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CNET: Feds Put Heat On Web Firms For Master Encryption Keys
First time accepted submitter fsagx writes "The U.S. government has attempted to obtain the master encryption keys that Internet companies use to shield millions of users' private Web communications from eavesdropping. These demands for master encryption keys, which have not been disclosed previously, represent a technological escalation in the clandestine methods that the FBI and the National Security Agency employ when conducting electronic surveillance against Internet users."
I know this is an important issue, but didn't we just do this exact same article yesterday?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/07/24/1812227/anonymous-source-claims-feds-demand-private-ssl-keys-from-web-services
From TFA.. "Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Opera Software's Fastmail.fm, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast declined to respond to queries about whether they would divulge encryption keys to government agencies." Now you know who is coughing up to the NSA..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
I wanted the first post saying it was a dupe!
Anonymous Source Claims Feds Demand Private SSL Keys From Web Services
Posted by Unknown Lamer on Wednesday July 24, 2013 @02:41PM
from the world-wide-fool-proof-cage dept.
[shakes fist at rsmith-mac]
Congress agrees: Americans no better than foreigners, spy on everyone!
Fuck the NSA.
"The government's view is that anything we can think of, we can compel you to do."
Seems pretty spot-on. Unless people challenge these illegal activities, they'll just keep on and on.
After all, they have pretty-much unlimited resources compared to most private entities, and no real pressure to justify their usage.
Your tax dollars at work.
If they can get the keys, then they don't need to use PRISM, they can grab the data upstream.
It lets them hide the PRISM surveillance, Google/Yahoo/Facebook/DropBox etc. no longer gets to see the volume of requests, it is hidden. US companies can claim, with some degree of truthiness, that they no longer deliver data to PRISM requests, as if the program has been ended, because they no longer see the requests or get to challenge them. In fact surveillance had been expanded to all https traffic.
They gain 'plausible deniability', and NSA gains 100% surveillance of their https traffic and the ability to man-in-the-middle at will, by simply using their connection upstream. NSA also removes the problem of companies challenging the intercepts.
The fix is to avoid US based services, either their servers are compromised by the NSA, or their keys.
More difficult is if NSA has signing rights from the US certificate authorities. Most of these are built into your browser. I tried deleting them from Firefox but it was not possible. With those compromised NSA can sign *foreign* traffic and man-in-the-middle intercept it even though both ends of the conversation are outside NSA control.
The fix there is to avoid traffic being routed across NSA controlled territories (USA/Canada/UK/NZ/AUS). So if it crosses the UK they record everything and the private keys will let them record all https traffic too. A lot of backbone crosses the US, and a lot of European traffic crosses the UK, so France to Germany might cross the UK, and Germany to Japan might cross the US.
Seems like a PR stunt:
1) NSA gets caught spying on everyone
2) NSA makes a big public show of asking for encryption keys from telecoms, emplying they haven't been able to read as much traffic as previously thought.
3) Telecoms of course refuse after rallying together.
4) NSA is foiled! We all believe we have security again because the NSA can't read our encrypted e-mails!
5) NSA goes back under the radar.
Bullshit. If the US government wants to break standard encryption, they have the resources to do so. At best, the telecoms crumbling under this demand would only reduce the required resources to spy on us.
Every telecommunication company that operates within the United States is required by law to provide law enforcement access to communication streams on demand. It's called CALEA and all telecommunications companies are required by law to follow it.
CALEA also requires that encrypted communications be decrypted. This includes services like Skype(specifically). CALEA requires that Microsoft provide law enforcement access to the UNENCRYPTED streams of Skype communications, on demand. This is not new and, in light of the House vote yesterday, is not likely to change.
Seem like the better option now. At least you know what the CA has done with the master key.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I imagine this has crossed (or should have) the minds of a few people here, is there any "credible" advice about the theoretical process and the best/least-worst practical actions to take if you're approached by your friendly local domestic intelligence agency and told to pony up your company's private keys (for example) along with the explicit instructions not to inform anyone else, ever? For the record I'd like to declare that I've never been in that or any similar position.
Regards, Phil
Total Information Awareness, championed by Admiral John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, a one time felon over Iran-Contra (overturned on appeal), wanted to do much of what the NSA is doing today. When the details of TIA became public there was an outrage and the plans for it had to be scrapped. Or were they?
The point is this: the public (voters) say "no" to these things... and they just sneak around our backs and do it anyway. Saying "no" once is not sufficient. If, as a citizen, voter, and patriot you believe that these ideas are bad you need to say "no" repeatedly, early, and often. Once whole bureaucracies are constructed to serve a bad aim it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to stop them.
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." With all due respect to Justice Brandeis, if some of these bad ideas do survive, though, it might be more because of public exhaustion than of public acceptance. Or, more simply, perhaps once a secret bureaucracy gets big enough in the darkness there is no way to kill it once it comes into the light. Even sunlight has its limits.
The good news is that if the web servers use forward secrecy in the SSL encryption ( https://community.qualys.com/blogs/securitylabs/2013/06/25/ssl-labs-deploying-forward-secrecy ), then an attacker who has the private key is not able to decrypt a connection he has passively eavesdropped on. An active man-in-the-middle attack is required in order to listen in on the connection.
