Slashdot Mirror
Italian Phone Taps Spur Encryption Use
manekineko2 writes "This article in the NYTimes discusses how a recent rash of high-profile mobile phone taps in Italy is spurring a rush toward software-encrypted phone conversations. Private conversations have been tapped and subsequently leaked to the media and have resulted in disclosures of sensitive takeover discussions, revelations regarding game-fixing in soccer, and the arrest of a prince on charges of providing prostitutes and illegal slot machines. An Italian investigative reporter stated that no one would ever discuss sensitive information on the phone now. As a result, encryption software for mobile phones has moved from the government and military worlds into the mainstream. Are GSM phones in the US ripe for a similar explosion in the use of freely available wiretapping technology, and could this finally be the impetus to for widespread use of software-encrypted communications?"
It would be really nice if that came standard in cellphones (Properly just a empty dream). But maybe a plugin for windows mobile and symbian handsets could be possible.
Visit http://www.crunzh.com/ for free software. Mac/Lin/Win
I doubt it'll break into the public domain any time soon.
Here at Chevron we encrypt our Blackberries, both on the unit and during transmission. If the Blackberry is lost, the data is safe because of the encryption.
I don't see it happening for the public unless the carrier provides the service and then wouldn't the government just request the carrier to give them access?
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
How would you go about key exchange?
Really, you need to ensure that your public keys don't get intercepted as if you sent them via SMS or otherwise. Considering the fact that you aren't trusting the network any longer, it means that you couldn't pass keys across it either.
So if you wanted a secure key exchange, you would probably have to meet someone or another trusted person and do a key exchange that way, IR would probably workk.
I guess email could work too.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Under US law, such a tap is illegal. There are some encrypted channels for cel phone conversations in America, but they have been mostly phased out because of the lack of consumer demand. In the US, such a tap is illegal. Even if such inflamatory behaviors were discovered, the person who did the tap would not disclose it as it would highlight personal illegal activities. Note that there is nothing that the technology is doing to prevent it.
On the other hand, wireless phones in the US typically do use encryption because they operate in the same frequency range as other devices (cel phones have their own dedicated frequency range). When baby monitors started picking up the conversations down the street, people took notice.
Hookers and blackjack! This prince guy must have one shiny ass.
...if my wife was cheating on me, I'd like to be able to monitor her cell phone. (Yes, I am married)
Awaiting laws passed in Italy that ban the use of encrypted cell phones in 3....2....1...
An Italian investigative reporter stated that no one would ever discuss sensitive information on the phone now.
Why on Earth would you ever discuss sensitive information on the phone before? There's always been phone tapping tech. It's only the laws for that technology's usage that protected anyone from it. You never say anything on the phone that you wouldn't say to a cop. If you don't know that rule, you're a pretty inept criminal.
Mama-mia! Someone call Tony Soprano. He'll know what to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A5/1
It can be broken, but considering the power of early GSM handsets this was quite an effective system. One of the major factors driving G2 (digital) phones was the easy of eavesdropping on the old analogue G1 network.
How do I know that the public key I'm presented with belongs to you and not some man-in-the-middle? Clearly you don't want a central agent (like a CA) be in control of trust, because the problem here is the central control over encryption in the 1st place.
A workable solution would be to accept public keys like you do with SSH. Once you have a connection you can verify the thumbprint (or babbleprint) with the other party using your voice, and move on to sensitive discussions if the keys check out. You'd only need to do this upon the initial connection, or when the keys change for some reason.
No matter how hard I look, I can't find a cordless phone with encryption. Ten years ago this wasn't so difficult to do. It seems after congress passed a law banning evesdropping on phones the industry just gave up on encryption. Hopefully this will reignite the use of cryptography in cordless phones.
Quite simply, one of two things would prevent encrypted cell phones from becoming successful in the US:
1. The government would simply make it illegal (don't want to give the terrorists any new tools).
2. The government would require a backdoor be built in by manufacturers, defeating the purpose.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Law enforcement has had the ability to tap in and monitor cellular communications.
In the days of AMPS and NAMPS it was a piece of cake. Friend of mine worked in IT for the local PD and was able to get a scanner that wasn't 800-900 blocked, and a little card and software for the computer that allowed us to follow calls as they went from cell to cell.
CDMA and GSM just throw a little wrinkle in.
