Video Transcript

Cybersecurity: Crash Course Computer Science #31

Hi, I’m Carrie Anne, and welcome to Crash Course Computer Science!

Over the last three episodes, we’ve talked about how computers have become interconnected, allowing
us to communicate near-instantly across the globe. But not everyone who uses these networks is going
to play by the rules or have our best interests at heart.

Just as how we have physical security like locks, fences and police officers to minimize crime in the real
world, we need cybersecurity to minimize crime and harm in the virtual world. Computers don’t have
ethics. Give them a formally specified problem and they’ll happily pump out an answer at lightning
speed.

Running code that takes down a hospital’s computer systems until a ransom is paid is no different to a
computer than code that keeps a patient's heart beating. Like the Force, computers can be pulled to the
light side or the dark side. Cybersecurity is like the Jedi Order, trying to bring peace and justice to the
cyber-verse.

The scope of cybersecurity evolves as fast as the capabilities of computing, but we can think of it as a
set of techniques to protect the secrecy, integrity and availability of computer systems and data against
threats. Let’s unpack those three goals:

Secrecy, or confidentiality, means that only authorized people should be able to access or read specific
computer systems and data. Data breaches, where hackers reveal people’s credit card information, is an
attack on secrecy. Integrity means that only authorized people should have the ability to use or modify
systems and data. Hackers who learn your password and send e-mails masquerading as you, are an
integrity attack. And availability means that authorized people should always have access to their
systems and data. Think of Denial of Service Attacks, where hackers overload a website with fake
requests to make it slow or unreachable for others. That’s attacking the service’s availability.

To achieve these three general goals, security experts start with a specification of who your “enemy” is,
at an abstract level, called a threat model. This profiles attackers: their capabilities, goals, and probable
means of attack – what’s called, awesomely enough, an attack vector.

Threat models let you prepare against specific threats, rather than being overwhelmed by all the ways
hackers could get to your systems and data. And there are many, many ways. Let’s say you want to
“secure” physical access to your laptop. Your threat model is a nosy roommate. To preserve the secrecy,
integrity and availability of your laptop, you could keep it hidden in your dirty laundry hamper. But, if
your threat model is a mischievous younger sibling who knows your hiding spots, then you’ll need to do
more: maybe lock it in a safe. In other words, how a system is secured depends heavily on who it’s being
secured against.

Of course, threat models are typically a bit more formally defined than just “nosy roommate”. Often,
you’ll see threat models specified in terms of technical capabilities. For example, “someone who has
physical access to your laptop along with unlimited time”. With a given threat model, security architects
need to come up with a solution that keeps a system secure – as long as certain assumptions are met,
like no one reveals their password to the attacker.

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There are many methods for protecting computer systems, networks and data. A lot of security boils
down to two questions: who are you, and what should you have access to? Clearly, access should be
given to the right people, but refused to the wrong people. Like, bank employees should be able to open
ATMs to restock them, but not me… because I’d take it all... all of it! That ceramic cat collection doesn’t
buy itself!

So, to differentiate between right and wrong people, we use authentication - the process by which a
computer understands who it’s interacting with. Generally, there are three types, each with their own
pros and cons:

• What you know.

What you know authentication is based on knowledge of a secret that should be known only by the real
user and the computer, for example, a username and password. This is the most widely used today
because it’s the easiest to implement. But it can be compromised if hackers guess or otherwise come to
know your secret. Some passwords are easy for humans to figure out, like 12356 or q-w-e-r-t-y. But
there are also ones that are easy for computers. Consider the PIN: 2580. This seems pretty difficult to
guess – and it is – for a human. But there are only ten thousand possible combinations of 4-digit PINs. A
computer can try entering 0000, then try 0001, and then 0002, all the way up to 9999...in a fraction of a
second.

This is called a brute force attack, because it just tries everything. There’s nothing clever to the
algorithm. Some computer systems lock you out, or have you wait a little, after say three wrong
attempts. That’s a common and reasonable strategy, and it does make it harder for less sophisticated
attackers. But think about what happens if hackers have already taken over tens of thousands of
computers, forming a botnet. Using all these computers, the same pin – 2580 – can be tried on many
tens of thousands of bank accounts simultaneously. Even with just a single attempt per account, they’ll
very likely get into one or more that just happen to use that PIN. In fact, we’ve probably guessed the pin
of someone watching this video!

Increasing the length of PINs and passwords can help, but even 8-digit PINs are pretty easily cracked.
This is why so many websites now require you to use a mix of upper and lowercase letters, special
symbols, and so on – it explodes the number of possible password combinations. An 8-digit numerical
PIN only has a hundred million combinations – computers eat that for breakfast! But an 8-character
password with all those funky things mixed in has more than 600 trillion combinations.

Of course, these passwords are hard for us mere humans to remember, so a better approach is for
websites to let us pick something more memorable, like three words joined together:

“green brothers rock” or “pizza tasty yum”.

English has around 100,000 words in use, so putting three together would give you roughly 1 quadrillion
possible passwords. Good luck trying to guess that!

I should also note here that using non-dictionary words is even better against more sophisticated kinds
of attacks, but we don’t have time to get into that here. Computerphile has a great video on choosing a
password - link in the dooblydoo. What you have authentication, on the other hand, is based on
possession of a secret token that only the real user has. An example is a physical key and lock. You can

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only unlock the door if you have the key. This escapes this problem of being “guessable”. And they
typically require physical presence, so it’s much harder for remote attackers to gain access. Someone in
another country can’t gain access to your front door in Florida without getting to Florida first. But what
you have authentication can be compromised if an attacker is physically close. Keys can be copied,
smartphones stolen, and locks picked.

