FBI Director Claims That The World's Most Knowledgeable Cybersecurity Experts Are Not 'Fair Minded' About Encryption Backdoors

from the oh-really? dept

Earlier this week, we noted that a huge list of companies, non-profits and cybersecurity experts had signed a letter to the White House about the stupidity and danger of trying to order backdoors into encryption (disclaimer: we signed the letter as well). While many in the press focused on the companies that had signed onto the letter (including Google, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook), as we noted, what was much more interesting was the long list of cybersecurity/encryption experts who signed onto the letter. Just in case you don't feel like searching it out, I'll post the entire list of those experts after this post.

It's a who's who of the brightest minds in encryption and cryptography. Whitfield Diffie invented public key cryptography. Phil Zimmermann created PGP. Ron Rivest is the "R" in "RSA." Peter Neumann has been working on these issues for decades before I was even born. And many more on the list are just as impressive.

So how do you think FBI director James Comey -- who has been leading the charge on backdooring encryption -- responded to these experts?

By calling them uninformed.

I wish I was joking.

A group of tech companies and some prominent folks wrote a letter to the President yesterday that I frankly found depressing. Because their letter contains no acknowledgment that there are societal costs to universal encryption. Look, I recognize the challenges facing our tech companies. Competitive challenges, regulatory challenges overseas, all kinds of challenges. I recognize the benefits of encryption, but I think fair-minded people also have to recognize the costs associated with that. And I read this letter and I think, “Either these folks don’t see what I see or they’re not fair-minded.” And either one of those things is depressing to me. So I’ve just got to continue to have the conversation.

First of all, it's kind of hilarious for the FBI director to be arguing that the people who signed that letter haven't done a cost-benefit analysis, since we've noted that the intelligence and law enforcement communities almost never do such an analysis. They always insist "more surveillance" must be better, without considering the costs involved.

And then there's this, showing that Comey still doesn't understand the letter at all:

We’ve got to have a conversation long before the logic of strong encryption takes us to that place. And smart people, reasonable people will disagree mightily. Technical people will say it’s too hard. My reaction to that is: Really? Too hard? Too hard for the people we have in this country to figure something out? I’m not that pessimistic. I think we ought to have a conversation.

Hey, Comey! No one is saying it's "too hard." They're saying it's IMPOSSIBLE to do this without weakening everyone's security. Impossible. It's not a "hard" problem, it's an impossible problem. Because if you weaken security to let the FBI in, by definition you are weakening the security to let others in as well. That's the point that was being made.

And this is important. For all of the ridiculous claims by Comey and others that we need to "have a conversation" on this, we do not. A conversation is counterproductive. All of these people can and should be working on systems to make us all more safe and secure. But if they have to keep explaining to ignorant folks like Comey why this is a bad idea, then they are taken away from making us safer. You can have a discussion over things that are hard. But there is no point in having a discussion over things that are impossible.

Filed Under: backdoors, cybersecurity, encryption, fbi, james comey, phil zimmermann, ron rivest, security, whitfield diffie

Pretty Much Anyone With Any Understanding Of Crypto Tells President Obama That Backdooring Crypto Is Monumentally Stupid

from the basic-understanding dept

Nearly 150 tech companies (including us via the Copia Institute), non-profits and computer security experts have all teamed up to send a letter to President Obama telling him to stop these stupid ideas about backdooring encryption that keeping coming out of his administration. The press headlines will note that big companies -- like Google, Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook -- are signing the letter. But significantly more interesting is the signatures from a huge list of computer security experts, all putting their names down on paper to make it clear what a ridiculously bad idea it is to even think about backdooring encryption. Among those signing on are Phil Zimmermann (who lived through this sort of thing before), Whitfield Diffie (guy who invented public key cryptography), Brian Behlendorf, Ron Rivest, Peter Neumann, Gene Spafford, Bruce Schneier, Matt Blaze, Richard Clarke (long-time counterterrorism guy in the White House), Hal Abelson and many, many more. Basically a who's who of people who actually know what they're talking about.

