viewer. The idea is that if an employees is watching March Madness (the NCAA basketball tournament) on his computer during working hours he could quickly hid the fact from his boss. Further, they wanted the content to look business-like, but to actually be funny on closer examination.

It is nice to know CBS Sports has a sense of fun. That's all this is of course. Some commenters have decried the waste of corporate bandwidth, and the poor morality of shirking work. As a CEO myself, I don't see it that way. I measure my team on what they accomplish. If they can do an excellent job and still watch the game, then they are excellent as far as I'm concerned. The corollary is that if someone is consistently only delivering excuses for why the job is not done well, then they are a problem that must be dealt with.

Anyway, what really grabbed me about Scott's blog post is that our product PrivateEye has a Boss Mode that solves this problem exactly, and in my opinion far more elegantly than with a keyboard button. There's an option in PrivateEye to turn on Boss Mode - a setting that lets you choose what you want your screen to show in an 'emergency'. When it's on and you're looking at your screen you can enjoy the game (or your work) normally, but if anyone else looks at your screen or you turn your head away PrivateEye immediately displays your chosen Boss Mode view.

The idea is more elegant than hitting a button on your keyboard because that's a dead giveaway that you were up to no good. With PrivateEye, all you do is look away and it happens automatically. If this sounds implausible to you, please suspend disbelief for a minute because the product is real. You can check out video of it working here.

Sorry for the commercial, I try not to do that in this blog. I'm just really excited that someone like CBS is, in a humorous way, acknowledging the display privacy issue too. Now what we really need is to get on their radar screens for next year. Coming in 2011: March Madness, On Demand, In the Privacy of your Cube (powered by Oculis Labs). Catchy, isn't it?

Who is watching you now?

You've probably heard the recent scandal about a public school near Philadelphia that enabled teachers and administrators to turn on the webcam in school-issued laptops. Apparently, and allegedly, someone used the feature inappropriately and was found out. The kid's family is suing the school in federal court.

These articles summarize the story:
Washington Post
CNN
Arstechnica

Let's be clear that it was not the school's intent to be kiddie voyeurs, but rather to recover the laptops if they went missing. You have to wonder who thought this would be a good system, and who didn't think about the incredibly bad possible consequences. Thinking a little more about it, you know there are other, better, more appropriate systems already available for recovering lost laptops using GPS. Companies like Absolute Software, for example, seem to have a pretty good solution.

Poor decision making aside, the case has really struck a nerve with the press and public. People really value their privacy, and the thought that someone could turn on that little webcam and watch you feels like a violation.

Have you thought about your webcam? How do you know it is not on right now? Oh sure, the little light isn't on, right? That doesn't mean anything, you know. You can go into your camera settings and disable it. A hacker can do the same, allowing him to turn it on and monitor you without your knowledge.

Feel better? Good, just trying to help.

This year 75% of all laptops will ship with webcams. Your next laptop will probably have one too. What can you do about it?

This case interested me because Oculis Labs is all about personal privacy. Our PrivateEye product is designed to stop people from reading your screen. It turns out it has a great side-benefit too: PrivateEye stops other applications from grabbing your webcam and spying on you. That's right: if you want to stop someone turning on your webcam and watching you feed the cat, or whatever, run out right now and install PrivateEye (you can get it here).

Feeling better now? Next question: how do you know your microphone is turned off too?...

Shoulder Surf for your country

The FBI illegally obtained thousands of Americans' telephone records during the Bush administration. The individuals involved apparently used a variety of methods, often with the cooperation of phone company employees.

NPR recently published the story at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122774614

"They [phone company employees] worked in the FBI building, and agents would do what they called "sneak peeks" — basically, looking over a phone company employee's shoulder to get information from the computer screen without going through any formal channels."

The questions around this report go far and wide. What I wonder is: did everyone know what was going on? I doubt it. I suspect there were some phone co execs who were aware and felt it was the right thing to do, but there were others who would not have been ok with it. Phone companies are big and complicated, and it would be hard for anyone to know what everyone else was up to. Let's just say the guys who were sure it was the right thing to do probably gravitated to a position where they could enable that information sharing.

What really struck me about the report was the realization that we (Oculis) could have stopped these leaks. This "social hack" of letting FBI read the data over the shoulders was used because it was an easy way of subverting the security and audit controls without notice. The info security industry has good solutions for securing data in electronic form, but when it gets to the computer display it's simply broadcast out there for anyone to see.

