Slashdot Mirror
Export-level Encryption Proves Insufficient
rossjudson writes: "The Independent is running an article about the shoe bomber terrorist. The interesting bit for Slashdot readers is at the bottom -- apparently the 40-bit encryption in the export version of Windows 2000 was cracked by a set of computers using a brute force method. So let's confront the question: Should the US prohibit the export of high-encryption software? Here is a case where the default values (40 bit) clearly helped recover valuable information from a system." There's another article in New Scientist focusing on the encryption issue.
Yeah because prohibiting the export of this will prevent anyone evil from getting hold of it...
Sig is taking a break!
If you really want to make the world a safer place, please demand that everyone wear helmets all of the time.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Advanced Math Textbook +
Computer +
Low-level programming skills =
High Grade Encryption... Anywhere in the world.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
40 bits is nothing, and has been for decades. /chosen/ to be crackable. And in my book, and in the minds of many others, that pretty much disqualifies it from even being called 'crypto'.
That limit was
THL.
Keeping
Should the US prohibit the export of high-encryption software?
Sure, why not? It isn't as if there are any cryptographers in any other countries in the world, is it?
Legislation is pointless, and even damaging in this case. The cryptography playing field is fairly level. That's not inherently a good or a bad thing; just as al-Queda can encrypt their files, they are equally prevented from intercepting sensitive information by the same technology. If legislation restricts crypto, we will find ourselves in a situation in which the FBI can't crack terrorist comms, yet terrorists can intercept commercial data. Airline security information, oilrig blueprints, whatever.
The laws are meaningless. I'm sure we can all think of dozens of ways to subvert them.
For instance, I could just fly over the US, buy/borrow/steal a copy of whatever software I wanted, dupe the CD and label it "Backstreet Boy's Greatest Hits" for my carry-on CD case.
------
Today's Top Deals
Only Outlaws Will have Strong Crypto.
I feel that the only good laws are ones that can be enforced to a reasonable degree. If we had no police officers that gave speeding tickets, then having speed limits would not do any good. I feel that higher level encryption can be had by anyone that wants it. They can just download it from anywhere. The only things that keeps people from illegally downloading it is a little message that says "If you don't live in the US, please download the suckier version." You don't have to be evil just to circumvent the system and get higher level encryption. Anyone can just click the button to download it. Therefore, I don't think this law should be in place as there is no way to enforce it.
Come on, how is it news that cryptography was broken? It's not hard! All it takes is time. The Distrubuted.net clients taught us that. Yes, it's bad that the cryptography was broken, but how can any Slashdot reader see this as anything more than the inevitable conclusion of using too weak a standard? Even 128-bit encryption can be cracked, given enough time and enough computers crunching on it!
HE WAS/IS A CITIZEN OF THE USA
Since when? Reid is a British subject, not a US Citizen.
It is extremely easy for anyone with a computer and internet connection to get their hands on strong encryption. Just because one person chose to use weaker encryption and had his files broken by our government, it does NOT mean that he could not have found PGP on the internet and used that instead. Crypto export regulations are worthless and hurt US business (and even US Free Software).
E4M (encryption for the masses) http://www.e4m.net/ is now merged into SecurStar in Germany that offers 256-bit filesystem encryption for Windows. Not in the US.
PGPdisk has been around for a long time.
So restricting US export will do nothing.
Users of *nix systems will probably have even more choices.
Bonus: PGP-folder-hooks in mutt
My answer is "no," the U.S. should not prevent the exportation of encryption (as if it were so difficult for someone to smuggle a CD out of the country). It's a silly, feel-good measure, as nobody who is going to use encryption for nefarious purposes will be even mildly troubled by it.
However, the U.S. has traditionally prevented the exportation of encryption and only now permit it when it is wimpy enough to be easily breakable. So, is it really all that surprising that this happened?
This doesn't prove out the fact that we should restrict crypto export to 40 bits... What it proves is that this guy was an idiot for relying on it. We all know that restricting the export of anything like intellectual property is like trying to catch helium molecules with a screen door. Additionally this policy is so arrogant to assume that the US is the only source for this type of technology... OK, ignorant/arrogant, whatever...
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
If the default encryption made it easier to "recover valuable information form the system" then it is clearly not doing a good job, should not be used and to be replaced by a better version.
I mean, afterall, where's the point in encrypting your stuff in the first place if it can be more or less trivially cracked?
No, this isn't about terrorists, it's about an obviously inferiour/defective product.
Why do people think that having a law regarding exporting software/code is going to stop ANYONE from using it? It's just like gun laws in Canada, the only people who are affected are the law abiding citizens who legally use their guns, or have them for decoration. If someone REALLY wants to use 128 bit encryption, they are going to. There is no way around that. Software is so easily obtainable that anyone who has access to a Windows platform can download it and install it. It really is a no brainer.
Now for this guy who happened to have 40-bit encryption installed by default, he's just a moron then. He obviously didn't know that 40-bit was easily breakable, he didn't care, or didn't take the 10 seconds to download and enable 128 bit on his computer.
I chalk it up to stupidy on his part for not simply looking for the stronger encryption (it's out there, and easily obtainable).
