Dual Cyber and Conventional Infrastructure Attacks Understood?

The Guardian says that for the first time the government  have admitted that firms providing "the essential services upon which daily life depends" have been subjected to attacks from abroad.

See also Power in Whose hands?

British officials will not comment who is responsible for attacks on UK, but earlier this year Guardian revealed the US was also worried about foreign powers mapping America's infrastructure ; The Pentagon pints a finger at "reconnaissance" work by China and Russia.

The BCS reports that the UK’s cyber security strategy has been criticised by a former US cyber intelligence officer for its lack of leadership and direction.

Bob Ayers, formerly of the US army and Defence Intelligence Agency, has questioned the structure of Britain’s cyber security program. He describes it  as “a collective of independent entities’ rather than a streamlined unit.”
A key criticism came from former GCHQ and CESG head Nick Hopkinson, who told Computing that the UK lagged behind the US, France and Germany in its ability to respond to cyber-attacks because of a "lack of cohesion" between the various organisations set up to work towards the strategy.
Comparing the UK's cyber programs to that of the US, Ayers suggests that Britain is decades behind and lacks the ability to produce ‘professionalised’ cyber security personnel.

The UK police now provide a central point of contact for information about fraud and financially motivated internet crime. If you've been scammed, ripped off or conned go to http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/

There should be an announcement by the Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, of new measures to protect people and companies from a daily bombardment of cyberscams and attempts to steal the nation's trade secrets.
Maude has suggested that cyber security capacity needs to grow globally, and cited the UK's centre of excellence on cyber security as an example of how Britain wants to help other countries by offering independent advice on building a secure and resilient cyberspace.

According to the Intelligence Security Committee the government does not understand the nature and extent of cyber-attacks from other nation states such as Russia and China, which are focused on espionage and the acquisition of information. This suggests that nations may never fully open themselves up to each other, as they are still some distance from being able to trust one another.

Are the implications of both dual cyber and conventional infrastructure fully understood?

Green energy held up by magnets and environmentalists?

Could the rising tide of wind farms be held up by green concerns.

Could it also be that Global warming will enable the magnets needed to be won from the ground?

What makes a good magnet?

Iron-based / ferrite magnets are cheapness abundant – But; you need an awful lot of ferrite to create a large magnetic field.

Better magnets have been produced by metallurgists mixing up promising elements and putting them in magnetic fields and seeing what happens.
Aluminium-cobalt-nickel or "Alnico" magnets in the 1930s produced  more than doubled the energy density of the best ferrites.
In 1970s the discovery of the magnetic potential of the lanthanide / rare earth led to Magnets made from a mixture of cobalt and the rare earth element samarium that can store more than twice the energy of Alnico magnets.
In the 1990 magnets made of the rare earth element neodymium plus iron and boron produced a magnet the size of a fingertip that could create a magnetic field several thousand times stronger than that of Earth's iron core.
When the likes of Neo was invented It drove up demand to the extent that the availability of rare earths is now a big problem.

Why do we need good magnets?

Huge quantities are being used in green energy technologies; Such as motors/generators for wind turbines, electric cars and bicycles. These have to be both powerful and lightweight. It is only Neo magnets give the performance needed.

Every motor in an electric car needs about 2 kilograms. A wind turbine capable of producing a megawatt of power needs about two-thirds of a tonne.

The demand for Neo magnets for wind turbines is projected to increase more than seven times by 2015.

How can we get more?

The US Department of Energy has a project called REACT Rare Earth Alternatives in Critical Technologies". Its aim is to come up with magnets that use less of rare earth elements or perhaps none at all.

Up until now most of the world supply of rare earths has come from China. Increasing though China wants the elements to use for itself.

In Canada Quest Rare Minerals Ltd holds one of the largest heavy rare earth element deposits in the world but it is located in an unforgiving northern part of Québec where, oddly enough, Global warming may allow access through the permafrost.

The possibility of mining in Malaysia has been dogged by criticism from environmentalists and residents; Opposition that has galvanized a "green" movement in Malaysia.

References:

New Scientist - We're running out of magnets
IET - Rare earth metals in short supply
Forbs - Largest Rare Earth Metals Deposit Outside Of China Faces Tough Northern Climate
ft.com - China to subsidise rare earths producers
BBC - Lynas rare earth plant set for Sydney demonstration

Money - decus et tutamen - how do you wrap it up?

