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1.8 Exercises

1. Distinguish between vulnerability, threat, and control.

2. Theft usually results in some kind of harm. For example, if someone steals

your car, you may suffer financial loss, inconvenience (by losing your mode of

transportation), and emotional upset (because of invasion of your personal

property and space). List three kinds of harm a company might experience from

theft of computer equipment.

3. List at least three kinds of harm a company could experience from electronic

espionage or unauthorized viewing of confidential company materials.

4. List at least three kinds of damage a company could suffer when the integrity

of a program or company data is compromised.

5. List at least three kinds of harm a company could encounter from loss of

service, that is, failure of availability. List the product or capability to which

access is lost, and explain how this loss hurts the company.

6. Describe a situation in which you have experienced harm as a consequence of

a failure of computer security. Was the failure malicious or not? Did the attack

target you specifically or was it general and you were the unfortunate victim?

7. Describe two examples of vulnerabilities in automobiles for which auto

manufacturers have instituted controls. Tell why you think these controls are

effective, somewhat effective, or ineffective.

8. One control against accidental software deletion is to save all old versions of

a program. Of course, this control is prohibitively expensive in terms of cost of

storage. Suggest a less costly control against accidental software deletion. Is

your control effective against all possible causes of software deletion? If not,

what threats does it not cover?

9. On your personal computer, who can install programs? Who can change

operating system data? Who can replace portions of the operating system? Can

any of these actions be performed remotely?

10. Suppose a program to print paychecks secretly leaks a list of names of employees

earning more than a certain amount each month. What controls could be instituted to

limit the vulnerability of this leakage?

11. Preserving confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data is a restatement of the

concern over interruption, interception, modification, and fabrication. How do the

first three concepts relate to the last four? That is, is any of the four equivalent to one

or more of the three? Is one of the three encompassed by one or more of the four?

12. Do you think attempting to break in to (that is, obtain access to or use of) a

computing system without authorization should be illegal? Why or why not?

13. Describe an example (other than the ones mentioned in this chapter) of data

whose confidentiality has a short timeliness, say, a day or less. Describe an example

of data whose confidentiality has a timeliness of more than a year.

14. Do you currently use any computer security control measures? If so, what?

Against what attacks are you trying to protect?

15. Describe an example in which absolute denial of service to a user (that is, the user

gets no response from the computer) is a serious problem to that user. Describe

another example where 10 percent denial of service to a user (that is, the user’s

computation progresses, but at a rate 10 percent slower than normal) is a serious

problem to that user. Could access by unauthorized people to a computing system

result in a 10 percent denial of service to the legitimate users? How?

16. When you say that software is of high quality, what do you mean? How does

security fit in your definition of quality? For example, can an application be insecure

and still be “good”?

17. Developers often think of software quality in terms of faults and failures. Faults

are problems (for example, loops that never terminate or misplaced commas in

statements) that developers can see by looking at the code. Failures are problems,

such as a system crash or the invocation of the wrong function, that are visible to the

user. Thus, faults can exist in programs but never become failures, because the

conditions under which a fault becomes a failure are never reached. How do software

vulnerabilities fit into this scheme of faults and failures? Is every fault a

vulnerability? Is every vulnerability a fault?

18. Consider a program to display on your website your city’s current time and

temperature. Who might want to attack your program? What types of harm might

they want to cause? What kinds of vulnerabilities might they exploit to cause harm?

19. Consider a program that allows consumers to order products from the web. Who

might want to attack the program? What types of harm might they want to cause?

What kinds of vulnerabilities might they exploit to cause harm?

20. Consider a program to accept and tabulate votes in an election. Who might want

to attack the program? What types of harm might they want to cause? What kinds of

vulnerabilities might they exploit to cause harm?

21. Consider a program that allows a surgeon in one city to assist in an operation on a

patient in another city via an Internet connection. Who might want to attack the

program? What types of harm might they want to cause? What kinds of

vulnerabilities might they exploit to cause harm?

1. Describe each of the following four kinds of access control mechanisms in

terms of (a) ease of determining authorized access during execution, (b) ease of

adding access for a new subject, (c) ease of deleting access by a subject, and (d)

ease of creating a new object to which all subjects by default have access.

• per-subject access control list (that is, one list for each subject tells

all the objects to which that subject has access)

• per-object access control list (that is, one list for each object tells all

the subjects who have access to that object)

• access control matrix

• capability

2. Suppose a per-subject access control list is used. Deleting an object in such a

system is inconvenient because all changes must be made to the control lists of

all subjects who did have access to the object. Suggest an alternative, less costly

means of handling deletion.

3. File access control relates largely to the secrecy dimension of security. What

is the relationship between an access control matrix and the integrity of the

objects to which access is being controlled?

4. One feature of a capability-based protection system is the ability of one

process to transfer a copy of a capability to another process. Describe a situation

in which one process should be able to transfer a capability to another.

5. Suggest an efficient scheme for maintaining a per-user protection scheme.

That is, the system maintains one directory per user, and that directory lists all

the objects to which the user is allowed access. Your design should address the

needs of a system with 1000 users, of whom no more than 20 are active at any

time. Each user has an average of 200 permitted objects; there are 50,000 total

objects in the system.