We urge you to reject any proposal that U.S. companies deliberately weaken the security of their products. We request that the White House instead focus on developing policies that will promote rather than undermine the wide adoption of strong encryption technology. Such policies will in turn help to promote and protect cybersecurity, economic growth, and human rights, both here and abroad.

Strong encryption is the cornerstone of the modern information economy’s security. Encryption protects billions of people every day against countless threats—be they street criminals trying to steal our phones and laptops, computer criminals trying to defraud us, corporate spies trying to obtain our companies’ most valuable trade secrets, repressive governments trying to stifle dissent, or foreign intelligence agencies trying to compromise our and our allies’ most sensitive national security secrets.

Encryption thereby protects us from innumerable criminal and national security threats. This protection would be undermined by the mandatory insertion of any new vulnerabilities into encrypted devices and services. Whether you call them “front doors” or “back doors”, introducing intentional vulnerabilities into secure products for the government’s use will make those products less secure against other attackers. Every computer security expert that has spoken publicly on this issue agrees on this point, including the government’s own experts.

There's much more in the full letter which I highly recommend reading. It very nicely summarizes why this is a completely insane idea, and highlights why anyone raising it should be immediately told to move on to some other project instead:

The Administration faces a critical choice: will it adopt policies that foster a global digital ecosystem that is more secure, or less? That choice may well define the future of the Internet in the 21st century. When faced with a similar choice at the end of the last century, during the so-called “Crypto Wars”, U.S. policymakers weighed many of the same concerns and arguments that have been raised in the current debate, and correctly concluded that the serious costs of undermining encryption technology outweighed the purported benefits. So too did the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, who unanimously recommended in their December 2013 report that the US Government should “(1) fully support and not undermine efforts to create encryption standards; (2) not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial software; and (3) increase the use of encryption and urge US companies to do so, in order to better protect data in transit, at rest, in the cloud, and in other storage.”

The Washington Post quotes another surprising signatory: Paul Rosenzweig, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at Homeland Security. If that name sounds familiar, it's because we've quoted his defense of the NSA, once arguing that "too much transparency defeats the very purpose of democracy." If even he is arguing against backdooring encryption, you know it's an idea that should be killed off. In his case, it's because he recognizes the simple reality that seems to have eluded the FBI director:

The signatories include policy experts who normally side with national-security hawks. Paul Rosenzweig, a former Bush administration senior policy official at the Department of Homeland Security, said: “If I actually thought there was a way to build a U.S.-government-only backdoor, then I might be persuaded. But that’s just not reality.”

That's just not reality. And neither should be any policy effort that involves pushing for more backdoors in encryption. It's bad economic policy. It's bad security policy. It's bad crypto policy. It's bad privacy policy. It's just bad policy all around.

And the world would be much better off if all of these security experts and companies could focus on better protecting us from harm, rather than having to join in ridiculous debates about what a bunch of clueless bureaucrats think might be some sort of mythical magic unicorn encryption breaker.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, backdoors, bruce schneier, crypto, encryption, paul rosenzweig, phil zimmermann, privacy, richard clarke, ron rivest, security, vulnerabilitities, whitfield diffie
Companies: apple, cisco, facebook, google, microsoft, twitter

Encryption: What The FBI Wants It Can Only Have By Destroying Computing And Censoring The Internet

from the and-it-doesn't-seem-to-understand-this dept

The FBI -- and by extension, every law enforcement agency it partners with -- wants holes carved in cellphone encryption. The problem is that it doesn't even know what specifically it wants.

When asked directly if the FBI wants a backdoor, [Amy] Hess [Asst. Director of FBI's Science & Technology branch] dodged the question and did not describe in detail what actual solution the FBI is seeking.

“We are simply asking for information that we seek in response to a lawful order in a readable format,” Hess responded, while also repeating that the Bureau supports strong encryption. “But how that actually happens should be the decision of the provider.”

When pressed again, Hess said that it would be okay for the FBI not to have a key to decrypt data, if the provider “can get us that information by maintaining the key themselves.”

That's asking the impossible -- for a great many reasons. First and foremost, compromised encryption is compromised encryption. It can be exploited by criminals and other unwanted entities just as certainly as it can assist law enforcement agencies in obtaining the information they're seeking. There's no way around this fact. You cannot have "good guys only" encryption.

