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Security Is Not Privacy, Part 1: The Mobile Target
In technical fields like information technology, definitions are fundamental. They are the building blocks for constructing useful applications and systems. Yet, despite this, it’s easy to assume a term’s definition and wield it confidently before discovering its true meaning. The two closely related cases that stand out to me are “security” and “privacy.”
I say this with full awareness that, in my many writings on information security, I never adequately distinguished these two concepts. It was only after observing enough conflation of these terms that I resolved to examine my own casual treatment of them.
So, with the aim of solidifying my own understanding, let’s properly differentiate “information security” and “information privacy.”
Security vs. Privacy: Definitions That Matter
In the context of information technology, what exactly are security and privacy?
Security is the property of denying unauthorized parties from accessing or altering your data.
Privacy is the property of preventing the observation of your activities by any third parties to whom you do not expressly consent to observe those activities.
As you can see, these principles are related, which is one reason why they’re commonly interchanged. This distinction becomes comprehensible with examples.
Let’s start with an instance where security applies, but privacy does not.
Spotify uses digital rights managementsoftware to keep its media secure but not private. DRM is a whole topic of its own, but it essentially uses cryptography to enforce copyright. In Spotify’s case, it’s what constitutes streaming rather than just downloading: the song’s file is present on your devicejust as if you’d downloaded it, but Spotify’s DRM cryptography prevents you from opening the file without the Spotify application.
The data on Spotifyare secure because only users of the application can stream audio, and streamed content can’t be retained, opened, or transmitted to non-users. However, Spotify’s data is not private because nearly anyone with an email address can be a user. Thus, in practice, the company cannot control who exactly can access its data.
A more complex example of security without privacy is social media.
When you sign up for a social media platform, you accept an end-user license agreementauthorizing the platform to share your data with its partners and affiliates. Your data stored with “authorized parties” on servers controlled by the platform and its affiliates would be considered secure, provided all these entities successfully defend your data against theft by unauthorized parties.
In other words, if everyone who is allowedto have your data encrypts it in transit and at rest, insulates and segments their networks, etc., then your data is secure no matter how many affiliates receive it. In practice, the more parties that have your data, the more likely it is that any one of them is breached, but in theory, they could all defend your data.
On the other hand, any data you fork over to the social network is not private because you can’t control who uses your data and how. As soon as your data lands on the platform’s servers, you can’t restrict what they do with it, including sharing your data with other entities, which you also can’t control.
Both examples illustrate security without privacy. That’s because privacy entails security, but not the reverse. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. If you have privacy, meaning you can completely enforce how any party uses your data, it is secure by definition because only authorized parties can access your data.
Mobile Devices: Secure but Not Private
Casually mixing security and privacy can lead people to misunderstand the information security properties that apply to their data in any given scenario. By reevaluating for ourselves whether a given technology affords us security and privacy, we can have a more accurate understanding of how accessible our data really is.
One significant misconception I’ve noticed concerns mobile devices. I get the impression that the digital privacy content sphere regards mobile devices as not secure because they aren’t private. But while mobile is designed not to be private, it is specifically designed to be secure.
Why is that?
Because the value of data is in keeping it in your hands and out of your competitor’s. If you collect data but anyone else can grab your copy, you are not only at no advantage but also at a disadvantage since you’re the only party that spent time and money to collect it from the source.
With modest scrutiny, we’ll find that every element of a mobile OS that might be marketed as a privacy feature is, in fact, strictly a security feature.
Cybersecurity professionals have hailed application permissions as a major stride in privacy. But whom are they designed to help? These menus apply to applications that request access to certain hardware, from microphones and cameras to flash memory storage and wireless radios. This access restriction feature serves the OS developer by letting users lock out as much of their competition as possible from taking their data. The mobile OS developer controls the OS with un-auditable compiled code. For all you know, permission controls on all the OS’s native apps could be ignored.
However, even if we assume that the OS developer doesn’t thwart your restrictions on their own apps, the first-party apps still enjoy pride of place. There are more of them; they are preinstalled on your device, facilitate core mobile device features, require more permissions, and often lose core functions when those permissions are denied.
Mobile OSes also sandbox every application, forcing each to run in an isolated software environment, oblivious to other applications and the underlying operating system. This, too, benefits the OS vendor. Like the app permission settings, this functionality makes it harder for third parties to grab the same data the OS effortlessly ingests. The OS relies on its own background processes to obtain the most valuable data and walls off every other app from those processes.
Mobile Security Isn’t Designed With You in Mind
The most powerful mobile security control is the denial of root privileges to all applications and users. While it goes a long way toward keeping the user’s data safe, it is just as effective at subjecting everything and everyone using the device to the dictates of the OS. The security advantage is undeniable: if your user account can’t use root, then any malware that compromises it can’t either.
By the same token, because you don’t have complete control over the OS, you are unable to reconfigure your device for privacy from the OS vendor.
I’m not disparaging any of these security controls. All of them reinforce the protection of your data. I’m saying that they are not done primarily for the user’s benefit; that is secondary.
Those of you familiar with my work might see the scroll bar near the bottom of this page and wonder why I haven’t mentioned Linux yet. The answer is that desktop operating systems, my preferred kind of Linux OS, benefit from their own examination. In a follow-up to this piece, I will discuss the paradox of desktop security and privacy.
Please stay tuned.
