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The NSA Wants Its Own Smartphone
Art Vanderlay writes "Troy Lange might work for one of the more secretive spy agencies in the United States, but he is happy to talk about his work. He is the NSA's mobility mission manager and he has been tasked with creating a smartphone that is secure enough to allow government personnel who deal with highly sensitive information to take their work on the road. At present, the U.S. Government has secure cellphones; they use the government's Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. The problem is that they can only communicate with other devices that are plugged into the network and their use is restricted to top-secret level communications. Lange wants a smartphone that is inter-operable and presumably trusted to deal with even more sensitive information. Lange said that he wanted to see his secure smartphone reach beyond the NSA – ultimately to reach every 'every employee in the Defense Department, intelligence community, and across government.'"
Oh, so your boys get the privacy protections that you've spent the last 10 years undermining for all the rest of us plebs, huh? I tell you what, I'll be cool with your special phones if, in exchange, the President and NSA Director will issue a public directive to all NSA employees reaffirming the pre-911 NSA policy of not to spying on the phone calls or emails of any American citizen without a court order. You know that policy, right? It's the one we put into law in 1978--the law that you ignored just because the President said so.
I'll hold my breath.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's from General Dynamics:
http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32640fd9-0213-4330-a742-55106fbaff32
Blackberry is very good, it currently holds many certifications (but not top secret):
http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/certifications.jsp
Fundamentally, there is a problem with mobile access for top secret communications - you don't know who is looking over the shoulder of the authorized user. Or if someone is pointing a gun at the head of an authorized user. These problems are reduced when you make the user come in to the office.
And the information will remain highly secure - right up until someone takes a non-secure camera and points it at the secure smartphone so they can get their job done.
wouldn't the value of security be gone if it is allowed to communicate with other phones? Don't these people learn anything?
did you forget to take your meds?
hey look! someone left their phone.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339444,00.asp
on the other hand they want to keep their turf secret
Does one have to be schizophrenic to work there?
if not mandatory, it sure would help!
This should be perfect
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The Android equivalent of SELinux and properly locked down phones?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
AT&T and the mass media propaganda machine spys on everyone's cellphones as it is now, (kind of makes that cell blocked 800MHz scanner thing a red herring)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Lange said that he wanted to see his secure smartphone reach beyond the NSA – ultimately to reach every 'every employee in the Defense Department, intelligence community and across government.
Yeah, so the NSA has a backdoor into every government worker's phone. No thanks.
There has to be a way for the Patriot Act spying to go mobile...you can't just have people spying on Americans from a cubicle somewhere when they can do it from the privacy of their own government-owned car...
what a load of crap. There are no TS data of any kind on or connected to SIPR. The current slate of smart phones that can carry classified comms do NOT connect to SIPR (they are point to point only and use PKI or Shared Secret keys to stand up a P2P secure channel). This article is regarding the Fort's effort to come up with a TS SMEPED as they're known.
Hopefully the NSA won't be leaving their new super secret smartphone in a bar as Apple has done TWICE now!
*facepalms*
How can they ask for something like this after doing everything in their power to ensure something like this can't be created?
Well, sure Mr. NSA, we can cobble together a secure phone for you...we'll just throw in an encryption / decryption chip and a process that prompts for a password every 5 minutes. And your agents will hate it, it will become compromised (journalists are so irresponsible), and it will become a waste of tax-payer money.
Did I mention it won't be secure? But don't worry; someone will tell you it can be done, and you'll pay them a lot of money, only to realize they lied.
I am John Hurt.
"Secret Internet Protocol Router Network"
"use is restricted to top-secret level communications"
This article contradicts it self, SIPR is only up to secret.
http://www.gdc4s.com/content/detail.cfm?item=32640fd9-0213-4330-a742-55106fbaff32
Looks like a Blackberry, but it's about an inch and a half thick and weighs about a pound.
Never before have I seen such hatred heaped upon an inanimate object by its user base.
Wireless, secure, cheap, reliable -- pick two.
