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Study Finds Bank of America SiteKey is Flawed
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Feb 05, 2007 10:49 AM
from the trying-something-new dept.
from the trying-something-new dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The NYT reports on a Harvard and MIT study, which finds that the SiteKey authentication system employed by Bank of America is ineffective at prevent phishing attacks. SiteKey requires users to preselect an image and to recognize this image before they login, but users don't comply. 'The idea is that if customers do not see their image, they could be at a fraudulent Web site, dummied up to look like their bank's, and should not enter their passwords.
The Harvard and M.I.T. researchers tested that hypothesis. In October, they brought 67 Bank of America customers in the Boston area into a controlled environment and asked them to conduct routine online banking activities, like looking up account balances. But the researchers had secretly withdrawn the images.
Of 60 participants who got that far into the study and whose results could be verified, 58 entered passwords anyway. Only two chose not to log on, citing security concerns.' The study, aptly entitled "The Emperor's New Security Indicators", is available online."
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Concerned Customer writes "The fake boarding pass guy is at it again. His blog shows a demonstration phishing website that is able to bypass the SiteKey authentication system used by Bank of America, Fidelity, and Yahoo. Users will be shown their security image, even though they're not visiting the authentic websites." This hack compounds the study showing that users don't pay attention to the SiteKey pictures anyway.
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Flawed system or flawed usage? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Flawed system or flawed usage? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a B of A customer, and I thought it was made pretty clear about how the sitekey worked - so did my wife (as non-technical as she is). If people are not seeing their site-key and continuing with the 'experiment', perhaps the experiment was flawed. (The people may have felt they should continue even though the sitekey was not present, as they wanted the experiment to succeed.)
Also, I don't think I'd be logging into my BofA account on someones strange computer that was 'set-up' for me... fear of keyloggers and all that.
Parent
Re:Flawed system or flawed usage? (Score:5, Informative)
Did you read the paper? The study attempted to control for this by telling one of the three groups that the purpose of the study was to test security awareness. This group did just as badly as the others.
Parent
Re:Flawed system or flawed usage? (Score:4, Insightful)
"The study attempted to control for this by telling one of the three groups that the purpose of the study was to test security awareness."
Exactly. That is my point, the people knew_they_were_part_of_a_study, and may have reacted differently to how they would normally.
I recall reading about a study (here on
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not clear to me how you could fix the experiment to avoid OTA behavior overriding and destroying your actual data.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody with a CLUE about online security would participate in such a study.
As for the two groups who were not using accounts set up for the purpose: They would be unfamiliar with the account settings, have no personal stake in the results, and could be expected to try to bull through
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience with the technology, websites do not adequately explain what it is you're doing and why.
The fault here doesn't lie just with the websites. As someone involved in implementing e-commerce websites, numerous user focus groups and usability analysis sessions indicate that people just wouldn't read the information even if you did bother to provide it, and moreoever they'd see it as off-putting and a detriment to using the site (I'm talking about the majority of users here, by the way, but it
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I couldn't agree more. People don't read. After our focus groups preceeding a recent launch, it was explained to me by a marketing fellow that we needed to explain a process and provide instructions for something that was
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Re:Flawed system or flawed usage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I'd suggest 'if you read this and believe this in any way makes you safe from phising you should take your banking offline'.
This scheme is worthless. Once the user enters his username the bank discloses the picture. There's nothing stopping a phishing site or trojan from immediately using the username to obtain the correct picture and displaying it to the user. IE, the explaining text should say 'if you recognize your SiteKey you still have no idea wether or not it's safe to enter your passcode'.
Whoever thought this up obviously missed a few computer security classes.
Parent
Re:Flawed system or flawed usage? (Score:5, Informative)
If I log in from a new computer (or clear cookies on my own), I have to add that computer to the safe list. That is, I have to get a new cookie.
In order to authorize a new computer, I have to answer one of three preselected security questions. These questions include:
What is your maternal grandmother's first name?
What is your maternal grandfather's first name?
In what city where you born?