#security #not #privacy #part #mobile
Security Is Not Privacy, Part 1: The Mobile Target
In technical fields like information technology, definitions are fundamental. They are the building blocks for constructing useful applications and systems. Yet, despite this, it’s easy to assume a term’s definition and wield it confidently before discovering its true meaning. The two closely related cases that stand out to me are “security” and “privacy.”
I say this with full awareness that, in my many writings on information security, I never adequately distinguished these two concepts. It was only after observing enough conflation of these terms that I resolved to examine my own casual treatment of them.
So, with the aim of solidifying my own understanding, let’s properly differentiate “information security” and “information privacy.”
Security vs. Privacy: Definitions That Matter
In the context of information technology, what exactly are security and privacy?
Security is the property of denying unauthorized parties from accessing or altering your data.
Privacy is the property of preventing the observation of your activities by any third parties to whom you do not expressly consent to observe those activities.
As you can see, these principles are related, which is one reason why they’re commonly interchanged. This distinction becomes comprehensible with examples.
Let’s start with an instance where security applies, but privacy does not.
Spotify uses digital rights managementsoftware to keep its media secure but not private. DRM is a whole topic of its own, but it essentially uses cryptography to enforce copyright. In Spotify’s case, it’s what constitutes streaming rather than just downloading: the song’s file is present on your devicejust as if you’d downloaded it, but Spotify’s DRM cryptography prevents you from opening the file without the Spotify application.
The data on Spotifyare secure because only users of the application can stream audio, and streamed content can’t be retained, opened, or transmitted to non-users. However, Spotify’s data is not private because nearly anyone with an email address can be a user. Thus, in practice, the company cannot control who exactly can access its data.
A more complex example of security without privacy is social media.
When you sign up for a social media platform, you accept an end-user license agreementauthorizing the platform to share your data with its partners and affiliates. Your data stored with “authorized parties” on servers controlled by the platform and its affiliates would be considered secure, provided all these entities successfully defend your data against theft by unauthorized parties.
In other words, if everyone who is allowedto have your data encrypts it in transit and at rest, insulates and segments their networks, etc., then your data is secure no matter how many affiliates receive it. In practice, the more parties that have your data, the more likely it is that any one of them is breached, but in theory, they could all defend your data.
On the other hand, any data you fork over to the social network is not private because you can’t control who uses your data and how. As soon as your data lands on the platform’s servers, you can’t restrict what they do with it, including sharing your data with other entities, which you also can’t control.
Both examples illustrate security without privacy. That’s because privacy entails security, but not the reverse. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. If you have privacy, meaning you can completely enforce how any party uses your data, it is secure by definition because only authorized parties can access your data.
Mobile Devices: Secure but Not Private
Casually mixing security and privacy can lead people to misunderstand the information security properties that apply to their data in any given scenario. By reevaluating for ourselves whether a given technology affords us security and privacy, we can have a more accurate understanding of how accessible our data really is.
One significant misconception I’ve noticed concerns mobile devices. I get the impression that the digital privacy content sphere regards mobile devices as not secure because they aren’t private. But while mobile is designed not to be private, it is specifically designed to be secure.
Why is that?
Because the value of data is in keeping it in your hands and out of your competitor’s. If you collect data but anyone else can grab your copy, you are not only at no advantage but also at a disadvantage since you’re the only party that spent time and money to collect it from the source.
With modest scrutiny, we’ll find that every element of a mobile OS that might be marketed as a privacy feature is, in fact, strictly a security feature.
Cybersecurity professionals have hailed application permissions as a major stride in privacy. But whom are they designed to help? These menus apply to applications that request access to certain hardware, from microphones and cameras to flash memory storage and wireless radios. This access restriction feature serves the OS developer by letting users lock out as much of their competition as possible from taking their data. The mobile OS developer controls the OS with un-auditable compiled code. For all you know, permission controls on all the OS’s native apps could be ignored.
However, even if we assume that the OS developer doesn’t thwart your restrictions on their own apps, the first-party apps still enjoy pride of place. There are more of them; they are preinstalled on your device, facilitate core mobile device features, require more permissions, and often lose core functions when those permissions are denied.
Mobile OSes also sandbox every application, forcing each to run in an isolated software environment, oblivious to other applications and the underlying operating system. This, too, benefits the OS vendor. Like the app permission settings, this functionality makes it harder for third parties to grab the same data the OS effortlessly ingests. The OS relies on its own background processes to obtain the most valuable data and walls off every other app from those processes.
Mobile Security Isn’t Designed With You in Mind
The most powerful mobile security control is the denial of root privileges to all applications and users. While it goes a long way toward keeping the user’s data safe, it is just as effective at subjecting everything and everyone using the device to the dictates of the OS. The security advantage is undeniable: if your user account can’t use root, then any malware that compromises it can’t either.
By the same token, because you don’t have complete control over the OS, you are unable to reconfigure your device for privacy from the OS vendor.
I’m not disparaging any of these security controls. All of them reinforce the protection of your data. I’m saying that they are not done primarily for the user’s benefit; that is secondary.
Those of you familiar with my work might see the scroll bar near the bottom of this page and wonder why I haven’t mentioned Linux yet. The answer is that desktop operating systems, my preferred kind of Linux OS, benefit from their own examination. In a follow-up to this piece, I will discuss the paradox of desktop security and privacy.
Please stay tuned.
#security #not #privacy #part #mobile
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