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
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.
Why would it be a problem? Only private keys ca be used to decrypt data. Unless you were concerned about the man-in-the-middle just rewriting the data to say something else, but it's hard to imagine how they'd do that to a live voice conversation.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
It's a fundamental feature of public key encryption that public keys can be exchanged in the clear without compromising security.
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.
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.
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.
In certain situations, a phone might have a bit of 'echo' (the reciver picks up a bit from the speaker). How much of a help could this echo be, in conjunction with a public key, to help identify the private key?
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
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.
We seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of PKE here.
Person A wants to talk to person B using encryption.
A sends B his public Key, B sends A her public key. They each then use the combination of the other's public key and their own private key to encode and decode messages to and from each other.
Let's say A goes to send B his key, but it's intercepted by C, and C sends B a modified key (man in the middle attack). Then B will not be able to initiate communication with A because the key won't match. This is how and why PKE works. If it was possible to capture and send a modified key and have the conversation still function then PKE wouldn't be very useful, would it?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I'veway eenbay usingway oicevay encryptionway orfay earsyay.
It'sway easyway andway otallytay onfusescay anyway
eavesdroppersway.
A CA is not in central control over encryption. They are only in control of authenticating keys. The only way they can subvert the encryption process is to issue matching (in details, but not in keys) certificates to you and the man in the middle. If they were to do this, it would be detected quickly, and their reputation as a trusted CA would suffer.
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.
Easy. Do what SSH does. Cache the public keys with the address (phone #, in this case). You accept the public key the first time it's used, and if a different public key is presented for a particular caller or recipient, you get warned that something funny is going on. The only difference being while SSH will outright refuse to connect to a key that's changed from the cached key, you would probably make the phone simply inform the user that the caller gave a different public key this time. It's up to the user to verify if this call is not subject to a MITM attack.
My blog
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.
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 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...
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]
Backwards: C intercepts A's public key. Therefore C can send encrypted data to A. C then passes a modified key to B, allowing B to send encrypted data to C (and similarly for the opposite direction). If C intercepts one direction, but does not intercept the other, the attack may or may not be detected...but C can only read from the side that it has sent a modified public key.
Sending someone a public key that decrypts YOUR transmission is Authentication, not Encryption. Key transmission must be done in the clear or PKE won't work by itself.
In accordance with E.O. 12958, this post is marked Unclassified.