What was the name of your first pet?
and 5 more that I don't care to take the time to count.
After this authorization takes place, my sitekey is displayed, allowing me to verify the authenticity of the site.
That's not to say it's foolproof, but it isn't quite as simple as you make it out to be.
What really makes it fun is when my mom's cookies get cleared, and she can't recall the answers to her questions.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This scheme is worthless. Once the user enters his username the bank discloses the picture. There's nothing stopping a phishing site or trojan from immediately using the username to obtain the correct picture and displaying it to the user. IE, the explaining text should say 'if you recognize your SiteKey you still have no idea wether or not it's safe to enter your passcode'.
Wrong. If you have not saved your userid (and thus have to enter it, as you would at a phishing site) then BofA will ask your security questions before allowing you to log in with the SiteKey. If you go to a phishing site, you would not only miss your security questions, but it would then have to get the sitekey picture.
So a phishing site, even with your userid, will have to try to retrieve your security questions and present them, long before it would ever get to the SiteKey.
If you can come up with someth
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about it. If I answer the questions truthfully, then a determined attacker would most likely be able to find out the answer to them through some means or another. If i answer the questions untruthfully then I now have to essentially remember 5 different passwords. Doable for one site, but th
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, that still doesnt help much; a trojan would have access to the cookie, and the phishing site could forward the security questions, faking lost or expired cookies (if it didnt just use cross-site scripting exploits to get it).
"If you can come up with something better, I'm all ears."
Well, it isnt easy to make the system foolproof, that's for sure. In a worst-case scenario (which is altogether far too
Re:Flawed system or flawed usage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope, it's clear, but I fear users are oblivious. That's why Vista's annoying security notifications will not be as effective MS would like them to be.
"Yes, quit bothering me. How do I turn that off? Let me google it."
Parent
Re:Flawed system or flawed usage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many systems require you to change your password once a month or more often. Of course, the password must not be based on an English word and must contain both uppercase and lowercase letters and digits. Is it then a user failure when every other user forgets their password? No! It is the system that is faulty.
Therefore Bank of Americas system is faulty, most password based systems are infact faulty. It is not an acceptable excuse to put the burden on the user. It is a cop out. We are techies, we should make stuff work. It is our job.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Lack of explanation, and technically poor. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, like most Slashdot readers, I'm a tech guy, but I didn't know what they were trying to do. My GUESS was that they were going to have me enter in the caption each time I logged in as a sort of separate password. It wasn't until I read some news article about it much later that I understood what the point of it was. I can'
Re:Flawed system or flawed usage? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
This could be solved... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
People want to access your site now and one in a while, you tell them "don't login now because we are doing an exercise, but if you login anyway, we will simply tell you it is bad before providing you the service", many people will simply chose to knowingly login because they trust their bookmark to link to the valid URL.
Newflash! (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like most security systems based on users not being idiots are doomed to fail. Phishing attacks work because people don't follow normal security procedures, making the authentication process longer/more involved for the user seems to be an inherently flawed idea because it trusts the user to know what is best for him/her.
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Re:Newflash! (Score:5, Insightful)
On a website all it needs is an official looking statement at the top of the phishing page that says "We are sorry, but our image security is broken just now, please log in as normal while we fix it, thank you." People are used to being told that computer systems are down and they should manage as best they can while they're repaired.
You simply can't regulate for people not willing to think for themselves.
Parent
Re:Newflash! (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is SSL accepted and widespread and PGP isn't? Because PGP requires people to deal with things they don't understand like fingerprints, keylengths and all that other technical stuff. SSL doesn't. If there's a yellow lock icon in the status bar, everything is good, otherwise something is wrong. That's the level that normal people deal with and it's not a fault of them.
You and I are the same, in areas we didn't study. What would you think if your doctor required you to understand every medical detail of that operation you need before he does it? You trust him to know his shit, that's what you pay him for, right?
It's time we earn our pay.
And I speak as a professional security guy. "User education" has failed because we tried to bring users to a high level of technical knowledge, instead of bringing the technical knowledge required down to their level.