Some time back I was Blogging about “Money without Banks” I was prompted to look at this again by some one calling about the vagaries of the current banking system and Governments.

One line in the editorial of the New Scientist from June 2011 says “While fraud is still a concern, the financial collapse of 2008 has called into question the competence of the central banks that are supposed to manage national currencies.”

 In November 2012 the editorial is again discussing something similar in the form of Bitcoins. This time there is another interesting line: “Like all truly disruptive technologies, Bitcoin is hard to conceptualise at first. But "fiat" money - the kind we use today, based on pieces of metal and paper whose material and face value have long since drifted apart - was once baffling, too.”

We have yet to see whether governments and banks will step in to stifle the possible evolution of new peer to peer currency. But one way or the other things could be changing.

In an article on the Bitcoin the New Scientist says that the European Central Bank has taken interest, last month publishing a report on virtual currencies. It says such currencies will have little impact on real-world financial stability for now, but if the popularity of Bitcoin and its ilk increase, central banks may have to start regulating them. One wonders what form this “regulation” would take.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

Where will the smart money go? Can (over) regulation be avoided?

Who watches what you type?

The IET magazine says that computer vision scientists at the University of North Carolina have revealed a way to compromise smartphone security. They have an effective way to snoop on every word typed on a person’s smartphone screen.

They were able to snoop on a phone from anything up to 60m away, and were able to reconstruct a message typed on the screen from video footage. The scientists said that “We found it was possible to automatically recover typed text, from reasonable distances, even using low-budget equipment,”

The project, dubbed iSpy, relies on the virtual keyboard that smartphones like the iPhone employ which pops-up each letter at a larger scale as you select it. They were able to capture images using an off-the-shelf video camera, stabilise the images and then analyse them.  At a distance it is not easy to work out which one of adjacent letters had been typed. To enable recognition iSpy fed the image data into a program that uses language models to calculate probable meaning depending on context, resulting in 90 per cent accuracy.

One of the scientists, Fabian Monrose, said iSpy was able to recover passwords remarkably easily, even though it relied on contextual information to help it. Users must have been choosing simpler words and ideas as passwords - instead of random strings of characters.

Perhaps people should be thinking about protecting themselves better by using systems like two-layer authentication. This system protects your account by requiring a second password in the form of a numeric code sent to your mobile phone when you login.

More at Google - http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1610214&topic=1099588&ctx=topic  Yahoo also provide a similar facility – See here: http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2011/12/yahoo-introduces-stronger-user-authentication-%E2%80%93-second-sign-in-verification/  

Power in Whose hands?

Across the UK computer usage is increasing, for both social and business areas, and it looks to continue to do so. This is leading to an increase in the ways in which we as individuals, households, service providers, and the organisations we work for may be attacked.  Ownership of numerous gadgets and systems that we have, all increase the technical attack surface we expose. See page 10 of the IMIS Journal (Bring Your Own phenomenon), and the Google powermeter.

Earlier this year Dave Clemente in written evidence to a Select Committee said “Protection of critical national infrastructure (CNI) is an area of significant importance and one that is becoming more difficult to analyse as inter-dependency increases between CNI sectors.”
He also says that in a conflict situation it may be necessary for the military and wider Government to operate in a degraded or insecure cyber environment. This requires acceptance that total control of ‘UK cyberspace’ – however defined – is impossible. As the late Prof Philip Taylor noted, ‘full spectrum dominance is impossible in the global information environment.’  This was meant in the context of military psychological operations, but it holds equally true when attempting to secure highly inter-dependent computer networks and information systems.

A recent Daily Mail article tells us that the Government has plans to install smart meters in our homes. Essentially a large scale Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition system. As well as the Government wanting information from these devices, people will want to access it on their various portable gadgets.

This prompted me to revisit an article the March 2012 IMIS Journal. Certification constraints and product life spans are pointed to as throwing up problems. Allan Dyer says that “New PC operating systems are released every few years, but they may be connected to systems with much longer life spans, such as line-of-business mainframe applications, or SCADA systems, or medical equipment. Medical equipment is often certified to medical standards, and the certification includes the computing hardware and software. The software may be obsolete and no longer supported by the software developers. There are Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows XP systems controlling medical systems still in daily use and the situation is ongoing”

In the case that the Daily Mail is talking about, the network linking 46 Million meters would have to be highly secure, as it could become impossible to ensure all those systems are up to date and protected against malicious hackers. As the system grows older, so the availability of protection would diminish, and the potential for infection increase. Malware disrupting the operation of just a few meters might be manageable, but malware could rapidly spread and disrupt many devices. The MIDPM article suggested that network traffic be strictly filtered so that only legitimate transactions are allowed. Maybe also there should be physical breakpoints or switches in the system to isolate parts, should the monitoring or firewall systems become compromised.