SIPRNet only allows SECRET information and below. You need to be on JWICS to access Top Secret information.
First of all, in order to take classified data out of a secure area, you have to seal it in an approved manner -- triple wrap it, stow it in a lockable opaque container, sign for it, and basically chain it to your body until it reaches its next secure location. That's been the rule in the DoD for over 50 years. Obviously a cell phone, even one with a password, doesn't meet any of these criteria.
Second, how are you going to access this device while maintaining secure surroundings? Based on the way people must use STU III phones (encrypted mil-spec) you must be in a locked room which is acceptably 'sound proof'. To read or write classified documents, you must be in a locked room with no windows (or that are shuttered).
Who is going to use a classified smartphone ONLY within a locked shielded room? And if the room is secure, who is going to get a 3G/4G signal inside a shielded SCIF?
This idea is not only completely unworkable, it's dumbass to the bone.
"Troy Lange might work for one of the more secretive spy agencies in the United States, but he is happy to talk about his work. He is the NSA's mobility mission manager and he has been tasked with creating a smartphone that is secure enough to allow government personnel who deal with highly sensitive information to take their work on the road. At present, the U.S. Government has secure cellphones, they use the government's Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. The problem is that they can only communicate with other devices that are plugged into the network and their use is restricted to top-secret level communications. Lange wants a smartphone that is inter-operable and presumably trusted to deal with even more sensitive information. Lange said that he wanted to see his secure smartphone reach beyond the NSA – ultimately to reach every 'every employee in the Defense Department, intelligence community and across government.'"
More sensitive than TS? Maybe the article is poorly referring to handling of less sensitive data at the secret level, or beyond that, configuration of the device to handle (or refuse to handle) information transfer at a particular security clearance according to context (keys, location, clearance at each end point, whatever) as opposed to just TS-level information.
Or maybe the article is trying (again poorly) to refer to compartmentalization. That is, the device not only has a notion of TS, but also of compartments (and can handle/refuse to handle information according to applicable compartments at the TS level.)
Unless I'm missing something here, as presented in the article, that sentence makes no sense.
And they should name the device the telescreen!!
please excuse my apathy
Maybe they should buy webOS from HP, and have there own OS. Bet HP would sell it cheap. hehe
governments should not have secrets
I've always suspected that my supposedly secure Blackberry has some kind of NSA or FBI back door, and this only serves to confirm my suspicion.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Hmm, are you trying to put weapons in the hand of everyone, and especially terrorists? I don't think so. Have you forgotten that encryption technologies are considered as weapons by your own government?
And made in china components...
*facepalms*
How can they ask for something like this after doing everything in their power to ensure something like this can't be created?.
Uh, there is nothing preventing a US citizen or legal resident from creating a device that can handle information at different security levels, even TS. You are prevented (and rightly so) from having one already created *for them*, or to create a device that circumvent *their* information handling. But there is nothing that prevents you from creating one from scratch, even a more powerful (though it would be unlikely that you can market one of such from-scratch devices to them after building it outside of their specs.)
Long story short: any technical preventions by NSA are for those not in the NSA.
Well, sure Mr. NSA, we can cobble together a secure phone for you...we'll just throw in an encryption / decryption chip and a process that prompts for a password every 5 minutes. And your agents will hate it, it will become compromised (journalists are so irresponsible), and it will become a waste of tax-payer money.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur as building such a device takes a little bit more than just cobbling an encryption/decryption chip. I'm not necessarily sure where you are going with this (beyond mere rhetoric.)
Did I mention it won't be secure? But don't worry; someone will tell you it can be done, and you'll pay them a lot of money, only to realize they lied.
Uh, again, overt simplification of how these things are commissioned and built. No one can just go and say "it can be done" as such high-risk projects will be first assessed for viability by someone like MITRE for example. I mean, the NSA has an army of Ph.Ds in Mathematics, Computer Science and Computer/Electrical engineering with work experience in cryptanalysis, algorithms, VLSI, SoC and network hardware and communication protocols (both practical and theoretical) as well as defense contractors that build things like f* missiles, radar systems, jammers, and other incredibly complex shit like that.
