It is late a night and I just had a thought I want to share: have you ever went to a website, say, your abnk, where when you try to login -- pasting the username and password so there is no possibility of a typo -- it does not work and sends you to a "login failed, try again" page, it then works there?
I do not know about you, but if I were going to try to steal credentials, creating a website that sits in front of the real one (think man in the middle attack) would come into mind.
And now the bad news, which with your help can become but an example of the community rising to the occasion: recently all the gear they use in their event was stolen including their Weller soldering irons which are used in their workshops, and now they need help. If you can donate gear, little pieces of green paper, or become a sponsor, do contact them either through their website or Twitter account. They are already considering canning their CTF; let's see if that is that is the worst thing they will have to sacrifice.
Reason I am making this post is to ask those who read my blog to see if they can help in any way. If you can, thank you! If you cannot, just pass the word to others.
Let's start by stating the obvious: people do upload a lot of videos and
images to social media showing their family vacations, new dance movies, and, yes, twerking. These files are publicly available and can be easily gathered.
Do you remember the old warning about being very careful about what you share
on the internet? The security and privacy concerns were about showing
where you live, who are your family members, and when you will be out of
your house.
Thanks to advancements in AI we can add a new reason to slow down
posting so much about ourselves.
Biometric-based authentication is the process of authenticating people based on something you are, i.e. an unique pyshical feature -- fingerprint, iris, or retina to name a few -- instead of something you know (password) or have (token). Some of the applications are multifactor authentication and face recognition, which are used to unlock smart phones and identify people in a crowd.
Deepfake is an evolution of the tradition of inserting (or removing)
people in pictures and videos using cropping and blue screens. Benign results have been
seen in movies like Zelig and Forrest Gump; George Orwell' 1984 talks about using that for malign purpose,
namely rewrite history.
The difference is that thanks
to AI, deepfake is automated to the point it runs in real time. The classical
example of the potential of this technology is a Tom Cruise deepfake video
created by Belgian visual effects artist Chris Ume:
It did not take long for malicious individuals to apply deepfake to create celebrity porn videos,
fake news, hoaxes, and financial fraud.
What about the average people? They are not famous politician, singer, or
athlete; can they shrug it off saying "this does not affect me; I am too small
of a target for them to have an interest on" like they have done many times
before, or should they be worried?
The reality is that
Attackers are always looking for opportunities, and
will strike at the low hanging fruit.
The cost of the resources required to deepfake has dropped a lot in the last few years.
Let's have some fun
How can we combine that?
In 2007 (yes, time flies), Microsoft identified the following as the most popular types of biometric authentication devices of the time:
Fingerprint scanners
Facial pattern recognition devices
Hand geometry recognition devices
Iris scan identification devices
Retinal scan identification devices
Nowadays we can do all of that using just a camera. Let's consider a few applications that are possible today:
Videos and pictures collected from your social media provide enough info about your face to unlock your phone.
Inserting you in the CCTV records of a riot is just a matter of being able to access said records and change them. Only limiting factor here is bypassing tampering detection, which is not as common as you are led to believe. Yes, we are not at the Ghost In The Shell level, where video streams were being tampered in real time at the camera level, but there is enough knowledge to make some damage right now.
Back to those high quality videos found in social media, they are (not may be) good enough to collect your fingeprints or ear shape. The later has been successfully used to identify people in riots while wearing masks.
Saving the best for last, imagine someone using deepfake, after collecting your videos for images and voice samples, to have a webconference with your children's school or doctor. I will leave to your imagination to ponder on the consequences of that. Before you say anything, the Tom Cruise video I mentioned early is now old from Moore's Law's point of view.
We could go over an example of how to do that, but that is not the point of this article. If you thought your identity and, as a result, your privacy was at risk, I think we reached a whole new level.
What can be done to minimize exposing biometric data?
Think before posting! This rule has not changed. There are some who argue that millenials and Gen Z crowd are the biggest offenders, but this is just a matter of training. If you have to post, be mindful of what is being exposed. Or, cut down the quality of the pictures a bit so the bad guys do not have a nice clean image to start with. For the images and videos you already posted, once it is out in the internet, there is no coming back.
Make protecting your privacy a priority in your life. If people are going to steal your data, make them work for it.
Further reading
Trendmicro published a great paper on the risks of exposed biometric data.