Now for the conspiracy theorists: He wasn't ACTUALLY using 40-bit encryption, that's what they want you to think. He was using the full 128-bit encryption, but the NSA can easily crack that level now due to the computer power they have. They simply tell the media it's 40-bit just so that we don't come up and develop something even more powerful which would take them longer to decrypt.
I have no signature
He was/is a citizen of the USA.
No he wasn't.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
He's obviously a complete idiot for only using 40-bit encryption in the first place. He's an idiot for trying to light the shoes with a match.
Conclusion: We know the guy is an idiot... what would happen if a SMART person tried this?
I thought the US annexed the UK with mtv and endless pop culture in the early 80's.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
should the US prohibit the export of high-encryption software?
Oh FFS!
Must we go over this again!
Its already been exported!
Look
-export-a-crypto-system-sig -RSA-3-lines-PERL
#!/bin/perl -sp0777iX+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0j]dsj
$/=unpack('H*',$_);$_=`echo 16dio\U$k"SK$/SM$n\EsN0p[lN*1
lK[d2%Sa2/d0$^Ixp"|dc`;s/\W//g;$_=pack('H*',/((
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
128-bit Encryption Becomes the Default in Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 (SP2)
The Windows® 2000 operating system was the first Microsoft platform with 128-bit encryption to be shipped internationally after the United States government relaxed its export restrictions for strong encryption in early 2000. Microsoft has obtained the necessary approvals to ship Windows 2000 with strong encryption to all customers worldwide except U.S. embargoed destinations.
Remember, terrorists are like most of the people in the world in that they are not computer geeks. They're not interested in having the latest kernel or compiling gnupg by hand. Like Aunt Tillie, they have other things to do with their time, namely blowing stuff up. To that end, they're going to choose a software package that is already built and easy to use.
In fact, we should just make terrorism illegal, then people would stop. Because criminals follow the law, right?
Even though Osama was able to get a bunch of people into US flight schools, he surely wouldn't've been able to go to CompUSA, buy a copy of W2K off the shelf, and somehow get a 5 x 5 x 1/16" piece of plastic outside a country with roughly 10,000 miles of borders and 1500 international flights daily. Nope, no way that coulda happened.
Considering how much planning and communication had to take place for 9/11 to happen, we only have a video tape and a few files? Sounds like the low tech method works better for keeping things under raps. Is a computer isn't going to commit suicide if the FBI catches it (well I suppose you could boobie trap it). A terrorist on the otherhand can mislead, or commit suicide. The only thing weak encryption does is make businesses more vulnerable to government snooping and crackers. Plus the government can use things like a warrant to get access. Oh I forgot they hate having to ask judges for warrants and answering questions like "do you have sufficient proof or cause?"
Export Level encryption proves insufficient.
That's the point.
Don't you think one of the reasons the government would want weak encryption in foriegn (and therefor, possibly adversarial) computers, so it's easier to break into them?
Remember, for the most part, US laws protect US citizens, and are valid only within the confines of the United States. Since we don't really seem to care about how our government gathers information outside our country, It makes sense that the Government would want to make this easy, and one way is through export controls.
Don't like it? You have other options.
And note to Eurotrolls, who might take the chance to cry US-centric, or brute american, or whatever trash you usually spew, don't think for a second your government isn't engaged in every kind of spying it can.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
40 bit
128 bit
Cowboy Neal with a pen
Yeah, yeah. That's what they all say... :-)
I dunno... What do you wanna do?
All it takes is one computer savvy member of al-Qaeda to compile a decent encryption package and make sure their operatives know how to use it. That's the whole point of al-Qaeda, training their guys and equipping them with the best tools.
-- Sigs are for losers
Who needs it? Well, businesses, anybody with information they want to keep private, anybody with information they don't want their bosses or employers to know, anybody who keeps secret information or documents that they don't want wife/children/family/parents to pry into, people with mistresses, and yes, perhaps some really bad people like terrorists.
The fact that one already acknowledged to be EXTREMELY incompetent terrorist who failed to successfully ignite his shoe bomb (which was packed with high explosive) ALSO failed to properly obtain a high security add-on for his computer is evidence of exactly one thing: his incompetence. Not of the effectiveness of export restrictions. So while I agree that perhaps investigators obtained useful information because he was using weak encryption, and that is fortunate, export restrictions would not prevent a determined, modestly informed criminal or criminal organization from using real crypto (as opposed to 40 bit crippleware).
You could argue that a really determined criminal could take down a plane too. That's probably true, but we're talking about levels of effort on different orders of magnitude here. One involves 5 minutes and a few clicks on a computer. The other involves serious tactical planning to commit a terrorist act. Conclusion: crypto export restrictions have never protected us from a competent criminal, and they still cause economic harm by restricting free trade of goods that support proper encryption by US companies, giving unfair advantage to foreign companies.
So banning 128bit encryption from export from the US will stop everyone getting hold of the AES standard Rjindael because US export regulations obviously cover Belgium.
What a dum idea.
Steve.
The drives contain more than 17,000 files. Though all of them are related to al-Qa'ida in some way, many are humdrum and dull. Others are not. The interesting files tend to be protected by sophisticated passwords or are encrypted, and the Journal is still working to decode them. One file, in particular, took five days to crack, using several computers. The reporters gained access to it on Sunday.
It's amazing to me that these savvy WSJ reporters would admit to circumventing security measures in Windows 2000 in order to access these files! Don't they know that anything they say can and will be used against them in a court of flaws?