But beyond that, even if the FBI manages to get what it wants, it will do so at the expense of general computing. Requiring built-in backdoors or key escrow will dismantle the very systems it's meant to access. Computer scientist Jonathan Mayer delivers a long, detailed hypothetical involving the Android platform and how the FBI's desired access would fail -- and do severe collateral damage -- every step of the way. (via Boing Boing)

First off, if Google gives the FBI the backdoors it wants, that only nails down Google. But Google also distributes thousands of third-party apps through its Play store. And these apps may not contain the subverted encryption the FBI is looking for. Now, Google has to be in the business of regulating third-party apps to ensure they meet the government's standard for compromised encryption.

The obvious answer is that Google can’t stop with just backdooring disk encryption. It has to backdoor the entire Android cryptography library. Whenever a third-party app generates an encrypted blob of data, for any purpose, that blob has to include a backdoor.

This move may work, but it only affects apps using Google's encryption. Other offerings may rely on other encryption methods. Then what? It has a few options, all of them carrying horrendous implications.

One option: require Google to police its app store for strong cryptography. Another option: mandate a notice-and-takedown system, where the government is responsible for spotting secure apps, and Google has a grace period to remove them. Either alternative would, of course, be entirely unacceptable to the technology sector—the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown system is widely reviled, and present federal law (CDA 230) disfavors intermediary liability.

At this point, Mayer suggests the "solution" is already outside the realm of political feasibility. Would the FBI really push this far to obtain encryption backdoors? The FBI itself seems unsure of how far it's willing to go, and many officials quoted (like the one above) seem to think all the FBI really needs to do is be very insistent on this point, and techies will come up with some magical computing solution that maintains the protective qualities of encryption while simultaneously allowing the government to open the door and have a look around any time it wants to.

So, if the FBI is willing to travel this very dark road littered with an untold amount of collateral damage, it still hasn't managed to ensure the phones it encounters will open at its command. Considering phone users could still acquire apps from other sources, the government's reach would only extend as far as the heavily-policed official app store (and other large competitors' app stores). Now what? More government power and less operational stability.

The only solution is an app kill switch. (Google’s euphemism is “Remote Application Removal.”) Whenever the government discovers a strong encryption app, it would compel Google to nuke the app from Android phones worldwide. That level of government intrusion—reaching into personal devices to remove security software—certainly would not be well received. It raises serious Fourth Amendment issues, since it could be construed as a search of the device or a seizure of device functionality and app data. What’s more, the collateral damage would be extensive; innocent users of the app would lose their data.

Even if the government were willing to take it this far, it still doesn't eradicate apps that it can't crack. (But it may be sufficient to only backdoor the most used apps, which may be all it's looking to achieve...) App creators could decide to avoid Google's government-walled garden and mandated kill switch by assigning random identifiers and handling a majority of the app's services (like a messaging service, etc.) via a website, out of reach of app removal tools and government intervention. To stop this, the US government would need to do the previously unimaginable:

In order to prevent secure data storage and end-to-end secure messaging, the government would have to block these web apps. The United States would have to engage in Internet censorship.

Robert Graham at Errata Security makes similar points in his post on the subject, but raises a couple of other interesting (in the horrific train wreck meaning of the word) points. While the government may try to regulate the internet, it can't (theoretically) touch services hosted in foreign countries. (Although it may soon be able to hack away at them with zero legal repercussions…)

Such services could be located in another country, because there are no real national borders in cyberspace. In any event, such services aren't "phone" services, but instead just "contact" services. They let people find each other, but they don't control the phone call. It's possible to bypass such services anyway, by either using a peer-to-peer contact system, or overloading something completely different, like DNS.

Like crypto, the entire Internet is based on the concept of end-to-end, where there is nothing special inside the network that provides a service you can regulate.

The FBI likely has no desire to take its fight against encryption this far. The problem is that it thinks its "solution" to encryption is "reasonable." But it isn't.

