Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Wants a Backdoor Into Windows
REBloomfield writes "The BBC is reporting that the British Government is working with Microsoft in order to gain backdoor access to hard drives encrypted by the forthcoming Windows Vista file system. Professor Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, urged the Government to contact Microsoft over fears that evidence could be lost by suspects claiming to have forgotten their encryption key."
Oh, and there are a few people who also consider encryption a matter of freedom of speech.
Funny the U.S. government targets Phil Zimmermann for three years but hardly raises so much as an eye when an encryption enabled OS is distributed. From Mr. Zimmermann's homepage: I think that his "criminal activity" was creating an encryption tool that allowed messages to be encrypted beyond what the United States government was capable of deciphering in a timely manner. Does anyone know if this is still enforced? Does anyone know what the max key length is now if it is? I think it was something like 128 bits (that the government could crack) around the time of PGP.
My work here is dung.
Let them try.
We have alternatives.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
This simply doesn't make sense. What prevents an user, using a different tool without said backdoor?
They do a google search for "backdoor" and "windows", then just take their pick. Microsoft if nothing else, offers a variety of backdoors for your every need.
Internet Explorer will offer all the back door access they need
What good is encryption if your government can read it - before long half the criminals in the country know how to decrypt your files - especially they way the British Secret Service has been losing laptops lately....
Let bad guys use deniable encryption schemes and this won't even be a concern... Please, someone in the U.K. gov get a clue about encryption!
\u262D = \u5350
If someone gets a hold of your whole computer, they can read files. If someone hacks your system, they can read your files.
About the only thing windows encryption seems to be able to do is prevent you from recovering your files if your PC ever dies.
Whats the point?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
... until the crack is published :)
(sadly this is more insightful than funny)
\u262D = \u5350
\ They just want to play with the big boys. We all know the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI each have their own key! \
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
Why don't they just use one of the hundreds of backdoors that everyone else uses? Seems to me M$ are already complying with this request several times over.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Pretty sure that's the point of encryption. Making sure that nobody but you and people you trust can read your data, and anyone else up to and including the government can't. Even if they really really want to.
When did a healthy mis-trust of government suddenly get you tin-foil hat status, and a visit from the FBI?
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
This is that definition of "lost" that appeared in the late 20th century. It's akin to the money that the music industry is "losing" due to file sharing. The evidence is not lost, it is as yet, undiscovered, and in any civilized country, we would not assert that there WAS any evidence unless we could actually see it. In the U.K., however, they actually have a law that says that you have to reveal your secret keys to the authorities with no provision for simply not knowing them. You can be convicted of the crime of having white-noise on your disk that authorities assert is encrypted data to which you are refusing to reveal the key. Heck, you could be convicted of a crime for not divulging the key to /dev/random, which is clearly some secret message channel from an unknown party, since messages arrive from it in small bursts!
US export restrictions for cryptographic software were violated when PGP spread worldwide.
This bring up an interesting point on ITAR and the US. Some encryption technologies could violate ITAR if they are done in the US and then exported to other countries. If I remember right, that was part of the reason encryption on OpenBSD was done in Canada.
Oh, and there are a few people who also consider encryption a matter of freedom of speech.
Some would, but how many governements and what is protected under the law. That is different everywhere. Others, also, consider it a privilege.
Some of these laws, in paticualr with the US, are actually there to protect it from other countries. Many people in the country may not want to protect the countires competitive edge but others do and that is part of what our government has been taked with for a long time.
Evolution or ID?
I often see arguments like this one. What's the point for some people to encrypt their files (other than temporary privacy) if you're going to get in trouble later in court anyway for not revealing your keys? Now this might actually be unlikely, but what if average windows user genuinely forgets their password? Seems kind of unfair.
If governments force a backdoor to be installed, it'll be for sale to crackers before the gold masters are pressed, and common knowledge a few weeks later. So "trusted computing" can be subverted using the govt master key. And anyone who actually wants to keep secrets will install somethng that works while not requiring a magic dongle on the mobo. The govt will be able to read data from clueless suspects as they do now. So a win all round. And who doesn't suspect MS would leave backdoors anyway?
It was inevitable something like this would happen after the whole 90 day detention debacle. Labour kept using the excuse of "needing time to break encryption" for requiring 90 days of detention without trial. Anyone with half a brain told them that any decent encryption is going to take many years to break, so I guess this is their response.
