Slashdot Mirror
Wikileaks Sidesteps Publishing Public PGP Key
An anonymous reader writes "Repeated requests toward the Wikileaks staff regarding their use of PGP have gone unanswered. The current public PGP key posted has been expired since November 2nd, 2007. A response on their PGP talk page notes that the 'SSL based mail submission system' will be the secure online method of document submission. At the current time, there is no method to safely encrypt any postal communications with Wikileaks or verify that any given communication actually originated from a Wikileaks staff member."
Doubtless there are some complicating factors here -- but what is the best way to keep a confidentiality-centric site like Wikileaks trustworthy?
Generally we recommend against using PGP in its simplest form, since the traffic is easily detected and provides proof of intention to conceal, which depending on the context may pose a significant difficulty. - emph mine
Gut reaction to that statement makes me feel a bit queasy.
What?
A decade ago, every geek had a PGP key, keysigning parties were a great way to spend a Friday night, and everyone was raving about Schneier's eggheaded but useful tome Applied Cryptography . Now when I ask otherwise normal geeks if they have a PGP key, they just look at me like I'm from Mars. I don't understand, PGP has gotten only easier to use, there's a great Firefox extension for it, but it has faded in popularity.
Unfortunately, there isn't - information is only as trustworthy as the source.
Once documents have been leaked, organizations know they can't put the cat back in the bag but they want to close the bag to prevent further escapes. Sure they sue but they sue to get the names of submitters (i.e. Apple vs. Think Secret, or Craig what's his name at Microsoft threatening to find the leaker of the Halloween documents via secret Exchange magic)
Wikileaks appears to want to provide a way for submitters to deny they even submitted anything to Wikileaks. Sending an e-mail to wikileaks with the contents encrypted is a clear indication that you're sending something to them. By the time the leaks are made public all they want to do is find the person, searching for something that sent pgp encrypted mail, even without being able to decrypt the actual contents, is going to be good enough for them.
An ssl page, especially if wikileaks sets up some sort of drop system with other domains so you aren't obviously submitting to wikileaks, is much harder to track because people use ssl pages all over the internet all the time. If PGP were used more frequently then they could probably use that with a drop system as well, but it's just too rarely used.
Have a video run at 3 in the morning on PBS or something. Have a recognizable figure say what the key is while it is displaying on the screen.
I suppose he could also sign it while he talks.
hmm.. no encryption and no answers. I smell an FBI national security letter and gag order.
I don't understand one thing: If someone performs a man-in-the-middle attack, isn't it likely that they are also able to mangle other traffic between Wikileaks and the submitter, i.e they can present a different PGP key to the submitter? So doesn't this go back to the old "The system is as secure as its key" ?
Expiration of PGP keys is a feature and does not prevent the key from being used in the future (although it should not be considered secure if used after the expiration date). The purpose is to prevent the impact of a compromised key by limiting its validity period.
Expiry can also be useful in the event that a private key is lost. Revocation of a public key requires access to the private keys.
Here you go.
Centralization breaks the internet.
The gmail revenue stream depends on targeted advertising, which means they need to have a daemon read your mail. If they supported encryption as standard, they'd be cutting off some not-insignificant portion of that revenue ; regardless of how much they'd like to support the feature, their responsibilities are to their shareholders ; unless they can find a way of making equivalent or greater revenue from encrypted mail, they can't field it as a feature.
I can't envisage an encrypted mail service that has an externalized revenue source, so the only way to fund it is by the customer paying. Which then begs the question, who do you trust enough to pay them to keep your secrets safe? In my case, I no secrets worth keeping, but if I did, I wouldn't trust anyone else to keep them for me.
Open-source, peer-reviewed encryption, under my own control, is the only technique I would trust to keep digital secrets transmitted across a wire.
The best kept secrets are of course the ones you keep solely in your own head.
There isn't. By verifying that anyone is anyone the cover is blown. Regardless the best use of it is still to post anonymously and link as many people as humanly possible. Then even if your cover is blown, the message still gets out. If you're a whistleblower, this is something you should have accepted long before you blew the whistle
- Wikileaks Changes Headings to Times New Roman
- Wikileaks Director Recommends Ivory Soap
- Wikileaks to Sponsor Next Super Bowl
- Wikileaks leaks Wikileaks' Wikileaks leaks
- Wikileaks wikileaks wikileaks, Wikileaks wikileaks
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
Well, since people can't use PGP with their regular email addresses anymore to correspond with wikileaks, what's stopping them from making a dummy gmail account or something? It takes all of a couple seconds and that way you don't even have your regular email address associated with them at all.
Weaksauce as they say...
So enable IMAP and SMTP support in Google Mail and use a PGP-equipped client.
I'm in a situation where I need to *prove* that someone has opened/read an email. I know there are paid "registered email" services, but they seem a bit overkill to me. And return receipts are jokes, since they aren't widely supported.
The short answer is "don't try to make SMTP do something that it wasn't designed to do".
The long answer - send people unique links to a web server that you control.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Nothing, the same way that PGP cant protect you from a trojan used to read your mail.
But if you want: open the mail, go offline, then decrypt the email, read it, close it, clear your cookies, then go back online.
the point of encrypted emails was never to protect you from your email reader, it was to protect it from between sender & receiver
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I can neither confirm nor deny that I have sat in a classified lab with info controls that has a non-trivil number of points of access to the unrestricted internet. The labs may or may not have restricted the movement of cell phones, thumb drives, CD ROMS, etc.
When push comes to shove, "the individual persons" are both the weakest and most important of a security plan. Plans based on having "no bad actors" inside the security ring is important and everyday useful.
One of the major reasons to restrict the aforementioned items and movements it to prevent the _accidental_ transmission of data.
You can only inconvenience a bad actor who is deliberately trying to transmit information. That is why they don't let just anybody into classified circumstances and depend on preventing leaks with technology and security measures as a primary approach.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
But thats so early 90's. Still might be useful, although I don't think there any left that will anonymously send the recipient plain text.
Anyone dumb enough to submit information to wikileaks from their work deserves any humiliation that follows.
Furthermore, anyone using SSL to send data to Wikileaks from work is equally stupid. The logs you speak of can just as easily identify who connected to Wikileaks over a secure connection and thus are just as easily identified as the PGP encrypted fool who does so.
Besides, they don't seem to get much pgp tagged submissions, according to them. Or perhaps it's all someone pretending to be them, and the real wikileaks people are now in the hands of unknown blacksuits and everything submitted to them now goes directly to a white farmhouse somewhere in Virginia to be analyzed.
Ha! That's the beauty of it!
You see, in phase #2 of their plan for global domination, wikileaks is planning to offer annual Playboy subscriptions at 50% rate, at which point their SSL servers are going to be taking hits like there's no tomorrow ;-)
OpenSSH 5.0 has chroot and sftp only accounts support in the sshd_config file.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
ssl provides an encrypted layer which is secure enough to transmit credit card information over the internet on a regular basis. it should be plenty sufficient.
what i don't think is sufficient is how the info is distributed. the thing can be shut down / censored too easily. to make the information distribution resiluant, it needs to be decentralized. that's why i think the website should provide an rss feed that can serve new leaks as torrents. torrent clients equiped with rss scanners can automatically download and seed the leak - this would essentially create thousands of backups of the data as quickly as possible, while also creating thousands of backup connections ("mirrors").