Parent
Sensationalist headline... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sensationalist headline... (Score:5, Insightful)
People are, by definition, flawed. Any security system that is predicated on this changing sometime soon is broken.
Parent
meh - controlled environment? (Score:5, Insightful)
2. sign an agreement form,
3. follow instructions that say: "Log into your account"
4. you're aware that people are watching you and will analyze what you did
whatever results they get do not prove anything other than:
People placed in a unfamiliar, controlled environment with Harvard scientists ogling at them will not check the security image.
h
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Biased sample? (Score:5, Insightful)
The few that did participate where either excessively trusting or clueless, making them more likely to not worry about the missing image either.
In a word, they used a biased sample.
Parent
It works for me... (Score:4, Insightful)
The BofA login is helpful to me, I fully expect to see my login token when I login to my account and would not login if I didn't see it. Some people won't pay attention and there isn't ANYTHING that BofA could do to prevent that (that isn't outrageously inconvinient for me.)
SiteKey is not to protect customers (Score:5, Insightful)
People are not "Flawed" (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, go forth and design systems that work, instead of blaming your design failure on the user.
Re: (Score:2)
So the challenge is to come up with a solution that requires the user to react properly and cannot be faked by a man-in-the-middle attack.
This solution obviously doesn't work. A captcha obviously doesn't work, as criminals can simply decode those
BoA ppor implementation (Score:2)
Fishy? (Score:2)
I'm beginning to wonder if this article actually appears on the NYTimes website...
As a BOA customer... (Score:2, Informative)
Give me an online banking system with a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Bank of America has unrolled this stupid SiteKey thing, which just doesn't benefit the consumer much. It seems to be a way for them to have more plausible deniability without actually taking on any responsibility.
The idea is th
The Real Question is... (Score:4, Informative)
you have succeffully logged out! (Score:3, Informative)
Poorly designed populace (Score:2)
Security requires active checking to make sure a security measure is in effect. If you don't check to see if your padlock was secured, it's not the lock maker's fault if someone unhooked the unlocked padlocked and stole your stuff.
Actually this is worse. The lock maker damn well isn't at fault IF YOU DIDN'T CHECK THAT IT WAS YOUR PADLOCK.
The system is actually technically flawed (Score:5, Informative)
http://bbaadd.com/blog/2006/08/security-why-sitek
This overview of "Fraud Vulnerabilities in SiteKey Security at Bank of America" is written for a non-technical audience. Some details have been greatly simplified, and some new material is presented. Readers seeking more depth of coverage should consult the original paper, available at the above URL.
Although this report discusses SiteKey at Bank of America Corporation, the general risks discussed here apply to all SiteKey sites including ING Direct and Vanguard.com, and they apply even more generally to any security method that relies solely on server-side interventions to detect and stop online fraud.
SiteKey Explanation insufficient. (Score:3, Interesting)
If someone is already familiar with the concept, then it makes sense. However, for most people, the explanation was an annoyance and a confusion one time when they logged in, and the rest of the time it's just an extra click before they can enter their password.
I have two banks that use that scheme for authentication. On both of them, one day they just popped up a picture and said, "what is this picture?" So you make a guess as to what is shown in the picture, and hope you guessed right.
On subsequent logins, they fill in your guess for you, so it seems ridiculous that they are asking what that picture every time.
Since the explanation was lost on most users, it's not surprising that they don't care that it's different.
Infact...if you just make a site that popped up a random picture and asked them to name it, I'd expect everyone would fall for it.
This isn't about customers being lazy or stupid, (well not always.) It's about the SiteKey deployment being inadequate and there being insufficient explanation for something that customers have never heard of before.
"It's the users, not the system!" syndrome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I hate to defend SiteKey, because it's a piece of shit, but BoA knows the user from the phishing site because any time a new IP address tries to access the image, the authentication does not include the SiteKey picture and instead asks the usual security questions.
Of course, BoA may have screwed the pooch on this one as well, so you never know.