Slashdot Mirror
Feds' Radios Have Significant Security Flaws
OverTheGeicoE writes "The Wall Street Journal has a story describing how the portable radios used by many federal law enforcement agents have major security flaws that allow for easy eavesdropping and jamming. Details are in a new study being released today (PDF). The authors of the study were able to intercept hundreds of hours of sensitive traffic inadvertently sent without encryption over the past two years. They also describe how a texting toy targeted at teenage girls can be modified to jam transmissions from the affected radios, either encrypted or not."
"Why isn't there a mechanism in place to punish these folks?"
A fine idea, but let's outsource it to save money.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Kim Possible has become Evil!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There is, you're allowed to Sue on behalf of the government if it doesn't do so itself. You get a 30 percent take.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The front page of the 'texting toy' website begins with 'It sounds 2good2btru - but it's 4real!' and ends with my stomach contents, evacuated onto the floor. Shame on TheGeicoE for subjecting us to that.
Hey mate, spare a sig?
Obviously, any RF device can be jammed(if nothing else, a correctly crafted jamming signal could cause destructive interference resulting in zero signal at the receiver site; but good luck with that one...); but the difficulty of doing so can vary widely. If a spark-gap that blacks out the east coast and draws complaints from the FCC-analogs of 6 nearby countries jams something, the designer gets a pass. If some FCC approved kiddie toy can jam it, the system is likely being attacked in a manner significantly more sophisticated than brute force...
From TFA: " But, as we will see below, the situation is actually far more favorable to the jammer than analysis of its modulation scheme alone might suggest. In fact, the aggregate power level required to jam P25 trafc is actually much lower than that required to jam analog FM. This is because an adversary can disrupt P25 trafc very efciently by targeting only specific small portions of frames to jam and turning off its transmitter at other times... It is therefore unnecessary for an adversary to jam the entire transmitted data stream in order to prevent a receiver from receiving it. It is sufcient for an attacker to prevent the reception merely of those portions of a frame that are needed for the receiver to make sense of the rest of the frame. Unfortunately, the P25 frame encoding makes it particularly easy and efcient for a jammer to attack these subelds in isolation."
Oops: A sophisticated digital RF transmission mechanism substantially more vulnerable to jamming than analog narrowband...
I'm totally lost here; want to try again?
Uh. Yeah. I think FCC rules prohibit encryption.
They do not.
And we are talking about radio, not wired communications.
Security issues in radio and wired communications are almost the same unless you can guarantee no physical access to your wire.
You want privacy? Use a phone.
Phones are radios.
Because we want to minimize the amount of chatter that goes on behind closed doors?
You're 'sane' default leads to less checks and balances. No thanks. OTOH, very few criminal would actually know or do anything about this.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We kind of do... It just isn't all that toothy and appears to apply more seriously to smalltime operators, not to Big Respectable Contractors...
And it is legal to listen in on them. Google for "police scanner".
Now I could see reasons why the FBI might have encrypted radios, but then again they also might decide such a thing isn't necessary, or that they should be selectable.
Either way, the idea of unencrypted police radio isn't surprising, it is the norm. That may change, but for now in most places a cheap scanner is all you need to listen to police radio, if you wish to do so.
Apparently, aside from user interface failings, the system is based on manual keyfill and pre-shared keys...
And I'm not talking "Man, I hate trusting CA certs" pre-shared keys, I'm talking "Apparently, news of assymetric key cryptography hasn't made it to P25 land yet, and we have no option but to talk in the clear unless everybody we are talking to has been keyfilled ahead of time. Oh, also, none of our radios provide any warning when receiving a cleartext signal, they just decode and play exactly the same as if it were encrypted... We are deliberately ignoring everything that has been learned about maintaining encrypted channels under real world conditions here, apparently!"
Uh. Yeah. I think FCC rules prohibit encryption
There's no overall ban on encryption, although some services such as amateur (Ham) radio aren't allowed to use it.
You can't do encryption over HAM waves because it is supposed to be free and open to all that qualify, not a place for exclusivity. Also they want to be able to monitor to make sure people aren't using it for commercial purposes.
However on other bands, encryption is just fine. You really think the military uses unencrypted radio for all their communications?
For that matter, your cell phone is encrypted. Grated it isn't very good encryption, but it is encrypted. All digital cell phones are.
Because encrypting analog radios costs extra money. Ask most police depts what they would rather have - 1000 encrypted portable radios, or 1000 portable radios that work with the portable radios and base stations they already have plus 1000 6 cell maglites.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
However, more recently, most police bands have gone encrypted. The thinking is that if the info is broadcast in the clear, the perps have a much better chance of avoiding the police and getting away with whatever they were planning. Broadcasting police information in the clear also has privacy implications (did you here that Fred Smith was busted for speeding last night?).