I don't really see why the need this anyway.
The government has the RIP Act (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000) which allows them to detain you, with a press gagging order if you refuse to hand over the encryption key they need to decrypt your data. If you refuse or claim you have forgotton and they don't believe you, then it's two years in gaol for you sonny jim.
They only really got this into law because most people don't understand it. Oh and don't forget that since this government came to power the amount of time they can hold you, uncharged, under the terrorism act has gone from 7 to 28 days... and the police want 90! Yes ninety days, 3 months, 2160 hours!
How about making governments install a keylogger before they seize the computer? Hardware or software, it would go in the old tradition of installing a telephone tap. It's not that hard either. Did the government demand that paper notebook makers supply a backdoor so they could decipher drug accounts written in code?
You should not be able to read the files without logging into the computer with your password and/or other identification token.
After logging in, the files are accessable. But not before. Someone who just swipes your PC would boot into Windows but would be unable to read any data files, even with a seperate boot CD. That's the whole idea.
But if the government adds a backdoor, you can bet that a hacker (white or black hat) would find it as well, probably within a few weeks of the OS being out. Thus making the encryption useless.
The whole government complaint is useless anyway because for all they know people can be using deniable encryptionn schemes *today* and they'd never even know about it.
Anyone with something to really hide will use a third-party encryption system, and "lose" the keys to that instead.
Everyone else* will have a computer with a guaranteed back door, which I am willing to bet will be open to hackers on about Day 3 after Vista's launch.
* - Well, everyone else who's not running Linux, of course.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
to idiocy what can be explained by malice. There are a lot of backdoors around, and Windows had functional ones for years (wmf anyone?) but the intentionality of them could have been in doubt. Now if is known, proved, and by design adding another backdoor, one that will not be removed by any hotfix because is a "feature", well, 2 things will probably happen: the bad guys will find how to exploit it making all backdoored windows a target, and the bad guys find know how to disable it, so the most harmed people will be the good ones that should not have anything to hide (and because of that, removing/disabling the backdoor would make them suspectful)
Why would anyone consider 'trusted computing' some binary program which you haven't compiled yourself is beyond my understanding.
Since when does the government have a right to all evidence in any case? One aspect of English law that I thought existed, is that the people should be protected from the government (particularly from self-incrimination). One could reasonably argue that the average citizen needs the availability of government-inaccessible encryption, due to the decreased cost (in terms of time and manpower) required to search through computer records vs. paper records. Current computers, and the massive amounts of data that they store (internet cookies, browsing history, cache data, registry entries, etc.) make fishing expeditions much, much, easier on law enforcement than sifting through physical documents and interviewing co-workers and family.
Not turning over the key (for any reason) is an offense punishable by a couple of years in prison anyway.
Deleted
OS X FileVault...AES128 encryption of your home directory with no backdoors! (At least not that I know of). Ain't nobody reading your files without your key.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
For the same reasons that I use Firefox as a web browser and OpenOffice.org as an office suite, if I felt it necessary to encrypt my filesystem I'd use somebody else's tools to do it. (Even if I weren't aware of such a backdoor into my filesystem).
I recall some years ago, someone found supposedly secret NSA backdoor keys buried in Windows98. I don't recall if it was actually proven, but I would not be surprised if the NSA already has backdoor keys in 98/ME/XP and now Vista. Now the British Government wants their turn. Where will it end? Once MS bows to the British, surely other governments will also demand backdoor keys. Who decides which of those governments get it?
Sooner or later, other organisations (like the RIAA and the MPAA) will also want their keys too (if they don't already have them thanks to their DRM chips). Where will MS draw the line? I highly doubt MS would be very open about how many different governments or other organisations really have backdoor keys.
It is easy for us to say that we'll never use it, or that there are other options out there, but I'm more worried for less computer savvy members of the public who think they are buying a secure system. I know most of those users will never use encryption, but this will set another precident that will further erode all of our rights.
Sorry, cheap jibe.
This is amazing - especially when the idea is being promoted by a 'Professor of Security Engineering' at a reputable university. How can adding a backdoor to security systems be anything other than a massive weakness just waiting to be exploited?
Imagine if this went ahead - the British government would want access to versions of Windows sold in this country, the American government to US copies of Windows, the German government ... and so on and so on... Would Microsoft allow the Chinese government access to their citizens' disks? The Chinese government are signed-up members of The War Against Terror - so they could claim they need access, and besides recent experience says that big businesses will always accommodate governments no matter how repressive.
