Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
A lot of people mention the total lack of authentication with faxing as a means of breaching security, but this is normally mentioned in the context of mistakes and is countered with the fact that obscurity makes that a non-issue. And that is basically true, the same goes for email, the chances that you would type in a keying error and get a real email address and one that would exploit the contents of the email are super low. So that's negligible in both cases.
However, what is often ignored, is that the real risk is in tricking people into using the wrong phone number. We are talking about focused security attacks here, in both cases. This is not someone trying to access stored data, this is about data in transit. If you want to get a fax sent to the wrong number, you use social engineering to get people to send to the wrong number. Same can happen with email, but it is likely harder. Fax numbers are totally anonymous, have zero authentication and involve "tossing the critical security data over the wall" and hoping for the best. It's blind, and no secure process can be blind.
Email is no different in this regard.
It is different and I mentioned that both are affected but it is harder to do so with email. For example, email normally has a logical name in some portion of the email field, not just a random number string. Email is far easier to remember and verify. Email is typically stored in more secure ways.
But people can make up anything they want for an email address on google, then use that unverifiable address to get something sent to them... just like calling and giving a fax number.
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
While that's generally true, it's not exclusively so. Just look at FreePBX. DID's could be set to listen for fax tones on a DID line and intercept the fax then forward it onto the individual.
That's very true. And hosted fax can mitigate a lot more risk. But we are doing that by not being fax any longer. Literally... FreePBX and hosted fax solutions secure fax by... turning it into email!!
So the best way to secure fax is to replace it with email, I totally agree.
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
But people can make up anything they want for an email address on google, then use that unverifiable address to get something sent to them... just like calling and giving a fax number.
Not in the real world. Go look at a list of email addresses that are used by people (NOT intentional spam catching accounts.) Some are random but very, very few. Most involve part of a name or something that identifies someone... they are things that can be remembered even if they are random-ish. I've never seen a truly random email address that was used. But every fax number is just a number, totally random.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
While that's generally true, it's not exclusively so. Just look at FreePBX. DID's could be set to listen for fax tones on a DID line and intercept the fax then forward it onto the individual.
That's very true. And hosted fax can mitigate a lot more risk. But we are doing that by not being fax any longer. Literally... FreePBX and hosted fax solutions secure fax by... turning it into email!!
So the best way to secure fax is to replace it with email, I totally agree.
We haven't received paper faxes in my office for more than 10 years - it's all saved to a network share. but the rest of the insecurity is there.
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
But I think the purpose of faxes, at least in a medical facility are intended for the practice at large, not an individual. If we moved things over to an email, we'd have to have a group email address used, one that dispersed the message to many people to ensure work was being accomplished and not halted because someone was on vacation.
True, but if that is so you have the ability to secure that group far more extensively, control access by person, have access rules, routing rules, etc. Things that faxing cannot do. Even when it is bad, email retains security advantages.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
But people can make up anything they want for an email address on google, then use that unverifiable address to get something sent to them... just like calling and giving a fax number.
Not in the real world. Go look at a list of email addresses that are used by people (NOT intentional spam catching accounts.) Some are random but very, very few. Most involve part of a name or something that identifies someone... they are things that can be remembered even if they are random-ish. I've never seen a truly random email address that was used. But every fax number is just a number, totally random.
We weren't talking about real people - I though we were talking about people specifically trying to steal data. And just to appear normal, those people too would make fake accounts that look like real accounts, but there's not authentication there either, so again, the fact that there's a real name in the email address doesn't actually make it any better - the believe that it does is social engineering too.
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
Open Email is, of course, not super secure but is very secure compared to faxing. Even insecure email scenarios standardly have email servers at a different location than the place from which the email is sent initially. And the connection between sending and MTA is usually secure and can always be in cases where we are concerned about security. This trivially eliminates the possibility of location based attack on the sending side.
No it doesn't. If you are targeting someone, you send them an ebomb and infect their computer, because, well everyone loves cat videos, now you're watching everything they do their computer, not just email.
I don't even know what you are disputing here. If you are saying that email gets spam, so do fax machines. I've gotten plenty of fax spam over the years.
You say that it does not eliminate location based attacks but mention cat videos from a non-location attack. What is that comment in reference to?
You said you can location attack a fax machine - presumably because it can't/doesn't move, but then say you can't location attack an email user. I say you can attack an email user, by attacking their computer...
Ah. Not what I meant by location attack. With fax you can attack someone by leveraging their location. You simply go to "where" they are (they can't move, the phone line just doesn't move with them) and you can use their location as a vulnerability.
Email systems move. It's part of their nature. Even if you know where someone is sending email from, you don't know where it will go to or from. So knowing their locality is not useful in attacking the data in transit.
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I really feel the need to say - I'm not defending faxing!
I hate faxing! It's slow, low resolution, as mentioned insecure, often requires dedicated hardware, hell, it's expensive!!
But moving slow moving entities off of it is difficult or impossible.
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
But people can make up anything they want for an email address on google, then use that unverifiable address to get something sent to them... just like calling and giving a fax number.
Not in the real world. Go look at a list of email addresses that are used by people (NOT intentional spam catching accounts.) Some are random but very, very few. Most involve part of a name or something that identifies someone... they are things that can be remembered even if they are random-ish. I've never seen a truly random email address that was used. But every fax number is just a number, totally random.