I wonder if Junis' email is on either of these? Oh, wait, never mind, they aren't Commodore drives.
bugger 40 bits.. bugger exporting from the US. But should we europeans allow the US to use AES?
the US is no longer the top of encryption.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
So let me get this straight...
Two journalist are in Afghanistan, one of their laptop is broken, so they deside to buy anther one.
So far, so good, I would probably have tried to repair it and ask for replacement, but then, I am not in Afghanistan.
They buy two computers, another laptop and a desktop. What did they buy the desktop for again?
And they buy it from people who are looting buildings? I always thought journalist to have low ethics anyway...
Instead of re-installing the PC, they decide to look at what is on it. Ok, I can understand that, but they must have spent quite some time looking at those files to determine that they were willing to spend five days to crack some of the encrypted files they found.
In other words, two american journalist pick up a PC (they had no reason to buy), and they happen to find Terrorist secret files on it. Sounds too good to be true. I don't buy it, it's a setup.
And now they use that to attest of the validity of the export restriction on encryption.
If the BSA or RIIA is going after me because I have some illegal stuff on my hard disk, I can just claim that I got my PC second hand, and that all this stuff was left there by the terrorists who had the PC first...
Black holes occur when God divides by zero.
Let's not forget , where the Taliban got their weapons.....
Why do people think that having a law regarding exporting software/code is going to stop ANYONE from using it?
And laws against theft don't stop determined shoplifters, and laws against copyright infringement don't stop determined Napster users, et cetera, et cetera. But that's not the point. The point is to make it (a) difficult and (b) punishable if someone does it, in order to keep it to a minimum.
A better argument would be to point out that there are ways to circumvent the law without breaking it -- by simply creating the software/hardware in another country using the same mathematical principles, for instance. But for the love of Pete, people, stop using "laws can always be broken" as an argument against making laws.
If this guy was informed about cryptography (not necessarily knowledgable, but informed - sort of like having the equivalent of a financial planner for cryptography) he would've used one of a number of bolt on products to really secure his computer. Some of these products are commercial, others are open source. He may have more difficulty getting (and if he's properly informed - less trust in) the higher grade commercial packages but it'd still be doable. Fly to California, go to Fry's and buy it. If he goes for the source code route its just about impossible to police. You can get it anywhere in the world where there's an internet connection or a mail system (CD ROM or a package of floppies through the mail).
Saying that 40 bit encryption is an assistance to the CIA/FBI/NSA is only true if you rely on having stupid terrorists, in this case it was obviously true. Suppose they hired the equivalent of a director of IT though, who would come up with approved solutions. Life would become more difficult for the government. Whether the solutions that are proposed are legal or not doesn't matter. You're planning on blowing up aircraft, knocking down buildings and killing people. You won't even bat an eyelash at breaking encryption laws.
What low grade encryption really helps with is gathering data against ordinary citizens such as the guy who was a bit less than honest about his tax return.
Also, despite this low grade encryption the attack wasn't stopped. It's only after everybodies eyes were on this guy that his computer was examined and found to have low grade encryption.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
I seriously doubt it. Over a year ago, Notes (Domino, actually) integrated the International and US versions of their product.. around the same time that the US loosened the export regs for strong encryption so long as the govt is supplied with the source code (not necessarily any backdoor keys)
Intelligent Life on Earth
I've just read 50 posts saying that limiting export strength encryption won't stop any non-US people from using higher encryption. I agree that this makes perfect sense. It's completely logical.
But everyone seems to conveniently ignore the fact that this group DID rely on the export strength encryption that they had available. They DIDN'T use PGP or any one of the myriad of other options for better encryption. Perhaps the premise that a slashdot reader is familiar with other encryption techniques isn't equivalent to the premise that an Al-Qaida member will be familiar with other encryption techniques.
Any reasonable and complete argument against limiting export strength encryption at least needs to address this fact. One could argue that it is an unusual case, that it won't be repeated, that you don't care if non-US folks have default access to better encryption, etc.
But arguing that it will never stop anyone from using better techniques seems silly when presented with this case of a group using exactly the default abilities that they were given in Win2k.
"Should the US prohibit the export of high-encryption software? Here is a case where the default values (40 bit) clearly helped recover valuable information from a system."
If the US could somehow ensure that we were the only ones who provided encryption, this may be an argument on national security bounds. However, we cannot.
If anything, all of this talk about encryption has provided criminals with the knowledge that we can eventually break in. Even if that were not the case, better encryption is available in any of over a hundred countries, many with little concern for US regulations. I believe 128-bit encryption has been freely available for years, provided by companies outside the US.
We need freely available encryption of every higher levels to stay ahead of our enemies (and some would argue our friends). Consider it only took five days to break the 40-bit encryption. How long would it take someone to brute force his or her way into a financial institution? Banks, trading firms; electronic merchants, etc. are and or should be constantly upgrading their security and encryption levels.
Encryption should be viewed like a car. A car has very powerful, valuable, perhaps even essential uses. Unfortunately, people can use cars to rob, kidnap, and murder. Still, we allow and even encourage access to cars because the benefits far outweigh the problems that periodically occur.