6. Calculate the timing of password-guessing attacks:

(a) If passwords are three uppercase alphabetic characters long, how much

time would it take to determine a particular password, assuming that testing

an individual password requires 5 seconds? How much time if testing

requires 0.001 seconds?

(b) Argue for a particular amount of time as the starting point for “secure.”

That is, suppose an attacker plans to use a brute-force attack to determine a

password. For what value of x (the total amount of time to try as many

passwords as necessary) would the attacker find this attack prohibitively

long?

(c) If the cutoff between “insecure” and “secure” were x amount of time,

how long would a secure password have to be? State and justify your

assumptions regarding the character set from which the password is

selected and the amount of time required to test a single password.

7. Design a protocol by which two mutually suspicious parties can authenticate

each other. Your protocol should be usable the first time these parties try to

authenticate each other.

8. List three reasons people might be reluctant to use biometrics for

authentication. Can you think of ways to counter those objections?

9. False positive and false negative rates can be adjusted, and they are often

complementary: Lowering one raises the other. List two situations in which false

negatives are significantly more serious than false positives.

10. In a typical office, biometric authentication might be used to control access to

employees and registered visitors only. We know the system will have some false

negatives, some employees falsely denied access, so we need a human override,

someone who can examine the employee and allow access in spite of the failed

authentication. Thus, we need a human guard at the door to handle problems, as well

as the authentication device; without biometrics we would have had just the guard.

Consequently, we have the same number of personnel with or without biometrics,

plus we have the added cost to acquire and maintain the biometrics system. Explain

the security advantage in this situation that justifies the extra expense.

11. Outline the design of an authentication scheme that “learns.” The authentication

scheme would start with certain primitive information about a user, such as name and

password. As the use of the computing system continued, the authentication system

would gather such information as commonly used programming languages; dates,

times, and lengths of computing sessions; and use of distinctive resources. The

authentication challenges would become more individualized as the system learned

more information about the user.

• Your design should include a list of many pieces of information

about a user that the system could collect. It is permissible for the

system to ask an authenticated user for certain additional information,

such as a favorite book, to use in subsequent challenges.

• Your design should also consider the problem of presenting and

validating these challenges: Does the would-be user answer a truefalse

or a multiple-choice question? Does the system interpret natural

language prose?

12. How are passwords stored on your personal computer?

13. Describe a situation in which a weak but easy-to-use password may be adequate.

14. List three authentication questions (but not the answers) your credit card

company could ask to authenticate you over the phone. Your questions should be

ones to which an imposter could not readily obtain the answers. How difficult would

it be for you to provide the correct answer (for example, you would have to look

something up or you would have to do a quick arithmetical calculation)?

15. If you forget your password for a website and you click [Forgot my password],

sometimes the company sends you a new password by email but sometimes it sends

you your old password by email. Compare these two cases in terms of vulnerability

of the website owner.

16. Defeating authentication follows the method–opportunity–motive paradigm

described in Chapter 1. Discuss how these three factors apply to an attack on

authentication.

17. Suggest a source of some very long unpredictable numbers. Your source must be

something that both the sender and receiver can readily access but that is not obvious

to outsiders and not transmitted directly from sender to receiver.

18. What are the risks of having the United States government select a cryptosystem

for widespread commercial use (both inside and outside the United States). How

could users from outside the United States overcome some or all of these risks?

19. If the useful life of DES was about 20 years (1977–1999), how long do you

predict the useful life of AES will be? Justify your answer.

20. Humans are said to be the weakest link in any security system. Give an example

for each of the following:

(a) a situation in which human failure could lead to a compromise of

encrypted data

(b) a situation in which human failure could lead to a compromise of

identification and authentication

(c) a situation in which human failure could lead to a compromise of access

control

21. Why do cryptologists recommend changing the encryption key from time to

time? Is it the same reason security experts recommend changing a password from

time to time? How can one determine how frequently to change keys or passwords?

22. Explain why hash collisions occur. That is, why must there always be two

different plaintexts that have the same hash value?

23. What property of a hash function means that collisions are not a security

problem? That is, why can an attacker not capitalize on collisions and change the

underlying plaintext to another form whose value collides with the hash value of the

original plaintext?

24. Does a PKI perform encryption? Explain your answer.

25. Does a PKI use symmetric or asymmetric encryption? Explain your answer.

26. Should a PKI be supported on a firewall (meaning that the certificates would be

stored on the firewall and the firewall would distribute certificates on demand)?

Explain your answer.

27. Why does a PKI need a means to cancel or invalidate certificates? Why is it not

sufficient for the PKI to stop distributing a certificate after it becomes invalid?

28. Some people think the certificate authority for a PKI should be the government,

but others think certificate authorities should be private entities, such as banks,

corporations, or schools. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each

approach?

29. If you live in country A and receive a certificate signed by a government

certificate authority in country B, what conditions would cause you to trust that

signature as authentic?

30. A certificate contains an identity, a public key, and signatures attesting that the

public key belongs to the identity. Other fields that may be present include the

organization (for example, university, company, or government) to which that

identity belongs and perhaps suborganizations (college, department, program, branch,

office). What security purpose do these other fields serve, if any? Explain your

answer.