We weren't talking about real people - I though we were talking about people specifically trying to steal data. And just to appear normal, those people too would make fake accounts that look like real accounts, but there's not authentication there either, so again, the fact that there's a real name in the email address doesn't actually make it any better - the believe that it does is social engineering too.
Right. But, let me give an example, maybe it will make more sense...
Background: Joanna McMillen needs some PCI data sent to her office at the hospital. Her email is [email protected] and her fax number is (202) 555-2325.
Debby works in accounts and has to send some data to Joanna's office.
If she goes to send an email she sees [email protected] and thinks to herself "I've seen that address before and it is totally reasonable." You have light security, hard to trick Debby as you'd need to either trick a LOT of people and change only the name portion of the email address or REALLY trick Debby and alter the domain name.
Debby goes to send a fax and looks up, likely on paper, a string of numbers to type into the fax. No matter how "normal" the number looks, it is all the same to Debby. Maybe the area code would tip her off, but that produces a crazy number of false positives as people just don't understand area codes so either this gets ignored or you get problems. Debby just doesn't memorize enough numbers to know when one looks "fishy".
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
I really feel the need to say - I'm not defending faxing!
But you have defended it often in the past and tried to make a point of it being more secure than email.
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Similar goes for home users... if someone hands over an email address we normally check it to see if we can read it. It is super simple for humans to remember the basics of an email address. Not so with phone numbers. In "one off" scenarios, emails get some verification 99% of the time, fax numbers less than 1% of the time.
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You're example works when you are sending emails to the same person or group of people. But if that's not normal, i.e. you send to random people all the time, which we would be doing when sending data to patients, then the email address becomes as meaningless as the fax number does - in fact it could be worse because if you are sending to someone locally with fax, you would think someone would know the local available area code numbers.
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
You're example works when you are sending emails to the same person or group of people. But if that's not normal, i.e. you send to random people all the time, which we would be doing when sending data to patients, then the email address becomes as meaningless as the fax number does - in fact it could be worse because if you are sending to someone locally with fax, you would think someone would know the local available area code numbers.
You were too slow, I mentioned that in the second update. Even the local part because I've had so many places refuse to send me things over the years because they can't tell what local phones are and now as phones don't have locality any longer, it's so much worse. NTG HQ's numbers are all from a different LATA than they are in (about two cities to the east of them) and my home number is in a different country than me physically and uses a local code that even the locals think is somewhere far away. Even pizza people used to refuse to deliver to me within walking distance. Numbers even two decades ago were useless for security as locality is not actually as meaningful as it seems.
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I think we are both saying that neither email address nor phone numbers are good indicators of identity. If not, you still haven't sold me on why email addresses are better in that regard - but again, really doesn't help solve the problem at hand.
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
I think we are both saying that neither email address nor phone numbers are good indicators of identity. If not, you still haven't sold me on why email addresses are better in that regard - but again, really doesn't help solve the problem at hand.
It's that they almost always offer some verification instead of never offering any. Neither are good, but one is better. In essentially all cases, you get some security.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
Fax machines are archaic; first one patented 150 years ago. 'New' ones from ATT designed in the mid 1920s. I try to avoid them, though i imagine they will never go away.
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
Faxing is totally open an unsecured from the device through the network to the other device. It is analogue and well defined standard that any old fashioned modem, fax machine or similar can reproduce.
Tapping fax lines is the easiest method of accessing them. Faxes go our over lines that cannot be secured and can be tapped without physical access. PHI in transit is essentially, exclusively a "local" activity either to the recipient or to the sender, and both sides of a fax transaction have to be completely exposed. Even if the building is secured, the external phone lines are not and those are where the biggest vulnerabilities are.
Fax lines are also vulnerable to a man in the middle attack due to the lack of authentication. If someone is being targeted, the opportunity to intercept a fax and repeat it on is trivial, unlike phone calls where you have to speak "live" to the person on the other end.
Tapping a phone line once it reaches a neighborhood hub is anything is trival I'm guessing. But the main point that I want to point out here is that tapping a phoneline requires physical access to something, somewhere in the path to make happen. This requirement makes the cost significantly higher than trying to get access to say email, through the previously mentioned malware attack.
How can you say this but then also talk about FreePBX and other things which can intercept and redirect fax calls? Clearly if they can detect them by tone, they can record them. Root a FreePBX box and you're on your way, that doesn't work for already-encrypted email traffic though.
Lest we forget about things like Switch Access Service for digitally tapping phone lines that AT&T still has that has been used by criminals in the past, unencrypted VoIP, etc. By default it's just security through obscurity, because you don't consider actually how easy it is compared to breaking SSL and/or PGP.
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@Dashrender said in Why Faxing is Less Secure Than Email:
I think we are both saying that neither email address nor phone numbers are good indicators of identity. If not, you still haven't sold me on why email addresses are better in that regard - but again, really doesn't help solve the problem at hand.
No, but email is better. Neither is good, but one is 100% useless, the other is 50% useful. That's a huge increase.
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https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/11/hacking_faxes.html
Faxes are insecure in both directions, as well. Not only can you not trust where the information went, you can't trust what you receive.
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All that being said... both my Pops and I heard a fax machine go off in the reception area while we were having our ears reprogrammed yesterday.