Correct. 40-bit keys have no protective value. Remember the article about IBM's crypto chip being broken? (Somebody please provide the link to /. article, I can't at the moment.) In practice, they broke single DES, 56 bits worth of security in a good block cipher. In brute force.
It took at most 2 days with ~1000 $US worth of gear to find the key. Let's assume that they needed the full 48 hours to get that key broken. Simple math follows:
48 hours is 48*3600 seconds. It takes this much time to brute-force a 56-bit key. 40 bits is 1/(2^16) times the size of that, hence the time to break a 40-bit key with similar equipment is 48*3600/(2^16) seconds. This is no more than about 2.6 seconds.
To underline this as clearly as I can: 40-bit keys provide NO security. They may have provided some, at a time - but definetely not for some time now.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
The ability to protect and secure information is vital to the growth of electronic commerce and to the growth of the Internet itself.
You are absolutely right. I'm surprised that sheer profit motive alone hasn't pushed big software corporations and their pals in Congress to permit and even encourage the export of more sophisticated encryption. Using weak encryption makes about as much sense as guarding your premises with flimsy locks and corrugated fences. I'm just as interested in keeping the government out of my business as I am keeping out competitors.
So what if better code-making leads to better code-breaking? You build better bullet-proof glass, and someone comes up with better bullets. (Likewise missile shield: missiles; mousetrap: mouse, etc.) It's progress. It's full employment for developers, programmers and marketers. I think profit motive will trump "patriotism" on this issue.
We need to stop the export of strong encryption. While we are at it, we should probably go ahead and prevent foreigners from CREATING strong encryption. There is no reason for Operation Infinite Justice to target all those criminal foreign programmers, especially those evil terrorist scum behind GNUPG, those foreign OpenSSH programmers, the entire development staff of OpenBSD, and probably a good dozen other groups. Hell, as long as we are at it, we should probably bomb all of Ireland and India, I hear that they have quite a few proficient programmers who could produce this stuff as well. And what about that Schneier guy? His "Applied Cryptography" is probably the number one source of information about writing crypto apps as well, we should probably kill him so that he can stop showing people how easy it is to write crypto apps with rudimentary programming skills.
Fuck it, why don't we just nuke EVERYONE else and start wearing helmets everywhere. Because, you know, we just need to be safe.
The only real newsworthy bit I saw in it is that apparently the people who bought the laptop and then decrypted the disk are not govenrment operatives, but "just" people working for the Wall Street Journal. If anything, this says that moderate cryptography knowledge has become routine in corporate America.
When the NSA can uncover my deepest secrets, that's one thing. When a potential employer can decrypt anything protected with twenty year old technology, I don't worry yet, but talk to me again in my mid-40s. I wonder when some of the early posts to alt.anonymous.* will become decipherable.
The drives contain more than 17,000 files. Though all of them are related to al-Qa'ida in some way, many are humdrum and dull. Others are not. The interesting files tend to be protected by sophisticated passwords or are encrypted, and the Journal is still working to decode them.
Good thing our country is being saved by the WSJ. I wouldn't want those journalist clowns over at the FBI performing any kind of evidence gathering.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
"why it's always to usa to restrict something?"
Um... maybe because we're the world's biggest importer/exporter of just about everything under the sun?
"They think they are the king of the world,"
And unlike all the other crackpots out there who think the same thing, we're right.
" but why should they decide for other country what to do?"
We decide only so far as how that country interacts with the US. After all, we're talking about export restrictions from the US, aren't we? The rest of the world has no right to dictate how we handle our own affairs or how we make decisions that affect us.
"that's the same for encryption, US should control everything, every bits, every communication, every philosophies?"
Control? Probably not. But have a hand in it or an eye on it for the sake of improving our own? Hell yes. And if you don't like dealing with US export policies, there's always the alternative of not using US software. Ever think of that before you started whining?
"sorry, but I just hate US way of thinking and Bush administration."
You hate it so much you come to a forum where the majority of the participants are from the US?
"I lives in Canada and we are becoming a state of the US Empire, I just soooo hate and disapprove this,"
... and bitching about it here is more effective than writing a letter of complaint to your MPs because...?
"I wanna go somewhere else!"
... and Slashdot counts as "somewhere else" because...?
Cheer up
It coud be worse if the government lied to us
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Despite this public knowledge, Al Quaeda has been using weak (MS-supplied) crypto to protect sensitive information... that could be discovered within days. Therefore:
Just my US$0.02...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I know this is definitely an "anti-slashdot opinion" take on the matter, but hear me out.
Just to be clear, I don't really have views on eportation of encryption. In this case, however, I see a lot of responses that just repeat the party lines "encryption can be found outside the US", "the US doesn't have a monopoly", and "criminals will get encryption anyway"
In this particular case these just aren't true. We got useful information BECAUSE the encryption used was weak. Ther's no way to calculate how many lives were potentially saved because of this situation, but as far as I'm concerned one life saved would be enough to justify exportation laws. It's not that strong encryption won't be found outside the US but that it's more difficult to get ahold of. If ridiculously strong encryption was available and packaged by default with operating systems, we would have had a much harder time getting access to those files. So, in this situation at least, the fact that strong encryption was not redily available did do some good.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
We should be more worried about importing strong encryption right? Hell, Osama can go over to the two countries to the right and get better stuff.