Finally, what you are authentication is based on... you! You authenticate by presenting yourself to the
computer. Biometric authenticators, like fingerprint readers and iris scanners are classic examples.
These can be very secure, but the best technologies are still quite expensive. Furthermore, data from
sensors varies over time. What you know and what you have authentication have the nice property of
being deterministic – either correct or incorrect. If you know the secret, or have the key, you’re granted
access 100% of the time. If you don’t, you get access zero percent of the time.

Biometric authentication, however, is probabilistic. There’s some chance the system won’t recognize
you…maybe you’re wearing a hat, or the lighting is bad. Worse, there’s some chance the system will
recognize the wrong person as you – like your evil twin!

Of course, in production systems, these chances are low, but not zero. Another issue with biometric
authentication is it can’t be reset. You only have so many fingers, so what happens if an attacker
compromises your fingerprint data? This could be a big problem for life. And, recently, researchers
showed it’s possible to forge your iris just by capturing a photo of you, so that’s not promising either.

Basically, all forms of authentication have strengths and weaknesses, and all can be compromised in
one way or another. So, security experts suggest using two or more forms of authentication for
important accounts. This is known as two-factor or multi-factor authentication. An attacker may be able
to guess your password or steal your phone: but it’s much harder to do both.

After authentication comes Access Control. Once a system knows who you are, it needs to know what
you should be able to access, and for that there’s a specification of who should be able to see, modify
and use what. This is done through Permissions or Access Control Lists (ACL), which describe what
access each user has for every file, folder and program on a computer. “Read” permission allows a user
to see the contents of a file, “write” permission allows a user to modify the contents, and “execute”
permission allows a user to run a file, like a program. For organizations with users at different levels of
access privilege – like a spy agency – it’s especially important for Access Control Lists to be configured
correctly to ensure secrecy, integrity and availability.

Let’s say we have three levels of access: public, secret and top secret. The first general rule of thumb is
that people shouldn’t be able to “read up”. If a user is only cleared to read secret files, they shouldn’t be
able to read top secret files, but should be able to access secret and public ones. The second general
rule of thumb is that people shouldn’t be able to “write down”. If a member has top secret clearance,
then they should be able to write or modify top secret files, but not secret or public files. It may seem
weird that even with the highest clearance, you can’t modify less secret files. But it guarantees that
there’s no accidental leakage of top-secret information into secret or public files.

This “no read up, no write down” approach is called the Bell-LaPadula model. It was formulated for the
U.S. Department of Defense’s Multi-Level Security policy. There are many other models for access
control – like the Chinese Wall model and Biba model. Which model is best depends on your use-case.
Authentication and access control help a computer determine who you are and what you should access

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but depend on being able to trust the hardware and software that run the authentication and access
control programs. That’s a big dependence.

If an attacker installs malicious software – called malware – compromising the host computer’s
operating system, how can we be sure security programs don’t have a backdoor that let attackers in?
The short answer is… we can’t. We still have no way to guarantee the security of a program or computing
system. That’s because even while security software might be “secure” in theory, implementation bugs
can still result in vulnerabilities. But we do have techniques to reduce the likelihood of bugs, quickly find
and patch bugs when they do occur, and mitigate damage when a program is compromised.

Most security errors come from implementation error. To reduce implementation error, reduce
implementation. One of the holy grails of system level security is a “security kernel” or a “trusted
computing base”: a minimal set of operating system software that’s close to provably secure. A
challenge in constructing these security kernels is deciding what should go into it. Remember, the less
code, the better! Even after minimizing code bloat, it would be great to guarantee that code as written is
secure. Formally verifying the security of code is an active area of research. The best we have right now
is a process called Independent Verification and Validation. This works by having code audited by a
crowd of security-minded developers. This is why security code is almost always open-sourced. It’s
often difficult for people who wrote the original code to find bugs, but external developers, with fresh
eyes and different expertise, can spot problems.

There are also conferences where like-minded hackers and security experts can mingle and share ideas,
the biggest of which is DEF CON, held annually in Las Vegas.

Finally, even after reducing code and auditing it, clever attackers are bound to find tricks that let them
in. With this in mind, good developers should take the approach that, not if, but when their programs are
compromised, the damage should be limited and contained, and not let it compromise other things
running on the computer. This principle is called isolation. To achieve isolation, we can “sandbox”
applications. This is like placing an angry kid in a sandbox; when the kid goes ballistic, they only destroy
the sandcastle in their own box, but other kids in the playground continue having fun. Operating Systems
attempt to sandbox applications by giving each their own block of memory that other programs can’t
touch. It’s also possible for a single computer to run multiple Virtual Machines, essentially simulated
computers, that each live in their own sandbox. If a program goes awry, worst case is that it crashes or
compromises only the virtual machine on which it’s running. All other Virtual Machines running on the
computer are isolated and unaffected.

Ok, that’s a broad overview of some key computer security topics. And I didn’t even get to network
security, like firewalls. Next episode, we’ll discuss some specific example methods hackers use to get
into computer systems. After that, we’ll touch on encryption. Until then, make your passwords stronger,
turn on 2-factor authentication, and NEVER click links in unsolicited emails! I’ll see you next week.