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