Considering India and Pakistan are making and programming the super computers of the world, he could be using 666299465164-Bit encryption right?
Hell, he could be breaking our encryption. Right now he's reading your lame PGP encoded e-mails about that rash.
Seriously though, there are two major points here: Terrorists want you to read the contents of their hard drives. They do the things they do for attention/a message/for fun/whatever. And two, they already used encryption of sorts... when they bombed the WTC the first time they spoke in code on the phone.
Security through obscurity? No. Why bother encrypting ever letter and white space when you can change a few words and render the conversation useless to an outside listener.
Cryptography is nothing new, and wasn't invented for the computer. It goes way back, and takes many forms. Nothing you can do about that.
Get your Unix fortune now!
It used ot be that the French version was horribly cripled. Lotus folks actually compared it to sending mail on a postcard :-)
Anyway, it was done this way becaue th eFrench did NOT want the US Govt. to have an easier time decrypting the documens than did the French Govt. so they required a really poor encryption be used in Notes. Once the US Govt. dropped it's export restricitons the French Govt. lifted this requirement since this placed us all on a "level" playing field. One of the point revisions of R5 brought nearly all of the versions together except the French I THINK. Due to the extreme crippling they had to do the French may have had their own upgrade or have been forced to reissue certs and IDs - I'm fuzzy on this. I believe if you spend some time on the Notes site you'll find your answer.
On a plus note - Lotus has determined that 128 just isn't good enough. They mentioned plans to upgrade the crypto at Lotusphere last year but it probably won't be there till RNext goes gold. If there's one product out there that actually seems to care about security and was WAY ahead of the certificate thing it's Notes. And no, they aren't perfect...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
My God, it seems like some of you posters do nothing but cut-and-paste posts from articles five years ago!
1.) Export restrictions aren't about making it impossible to get high encryption (that in and of itself would be impossible), but to make it more difficult. Much like the point of encryption itself. Sure, you could get PGP and the like, but could you be bothered to go out of your way like that? Obviously at least one criminal didn't, or else you wouldn't be reading this.
2.) No, the criminals won't automatically be the most heavily-encrypted amongst us. If you actually took two seconds to read the description of the article (if not the article itself), you'd see that this is about a very big isntance where a criminal DIDN'T use heavy encryption. Your argument officially doesn't hold as much water as it used to any more. Time to try something new.
3.) This is about EXPORT restrictions. EXPORT! EXPORT! You know, where something LEAVES THE US!?!? Restricting what kind of crypto can be exported doesn't do a damned thing to the domestic market unless you're a seller trying to export your stuff or you're a foreign organization trying to buy the software on the open market. Restrictions on domestic crypto sale and use may or may not be an issue, but it doesn't have a damned thing to do with this article beyond sharing the words "crypto" and "export." If you read things more closely than your average IRC bot, you'd have noticed that.
Go ahead, mod me down to -17 flamebait or troll or whatever. Just so long as you're spending your mod points on sending me down there instead of modding up some of the posts I've seen in here so far described as "interesting" and "insightful."
There I was, foaming at the mouth and ready to launch into a "how can you be so stupid?" diatribe. How can you keep encryption out of the hands of Bad People by denying it to Good People? In general terms, writing laws aimed at criminals is futile, because the criminals (by definition!) won't care about the law and will use whatever technology or methods they want. Nobody would be stupid or lazy or overconfident enough to use the lame default encryption on an export system, surely?
And then I read the article.
The al-Qa'ida machine was indeed running 40 bit encryption. It's hard to credit, but it really does appear that they simply were too stupid or too lazy or overconfident to upgrade the default lame-o-crypt settings. It's astonishing, especially compared to the planning that they put into September 11th, but there it is.
No, I don't think we should try and ban strong encryption. There are plenty of Good People who can make use of it (think Tibet), and any competent and determined Bad People can get it anyway. But these opponents just demonstrated clearly that while they were determined, they were not competent, and that changes my mind, just a litle.
I can see an argument for encouraging developers (Microsoft, MacOS and yes, Linux hackers) to supply 40 bit security by default on all consumer systems. Aunt Jemima doesn't need strong encryption, you and I probably don't need it. I wouldn't want strong encryption to be limited, but honest to god, I'd be flattered if anyone ever thought it was worth breaking even 40 bits worth on anything that I produced. I want the option to upgrade to be there, but I feel no particular need to use it, and here's the kicker: the less we kick up a fuss about it - and just quietly download the strong stuff ourselves without demanding that Aunt Jemina have it by default - the better.
I can't help but think that the more noise we make about the distinctions between low and high encryption, the more likely it is that even stupid, lazy, overconfident terrorists will perk up their ears and ask "Hey! Is this something we should be thinking about? Maybe we should send Achmed out to buy a copy of 'Security For Dummies'." Because they clearly are dummies, and I'm quite happy for them to stay that way, thanks all the same.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Recorded voice: "Please press 1 if your call is related to the time-limited explosives exchange program. Please press 2 if you are experiencing problems igniting your shoes. Or please hold to speak to a support terrorist."
(time passes)
Recorded voice: "Please hold.. your call is important to us, brother. We are currently transitioning our support strategy to Compaq Global Services."
(time passes.. bad musak to the tune of "The Girl from Ipanema")
BoFA (Bastard Operator from Afghanistan): "Hello, caller, you're through."