The point is this. Forcing Apple to insert a "Golden Key" into the iPhone looks reasonable, but the truth is the problem explodes to something far outside of any sort of reasonableness. It would mean outlawing certain kinds of code -- which is probably not possible in our legal system.

The biggest problem here is that no one arguing for "golden keys," key escrow, "good guy" backdoors, etc. seems to have any idea what implementing this could actually result in. They think it's just tech companies sticking it to The Man, possibly because a former NSA sysadmin went halfway around the world with a pile of documents and a suitcase of whistles with "BLOW ME" printed on the side.

But it isn't. And their continual shrugged assertion that the "smart guys" at tech companies will figure this all out for them is not only lazy, it's colossally ignorant. There isn't a solution. The government can't demand that companies not provide encryption. It's not willing to ban encryption, nor is it in any position to make that ban stick. It doesn't know what it needs. It only knows what it wants. And it can't have what it wants -- not because no one wants to give it to them -- but because no one can give it to them.

Yes, many tech companies are far more wary of collaborating with the government in this post-Snowden era, but in this case, the tech world cannot give the FBI what it wants without destroying nearly everything surrounding the "back door." And continually trotting out kidnappers, child porn enthusiasts and upskirt photographers as reasons for breaking cell phone platforms doesn't change the fact that it cannot be done without potentially harming every non-criminal phone owner and the services they use.

Filed Under: backdoors, computer security, cybersecurity, encryption, fbi, jonathan mayer, security

Cybersecurity Official Believes Encryption Can Be Backdoored Safely; Can't Think Of Single Expert Who Agrees With Him

from the broken-encryption-isn't-broken-said-no-one-ever dept

The government continues to looks for ways to route around Apple and Google's phone encryption. The plans range from legislated backdoors to a mythical "golden key" to split-key escrow where the user holds one key and the government shares the other with device makers.

None of these are solutions. And there's no consensus that this is a problem in search of one. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies will still find ways to get what they want from these phones, but it may involve more legwork/paperwork and the development of new tools and exploits. Without a doubt, encryption will not leave law enforcement unable to pursue investigations. Cellphones are a relatively recent development in the lifespan of law enforcement and no crime prior to the rise of cellphone usage went uninvestigated because suspects weren't walking around with the entirety of their lives in their pockets.

But still the government continues to believe there's some way to undermine this encryption in a way that won't allow criminals to exploit it. This belief is based on nothing tangible. One can only imagine how many deafening silent beats passed between question and answer during White House cybersecurity policy coordinator Michael Daniel's conversation with reporters following the recent RSA conference.

In a meeting with a handful of reporters, Daniel was asked whether or not he could name a respected technology figure who believed it possible to have strong encryption that could be circumvented by just one party's legal authority.

"I don't have any off the top my head," Daniel said…

And he never will. No one who knows anything about encryption will ever say it's possible to create a "good guys only" backdoor. Or front door. Or whatever analogy government officials choose to deploy when arguing for the "right" to access anyone's device with minimum effort.

But that's not the end of Daniel's embarrassing response. He went on to disingenuously toss this back at "Silicon Valley" with a back-handed compliment insinuating that if these companies don't solve this "problem" for the government, they're either stupid or evil.

[Daniel] added that if any place could come up with an answer, it would be the "enormously creative" Silicon Valley.

The government believes there's a solution out there -- some magical alignment of hashes that would keep malicious hackers out and let the government in. It certainly can't figure out this conundrum, so it's going to keep insinuating that tech companies already know how to solve the problem but they hate children/law enforcement/America so much they won't even consider meeting the government halfway.

But the tech companies know -- as do security experts -- that there's no "halfway." You can have encryption that works and keeps everyone locked out or you can have the government's "encryption," which is spelled exactly the same but has extremely leaky quote marks constantly appended, and which lets everyone in the same "door," no matter who they are or what their intent is.

