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NSA Foils Much Internet Encryption
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is reporting that the NSA has 'has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show. ... The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. The documents do not identify which companies have participated.'" You may prefer Pro Publica's non-paywalled version, instead, or The Guardian's.
For awesome powa
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I wonder if their list includes SSH
I believe the "working with industries to install backdoors" part, but the cracking internet standards encryption? Nope. The report doesn't even say what they are supposed to have cracked, only some nebulous "widely used internet encryption". Do they have a ton of computation power? Yes. Do they have some magical break on AES that no one in academia knows about or can even fathom? No. Just some FUD.
From Bruce Schneier Here and here.
Also a nice call to arms here.
"I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better."
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
The three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the story because of the value of a public debate about government actions [...] .
Yet, the article does claim this:
"Project Bullrun deals with NSA's abilities to defeat the encryption used in specific network communication technologies. Bullrun involves multiple sources, all of which are extremely sensitive." The document reveals that the agency has capabilities against widely used online protocols, such as HTTPS, voice-over-IP and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), used to protect online shopping and banking.
But they also quote Snowden that:
"Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on," he said before warning that NSA can frequently find ways around it as a result of weak security on the computers at either end of the communication.
Maybe we still have some hope?
So I'm left with the impression that the NSA will add features in return for improved access.
SELinux comes to mind as a gift from the NSA to the Linux community. A gift with a hidden payload.
Hmm.... We can call it Trojan Linux. Ribbed for your pleasure. The ultimate in back door penetration.
the NSA has done over a 100,000,000 million legal searches.
From all the leaked records, 22,000 are questionable. Those 22,000 lie everywhere between needing a judicial interpretation, to blatant breech.
The leaks also show NSA's number one whistle blower to the courts is the NSA. They report them and correct them.
Not to excuse there blatantly illegal searches, but to thing the whole system is some corrupt entity that s out to get everyone is simply wrong. /. claim.
No evidences supports that at all.we have a lot of hope becasue none of the evidences shows it to be nearly as bad as the media claims. And certainly nowhere near where the chicken littles on
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
surely there should be a ripe market niche for some smart geek to 3D print arduino-controlled quadcopters to facilitate key exchange. hmmmm... hold on, still a few bugs to be worked out...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The NSA can crack 4096-bit PGP keys? I doubt it. Seems like FUD to dissuade people from even attempting to use encryption
From ProPublica:
In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.
Who else remembers the debacle about the government no longer purchasing Lenovo computers? I remember some people saying that if the U.S. government is making all this fuss about it, they're probably the ones doing it.
This seems to indicate those people are correct.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The raw document provides some more details but remains not especially explicit.
"The fact that NSA/CSS has some capabilities against the encryption in TLS/SSL, HTTPS, SSH, VPNs, VoIP, WEBMAIL, and other network communication technologies".
Capabilities are defined here as NSA/CSS ability to exploit a specific technology. This may encompass acquiring and processing plaintext data and/or acquiring, decrypting and processing encrypted data.
So do you want the NSA to break Syria's encryption about their chemical weapons attacks?
Or do you prefer we not know that the Syrian government uses chemical weapons to kill civilian populations, affecting public policy?
Which social contract would you prefer government to break? the "Government shouldn't know private activities of foreign governments" or "Government shouldn't allow foreign governments to kill civilians"?
If your privacy is important, then you think that means your government shouldn't monitor foreign communications, correct? And that means you think it's ok for foreign governments to kill civilians as they please? And if you think foreign governments should be allowed to kill civilians, then I guess you don't donate to charity either? Why would you want to help other people, after all?
You can pick either charity or privacy, but you can't have both. Sorry. That's because bad guys have power, and you need more power to overcome those bad guys for the purposes of charity.
So charity or privacy? What's it going to be?
Won't somebody please think of the civilians!
All else aside, if you think the NSA breaks codes in order to prevent civilian casualties, or for "charity", you have another thing coming. They do it to provide intelligence to the US government to facilitate furthering its national interest, in whatever form that may take. And if you think civilian casualties or chemical weapons are the actual reason we are considering whether or not to attack Syria, you have yet another thing coming.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
"Government shouldn't allow foreign governments to kill civilians"?
Incidentally, that policy also applies to the Syrian government versus the US. Cos', you know, the US is a foreign government and airstrikes would surely also kill civilians.
Also, your entire post is a false dichotomy.
There are a surprisingly large number of public key generators with weak random number generators:
And those are the ones we know about.
For open source systems, the person or persons who inserted the weak code should be identified and kicked off the project. It may just be incompetence, but that's a good reason to keep them out of security-critical areas.
Weak keys don't just let the NSA in. They let the People's Liberation Army of China in, too.
