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.'"

Comments

Good enough for them, but not for us huh?

[elrous0]

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.

Re:Good enough for them, but not for us huh?

[FatLittleMonkey]

Who's saying that the employees conversations on these phones won't be tracked?

Yeah, but securely tracked.

Re:Good enough for them, but not for us huh?

[bsDaemon]

I would be willing to bet that the people who will have this phone issued to them will have even less personal privacy on the device than normal cell phone users. After all, what good is securing the device from evesdropping by foreign intelligence if you can't catch people who are spying from the inside? State security and personal privacy aren't the same thing, not that the difference justifies fucking us, as citizens, over in the name of stopping turrerism.

Re:Good enough for them, but not for us huh?

[Anthony Mouse]

Yeah, the NSA has a different security model than Apple.

For one thing, if the thing is really secure, it shouldn't matter that nefarious people get access to one -- that is one of the main things you need it to be secure against.

Of course, the way you do this is pretty obvious. You put plenty of memory in it but only read-only permanent storage which holds the OS and the device's unique private key, and store all other data "in the cloud" (i.e. on the NSA's secure server). You put a hardware AES engine on the CPU and have it encrypt everything in RAM. You have it establish an encrypted tunnel at all times to a secure building in spy central somewhere and send all other communications through that. Then you use two or three factor authentication to unlock the phone, which authenticates against the central server, and when the phone is locked the encryption key to decrypt most of memory is stored in the central location rather than on the phone. If the phone gets lost you disable its account on the server and it's instantly bricked because it can't even read its own memory, and it doesn't contain any sensitive data in permanent storage.

Re:Good enough for them, but not for us huh?

[Ouchie]

The NSA/DOD listening is not as simple as you think. It isn't a bunch of analysts sitting around listening to everyone's phone calls to Pakistan. Computers listen passively to international phone calls looking for keywords and codewords. They score hits based on these usages and push it up for further analysis such as voice identification and stress pattern analysis.

The analysis is multi-level relying on computers for the first few levels until the computer ranks you high enough to warrant an analyst attention.

The likelihood of you being snooped on is slim, unless you do make regular phone calls to a phone number previously flagged. Like a payphone down the street from a known safe house.

Oddly enough they get around the search warrant thing by primarily listening to phone calls that leave and enter the United States. Your long distance calls fall under their charter as Foreign Intelligence because your phone calls are most likely bounced off a satellite owned by a Canadian, or other foreign subsidiary.

There already is one, the sectera

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That makes no sense

[js3]

wouldn't the value of security be gone if it is allowed to communicate with other phones? Don't these people learn anything?

Gah

[lightknight]

*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.

Small article error that changes the context a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

"Secret Internet Protocol Router Network"

  "use is restricted to top-secret level communications"
This article contradicts it self, SIPR is only up to secret.

Correction

[kevin_conaway]

SIPRNet only allows SECRET information and below. You need to be on JWICS to access Top Secret information.

Re:contradiction per se

[kevinNCSU]

I don't think there's anything inherently contradictory about wanting to keep the enemy's knowledge of you to a minimum while maximizing your knowledge of the enemy. Both stem from the idea that knowledge/information is power, and in the information battle, just like the physical battle, you're not interested in a level playing field.

Confirmation bias + Dunning–Kruger effect

[luis_a_espinal]

*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 ;)

Re:contradiction per se

[denis-The-menace]

schizophrenic ? No.

Hypocrite? YES

Re:It's a bad idea and not good enough.

[GameboyRMH]

Encrypted partitions + well-secured lock screen with anti-bruteforce + case intrusion detection systems (to prevent cold boot attack) + self-destruct systems (remote wipe + dead man's switch) = really fucking good security.