Filed Under: backdoors, cybersecurity, cybersecurity czar, encryption, michael daniel

White House Floats Idea Of Crypto Backdoor... If The Key Is Broken Into Multiple Pieces

from the crossing-the-threshold dept

It's no secret that some in the law enforcement and intelligence communities are hell bent on stopping encryption from being widely deployed to protect your data. They've made it 100% clear that they want backdoors into any encryption scheme. But when actual security folks press government officials on how they're going to do this without undermining people's own security and privacy, we get a lot of bureaucratic gobbledygook in response. Either that or magical fairy thinking about golden keys that basically any security expert will tell you are impossible without weakening security.

Not surprisingly, the law enforcement and intelligence communities are not giving up yet. The latest is that the White House appears to be floating a proposal to setup a backdoor to encryption that requires multi-party keys. That is, rather than just having a single key that can decrypt the content, it would require multiple parties with "pieces" of the "key" to come together to unlock it:

Recently, the head of the National Security Agency provided a rare hint of what some U.S. officials think might be a technical solution. Why not, said Adm. Michael S. Rogers, require technology companies to create a digital key that could open any smartphone or other locked device to obtain text messages or photos, but divide the key into pieces so that no one person or agency alone could decide to use it?

“I don’t want a back door,” said Rogers, the director of the nation’s top electronic spy agency during a speech at Princeton University, using a tech industry term for covert measures to bypass device security. “I want a front door. And I want the front door to have multiple locks. Big locks.”

Of course, this proposal is nothing new. As Declan McCullagh points out, during the first "Crypto Wars" of the 1990s, the NSA proposed the same sort of thing with two parties holding parts of the escrow key. It was a dumb idea then and it's a dumb idea now.

The idea being floated here is that by setting up such a system, it's less open to abuse by government/law enforcement/intelligence communities. And maybe that's true. It makes it marginally less likely to be abused by the government. But it can still be abused quite a bit. It's not like we haven't seen multiple government agencies team up to do nefarious things in the past, or even federal officials and private companies. Hell, just look at the recent discussions about the DEA's phone records surveillance program, where the DEA later teamed up with the NSA. And, also, that program required the more or less voluntary cooperation of telcos. So the idea that the requirement of multiple parties somehow lessens the risk seems like a stretch.

But, even if it actually did reduce the risk of direct abuse, it doesn't get anywhere near the real problem with this approach. If you're building in a back door, you're building in a vulnerability that others will eventually be able to exploit. You are flat out weakening the system -- whether or not you split up the key. You're still exposing the data to those with nefarious intent by weakening the overall system.

Thankfully, at least some in the government seem to recognize this:

“The basic question is, is it possible to design a completely secure system” to hold a master key available to the U.S. government but not adversaries, said Donna Dodson, chief cybersecurity advisor at the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technologies. “There’s no way to do this where you don’t have unintentional vulnerabilities.”

So, now the questions is if the White House will actually listen to the cybersecurity experts at NIST -- or the people who want to undermine cybersecurity at the NSA and the FBI?

Filed Under: backdoors, crypto, cryptowars, encryption, key escrow, mobile encryption, multiple piece, nist, nsa, threshold

Security Audit Of TrueCrypt Doesn't Find Any Backdoors -- But What Will Happen To TrueCrypt?

from the questions-still-left-to-be-answered dept

Over the past few years we've followed the saga of TrueCrypt. The popular and widely used full disk encryption system got some attention soon after the initial Snowden leaks when people started realizing that no one really knew who was behind TrueCrypt, and that the software had not been fully audited. Cryptographer Matthew Green decided to lead an effort to audit TrueCrypt. A year ago, the team released the first phase, finding a few small vulnerabilities, but no backdoors and nothing too serious. This week the full audit was completed and again finds no evidence of any backdoors planted in the code. Matthew Green's blog post on the report provides the key details, which notes a few small issues that should be fixed, but nothing too serious:

The TL;DR is that based on this audit, Truecrypt appears to be a relatively well-designed piece of crypto software. The NCC audit found no evidence of deliberate backdoors, or any severe design flaws that will make the software insecure in most instances.

That doesn't mean Truecrypt is perfect. The auditors did find a few glitches and some incautious programming -- leading to a couple of issues that could, in the right circumstances, cause Truecrypt to give less assurance than we'd like it to.