I can see (although I don't necessarily agree with) the argument that we have no expectation of privacy on metadata, but surely there is an expectation of pricacy on encrypted data. Surely the fact that the user has encrypted his data (or knows that it will be) provides an expecation of privacy that would invoke a 4th amendment protection.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
How did the NSAs ability to decrypt most of the encrypted communications of the world prevent Syria's chemical attack on its own people?
Or even help after the fact, for that matter?
How is helping Syria's people even part of the NSAs charter?
Now that we know the NSA can intercept and decrypt any message, doesn't it also mean that they can change the message to whatever they want, re-encrypt it, and pull it out in a court of law as evidence?
If they do, or even if they don't, I can now say they did, and they can't prove they didn't.
Spy on foreign governments and foreign citizens. They need to stay the fuck away from Citizens of the United States of America. Spying on Americans is what other governments are for.
The NSA is operating far outside of its charter. Put them straight.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Actually, you will get neither if the NSA is able to read all encrypted communication. Simply put, if the government has the ability to penetrate all encrypted communications, there will be no privacy. If there is no privacy the government will eventually degenerate to a tyranny. Given a choice between a tyranny and dead Syrians, I choose the dead Syrians. I don't like the idea of people being killed by their government but I'd rather have the Syrian government killing Syrians than the American government killing Americans, something which will eventually happen if we lose our civil rights.
Don't doubt for a minute that there are forces in the government that are working toward that. They're mostly not evil people and most don't really understand what the ramifications of what they are doing, but history does repeat itself and there is plenty of history that demonstrates what happens when a government can do whatever it wants. Orwell's "1984" is fiction, not history, but it is based upon history and basic psychology. If we want to retain our civil rights, we need to fight and struggle for them, both in the courts and in civil disobedience if necessary.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
I'd like us to continue treating encryption as weapons and regulate its export accordingly. Unfortunately, it is not really possibly — any enemy worth the designation would be able to get it anyway, because moving an algorithm is much easier than a gun. And, unlike guns, you only need to move an algorithm once.
I wish I had sufficient confidence in my own government to be able to sincerely pick charity... Unfortunately, I do not. If the President can already ask the IRS to hurt opposition's finances, what's to prevent him from asking the NSA to look into the opposition's e-mails? The sort of thing, that got Nixon to resign is barely an issue with today's Americans...
However, according to an earlier article about Snowden's interaction with journalist(s), PGP (with sufficiently large keys) is still unbreakable even to the NSA — at least, as far Snowden was aware:
So that's, what a particularly private person should be using for all of his communications...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This has nothing to do with liberal or conservative and everything to do with the power of government.
From Bruce Schneier:
Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-internet-nsa-spying
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Though I sympathize with the gist of your position, I must question this particular argument:
Why exactly is this so? Of course, it would be rather uncomfortable to have no privacy, but would it necessarily lead to tyranny? Why not the opposite, for example — if no one's dealings are private and all information (from banking transactions, to kissing, to bowel movements) about everyone is readily available to whoever cares, wouldn't it be harder to subdue the electoral process, for example?
You would make it much, much easier to "subdue the electoral process". If you're currently the party in power and facing re-election, you first kill everyone who donates money to the opposition--everybody stops giving them money, hampering their campaign. Then you kill anyone who's given any hint that they might vote for the opposition. You and your cohorts get re-elected. Rinse and repeat, and eventually nobody dares form an opposition party, much less support one. If anybody says or does anything that remotely sounds like rebellion, you kill them too. Your party stays in power indefinately, the only things that might end your reign are a split in your party, or killing off so many people that there not enough people left to work and your economy collapses.
Yeah, 'accidental' civilian deaths, or deaths from 'necessary collateral damage' are so very noble and just.
In Serbia the US/NATO 'accidentally' bombed a farmers market, two hospitals, the Chinese embassy, civilian radio/TV stations, bridges on the wrong side of the country with civilians on them, etc. Also random factories that weren't military-related industry (eg. tobacco) - Interestingly the tobacco factory got bought by Phillip Morris a couple years later...
Chemical weapons are abhorrent, absolutely. But unless use is widespread, picking winners and causing more death and destruction isn't ideal, neither.
Sent from my PDP-11
Your can configure your HTTPS server to use forward secrecy. Forward secrecy uses one-time keys, generated by between the website and the browser for the single session. Most modern browsers support it. But it generally requires compiling the latest version of OpenSSL and the compiling Apache 2.4.x against that, not using the Apache 2.2.x versions that are standard in most of the Linux distros. More detail also here.
If you set up your webserver this way, and your visitors use the right browsers, they NSA's having good copies of the site's certificates won't gain them much. At least that's what Ivan Risti's saying. On TLS/SSL stuff, there may be no one better.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
No, the article wasn't referring to AES. AES was developed by a pair of Belgian cryptographers as part of an open competition. The NSA approves the use of AES to protect Top Secret information. They didn't put a back door in AES.