T: "Hi, er.. yeah.. my laptop seems to be broken.. I can't decrypt my files!"
BoFA: "Are you using the Standard Terrorist Operating Environment?"
T: "Er.. no.. my cell leader says that this other routine we found on the internet is more secure."
BoFA: "I'm afraid we only support the STOE with W2K SP2 128-bit EFS."
T: "Is there anything you can do?"
BoFA: "You can wipe the laptop and start again. We can do that for you, but we'll have to charge 10,000,000,000,000 afghanis (or US$100) to your cost code."
T: "But it's got secret plans of the Pentagon on it!"
BoFA: "I'm sorry, I can't help you. If every terrorist picks their favourite non-symmetric crypto, we can't be expected to know them all. We're trying to run an elite multinational terrorist organisation here."
T: "Okay.. I'll try somewhere else. On another matter, can you help me with my Palm Pilot? I stuffed it with C4, and now it won't start properly."
BoFA: "I'm afraid we only support Pocket PC."
*click*
somehow get a 5 x 5 x 1/16" piece of plastic outside a country
Why bother?
Just print the code in a book (or even use the 3-line RSA algoritham on a bit of paper) and it was perfectly legal to export it from the US (freedom of the press).
This is how the international PGP versions were legitematley exported, and then scanned in using OCR to get the code in an electronic format again.
This was partly why the law was overturned. What is the point in banning the export of code in an electronic format, when it was perfectly legal (first amendment) to export in a writen format.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
It took them a whole 5 days to crack the 40-bit Win2K encryption. It really makes one realise how stupid and short-sighted the DVD people were when they used 40-bits for DVD's CSS. Even without dodgy programming by Xing, the system would still have been brute-forced quite easily. Issues of whether they should have implemented CSS at all aside, they basically presented an unlocked house with a sign outside saying "burgle me!" BTW, what did the article mean by "super-computers" - Crays, or those Apples that couldn't be exported to France?
128 bit- HaHa, silly mortal! You'll never unlock my secrets before the apocolypse comes!!!
64 bit- You'll get my secrets when they're no longer of any use! (RC5 anyone?)
56 bit- Never! Never will you have my secrets. If never means three weeks from now anyway.
40 bit- You'll have to arm-wrestle me for access.
32 bit- You'll have to thumbwrestle me for access.
24 bit- You want access? You'll pry it from my cold, dead... Hey, give that back!!!
8 bit- What's your favorite color?
4 bit- Guess my shoe size
1 bit- Want access?
0 No
1 Yes
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Why is he an idiot? He had C4 of some sort in the shoes and det cord that could've ignited it had he managed to get the match to light the cord. It WOULD have worked. Ask a military or demo person about it. The det cord would supposedly have burned hot enough to lite C4 but the downside is that det cord that can do that is HARD to light with a match. Ergo - he picked the right tool for the "job" but an observant flight attendant stopped him! Yeah, I'd question blowing one's self up but at least he was doing it in a way that would have the intended effect!
As for the encryption - duh! READ the article, it was on a HD that didn't belong to him. The report was a debriefing of the guy written by a debriefer. He had NO control over what encryption was done on it - it could've been skywritten from an airplane for all the "control" he had over it. The mistake in this case was NOT his, it was some other moron. (sigh)
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Okay, breaking WIN2K passwords - no biggie. Getting around the NTFS file permissions, no biggie. Cracking a WORD password, brute force later versions, others trivial, no biggie.
:-) Just to hang on to mind you, no real use for it of course...
Getting the file decrypted that had been encrypted using the WIN2K filesystem?
Umm, okay I want to know what software was used to attack this please. I've yet to see anything out there designed to break file system encryption in WIN2K but if someone has a link I'd REALLY appreciate it
Oh, and two guys bebopping around in Afghanistan had ready access to this? I think I smell fish here!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
What the crypto regulations really do is prevent most people in the USA from adopting it. None of the three-letter agencies want everyone encrypting their E-mail or network traffic by default. That simply wouldn't do -- if everyone did it, how would they know who actually has something to hide? So they make it a pain in the ass for software developers to incorporate it into their software and they make it a pain in the ass for most users (Who don't know to go to international sites where you don't have to fill out a form to download the software) to get it.
The irony is that now they're bitching because the network is so insecure and how a cyber-attack could bring down public utilities and banks and things. Well they're just reaping what they've sown. The network would have tended to cryptographic authentication and tighter security except for the artificial and fundamentally useless restrictions the federal government has put in place.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ok, did you read the article?
For all the noise that's being made about how easy it is to get high-encryption software & how laws cannot or will have no effect on criminal behavior.... Guess what?
It worked. The terrorists used the east easily & readily available tool -- the default windows 40-bit encryption.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Yes, when US lives are at stake. Let the criminals make their own encryption to kill themselves.
Something that runs parallel to this is the world of Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age." It goes something like once there exists a secure and anonymous network for individuals to exhange information and transactions, the current world order collapses. Why? Because governments can no longer track the flow of money.
The crypto is already out. Forbidding "export"? Why? It's like banning the export of algebra.
The fallacy mayhap is a result of the acceptance of the concept of non-things like "intellectual property". Since a song or a story has the cache of an actual physical object under the new batch of laws, somehow cryptological methods are also like physical objects, and can be stopped at the border by Customs if they find it hidden in someone's suitcase.