Indeed, and a nice thing about cryptophone is that they apparently provide protocol specs and invite others to be compatible (it would have to be reimplemented though).
There has also been talk of encrypted call support (would be nice if compatible with cryptophone, considering the published protocol) in OpenMoko, the open GNU/Linux-based phone OS, though no real work as of yet (hopefully only because the developer sales of the Neo1973 devices haven't properly started on schedule).
It is just a question of software regardless, what with the platform having no relevant restrictions. I suspect encrypted calls will be a reality on the platform before mass-market sales in the fall. I haven't the energy to do something that big myself, though, so just a guess from the sidelines.
Though in the acedmic circles, serious flawa with GSM encryption
have been found they are still not all that trivial to implement.
The main work on attacking GSM in a practicle scenario was done by
Elad Barkan with the help of Eli Biham and Nathan Keller.
to briefly explain the security you must notice there are diffrent variants for
GSM encryption the weak one being A5/2 anf A5/1 and A5/3 being considarbly stronger.
breaking A5/1 in a passive attack requires a significant amount of precomputation and storage
that though one could buy of the self, I find it unlikely any private citizen will set up
a cluster of two dozen computers to crack GSM for the fun of it, though obviously a large
evil corparation or a small company would easily have the resources.
an active attack could convince a cell phone to use A5/2 even if it prefers A5/1 or a diffrent variant,
this requires more specialized equipment and it easier to catch the attacker as he must be sending out
radio signals, these may also interfere with normal cellphone traffice.
This is just to put the threat into proportion,
your own govement can wiretap without breaking encryption,
A serious enemy can probably muster up the resources to wiretap by breaking GSM encryption
but your next door neighboor will probablby find it exremly difficult to listen in on encrypted GSM cell
phone traffic.
Me.
I'veway eenbay usingway oicevay encryptionway orfay earsyay.
It'sway easyway andway otallytay onfusescay anyway
eavesdroppersway.
Is the encryption software open-source?
If not, how do we know that it doesn't have a back-door?
And if it does indeed have a back-door, how can people ever be sure that the "wrong" people (definition of "wrong" depending on the user) will not intercept and decode the communications using said back-door?
In this world of powerfull Intelligence Agencies, any kind of communications security software/hardware which is not at the very least peer-reviewed is bound to have some sort of backdoor.
It looks like a firm in Germany already offers a AES-256 bit encrypted mobile and POTS phone, as well as a softphone. Although their hard phones aren't cheap, the softphone is free to give to your contacts. http://www.cryptophone.de They alse include source code for "full independent review" with their products.
Similarly, Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP has released his Zphone to make encrypted VoIP calls. Also, the Asterisk project offers an encrypted IAX channel.
I notice that no one has commented on the problem with RF noise of the signal created at the microphone. It bleeds into the circuitry behind the encryption device and is amplified together with the encrypted signal. Provided you're within range (and phone companies will obviously be), you can sample the convolved signal, extract the unencrypted signal (an amplitude modulation?) from the encrypted signal (white noise).
The only way to get around this is to specifically design the phone so that no signal bleeds from the microphone to the antenna. The government uses such phones, but I haven't seen any of them available for consumers and companies yet (and their production cost is prohibitively high for consumers anyway).
Are GSM phones in the US ripe for a similar explosion in the use of freely available wiretapping technology, and could this finally be the impetus to for widespread use of software-encrypted communications?"
Unless I'm missing something, there certainly is not any freely available wiretapping technology for GSM phones and networks. There are a few vendors that sell very expensive GSM tapping and over the air capture devices and platforms, but they are extrememly expensive and only for sale to authorized buyers (law enforcement, military, and feds)
Lindsay Blanton
RadioReference.com
They'd demand the keys under the auspices of a recently passed bullshit law. If you don't give them up, you're jailed for contempt of court.
Be nice...because they might name you a terrorist and then you magically lose your habeus corpus rights!
But, we're safe from terrorists!
Blar.
They claim that communications are end-to-end encrypted, although they don't publish the source code, so hard to verify for backdoors etc. They have a client available for mobile devices - you can then call from any hotspot. Free, too, unless you take or make calls to/from normal lines (which are then, of course, not encrypted).
