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Swiss to Use Spyware to Listen to VoIP
An anonymous reader writes "Heise Security is reporting that the Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications is entertaining the idea of utilizing the 'Superintendant Trojan', a spyware program designed to allow eavesdropping on VoIP conversations. According to ERA IT Solutions, the creator of the software, it will only be distributed to investigation agencies in the hopes of keeping it out of the hands of malicious hackers since firewalls apparently 'do not present a problem' for the software."
Actually, police-band radios have always been legal in the US (not in the UK, though). But with the rise of digital encrypted radio systems, those days may be fading fast, as it's a federal crime to even try to decrypt the transmissions.
Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
The omg-leak-to-blackhat bit isn't a big deal. Any blackhat worth his weight in RAM chips could cobble something together to record incoming/outgoing RTP traffic on a local network interface (in the case of SIP/RTP VoIP, and similar in IAX, H.323 and other protocols). It's just a few header fields and then pure Mu-law or A-law audio in most cases and other publicly available codecs in other cases.
It'd probably be more work to reverse engineer this trojan as opposed to writing something to do it yourself. It definitely would be for me. And from some experience with other 'law enforcement'-type programs, it's probably shit anyway.
The worrisome bit is utilizing trojans for law enforcement, even with some kind of judicial review (scoff).
It will also only be really useful when Joe User starts using VoIP, because it'd be much harder to get your average power user to install something infected with the trojan.
And end-to-end encryption renders it completely useless anyway, unless it actually reads pre-encrypted stuff from memory. Hopefully VoIP providers will get off their collective asses and get SRTP et al. working.
Just my $0.02.
In the USA the FCC gives permission to specific persons or agencies to operate radios on specific frequencies. The frequencies vary depending on the availibity of spectrum and the needs of the agency. A metro agency with many sky-rises will have diffrent needs from those of a rural agency in the plains states. Thus some agencies use relatively low frequencies, some in the 400mhz bands (mostly because most of the radio gear available on the market works here), others in the 800mhz bands(because the remainder of the radio gear on the market works here, with a few exceptions), and others scattered about diffrent parts of the spectrum.
It is NOT against FEDERAL LAW to own radios capable of receiving or broadcasting in these bands, as frequencies in these bands are liscenced out to all sorts of parties (private citizens, city workers, fire, police, ems, bus companies, etc.) It is also NOT AGAINST FEDERAL LAW to listen/receive tranmissions on ANY BAND. Decrypting, recording, and re-tranmission are another issue. If it is in the spectrum you are allowed to receive it (given you can past an FCC test to prove you know how to operate any equiptment you might use that is capable of transmission [Tx]) It is illegal to Tx on any frequency assigned to other persons or agencies. That goes for police, fire, ems, and civil users. Additionaly there are likely to be state and local laws regarding using of radio technlogy to impede the work of public saftey and/or the interference of civil use of radio spectrum in so far that it causes a cost to be incurred by the properly FCC liscenced party (IE: can't dispatch a taxi 'cause some prick is Txing all over your channel.)
Most TX is NOT encrypted as a form of security. Some transmissions are digital in nature and can not be parsed by the human ear as they are broadcasted. Other TX is "trunked" and spread over many frequencies, these can be both digital and analog trunked systems, and are hard to follow as users are moved from frequency to frequency as they become available for use, and the same frequencies are often shared by multiple users [a city that uses 10 channels for PD, FIRE, EMS, and civil functions for example.]
I am not aware of the legal status of decrypting signals where the encrypition is intended to protect the contents of said signal. Someone else will have to speak up on that.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Uhm, why exactly is this post insightful?
Do you know the first thing about Switzerland anyway?
FTA: "[...]is therefore examining the use of spy software to allow it to listen in on conversations on PCs[...]" I say: Yay for the Swiss government. They are examining this? Good, examining doesn't hurt. The press (ok, one newspaper... they might be misinformed) has heard about it and published it. People are being informed.
The contrast to the USA?
Well, firstly i'm sure somebody is examining the possible use of this or similar software in the US, too. But contrary to the US, Switzerland does not have a Patriot Act or similar stupid laws to allow wiretaps without a warrant.
Secondly, Switzerland is a direct democracy. The Swiss people can actually oppose anything the government decides and put it up to a vote. Yes, you heard right: no president can decide 'let's take away some rights from the people' without the people having the last word (for that matter, our executive is made up of 7 'ministers' (Bundesrat), with all of them together not having as much power as the US president on his own!).
So, to sum up my rant: I have no big fear of my government spying on me, while I am certain the NSA is spying on all of us. "Welcome to the USA!!!", indeed, for the world is your playground for all you care (and no, I don't hate Americans, just can's stand the current administration).
I read the original newspaper article and it contains some more information. Apparently the software is accessing the microphone directly, so encryption will not help. On top of that, the software will be able to record audio by turning on the Mic even if there is no VoIP-Software running, etc.
The newspaper article also said that it was theoretically possible to do the same with Webcams but there are no plans to use this "feature". Not because of privacy concerns or any such thing but because many webcams have a LED that indicates the usage.
I assume this thing only runs on Windows PCs, but this is pure speculation.
It's really distressing how they could put together such a piece of software without even having any "sound legal basis" for it's usage. Usually it takes years to change things here in Switzerland, which is a good thing to a certain degree.
Firewalls dont present a problem...........i read this as.....the software connects back to home by connecting to TCP port 80.
You done with that strawman yet? I'd like a whack at it...
If you use VoIP, you must have firewall rules allowing VoIP traffic out (and probably back in, but not neccessary for spying on the user).
Thus, this trojan would only need to connect the same way as your legitimate VoIP client. It could even act more-or-less like real VoIP traffic, since it basically needs to duplicate a legitimate call into a 3-way call with one hidden party (the police).
So yes, even a crappy software-only firewall could block the traffic from this trojan - But in doing so, it would also effectively disable VoIP, making the trojan unnecessary.
Now, you could certainly set up an out-of-channel means to tell an external firewall to allow a single VoIP session to a single designated IP address (ie, log into your gateway machine and manually enter the rule). But how many people will actually do that each time they want to make a phone call?