Like all "Homeland Security" notions, banning the immaterial mathematics of crypto only satisfies the need for people to feel safer. If that shoeboy had used 128-bit encryption, the calls for programmer blood would be deafening us. But, remember, he wouldn't need crypto to bring a shoe on the plane, so all the possible recriminations would have been for naught.
The objust of terrorism is to bring terror to your enemy, to disrupt and destroy and distract, and it looks like the collective consciousness of the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia are falling into the state of panic and foolishness desired.
Lots of people are saying
"Look how stupid Al-Quaeda are"
"They must be dumb to use it"
"Look, export restrictions helped us"
All of these statements are based on big assumptions.
First, why do we assume they thought their data was encrypted and secure forever from anyone? There are othe reasons for using the windows file encryption.. just to prevent casual accidental access to a file by another user, for instance. It's there, why not use it?
Who says export restrictions helped? This is the WSJ, not the CIA! If the data was so vital, don't you think that laptop would be in the hands of the government?
Who says having stronger crypto would have mattered? I'm willing to bet that uncle sam can crack 128 bit in a rather short period of time.
(Yes, I know how much computing power that would take)
And... someone please correct me here, because I'm not 100% on this.. but..
This was windows file encryption. The key is stored somewhere in your profile, encrypted by your password perhaps.
Windows passwords are EASY to brute force.
Which did they crack here? The windows password, or the actualy 40 bit key for the encrypted file? I'm willing to bet it was just a windows password.... oooh, that's hard.
There are a lot of arguments about how a reasonably motivated terrorist can just code their own strong crypto. But that kind of misses the point.
I would imagine that most decryption is done in bulk, sifting through for the occasional terrorist tidbit. Even if some terrorists do use 128+ bit, it frees up a hell of a lot of resources if the majority of the load is still easily crackable. It also allows the authorities to montior more different sources so now they can add minor suspects rather than having to focus on the major ones.
So, yes, for the most sophisticated criminals, export laws don't make a difference. For the total bulk work that the NSA etc. do, reducing the number of people with strong crypto makes their lives easier.
Some of these people have remarked upon, but others they haven't.
1) Whether they used export-grade or real encryption made absolutely no difference in this case in terms of preventing terrorism, saving lives, etc. All that prevented that plane from blowing up is that this guy had bad luck lighting his detonator cord and somebody noticed him. Even if there were no encryption of any sort in the world it would have made no difference in this case. It was all a matter of dumb luck, bad shoe-bomb design, and an attentive person. The only use the file has now is as evidence, and of course there are valid concerns as to its legitimacy.
Conclusion: perhaps we should be concentrating on keeping bombs off of planes (which we are finally starting to do, albeit in a half-assed ass-covering sort of way) instead of on crypto exports.
2) This file was kept on a communal Al-Qaeda PC. It happened to be encrypted using Windows EFS, but most of the other contents of the machine--many of them just as valuable as inteligence or evidence--were not.
3) Again, this file was encrypted on a desktop machine in Kabul. The only possible way Americans could get a look at it would be on the unlikely chance that we took over the entire country of Afghanistan. Otherwise the CIA/NSA/etc. never gets a look at this file, encrypted or no. Presumably the reason the file was encrypted was to prevent other members of Al-Qaeda who had access to the machine from looking at it, not to foil Americans. For these purposes 40-bit Windows EFS is probably just fine.
4) A correlary: presumably when Al-Qaeda wants to encrypt something that the CIA/NSA/etc. actually might have a chance to intercept, they use real encryption. i.e. they presumably use PGP for their email. (Although reports have them into steganography instead, presumably because with intercepted encrypted email at least you know who sent it, when, and to whom.)
In other words: there's nothing to see here. If this is the best the anti-cryptos can come up with then export-crypto would be quite safe in a reasonable world. (Of course no one said Washington after Sept. 11 was anywhere near reasonable.)
> The problem with that is that your implementation
> may be flawed - this accounts for the bulk of the
> cracked encryption. That's why it's best to use
> known good encryption.
I don't think this is very likely. While it's easy to write buggy C code, most complete descriptions of an encryption algorithm come with test input and output. If your implementation of the block cipher works on these, it's pretty damn unlikely that it is wrong in general.
Others are so easy to implement (RC4) that bugs are pretty far-fetched.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The administration might have had a better chance of getting the crypto policy they wanted but for the history of Hoover's abuse of office. The FBI has never come to terms with the fact that the concerns that the FBI might abuse the intercept powers they demanded were legitimate. Hoover's diservice to democracy was two-fold. First he attacked democracy directly by attacking democratic values, using the power of his office to persecute his political opponents, he even had Charlie Chaplin exiled for the 'crime' of satirizing him. Second Hoover attacked democracy indirectly, by abusing the powers of the state he made it necessary to curtail them. Having abused those powers in the past, the state cannot use them now that they might be necessary to defend democracy.
Win2K uses DES, which is notoriously vulnerable to today's raw CPU power and dedicated, custom-built machines. [eff.org]
DES is not 'notoriously vulnerable', it can be broken by a well financed and tecnically adept adversary, but it is not a negligible degree of protection. The weakened 40 bit crypto used in SSL can be cracked with readilly available resources however.