Oculis is all about solving this problem. We're protecting that last 2 feet in the chain - from the screen to you. With PrivateEye running on those machines it would not have been possible for FBI to simply shoulder-surf the information. There would have been an audit trail, there would have been physical evidence that someone else was looking at company confidential material.

PrivateEye would have stopped the shoulder surfing. The rule-breakers would have had to find another way around, and they probably could, but each additional step increases the chance of detection. At a certain point the rule-breakers would have weighed the risks and decided it would be better to just follow the rules.

If you build a security system for the purpose of protecting information then do it right - don't stop 2 feet short of the goal.

Bill

Finding a great niche

There's a great big buzz about tablets computers, fanned in particular by the announcement of Apple's iPad today. The idea of a tablet computer is that it does not have a keyboard, or any other peripherals. You simply touch the screen with your finger to point, click, gesture and type. Think of an iPhone, but with a much bigger screen.

I absolutely love them, by the way ... but that is not the point of this post. Oh, and they are great for some kinds of computing, like web browsing and casual note taking and, ... anyway, not the point of the post. What is the relevant is that they have been around for a while and there are several major PC makers already selling them, like Lenovo and HP. They are turning up in places like hospitals for use by professionals there.

Last week I met with executives at one of these bit PC makers to talk about PrivateEye. They are looking at integrating the product right into the platform, which would be great. That's when I found out about the perfect niche for us: You can't put a 3M privacy filter on a tablet. The plastic interferes with the touch screen.

So I am now an even bigger fan of tablets. And touchscreens in general. We learned something really useful in that meeting: There is a whole segment of new systems out there where we can go and the competition can not. Our next task is to start making connections and finding ways to tell buyers that they can still have privacy with that shiny new gizmo.

And maybe I'll need one myself... for testing purposes.

Bill

Loving the competition

We plan to be big at Oculis Labs. Our PrivateEye product solves a major computer privacy problem that just about everyone who works with proprietary or personal information has felt: is someone looking over my shoulder at my screen right now?

You've probably felt that sense of unease yourself. If so, you're part of that great big market we think will use PrivateEye. Given that you're reading this blog, there's a good chance you are technically interested enough to be an early adopter too. You could go over to the oculislabs.com website right now and download the product (go ahead, I'll wait here...)

The trouble is, not everyone is like you. Many people are happily not reading a tech blog right now. Most have no idea that they could solve the problem with a cool new software application. What they would think about is what you are probably thinking right now: 3M privacy filters.

There, I said it. We have competition, and they are big and well known. It's ok. This proves a $100m annual market for what they are selling. In other words, there's $100m worth of caring-about-that-problem-and-solving-it-with-a-primitive-piece-of-plastic in the world today.

It gets better: how many people have rejected the plastic filter because it is too cumbersome, or not effective, or too expensive? A lot of people have. There's the really big opportunity: finding ways to reach the 120 million new laptops that will ship this year.

Next time I'll tell you about one great niche we've found where we can go.

Thoughts on growth

Oculis Labs is now entering our third year in operation. It's been a good ride so far, and no-one wants to get off. In fact, we have more people jumping on. I should explain.

When I started the company in 2007 it was just me, some ideas, and the initial investment. I got to work prototyping the ideas, developing patents and making connections with partners and customers.

In 2008 we started getting attention from potential customers and press, but we were still in the development phase as we were trying to get the first product, Chameleon, working and stable. We had 4 engineers and other staff working at that point. Getting Chameleon working was a major effort - no-one had ever tried to combine gazetracking, with vision/cognition research, and Windows OS to make a radical new security application for protecting computer displays against eavesdroppers. In the end, we got it working and it is very impressive.

One thing we learned along the way was that selling to government was going to take a while, so in 2009 we started working on PrivateEye, a privacy application for consumers and enterprise (although it turns out government likes it too). By summer 2009 we had our first commercial release, and got a significant amount of press and customer enthusiasm.

It's one thing to have a good product idea, it is quite another to be in the market and selling it. We are there now, and while we have lots of work to do to make it big, we are on the right track and we're getting deals in both the government space Chameleon, as well as consumer and commercial with PrivateEye.

As we start 2010 we're are planning for more growth. Despite the poor economy for raising venture investment, Oculis has gained the confidence of enough groups to close our Series B round. That puts us into a rare group of small technology companies that has received funding in the past year.

It feels really good. It feels like growth.

Bill