I could be wrong, but I could bet just surely that you are over estimating your understanding on this issue (and under estimating theirs.) Don't let that stop your rhetoric, though ;)
1. Create a nation wide LTE network using IPv6.
2. Use end to end encryption on all devices and only use VOIP for voice.
3. Allow the rest of the nation to use the network in the same way.
4. Place highly accurate time bases in all LTE towers so where you have tower overlap you can get extremely precise locations even indoors.
5. When overlap is not available use the LTE tower in the aGPS mode to provide the ephemeris data almanac as well as improved location based on differential GPS with the LTE tower as a base reference.
Then charge all the carriers to use this network and allow the consumer real choice in carriers. The carriers would in effect become nothing but dumb pipe suppliers and VOIP suppliers.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So lets say that you have this super secret network smartphone and you had a super secret topic that you wanted to talk about with another super secret person. Where could you have this discussion and should you even be talking out loud? Wouldn't you need to be in a building somewhere that has sound insulation, or some other mechanism to keep your voice from being picked up from some other microphone than the one on your super secret smart phone? Or is it a fancy camera phone and not meant for voice? I hope that the camera is better than the one on my smartphone.....
And of course, they won't be allowed to use it outside the USA, because it won't get an export license due to the encryption.
So just what do you need a secure encrypted
Several china manufacturers will gladly make you these phones.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This sounds like an absolutely terrible idea.
Has history not proved that if it exists it can be broken, eventually?
What is at stake if his "secure" smartphone is broken? If I were the NSA I would be looking for a new communications expert... one with a stronger background in history, and info sec.
They certainly don't have the capacity to mass produce a smartphone, but they make plenty of silicon in-house
http://www.whispersys.com/
They could just expand the App to work with data too. Or fix the encryption for our current network, but then they would actually have to get jurisdiction to listen to our calls, instead of just doing it anyways.
mod parent up. summary doesn't seem to know what he's actually dealing with here.
It's a really bad, in fact, it's a stupid idea to try to use a mobile toy smartphone for something like this.
It's not about the encryption either. Every single component in that smartphone will have to be made by the right people and in such a way so that there isn't a hardware backdoor. Every piece of software would have to be audited, And even then I still think it's a bad idea to do this.
The encryption part is easy. It's easy to create schemes which are perfectly secure. It's difficult to defend against user error, against the phone being lost or being operated by someone other than the owner.
How would they even do authentication? If it's a password then that will be easily defeated. If it's 2 factor authentication that could still be easily defeated. I just cannot see how this is a good idea, and I'd think it would be silly use smart phones to handle classified information.
How can they claim to be worried about situations presented in the Bradley Manning case if they want to simultaneously bring SIPRNet to your hip? Just the concept of trying to have mobility and security seems a bit naive.
That person over there has a strange phone oh that's right, that is a spy phone so ....... They are a spy!
"Secret Internet Protocol Router Network"
"use is restricted to top-secret level communications"
This article contradicts it self, SIPR is only up to secret.
Ah, that explains the statement "Lange wants a smartphone that is inter-operable and presumably trusted to deal with even more sensitive information." I already wondered what information would be more sensitive than top secret.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
SCREW EM hackity hack hack
lets give it right back at them.
will certainly end in tears. Secure (classified) information on a mobile device? What could possibly go wrong here?
To think that these employees aren't going to be tracked by foreign intelligence is impetuous in itself when the mission of many of these foreign intelligence agencies is to extract secrets from the US government.
Employees who carry this phone are going to be targeted. And it's not the US spies they'll have to worry about.
It still does not change the fact that using a cellphone leaks emissions. Those emissions can be deciphered because of a human being can read the screen and decipher it, a non human can detect the emissions and decipher the signals to read the same screen.