And it gets worse. Microsoft would either have to make a single key that would open every machine in the World; or they would have to issue copies of all the keys to every government - the British government won't accept not being allowed into a suspected terrorist's (and we have a splendidly wide definition of 'terrorist' in this country) computer purely because the suspect happens to be foreign.
But it will all supposedly remain secure and not fall into the hands of wrong-doers.
The Home Office, IT and Microsoft - what an unholy trinity we have there. With this level of stupidity the legislation can't be far off.
Yes.
Marutukku, pronounced rubberhose.. (or is it rubberhose, pronounced maru tukku? I forget...)
Any politically active programmers out there want to take a crack at maintaining it?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
...the TrueCrypt binaries alone in your possession then every piece of digital media you own that appears to contain random bytes will be accused of holding an encrypted volume and they will torture out of you whatever they want to hear you say.
Oh wait, I forgot... civilized Western nations never commit torture upon their subjects.
FTA:
The system uses BitLocker Drive Encryption through a chip called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) in the computer's motherboard.
It is partly aimed at preventing people from downloading unlicensed films or media.
"This means that by default your hard disk is encrypted by using a key that you cannot physically get at...
The government shouldn't be the only folks horrified at this one. MS wants to turn your entire computer against you, encrypting all of its contents and allowing you to read it only if MS wants to allow it. Even if you're okay with that, imagine if something in the scheme goes wrong? I've used the Windows Encrypting File System in XP, and if you lose your encryption key (not that hard--say, if you reformat your hard drive) you are permanently locked out of all the data you've encrypted.
If this is true, MS really wants a death grip on your computer. I'd never use Vista under those circumstances.
Penny - plain text accounting
The pleasant result of all this is that it dispells the whiff of paranoid conspiracy-theory. The government has been advised to ask for the backdoor access. By a british Cambridge expert. There is every reason to think Microsoft will agree.
There is now simple historical evidence to point the public to. Previously there were more technical , less convincing ones.
The average person is not going to care if Microsoft accidentally included some debugging code in a patch. Even if that made it look like it had a backdoor key. "Whatever that means?", they'll say.
A BBC news article about an expert asking for such a backdoor is a lot more convincing.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
From what I've been reading in the news what's the use of another stupid law when they can just get a couple of ex-Iraq army guys to torture the hell out of them. Most geeks I know would spill the beans as soon as these bad boys showed up. Especially if they show the "illegal key-holder" the film of the British soldiers battering, clubbing, kicking prisoners in Iraq. Isn't this what Tony Blair meant when he said "What's good for the goose is good for the gander"?
{I hate to have to include a disclaimer but this IS sarcasm}
Billions and billions have and are being spent on a fake and false attack on innocent people but the big problem is that YOU may be hiding a few quid on your computer. Fascism has taken over.
The jokes really write themselves.
Seriously, though, I'd store inciminating stuff on something I could get rid of more easily than my hard disk.
Having needed to break into someone's system to recover encrypted files, I can say it's not that simple.
Windows NTFS encryption is certificate based. For installs done by anyone not a professional paranoid, the user has access to the file recovery certificate, and the domain administrator may have access to a file recovery certificate valid domain-wide. To use a certificate stored on the hard drive, you MUST have the password to that certificate... which is NOT changed when you force-change an account password.
So, yes, you can hack a machine, install a trojan, and read the users files when they login next. But, until the user logs in (which, yeah, is usually a short wait) and starts the trojan running under their user ID and password before your trojan can decrypt the files to examine/copy them. Alternately, you can get a dump of the encrypted password files, and try a brute force crack. But if the password used on the account (and, ergo, certificate) is, say, 12 random printable characters... dude, you are so SCREWED.
Fortunately, the time I needed to break in for someone, the password was "only" nine random characters. I used a boot disk to dump the password file. Then, we wandered over to the operator for the school 128-processor Linux cluster with a case of good beer at 3:30 on Friday, explained the problem, and he agreed it would be OK this once to "not notice" the copy of the cracker program that would be blatantly running over the weekend in violation of several rules. We left, "not noticing" the case we were leaving behind. At 9AM Monday morning, I checked my email, and my batch job had left the user password sitting in my inbox.