For example: the most significant issue in the Truecrypt report is a finding related to the Windows version of Truecrypt's random number generator (RNG), which is responsible for generating the keys that encrypt Truecrypt volumes. This is an important piece of code, since a predictable RNG can spell disaster for the security of everything else in the system.

However, as Green notes, the problem with the way its implemented in TrueCrypt would only be a problem in "extremely" rare circumstances that wouldn't impact most users. But it's still something that could be fixed.

But that's where the problem lies. As you may recall, in the midst of all of this, the still anonymous developers behind TrueCrypt suddenly announced that it wasn't secure and that all development had ceased. There have been some efforts to fork and rescue TrueCrypt, but that's come with some skepticism as people feared what might be hidden in the code (and also some concerns about the TrueCrypt license.

Hopefully this new audit puts at least some of those concerns to rest (though it's always good to be paranoid when building security software) and people do really put an effort developing an updated version of TrueCrypt. For what it's worth, I've seen a bunch of articles claiming the audit shows that TrueCrypt is safe. That's not quite true. It's just saying they didn't find anything -- which should be very re-assuring, but you can never say with 100% certainty that the code is safe. Either way, what's needed now is more development moving forward.

Filed Under: audit, backdoors, encryption, full disk encryption, matthew green, security, truecrypt

Cisco Shipping Hardware To Bogus Addresses To Throw Off NSA Intercept-And-Implant Efforts

from the 1324-Middle-Finger-Extended-Blvd. dept

Cisco became an inadvertent (and very unwilling) co-star in the NSA Antics: Snowden Edition when its logo was splashed across the web by a leaked document detailing the agency's interception of outbound US networking hardware in order to insert surveillance backdoors.

It moved quickly to mitigate the damage, sending a letter to the President asking him and his administration to institute some safeguards and limitations to protect US tech companies from the NSA's backdoor plans. To date, there has been no direct response. So, Cisco has decided to handle the problem itself.

Cisco will ship boxes to vacant addresses in a bid to foil the NSA, security chief John Stewart says.

The dead drop shipments help to foil a Snowden-revealed operation whereby the NSA would intercept networking kit and install backdoors before boxen reached customers…

"We ship [boxes] to an address that's has nothing to do with the customer, and then you have no idea who ultimately it is going to," Stewart says.

"When customers are truly worried ... it causes other issues to make [interception] more difficult in that [agencies] don't quite know where that router is going so its very hard to target - you'd have to target all of them. There is always going to be inherent risk."

Stewart acknowledges that Cisco's modified dead drop shipping operations aren't foolproof, but will at least force the agency to do a little more research before intercepting packages. Stewart also noted that some customers aren't taking any chances, opting to pick up their hardware from Cisco directly.

There are also variables Cisco simply can't control, like the possibility of inbound components from upline manufacturers arriving pre-compromised. But it's doing what it can to ensure that "Cisco" isn't synonymous with "spyware."

Then there's always the possibility that the government may find Cisco's new routing methods to be quasi-fraudulent and force the company to plainly state where each package is actually going. No response has been issued by the ODNI or NSA to this news, and most likely, none will be forthcoming. Any statement on Cisco's fictitious routing would tip its hand.

Cisco's plan makes a lot of assumptions about the NSA's capabilities, most of which aren't particularly sound, but this seems to be more a public display of pique than a surefire way to eliminate most of the NSA's hardware interceptions. It also sends a message to the NSA, one it's been hearing more and more of over the last couple of years: the nation's tech companies aren't your buddies and they're more than a little tired of being unwilling partners in worldwide surveillance.

Filed Under: backdoors, fake addresses, interception, nsa, shipping, surveillance
Companies: cisco

CIA's Shrugtastic Response To Hacking Apple Security: 'It Is What It Is' And 'That's What We Do'

from the meh dept

We just had a story based on the Intercept breaking the fact that the CIA holds an annual hackathon (the CIA calls it a "Jamboree") to come up with new ways to hack secure systems, inviting in various contractors and government agencies. Much of the work is focused on hacking Apple's security, inserting backdoors and generally degrading security and encryption for everyone.