An another point, some of the posts here seem to be missing the point - the Italian wiretaps involved not just the state, but also illegal snooping done by powerful individuals, corporations and also the state phone company. It's not just the mobiles that were tapped, but land lines too. No point in having an encrypted GSM if you then use it to call a bugged land line...
Does an encryption plugin to Skype exist ?
And how safe is this ? As tapping could be done at a Supernode.
In short: public key exchange is not a problem, not even for man-in-the-middle, if you do it right.
The parent poster said: public key exchange is a problem. People seemed to think that the "problem" in question was that public keys must be kept secret, and answered, "No need to keep it secret." A better answer might have been: "You MUST NOT keep it secret," and that would answer the comments about man-in-the-middle as well.
People worried about man-in-the-middle note that the phone company owns the channel, and thus can intercept everything! But that's not enough for a man-in-the-middle attack (MitM attack, where attacker K intervenes in the conversation between A and B; K tells A that K is really B, and K tells B that K is really A, and relays the conversation). The key to breaking MitM is to recognize the additional condition for such an attack: the attacker must completely replace the messages from the sender with his own messages. Otherwise, either:
Thus, sender and receiver must prevent a MitM attacker from completely replacing all the messages. The way to do this is to exchange messages through more than one channel, at least in the beginning.
With the usual PKE such as GPG over email, for example, the sender doesn't just send public keys to you and say, "Here's my public key; now let's talk." That's a foolish and insecure way to do it, and the importance of drilling this into the users' heads is the number one reason why GPG isn't that well-promoted: its proponents (rightly) prefer to have the system less popular but secure, rather than have some AOL weenie start using GPG improperly and getting a false sense of security.
And, no, the way to make it more secure is NOT to send more data, like "Here's my public key and my photo. Now do you believe that it's my real key?" That would just be sending more data over the same channel. You need another channel.
If sender and you have already exchanged public keys before, assuming it was in a secure way, then we're good, because the exchange was made in a previous conversation over which the MitM attacker had no control. That's an additional channel.
But say they've never exchanged public keys before. Well, you can check if the sender has published the public key on some keyserver, or hopefully multiple independent keyservers. These would be separate channels over which the MitM attacker would have no control. The sender puts up the key (or has already put up the key) on the pgp.mit.edu server (for example) and has already checked that it had been uploaded correctly. Once it's published, no MitM can modify the key. Note that you just need any publicly accessible info source where published data cannot be changed, so you don't need to trust the keyserver as much as, say, a SSL Cert authority like VeriSign. The "keyserver" could be the local newspaper classifieds, for example.
But let's say that there is no trusted key repository. What now? Well, if you have someone you mutually trust, who has a public key known to and trusted by you, and who knows and trusts
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Uhm... how do you know Pluto exists? Seriously, before getting all testy, please use the extensive resources of the internet to try to educate yourself even a tiny little bit. Damn.
Telecom Italia and SISMI have gone up against organized crime, terrorists and the CIA.
They always win as the great work of Adamo Bove showed.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
When I worked at Nextel, the "Guys in Suits" had a server set up in our transport room (where the OC-92 and other fiber came in to the demarc). We had no real input, but one person (not me) was responsible for admin of it (in case it needed reboot, etc). It's now able to be public, but we had to keep it hush-hush that there was no way to tap Direct Connect for quite some time. It's able now, but it was more difficult with Direct Application Processors (DAP - used to process Direct connect traffic). Nextel is/was TDMA.
Sprint had it, but visibility was 0 even at the 2nd tier technical support level. Sprint uses CDMA.
In both cases, it's fairly straightforward to tap a normal cell phone call. Any switch that processes your call sees the flag and adds the additional phone tap and then sends the data to a predetermined trunk leading to the CALEA servers. Only trusted and specifically trained people are allowed to touch the servers, and calls from law enforcement are directed to a group which knows how to process and execute legal wire tap requests.
That was very informative, and I hope you get modded up to five. It's nothing original of course, but being able to condense long-known information that people should be aware of (but aren't), into something understanable, is itself difficult.
With respect to making talk of PKE easier to understand, I've never understood why, other than history, they use the term "public key". It seems a "public key" is more analagous to a physical lock than a physical key. When you apply a public key, you are, in essence, locking the data, and can be done whether or not you have the key (the private key, that is). So, I just think it would be easier to call it a "public lock".
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
if you are pokering on me not using my two 60 cpu 50gig ram outdated supercomputers against your phone you loose. :)
stuff is cheap. go get a garage.