If it had been a 12 random printable character password, we'd still be waiting for the rest of our lives. And, for the professionally paranoid, I understand it's possible to use a non-default certificate (with potentially a different password) for encrypting files... where the decryption certificate need not be on the machine.
Afterwards, I gently explained to the user that EFS should generally be reserved for situations where you consider the data's loss preferable to its disclosure. "EFS is not quite blow-up-the-building-first security, but it's close." He now reserves EFS for his financial information and consulting work covered under legal privelege.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
It's worth noting that harm can come not only from data being revealed under coercion, but also from data becoming unavailable.
If terrorists or an oppressive government take your computer and hard drives away, anyone who depends on that data is very much out of luck.
For this reason, local encrypted filestores and plausible deniability are only part of the puzzle. Quite a lot more is required, in particular cryptographic online distribution.
A comprehensive solution will need to use a large population of fixed size raw dataspaces spread across the net, instead of local disks. Quite likely, it would be stored steganographically 1:<large-N>:1 so that (for example) changing webcam images could be used as repositories. And it will need cryptographically-random access for site selection and dataspace selection and to individual bits in the dataspaces. And it'll need huge redundancy since the online storage will be inherently unreliable, yet without laying the scheme open to pretty simple differential cryptoanalysis.
That's a very tall order.
You know what the secret code for the backdoor to encrypted data on a harddrive running Vista is gonna be, don't you?
Up-Up-Dn-Dn-Lt-Rt-Lt-Rt-A-B-A-B-Ctrl-Enter
Support the FairTax
Worth pointing out that keyloggers are exactly the route that the FBI here in the US has taken:
http://www.epic.org/crypto/scarfo.html
That's US v. Scarfo; basically a mobster was using PGP to encrypt his communications and rather than breaking the encryption the hard way, the investigators got a warrant to install a keylogger. I'm not sure exactly how they did it, but I'm pretty certain that it was a hardware device implanted in the keyboard, rather than software. (The warrant they got was pretty much a blanket thing, approval for 'hardware, software, and firmware as necessary...') However they didn't divulge the exact methodology in the trial, because they successfully claimed an exemption under the Classified Information Procedures Act.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
When will the courts realize the bloody obvious fact that bits on a hard drive are evidence of nothing! Until computers are not able to be remotely hijacked with all tracks erased, there's no way to prove who put the bits there!!!
As more and more traditional forms of evidence (audio tapes, photos, DNA records, VOTES for god sakes) become digitized, the more we need to be skeptical of them.
And don't bring up digital signatures so long as keyloggers exist.
I used to use BestCrypt as a means of keeping encrypted volumes, but I found TrueCrypt a while back and have been very satisfied. It's open source, cross-platform, and generally works very, very well. For something as important as encrypted data I want to be able to look at the code myself (and more importantly, I want a lot of other people looking at it so they can blow the whistle on any inappropriate backdoors and such).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Institutions such as NIST test the implementations of the algorithms, then the program either gets certified or not.
The problem is that without certification, we do not know whether what they've implemented is what they think they've implemented*.
The point is that they might use some obscure algorithm nobody knows - which has no guaranteed strength; thus one cannot rely on it. They can also implement standard algorithms such as AES or DES - but were they correctly implemented?
Sure - "why don't you take the sources and look at them yourself?" some might say, but is everybody competent enough to do that?
On the other hand, implementing something and then certifying it, means that:
[a] it was done right
[b] it is as strong as the standard says
In the case of encryption, the strength is in the key itself and in the mathematical basis of the algorithm, NOT in the obscurity of the mechanisms applied within the software.
One minor thing - NIST certification is expensive, I doubt TrueCrypt will pass it, unless some company pays for this. Commercial encryption software is a different thing, if they want to be treated seriously, they must go for it. An example is Private Disk.
* an old saying:
The saddest poem
Although I don't know the man, I just looked up what I think is his blog, and provided he's not lying through his teeth, the Politics and Public Policy section of his blog seems quite agreeable in spirit to me.
He also has some really interesting papers on there. (Check out the "Cocaine Auction Protocol" and "Programming Satan's Computer" -- the first is a methodology for creating an un-mediated auction house, the latter is about programming on untrusted networks.)
Of course, to each his own.
Here's the link:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/#Lib
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If you supplied only the first code the system would see a 100MB partition, not 50MB. It would see the 50MB hidden partition as free space, and would begin overwriting it if data were modified.
The algorithm does in fact provide plausible deniability.