This is why such services that let users store data in their "cloud" should enable user-specific encryption keys - the user's public key encrypts the data, and ONLY the user's private key can decrypt it. Then if "authorities" want access to the data, they would have to ask each and every user for their key. Sure, as in I'm convinced I would do that!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
All the movies/shows that use the repeating day theme are PKD ripoffs.
Then why hasn't Dick's estate sued?
Is there any external mathematical difference between "we need to spy on terrorists" and "we are going to spy on political opponents"? How could we tell?
- "Trust us" is used in both situations.
- "We have processes in place" is claimed in both cases.
- Alarms don't go off if an agent listens in on a call without a warrant. See first two points?
I suppose we should rely on historical experience of how governments operate. Oh oh.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
What I wish....
FED, "Give us your encryption keys"
CORP: "EAD, DIAF!"
Reality....
FED: "Give us your encryption keys"
CORP: "Why?"
FED: "To fight terrorisim, you are not harboring terrorists are you?"
CORP:" Here's the keys, would you also like the keys to the bathrooms and the filing cabinets?"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you are relying on a service with a master key for security, you have no security. This is true regardless of whether the government has access to those keys.
GPG is your friend. More people should use it.
But then you'd have to get your key signed. And to extend your web of trust outside your hometown, you'd have to fly to a key signing party elsewhere, get your junk touched, and still worry about what information airlines share with the spooks.
you've managed to make me feel sorry for the poor saps that have to spy all day on us
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Our two party system only works were the two parties are not the same.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again...the left-leaning half of the Ruling Party is no more, or less, virtuous than the right-leaning half of the Ruling Party.
The only real difference between them is how they want to kill us. The left want to smother us in a stifling nanny-state bureaucracy that'll collapse under its own weight, and the right want to abandon us to fend for ourselves. The latter is more sustainable, but either way we die a miserable death.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
""Strongly encrypted data are virtually unreadable," NSA director Keith Alexander told (PDF) the Senate earlier this year." Hmmnnn, should I trust what the Emperor of the NSA, who has directly lied under oath numerous times, is saying? I have no doubt that if the companies don't provide those master keys (seems many if not all of the big ones won't do this), this intelligence empire would just obtain them illegally via direct attacks and/or people on the inside of these organizations.
..no takers on THAT bet....too much like a sure thing.. BT (our biggest ISP and our biggest telecoms company) regularly spreads its legs for the government, so I would bet BT handed the keys over at the first hint.. So now anyone in gorvernment who doesn't like your face can make your bank accounts say whatever they want. We're all doomed.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
The same master key would be used as the 1/2 of your visit to a site 'everytime'. :)
So with the key, your hidden urls would turn back to plain text months, years later via a stored server/logs.
The way around that seems some form of "per-session" key.
ie decrypting each separate search or use vs a key for all historical traffic via a court order for the key - even for an unrelated user
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It would explain a lot.
Can the FBI or a spooktacular TLA simply request a US based CA hand over private keys used to generate an intermediate signing key?
If not why? Is the CA's "private key" not a "tangable thing" and I could imagine it would be quite helpful to a great number of "authorized investigations".
Planet scale trust anchors are an oxymoron anyway I suppose.
Keys are expensive to generate. It would kill any server to have to create new one for each session.
All the commentary I'm reading about this just talks about using it to decrypt captured traffic. One aspect I've not seen anyone address yet is this: wouldn't this allow them to spoof the services in question, and just capture any data they want directly? If you have someone's server certificate (which the server will give you freely), and the corresponding private key, you can set up a server which looks exactly like the real, say, gmail.com, legit certificate signed by a trusted CA and all, and capture unencrypted data to your heart's content.
Maybe that's what the government wants those private keys for? It would completely sidestep the issue of forward secrecy. To me that's even more scary than the possibility that they may be capturing encrypted traffic and using these keys to decrypt it...
Key exchange is not performed over HTTP - it is performed by SSL or TLS (or whatever encryption protocol is being used). Even then, the public key exchange and encryption that is set up by the handshake is to set up a secure connection for exchanging symmetrical keys. Then the entire payload (whether it be HTTP, FTPS, or other application protocol) is encrypted. Asymmetric (key pairs) encryption/decryption is expensive, which is why symmetric keys are generated and used.
So with the key, your hidden urls would turn back to plain text months, years later via a stored server/logs.
URLs in transit over HTTPS are encrypted, but once they hit the server logs, they are stored in plain text along with any other data configured to be logged (unless on an encrypted volume, but that's outside the control of the web server software).
"Apple, Yahoo, AOL, Verizon, AT&T, Opera Software's Fastmail.fm, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast declined to respond to queries about whether they would divulge encryption keys to government agencies."
I'm sometimes surprised at big companies cozying up with big brother. This might help get them some favorable legislation and tax breaks, but it comes at the expense of international credibility. If I worked at a company in Europe, I would have second thoughts about purchasing software from a US vendor with backdoors for the US government. Same goes for cloud service providers where the US government could issue national security letters and read all my data without notifying me. I don't know how this kind of policy could be good for Silicon Valley in the long run.
Just revoke them as soon as you hand them over, issue a new key and wait for the next request... Rinse. Repeat.
Stealing an idea isn't infringing, only the concrete expression of that idea.
That depends on where the judge chooses to draw the line in each particular case between what is idea and what is expression. For example, judges have drawn that line in different places for APIs (Oracle v. Google) and business software user interfaces (Lotus v. Borland) compared to video games (Tetris v. Xio).