So most importantly would be finding a secure location to use the phone in such a way that nothing can leak. Light, sound, radiation, no emission whatsoever must leak from the secure room, and if you have to be in a special room to use these phones then it defeats the purpose of having them because why not just use a desktop computer in that special room?
hence the entire article is crap. You also cannot take it seriously that the use of the phone is unrestricted according to location. You simply cannot talk any classification level out in the open.
i think above TS you get into "special access" things where there is an actual list of who has a copy of the data (with sometimes even the NAME of the project can get you SHOT).
I Do Not Currently Hold Top Secret Clearance (but do have dogtags).
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Phones get lost and stolen All The Time. Then the bad guy has unfettered physical access to the device. Normally that means Game Over. Suppose they try to make it tamperproof, ignoring the lessons of history. A targeted pickpocket will deliver it into the hands of a national intelligence agency.
You'd have to have a design that makes local storage impossible, which would make for a very strange smartphone.
all is in the title, indeed... capable of working both the normal GSM way and with various levels of encryption...
Various evolutions and models since then, like for instance
http://www.thalesgroup.com/Press_Releases/Markets/Security/2011/Thales_launches_Every_Talk,_the_first_ruggedized_high-speed_smartphone_for_security_forces/?pid=15928
Herve S.
mission: to allow senator halfwit to export 10,000 american jobs to mexico without getting caught.
tech: an encrypted cellphone that talks with a central server that decrypts the call and sends it on to the recipient. No risk of radio intercept on your end or a spy in the telco listening in. So long as the other end has the same you're good to go.
The SME-PED does SIPR data communications. Voice runs over the normal telephone network and can go up to the TS level.
whatever you say about security theater and such, the government does seem serious about securing its own stuff.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
These are not intended for voice communications involving the discussion of classified material. These are only for EMAIL and for getting access to classified web sites. Additionally, they are probably talking about a JWICS-compatible phone. We already have phones that talk to SIPR, they're called SME-PEDs and they're big ugly PoS's. Personally, I think they're a terrible idea. Not because there's any realistic threat of shoulder surfing, but because it brings us down to the level of all the other corporate plebs who have to answer their email wherever they are. And these phones aren't cheap. No sir.
The current STE (Secure Terminal Equipment, the rename of the STU (Secure Telephone Unit) series) costs around $3500 for the basic model. The technology in it is rather inferior my contemporary geek standards. One of the big reasons it costs so much is all the critical technology is sourced within the US from trusted sources. (Well, that's the theory, anyway.)
The NSA goes to considerable lengths and expense to protect their supply chain. (It's easy to spare no expense when you're spending others' money.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
But don't worry; someone will tell you it can be done, and you'll pay them a lot of money, only to realize they lied.
The NSA employs more mathematicians than any other organization in the world. I don't know you from Adam, but it's still a near-certainty that they have people much smarter than either of us working for them. They often fab their own silicon, build their own hardware, write their own software -- all from the ground up.
Whether or not this particular project will be a success is an open question -- the NSA is hardly immune to the Dilbert-style failings of any large bureaucracy, and "National Stupidity Agency" is a common-enough expansion -- but don't assume they'll fail just because you disagree with their mission and/or policies.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I believe a more apt term would be megalomaniacal; believing oneself to have absolute moral superiority -- in this case, over a craven race of incipient terrorists, pedophiles, and copyright infringers.
Hey now! Do you have any evidence at all that any copyright infringement is going on?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
So what about us normal and decent folks? What options exist for us to end-to-end encrypt calls and messages (at minimum)? Anything open-source out there, that let's you do that?
"Secret Internet Protocol Router Network"
"use is restricted to top-secret level communications"
This article contradicts it self, SIPR is only up to secret.
Right on, thanks for posting it for me. Also would like to point out the human factor that will take place. Someone WILL lose their phone, whether it be on accident or an outside entity.
I believe there are some really good ideas here, and that we can put them together in a comprehensive way and lend Mr. Lange a hand. Anyone know how to contact him?