I'm not sure about the UK, but in the USA, wouldn't this be a 5th amendment rights issue?
The summary states that this black hole is desirable for "fears that evidence could be lost by suspects claiming to have forgotten their encryption key", but why would a suspect have to say they lost their encryption key? Why not just plead the 5th?
The 5th amendment states: "No person shall [...] nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself [...]"
I honestly do not believe that the contents of a person's hard drive falls into the same category of evidence as eye witnesses or DNA. A personal computer's hard drive, particularly one with an encrypted file system, is effectively an extension of that person's memory and hence any data extracted from it seems very much like testifying against oneself.
http://brandonbloom.name
Britain has sadly already become a police state. Only criminals and cops have guns, cameras everywhere, illegal to state non-liberal opinions, and now this. Once the control structure is fully in place, most Brits will find themselves being openly persecuted. Anyone want to bet how long it will be before they start implanting RFID chips in everyone? They'll start with the kids and say it's for safety.
Unfortunately, some in the U.S. want that here. I hope the red states can save us.
Maybe his long term goal is Muslim rule (though I'm not conviced he's anything more than a power hungry madman who's merely using Islam) but his short term goals generally revolve around hurting/killing people and the general undermining of societies he doesn't like.
He doesn't like our way of life, with our quasi-democracy and capitalism and relative tolerance of different faiths. And every time we change our way of life, every time we give up one of our rights in the name of "fighting terrorism" we are delivering a victory to him and people like him.
"UK Government Wants a Backdoor Into Windows"
Makes a change, Tony Blair's been making his back door available to Bill Gates since he came to power.
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Sounds to me more like the good guy is making a really smart play. Note that it looks like he sort of slipped this in as an aside, since he was really giving evidence about "holding terrorist suspects without charge". Talk about pushing all the right buttons on the govt. machine.
If you are an opponent of TCG / TPM / DRM it is really quite beautiful. As far as I can see it is something like:
"Hey Mr. Government Committee, while you're asking me about terrorist suspects you might want to note that this new TPM / DRM stuff coming real soon from MS/**AA now will make it virtually impossible for you to get info off suspects' PCs. Oh, and the PCs are setup that way by default so no chance of using that fact against suspect. Also, you know that law you fought so hard for where you can jail people for not handing over encryption keys ? - well with this new stuff the key's in hardware and the suspect never has it. If you're worried by this, then maybe you should speak to these guys about crippling the tech..."
Aim big nasty government machine at big nasty corporate machine, stand well back...
Sweet.
You know what the secret code for the backdoor to encrypted data on a harddrive running Vista is gonna be, don't you?
If president Jr. get to pick it, I'll bet it is 1-2-3-4-5.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
oh please, yes please. switch on encryption that uses TPM. then all it takes is a virus to overwrite the TPM keys in the BIOS memory and that's it - game over: your entire hard drive rendered useless. mwhahahahah
And so, inevitably, the Powers That Be(TM) competing to dominate the lives of the Minions(TM) come into conflict.
If the governments get their way, there will be no true encryption permitted, because otherwise they can't spy on people.
If there is no true encryption, there is no point whatsoever to having the TPM, the entire DRM concept just got screwed, etc. It doesn't matter whether it's "only governments" who can break the codes, because someone will crack/leak/otherwise work around that restriction within days, and the Internet will do the rest within hours.
So, the media industry's current prime directive and major investment just came into direct opposition with the government's current prime directive and major political hot potato. The blue touch paper has been lit; please retire to a safe distance, and wait to see which of the rights you thought you were losing will be staying after all...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In the US, 12 September 2001.
In the UK, 8 July 2005.
You get the idea.
After a major terrorist act, the population is angry, not rational. Many are personally affected by the attacks. Thoughts of proportionate responses and civil liberties are overwhelmed by fear and grief.
This is, of course, the ideal time for a government to try to increase its own power at the expense of the people it should represent. This goes double for governments with only a tenuous hold on power, as is usually the case in the US because of its two-party politics, or for governments whose very mandate is dubious, as is the case of Blair's UK government (which didn't actually win the popular vote in England, and has often relied on the votes of Scottish MPs to push through controversial legislation to which their own constituents will be immune because the Scottish Parliament will decide for them separately).
Hence it is precisely in the wake of a terrorist atrocity that we should be keenest to protect our civil liberties, for it is at these times that they will naturally come under the gravest threat.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.