The point that everyone appears to be missing is that export of W2K to Taleban controlled Afghanistan was illegal. If the Taleban can get hold of illegal copies of W2K they can get hold of illegal crypto upgrades.
Al-Quaeda/Bin Laden operatives are not the crime geniuses the US government say they are. As a matter of fact, they appear as pretty incompetent to me.
That is not unusual, in fact it is the rule. Terrorist movements are founded by fruitcakes for fruitcakes. Bin Laden had the somewhat bizare idea that restaging Pearl Harbor would cause them to withdraw from Saudi Arabia and let him conduct a coup. There were at least six major Al Qaeda operations planned during the Clinton Presidency that were foiled.
Incidentally it is somewhat hard to credit GOP claims that the military has been decimated under Clinton when that same military was able to conquer Afghanistan in a matter of weeks with only a fraction of its strength. The last time Afghanistan was conquered it was Ghangis Khan doing the conquering.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I'm assuming that 40 bits is vulnerable because you are able to quickly test each permutation against a file to see if it looks like you've found the key. If the files were compressed, then unless you knew the compression algorithm and could try it out against an entire file, your test speed would drop dramatically, no?
Not that that would help Mr. Shoebomber, as he was using an encrypted filesystem where there are bound to be lots and lots of clues as to whether you've got the right key (i.e., the filesystem makes sense, has valid pointers, etc.).
Surely this can be some small factor, at least?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
and it probably happened just the same way as it would in any organisation... Pointy Bearded Boss tells computer-guy to 'make the computer secure' or something. Computer guy thinks "Bollocks to that, we're in the arse end of Afghanistan, who's going to come and get it?" ,uses the default available, and goes for a coffee. PBB gives him a slap on the back and everyone has a nice glowy feeling.
Next thing, al-qaeda is owned by the l33t nsa haxors, and their credit card numbers are all over irc.
bummer for the sysadmin.
This is dead-on accurate. The line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" is pretty damn thin, probably even non-existant. Mostly, the thing that determines what label applies is which side you are on.
By current standards, the actions of the French Resistance in WWII would be considered "terrorism". However, the partisans of the French Resistance will probably never be refered to as terrorists, because their opponents (the Nazis) are nearly universally recognized as being evil and (more importantly) they were on the winning side
IMHO what seperates the terrorist from a legitimate partisan is that the latter will not intentionally target civilians. The Pentagon was a valid military target by the accepted standards of warfare and international law; the WTC was not. If the 9/11 bombers had taken over the planes on the ground and evacuated the passengers first before making their kamakazi attacks, and if they had restricted themselves to military & government targets, the US would not have the near-universal international support we are currently enjoying for our military efforts in Afghanistan. If you want to be treated as a soldier and not a murderer, you need to play by the accepted rules of warfare. The fact that al-Queda and other terrorist groups fail to understand this basic premise just goes to show how ignorant and delusional they really are.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Clearly they didn't ask the EFF, since as you pointed out, their des cracker can crack a 40 bit key in under 5 minutes.
While it's tempting to think that this is due to some conspiracy on the part of law enforcement to conceal the weakness of 40 bit crypto, I think it's more likely due to ignorance on the part of the people trying to break it. Apparently terrorists aren't the only one unaware of recent advances in cryptography
Sound bytes for industry!
The principle use of encryption today is to prevent theft.
There are millions of credit card transactions every day protected by encryption.
Asking for a ban on strong encryption is like asking a hacker to steal your credit card.
The cost to society of not having strong encryption would be billions of dollars.
This post brought to you Credit card hackers for weak encryption.
Soon, Bill will claim that this is a reason why the government should strengthen the Windows monopoly (SSSCA anyone?) rather than break it up. After all, if al-Queda had used a non-Microsoft OS, the FBI might have less evidence against Reid.
Once we get quantum computing, we'll be able to encrypt at a helluva lot more than 128 bits. I doubt even quentum computers can crack a 8192-bit key.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
So why didn't he go lock himself in the lavatory and light it, instead of trying to do it in his seat?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I think we really need a complete prohibition of calling anything less secure than a 128-bit symmetric cipher "secure". It is fraudulent advertising.
First off, export laws are now set at 128 bits, not 40. Anyone read the article? The computer was running Windows 2000, an operating system released before export controls were relaxed. Of course it had insufficient encryption capabilities! Windows XP now ships with 128-bit encryption in its export version, too.
What, precisely, is the story here?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I guess that's a distinct possibility. I flew quite a bit a week after September 11th (Australia to England, Switzerland, England, Holland, England, Australia) and I don't remember lighters being on the banned items list (though any ignitable materials probably should be), just anything sharp (one girl was seen complaining bitterly at having her tweezers confiscated and they wouldn't be given back at the other end, you just wanted to grab her and tell her to get some perspective).
On the other hand flights to the US did have visibly stricter checking processes. All carry on baggage was being hand searched at the gate on the way out of Sydney.
In any case I still don't think the guy is looking that bright. If a match were the only possible method then why would you try and light your shoe in public where everyone could see and possibly stop you? Surely you'd pop off to the toilet and get the fuse going in private. If the toilets are near the doors you could probably have a good shot at running out and blowing one off or alternatly just sit there and wait for the shit to hit the fan.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park