The CIA refused to comment on the Intercept's original story, but the reporters got former FTC official Steven Bellovin to sum it up as:

“Spies gonna spy,” says Steven Bellovin, a former chief technologist for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and current professor at Columbia University. “I’m never surprised by what intelligence agencies do to get information. They’re going to go where the info is, and as it moves, they’ll adjust their tactics. Their attitude is basically amoral: whatever works is OK.”

Now, "unnamed" anonymous CIA officials seem to be picking up where that shrugging comment left off. Talking to CNBC reporters, the CIA folks give similarly "meh" kinds of responses:

"That's what we do," the official said. "CIA collects information overseas, and this is focused on our adversaries, whether they be terrorists or other adversaries."

Except, of course, they don't just spy overseas. The CIA has done domestic spying as well, and the descriptions of the projects don't just impact people overseas. And then there's this one:

"There's a whole world of devices out there, and that's what we're going to do," the official said. "It is what it is."

It is what it is. That's someone who clearly doesn't care one bit about the negative consequences of attacking security and inserting backdoors that can harm everyone, just so long as they can also spy on people they don't like. You know, like the US Senate.

Filed Under: backdoors, cia, encryption, hackathon, jamboree, privacy, spying, surveillance
Companies: apple

CIA Holds Special Annual Hackathons Looking To Undermine Apple Encryption And Privacy

from the the-ijamboree dept

The latest big report from the Intercept is about an annual hackathon, put on by the CIA (which the NSA and others participate in) where they try to hack encrypted systems, with a key focus on Apple products. The CIA calls this its annual "Trusted Computing Base Jamboree." The whole point: how can the CIA undermine trusted computing systems. If you can't see that, it notes:

As in past years, the Jamboree will be an informal and interactive conference with an emphasis on presentations that provide important information to developers trying to circumvent or exploit new security capabilities.

In other words, rather than seeking to better protect Americans by making sure the security products they use remain secure, this event was about making everyone less safe -- in particular Apple users. The report notes how researchers have undermined Xcode so that the intelligence community can inject backdoors into lots of apps and to reveal private keys (apparently not caring how that makes everyone less secure):

A year later, at the 2012 Jamboree, researchers described their attacks on the software used by developers to create applications for Apple’s popular App Store. In a talk called “Strawhorse: Attacking the MacOS and iOS Software Development Kit,” a presenter from Sandia Labs described a successful “whacking” of Apple’s Xcode — the software used to create apps for iPhones, iPads and Mac computers. Developers who create Apple-approved and distributed apps overwhelmingly use Xcode, a free piece of software easily downloaded from the App Store.

The researchers boasted that they had discovered a way to manipulate Xcode so that it could serve as a conduit for infecting and extracting private data from devices on which users had installed apps that were built with the poisoned Xcode. In other words, by manipulating Xcode, the spies could compromise the devices and private data of anyone with apps made by a poisoned developer — potentially millions of people.

The risks for nearly anyone using an Apple product should become pretty clear when you realize what this "whacked" Xcode can do:

• “Entice” all Mac applications to create a “remote backdoor” allowing undetected access to an Apple computer.
• Secretly embed an app developer’s private key into all iOS applications. (This could potentially allow spies to impersonate the targeted developer.)
• “Force all iOS applications” to send data from an iPhone or iPad back to a U.S. intelligence “listening post.”
• Disable core security features on Apple devices.

While the Jamboree appears mostly focused on Apple products, that's not all. Microsoft's BitLocker encryption was also a target:

Also presented at the Jamboree were successes in the targeting of Microsoft’s disk encryption technology, and the TPM chips that are used to store its encryption keys. Researchers at the CIA conference in 2010 boasted about the ability to extract the encryption keys used by BitLocker and thus decrypt private data stored on the computer. Because the TPM chip is used to protect the system from untrusted software, attacking it could allow the covert installation of malware onto the computer, which could be used to access otherwise encrypted communications and files of consumers.

Again, this suggests a serious problem when you have the same government that's supposed to "protect us" in charge of also hacking into systems. With today's modern technology, the communications technologies that "bad people" use are the same ones that everyone uses. The intelligence community has two choices: protect everyone, or undermine the security of everyone. It has chosen the latter.

