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NSA Releases Security-Enhanced Android
An anonymous reader writes with the recent news that, in line with its goal to provide secure phones to government employees in various domains, "The NSA has released a set of security enhancements to Android. These appear to be based on SELinux, which was also originally created by the NSA."
The question is what backdoors have they placed on it. Is it secure from themselves (NSA) and other three letter agencies?
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Time is on my side
One source said it has twice as many backdoors as SELinux. Another source said ten times as many.
I think they're both correct.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
SELinux Android is OSS, same as SELinux. Look at the code yourself if you are convinced there are backdoors. That is part of the point of OSS after all.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Take a look at DES. There was a big to do about the NSA "messing" with the S-boxes in DES. People conspiracy theoried that they had weakened it so they could crack it. Nobody at the NSA or IBM (who made DES) would say anything about it. The, in 1990, differential cryptanalysis was discovered by public researchers and it turned out the DES S-boxes were way more resilient to it than had then been random. Turns out IBM and the NSA knew about it back in the 70s, but the NSA asked IBM to keep a lid on it. The NSA's changes made DES more resilient.
Time has borne it out too. DES is decades old now and there has been no magic break in it discovered, no "backdoor" that would let people in, it is just too short a key to be useful anymore.
Along those lines, the NSA has signed off on AES (which was originally developed in Finland) as an approved standard to be used for classified data and said that AES is good security for the commercial world (which was the point of the AES standard). Again, time seems to bear them out on that, it is the most analyzed cryptosystem out there, and nobody has found any "backdoor" in it.
While there's no doubt the NSA takes their signals intelligence mission seriously, they seem to take their security mission seriously too. Their track record so far is excellent. Everything they've released has stood the test of time.
Now I suppose it is possible in theory that they are so far advanced of everyone else, and so arrogantly confident in their superiority, that they have hidden "backdoors" they figure nobody will ever notice... However if they really were that much better, would they need to?
Have you ever heard of the Underhanded C Contest. You get points for making the code exhibit some kind of backdoor, extra points for the more it looks like it could've been an innocent mistake (for instance, code where using a less-than-or-equal-to operator instead of less-than operator actually opens up an obscure security hole, and it's a mistake programmers make all the time).
I recommend you look at some of the examples of winning entries. It's amazing what these people have come up with. No number of eyes will find it. Simply put, even if it's a popular open-source project, thousands of eyes are likely to miss a well-placed backdoor like these. And if anyone is capable of doing it, the NSA certainly is.
Still don't believe me? How about the OpenSSH PRNG flaw that went unnoticed for two years, despite being used in servers all over the world. It was due to someone removing what appeared to be a useless line of code, but that code was actually adding some necessary extra entropy to the random number generator. It might've been an accident, or malicious. But the point is it happened, and on a high-profile project.
You can't be 100% secure, 100% of the time. There will /always/ be a weak link. Be it a backdoor or a security flaw. The goal is to manage your risks. Using security enhanced Android (after about a good month for security researchers to look at the code) is unlikely to introduce any more government-imposed security risks than simply being in the US and its tyrannical laws (PATRIOT Act, CALEA, etc.). Chances are, SEA is going to be more secure than the patched together stock Android system.
Of course they can hide a backdoor in it. But why bother when they already have nearly unlimited powers due to the PATRIOT act, have many corporations that will bend over backwards for the police state, and laws like CALEA.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Capable? Yes. The NSA hires geniuses. But so do foreign nations, various companies, and universities. If we're going to indulge in an encomium of the extraordinary competence of the NSA, though, the most honest praise would be for an NSA imagined as most likely trying to provide genuine security with this effort, not backdoors, which open up the possibility of breaches or discovery.
Consider the NSA's purpose in making a secure version of Android: it's a system built by geniuses to be operated, in the end, by idiots, who are targeted for attack by other geniuses. From the NSA's perspective, there are two opponents: the brilliant Enemy and the Friendly moron. Leaving a backdoor, however well-obfuscated, provides the brilliant Enemy with an avenue for taking advantage of the Friendly moron who violates security procedures for his ill-conceived convenience. Backdoors allow breaches, and the NSA has to be smart enough to know that there are enough geniuses out there working for the other side(s) to find one and exploit it.
Consider also the fallout if a backdoor were to be discovered in the NSA's source code. Geniuses will be reading this code, if for no other reason than because it demonstrates the NSA's thinking. If someone found a backdoor and, instead of exploiting it or selling it to exploiters, decided to publicize it as an example of a purposeful NSA backdoor, the NSA would lose immense credibility. What kind of turf and funding wars would they face then, if the rest of the government agencies lost trust in them? Would the much-vaunted geniuses of the NSA consider that risk acceptable?
It's in the NSA's interest not to introduce even well-obfuscated backdoors in this product. It is in their interest to have such facilities available in consumer-grade products and exports, and God only knows what's baked into the phone companies' customized builds that they've compiled and installed onto a consumer-grade phone. It is not, however, useful to them to have such access in source code that is publicly available to be read by people looking for problems or compiled by people smart enough to know what they're doing.
If the NSA really is as smart as we'd all like to believe, they'll make this an honest, open, secure product without backdoors or traps. They'll make a product that will solidify their place in the government funding arena as the authority in hardened security.
You're joking, right? Do you honestly think that, if someone were injecting a flaw, they would inject a flaw that was readily discoverable? No. Of course not. They'd introduce some miniscule mistake in some random number generator that makes the result no longer be quite uniformly distributed in such a way that the error is only detectable by performing thousands of calls and doing heavy math on them, thus enabling a side channel attack on the randomly generated symmetric keys used for SSL or some such.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
While I don't necessarily disagree with your premise; could I interest you in one of my new security enhanced tinfoil hats?
-- no sig today
while mainly correct, your proposition ignores the fact that in programming you have a lot of plausible deniability in form of the programming mistake. A wrongly placed comparison or wrongly compiled regexp can have huge side effects while looking like little mistypes even a good albeit tired dev would make. Now think that by implanting such a small discrepancy into a big project you could do very many things without being ever detected. Also the side effects of such a behavior are very difficult to follow in a big project making the possibilities of it being forcibly discovered ridiculous since you would have to follow every reroute into oblivion before being sure there are not deliberate side effects.
-- no sig today
No Sir, you must be joking. AES ie. Rijndael comes from Belgium.
AES
Having gone through the comments here, to read the distrust of the NSA. To be honest, that is good.
Yet, for a number of you, you will trust the physical hardware is OK coming in from China. Why on god's green earth, would you trust china, a nation that has more spies running around the world, esp. in the west, then does America, while screaming that America has planted a backdoor in open code?