In the US, federal researchers discovered that outside hackers could take control of the generators used to produce electricity in the US and destroy them.  Presentations at a Black Hat hackers conference showed how control systems can be located with special Google searches and then ordered to shut down or speed up, potentially blowing up a power or water treatment plant.

Joseph Menn writing in the Financial Times says that “Hundreds of thousands of people in darkness, hospitals in chaos, a banking system under siege – a cyber attack on the US electricity grid could have catastrophic consequences”. See also an article in the Busines Insider.

Back in the Daily Mail Article Ross Anderson, a Cambridge computer science professor and chairman of the think-tank, said: ‘GCHQ have also told us they are worried about it.  ‘Once you have the ability to turn off meters remotely, then it becomes a strategic vulnerability. ‘If the Iranians or Chinese want to attack Britain, they could do so easily through smart meters. This is the modern day equivalent of a nuclear strike.’

How do we trade off the need/want for integrated systems against what happens if those systems become compromised? Individuals can install protection on their own systems, but what of the wider world?

P vs NP. A big Problem?

I have just been reading write up’s about a new film. The subject is perhaps not on the usual list of things we see the cinema.
http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/

Complex math problems are probably near the bottom of things that people get excited about. But Travelling Salesman might just change that. The film is an, “intellectual thriller" about four mathematicians hired by the U.S. government to solve the biggest unsolved problem in computer science. Four people have jointly created a ‘system’ which means major advancement for civilisation or the destruction of humanity.

The P vs NP problem lies unsolved despite a $1 million bounty.  The problem is whether the P and NP classes are actually identical. Most researchers believe they are not.   It seems that we live in a world where some problems are fundamentally harder than others (or impossible).
Travelling Salesman takes place in a  world where Horton and colleagues prove that P = NP, This means that they can solve a range of incredibly difficult real-world problems from gene sequencing to the “travelling salesman” problem, crucial for logistics and scheduling.

According to the New Scientist article the plot unfolds after we learn that the solution enables the mathematicians to crack any cryptography system in the world, which is why their four-year research project has been funded to the tune of millions of dollars by the US government.
This was interesting as it follows on from another article in the New Scientist about Alan Turing. He invented the computer while trying to solve the above fundamental mathematical problem. By building his machine, he demonstrated that mathematics wasn't as perfect as many at the time believed, while also showing how powerful a computer could be.

Alan Turing, was one of the 20th century's most wide-ranging and original minds, and was born 100 years ago. In the New Scientist there is an article by John Graham-Cumming explaining why his ideas still matter now. Turing essentially founded computer science, helped the Allies win the Second World War with hard work and a succession of insights, asked fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence and its link with the brain's structure, and laid the foundations for an area of biology that is only now being fully appreciated and researched. I Blogged a bit about him before.

Remote control cars?

The Department for Transport has a project looking at Intelligent Speed Adaptation. ISA  is a system by which the vehicle 'knows' the permitted or recommended maximum speed for a road and makes this information available to the driver or limits the vehicle maximum speed to the local limit. I blogged about something like this ages ago on a different site.

In my book Cold Suspenders, which is set slightly in the future I expanded this ability to control other parts of the car. One could imagine that once a system is in place, Governments will love to extend the use of it. Even with just the speed restriction, the Highways Authority could cause your car to halt if there was an accident ahead, or if you tried to enter a cordoned off area.

I was set thinking about this again by an article in the New Scientist about "Driverless Cars".   The self driving Lucas Jaguar PROMETHEUS car from 1994 had some interesting features - http://youtu.be/xlVx4Dhglkg . The video shows what could be done with the technology then. The article says that  the media were not impressed, describing the idea of cars that drive themselves as "madness".

Now take a look at the Google Blog where you will find:

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

All very interesting, and of course it would rely on all sorts of other technological stuff already in use, and some yet to be developed. One suspects an awful lot of reliance on Satnav type stuff.
"Automation of cars is going to happen," says Paul Newman, a robotics engineer,  "Computing has caused devastating change and transport is going to be its next target."
Newman's team at the University of Oxford is developing autonomous cars - The Oxford Mobile Robotics Group.