“The U.S. government is prioritizing its own offensive surveillance needs over the cybersecurity of the millions of Americans who use Apple products,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If U.S. government-funded researchers can discover these flaws, it is quite likely that Chinese, Russian and Israeli researchers can discover them, too. By quietly exploiting these flaws rather than notifying Apple, the U.S. government leaves Apple’s customers vulnerable to other sophisticated governments.”

There's been a lot of talk lately about the growing divide between the intelligence community and Silicon Valley. As more stories come out of projects to undermine those companies and the trust they've built with the public, it's only going to get worse.

Filed Under: backdoors, cia, encryption, hackathon, ios, jamboree, xcode
Companies: apple

Encryption Backdoors Will Always Turn Around And Bite You In The Ass

from the golden-keys dept

As you may have heard, the law enforcement and intelligence communities have been pushing strongly for backdoors in encryption. They talk about ridiculous things like "golden keys," pretending that it's somehow possible to create something that only the good guys can use. Many in the security community have been pointing out that this is flat-out impossible. The second you introduce a backdoor, there is no way to say that only "the good guys" can use it.

As if to prove that, an old "golden key" from the 90s came back to bite a whole bunch of the internet this week... including the NSA. Some researchers discovered a problem which is being called FREAK for "Factoring RSA Export Keys." The background story is fairly involved and complex, but here's a short version (that leaves out a lot of details): back during the first "cryptowars" when Netscape was creating SSL (mainly to protect the early e-commerce market), the US still considered exporting strong crypto to be a crime. To deal with this, RSA offered "export grade encryption" that was deliberately weak (very, very weak) that could be used abroad. As security researcher Matthew Green explains, in order to deal with the fact that SSL-enabled websites had to deal with both strong crypto and weak "export grade" crypto, -- the "golden key" -- there was a system that would try to determine which type of encryption to use on each connection. If you were in the US, it should go to strong encryption. Outside the US? Downgrade to "export grade."

In theory, this became obsolete at the end of the first cryptowars when the US government backed down for the most part, and stronger crypto spread around the world. But, as Green notes, the system that did that old "negotiation" as to which crypto to use, known as "EXPORT ciphersuites" stuck around. Like zombies. We'll skip over a bunch of details to get to the point: the newly discovered hack involves abusing this fact to force many, many clients to accept "export grade" encryption, even if they didn't ask for it. And it appears that more than a third of websites out there (many coming from Akamai's content delivery network -- which many large organizations use) are vulnerable.

And that includes the NSA's own website. Seriously. Now, hacking the NSA's website isn't the same as hacking the NSA itself, but it still seems notable just for the irony of it all (obligatory xkcd): But the lesson of the story: backdoors, golden keys, magic surveillance leprechauns, whatever you want to call it create vulnerabilities that will be exploited and not just by the good guys. As Green summarizes:

There’s a much more important moral to this story.

The export-grade RSA ciphers are the remains of a 1980s-vintage effort to weaken cryptography so that intelligence agencies would be able to monitor. This was done badly. So badly, that while the policies were ultimately scrapped, they’re still hurting us today.

This might be academic if it was just a history lesson — but for the past several months, U.S. and European politicians have been publicly mooting the notion of a new set of cryptographic backdoors in systems we use today. This would involve deliberately weakening technology so that governments can intercept and read our conversations. While officials are carefully avoiding the term “back door” — or any suggestion of weakening our encryption systems — this is wishful thinking. Our systems are already so complex that even normal issues stress them to the breaking point. There's no room for new backdoors.

To be blunt about it, the moral of this story is pretty simple:

Encryption backdoors will always turn around and bite you in the ass. They are never worth it.

Let's repeat that last line, because it still seems that the powers that be don't get it:

Encryption backdoors will always turn around and bite you in the ass. They are never worth it.

Whether it's creating vulnerabilities that come back to undermine security on the internet decades later, or merely giving cover to foreign nations to undermine strong encryption, backdoors are a terrible idea which should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Filed Under: backdoors, encryption, export encryption, export keys, freak, nsa, openssl, ssl, tls, vulnerability