The ghost of Stringer Bell is moderately impressed.
WHOA!! Ken and Barbie are having TOO MUCH FUN!! It must be the NEGATIVE IONS!!
Use a CDMA phone -- they are a bit more secure. The GSM algorithms were cracked quite a few years ago and are currently useless.
Radioactive decay. Truly random.
Man, you really need that seminar!
It was not just a prince that did the high class prostitute business, it was Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia, the heir of the last King of Italy. He is prince of Naples and proclamed himself king of Italy. He could not enter Italy until 2002, when its exile was ended. I wish they never did that... he started a money laundering and prostitution business between Switzerland and Italy at the Campione casino near the border... how noble of him.
Interesting... but can you prove that the data is truly random? The fact that it follows no known pattern is probably good enough, but I don't think you can be sure that someone hasn't discovered a pattern to it (or won't discover a pattern in the future).
Nobody can prove that it is random. We might live in a deterministic universe where radioactive decay intervals have been preordained. We can prove that radioactive decay has no detectable patterns and meets accepted ideas about randomness.
Another source of truly random numbers is atmospheric noise. (e.g. thunderstorms) You could predict this easily by constructing a 1:1 scale model of the earth and atmosphere with each atom corresponding to the original, but this would only work in a deterministic universe. If there is truly chaotic behavior your model would diverge from the original.
Classic truly random numbers can be obtained using coin tosses or die rolls, although some coins and dice have detectable patterns.
Man, you really need that seminar!
First A5/1 GSM Encryption is controlled by the US (I.E. government or corperate with gov over sight can't remember). You have to get permission and licenseing to use it, up to a few years ago we were only ones using, but once US companies started setting up services in other countries A5/1 spread out. However most of EU uses A5/2 and has been for some time. A5/2 is a much eaiesr encryption to break and can be down with the computing power of a single laptop. A5/1 requires numerous computers and a lot of crunch time, not very feasible, extremely expensive and not 100% success rate... its actually pretty low I think. Software to break out A5/2 is commercially available so it's quite easy to crack things in EU, A5/1 is not available not to mention the physical infrastructure required. Really for the time your quite safe from cellular wire tapping in the US from pretty much everyone but U. Sam... but if you consider that technically/legally as a US citizen (read: company creating base tech/key and then producing/selling product) you have to register any encryption/decryption with the NSA, you will never really be safe from them if it's a purely US product. Additionally all the A5/x encryption is between your phone and the tower, from the tower it can go strait to the base OR microwave to another tower/base. The microwave transmissions... are not encrypted... anywhere... so if you have the equipment and can get a antenna into that LOS M.W. beam, you can see it all. On a side note... is it really wiretapping when there are no wires involved until it hits the Base?
There were other comments talking about an active MITM attack, granted. This type of attack will work, although there are various countermeasures against it. Your comment was not talking about an active MITM. It was talking about a passive MITM, where no data modification is made.
I'm sorry if I came across as rude, but it truly seemed to me that you were claiming that a passive MITM attack is effective in this case. It's not.
Maybe the source of confusion is this: There are different types of MITM attacks. Two kinds are active and passive. Passive changes nothing; active allows changes to be made, for example the key exchange.
Man, you really need that seminar!
but anonymity is a very easy thing to achieve over the PSTN for a small fee, as it has been for many years. Look for the nearest payphone the next time you want to discuss a terrorist plot.
This guys are deploying a freeware secure phone application for windows mobile devices with full security for anyone, no register required!! See at http://www.raseac.com.br/
The usual method of verifying the public keys is with a certificate authority like Verisign, who each party contacts to verify the key is the correct one for the party they're communicating with. Even then you have to know that you are really communicating with the real Verisign, which is done by relying on the key for Verisign that came installed with your web browser or encryption software. Other systems like Pretty Good Privacy email encryption, use key servers that perform about the same function as Verisign. For systems like ssh(secure shell) that don't usually use key servers, you just have to verify the key by some other method like having it given to you on paper or told to you over the phone, or if you can, like when both ends are your own computers, you just write it down when you install the key. Actually you usually compare the relatively shorter key fingerprint rather than the actual big long key.