Slightly off topic - I have that exact radio shown in the TFA. It is a complete pile of garbage. It's UI is complex, non intuitive, poorly documented and buggy. The encryption switch is a tiny little ring around the channel switch knob. It's incredibly easy to turn it OFF when changing channels, especially with gloves on. The only visual clue is a tiny little "O" in the upper right hand corner of the crappy little low contrast LCD screen.
It seems like Motorola is really going downhill. They used to make great commercial / public service radios. They used to make great cell phones.
Sigh.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why shouldn't essentially everything be encrypted? That sounds like the sane default to me.
Because encryption requires management of encryption keys, which require security clearances for people who go around loading keys in radios and need to store keys locally.
It creates a terrible headache for backup radio systems and radio caches. I.e., the feds have several large storage areas for equipment that is needed in a disaster but wouldn't get much use otherwise. Someone would need to keep all those radios keyed up to date if everything was encrypted. Also, the radios need better security if they are encrypted. I manage a stack of about two dozen radios -- it would be a real PITA if I had to get a clearance so I could go rekey them once a week.
For CAP (Civil Air Patrol), they are getting/have gotten encryption capable radios. Out here, there is nobody with a clearance to manage the keys and keying of radios. It also shuts out personally owned equipment use, and mostly there isn't much that needs to be encrypted in the first place. CAP is getting this capability because they sometimes in some areas support fed agencies that want encrypted traffic. (The aircraft radios won't do it, anyway.)
And finally, encryption really puts the nail in the coffin of the idea of "interoperability"; that is, different agencies being able to communicate with each other when they need to. E.g., a major forest fire needs people from many agencies and different fire departments to fight it. They all show up with their own radio equipment. Interop means they all have standard channels (VTAC, VCALL, UTAC, etc) (look up "NIFOG" in google for the field guide that defines this all) and can talk to each other as soon as they arrive. Encryption means those who have encryptable radios have to get the right keys installed before they can do anything, and those without encryptionable radios don't talk to anyone.
And really, finally, encryption does NOTHING to prevent the issues of jamming and interference. The only people who haven't figured out that P25 digital systems have nowhere near the coverage as the old analog wideband systems are the radio manufacturers making billions selling the new P25 whiz-bang radios. We did a simple test out here (somewhere on the west coast) comparing P25 to analog narrowband, and P25 would fail where analog narrowband woked fine. One company (with the intials "M") came out here and proposed a trunked digital system to replace all the local public service systems, and they wound up with about thirty radio sites to provide the same coverage that we are getting with a dozen. Just doesn't work as well, and that's personal experience.
The changeover started pre 9/11, but the influx of Federal funds after that really kicked it into high gear. All or nearly all major metro areas now use digital, encryptable radio systems and they're spreading to smaller and smaller counties and cities. And thanks to the Publc Safety push they're using the P25 standard for interoperability.
It has made it much harder for journalists to learn about news-worthy incidents.
They also describe how a texting toy targeted at teenage girls can be modified to jam transmissions from the affected radios, either encrypted or not."
A texting toy targeted at teenage twats 'twas transformed to twist transmissions 'tween totalitarian terrorist-tackling tards.
Define "most."
I work in communications. Of the five or six counties I typically work in, all but one has recently moved to a statewide system based on P25 where law enforcement has been issued radios capable of encryption.
Of those four or five counties which have encryption-capable radios, only one agency in one single town uses it by default. Everyone else transmits in the clear by default, as a matter of policy.
Kid-proof tablet..
I agree; P25 is crap. (Qualification, for whatever it's worth: I've installed/programmed/fixed/pondered-upon many thousands of such radios, all from a company with the initials "M" and am entrusted with keys to the tower sites all over a certain midwest state.).
Nobody really likes it. Some agencies are happy because they've got new radios which aren't yet as broken as their old ones were, but they cost 5-10x as much to buy, each. Plus a monthly fee, per radio, for service. The only reason they're even slightly happy is because they were all pretty much "free" through a state-funded grant program, which to me (as a taxpayer) is not free at all.
Nobody is happier with coverage except in the off case that they're out of their jurisdiction (which does happen, but not routinely by anyone who needs to communicate regularly). Nobody is happier with audio quality (narrowband FM can sound rather good from 300-3000Hz; digital P25 is always robotic-sounding from codec artifacts). They all want to be happier with interoperability for individual units, but nobody ever uses that and therefore won't remember how when a Big Event happens.
Consequently, anything that involves multiple agencies things still get patched together on dispatch consoles and mobile communications centers, with dedicated radios per channel (or talkgroup) -- exactly as it always had been, pre-P25.
And nobody's going to be happy when the radios start to get tired after a few years and needing repairs.
I'm happy with it as someone who earns a meager hourly wage working on it, because the initial push kept me very busy for a few years in a rough economy.
But as a professional who enjoys doing good work, I'm unhappy with it because it inherently sucks, as built, and therefore I have to give people dumb answers to their legitimate questions and problems instead of just -- you know -- fixing it.
And as a (perhaps too-well) informed citizen, I hate it. The way I see it, the old stuff worked better, and allowed me better protection.
Kid-proof tablet..