In public/private key (e.g. GPG/PGP) crypto, it doesn't matter who gets the public key... that's why they're PUBLISHED on key servers and web pages and I've seen them in e-mail sigs and even Usenet sigs. Having the public key means you can send someone a message, not read his mail.
Of course, securing your private key is your problem.
Tech Public Policy stuff
America learn from other nations? LOL, that'll be the day. We would have to pay attention to national news for that to happen.
>>you have to register any encryption/decryption with the NSA, you will never really be safe from them if it's a purely US product I wonder how this could work if you used ephemeral elliptic curve private keys with Diffe-Helman. For each conversation, a new random private key is generated. The corresponding EC public key is sent to the other party and a shared secret can be computed. This is can be used as a key and IV for AES. Note that new tandom keys could be generated automatically at random short intervals in your converstaion to reduce the amount of cyphered information available for brute force decryption. The registration of the method is easy, but the registration of the keys almost impossible.
If you could construct a model that allowed you to predict atmospheric phenomenon with any degree of accuracy, it would have much greater significance than just breaking one-time pads. You could save countless lives if you knew when and where tornados and hurricanes would strike.
Unfortunately, I doubt anyone will be able to do this any time soon.
The biggest advantage I can see to building this 1:1 scale model of the earth and atmosphere is having a backup copy of every person, place, and thing on earth. If you drop your glasses you can simply grab the pair from the duplicate world. Of course, then your duplicate self won't have any glasses. And, it is possible that your duplicate self would have dropped his glasses at the same moment.
Man, you really need that seminar!
If the behavior of this model is deterministic, my duplicate self will drop his glasses at the same moment. If it is not deterministic and I do obtain intact glasses from my duplicate self, then I have altered the parameters of the model, and it will diverge (to an unknown degree) from "the real world".
Which leaves me with two questions:I thought it was funny to build an exact replica of the earth, atom for atom. Especially if the purpose of such an endeavor was to crack encryption. What other logical next step is there than using it for something truly trivial like broken glasses?
Broken glasses are nontrivial for me. I couldn't make it to the eyeglass store without glasses. Luckily I have several spares on this planet, no duplication necessary.
Man, you really need that seminar!
You're not wrong at all. Although I do have to point out that while I "like sci-fi" as an adult, I'm am certainly not as passionate about it as I was when I was younger. Lately I've been reading Tom Clancy more often.
Are you sure you're not my long lost twin? The problem I've had is that when the dog destroyed my good glasses, I had to wear the headache-inducing old glasses for a couple weeks while the "glasses in an hour place" ordered me new ones! (But I got even with the dog... I sent him to Oklahoma!)
Oklahoma, ouch. That'll teach 'em!
I've been going to this place that gives 2 pair of polycarbonate glasses, one sunglass-tinted and an eye exam for about $150. I now have lots of acceptable spares. My vision has stopped degrading violently from year to year, and I'm looking forward to needing bifocals in a few years. That'll be fantastic. Blind up close, too. It used to be that 3 year old glasses were nearly worthless, but now I can barely tell the difference.
Prescription sunglasses make me happy, plus in a pinch you can wear them indoors or at night.
Man, you really need that seminar!
In a pinch? Why not all the time?
You caught me. I even got lightly tinted ones specifically to wear inside and at night. My eyes are pretty sensitive, but I also like having my eyes hidden.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I'm with you up to here.
OK, now I think you're a psycho.
I don't think I'm particularly psycho. Do psychos think they are psycho? I doubt it.
My eyes are frequently bloodshot. I don't know why. I wore hard contacts as a kid and eventually blew out my corneas. Maybe it's the late hours, staring at a computer screen, my mild allergy to my girlfriend's cats, the heavy constant drinking, I simply don't know. In any case, hiding my eyes reduces people who stare or make comments.
Another benefit seems to be I am less approachable to bums seeking change, tourists asking directions, businessguys trying to network, fratboys wanting to comment to me about T&A, or drunks wanting companionship. I'm definitely a bit of a misanthrope, and it seems that irritating people can somehow detect this and are drawn to it. I was an eager adopter of portable music players for partly the same reason.
I don't think that makes me a psychopath. I am not violent and feel empathy for some people. I do dislike a lot of people and wish they'd leave me alone, but I think that's pretty normal. For someone who's a bit of a misanthrope.
Man, you really need that seminar!
That was supposed to be a joke. But your explanation proves some interesting insights into your personality.