The article was referring to the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG), published as part of SP800-90. The DRBG uses a set of constants, like many crypto algorithms. The NSA, as the designer of the DRBG, selected the constants. Microsoft researchers noted that if the constants were carefully chosen, the NSA could predict future outputs of the DRBG. Despite what the New York Time article says, the NSA probably didn't do that. No one was going to use this DRBG anyway, except for the NSA and their partners, so they would have very little reason to sneak in a backdoor. Still, it's a bad property to have in a crypto algorithm. You should really explain the provenance of any constants used in a crypto algorithm, and there was no explanation of how the Dual EC DRBG constants were selected.
"The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to 'covertly influence' their product designs."
So, the NSA creates exploit in everything they can influence. And they can influence almost everything. The NSA purchases exploit. Many times, they must be purchasing info on the exploits that they created. They preserve exploit. They mask everything in secrecy. And it all enhances the exploit marketplace.
If we could just get the NSA out of the exploit market, the whole thing would probably collapse like a real-estate broker's wet dream.
The other chilling revelation is the names of these programs:
"The NSA's codeword for its decryption program, Bullrun, is taken from a major battle of the American civil war. Its British counterpart, Edgehill, is named after the first major engagement of the English civil war, more than 200 years earlier."
The NSA has crappy internal discipline. Instead of using meaningless codewords for project names, their codewords frequently describe the project. PRISM described how the NSA collects info. These project names shout that the NSA is fomenting civil war. They are at war with the rest of the country.
If we survive as a nation of liberty, the NSA must serve us, not attack us.
Perhaps we shouldn't have provided the Syrians with the precursor chemicals to make weapons in the first place.
Your position is laughable. You have the precursor chemicals to make weapons under your kitchen sink. It's basically impossible to have any kind of modern industrial base without them.
People like you are why I can't buy fucking cold medicine anymore.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
The Guardian article refers to it as a "10 year program" which would put it's inception in the Bush Jr. years. As for the EU is better argument, it looks like my own country's government was a prime mover in this. Way to go guys.
Expanding on the above post, if the US is installing and/or exploiting bug related backdoors in
commercial software it would take relatively few to reach 99+% coverage.
If you can get the OS's you're set as you can hit 99% with less than a half dozen.
Likewise with cellular providers, handset makers, virus scanners, printer (driver) manufacturers,
cpu manufacturers, router manufacturers, email clients, web browsers, office suites, etc....
Take any category of software or hardware most of which are dominated by only a few major players
and if you can get your foot in the door with any of them then you have control of the computer or
device. I'm not sure that linux even has that much advantage as there are few if any people who
compile everything from scratch and even if they do, how hard would it really be to get an
undocumented bug inserted into one of several hundred programs that run on a typical computer.
If they're willing to throw enough time, money, and power behind it, there is no way someone can
avoid being eavesdropped on.
You can't do much with the knowledge that a government wants you dead.
But a government can do a lot with the knowledge that you want it replaced.
Rethinking email
So because there are scary bad men out there the government should be able to do whatever the fuck it wants to be able to catch them? Even if that includes massively violating the privacy of every citizen (never know who's a scary bad man!!) in the country? Even if it includes building a massive database filled with who the fuck knows what that never, ever, gets erased? You know how they say the internet forgets nothing? This is even worse, since random fruit loops on the internet don't have access to your phone records, your banking records, your phone calls, your location and every niggling little detail of your entire life! If you think it's bad that /b/ can access something stupid you said on your blog and troll you even if you delete it, just wait until some scary bad men, I mean trusted public servants, get ahold of all that juicy personal information that those stalwart do-gooders of the NSA put together for them, they'll have a field day! Accidently piss off some bureaucrat at the DMV? He'll just call his cousin at the Ministry of Love and they'll whip up some charges doubleplusquick then off to the Re-education centers (actually, that's too expensive, off to the work camps, more than likely).
If you really think it's just "metadata" you're deluded. All this stuff that's coming out used to sound like the fever dreams of the loony fringe, and god damn does it suck having to listen to them smugly say "We told you so."
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
While you guys are cracking jokes on ROT13, a letter to NYT ( http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?_r=0 ) caught my attention
- - - B Missouri Reader
Missouri
On the one hand, âoeIn the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,â but on the other hand the liberties of Americans are at risk by such programs.
In other words, we face a situation where the strongest, most secure nation can no longer be a nation that guarantees the rights of its citizens.
Privacy is not simply a convenience, but it is intimately linked to free speech and to the future prospects for democracy in America. Key elements of the Constitution provide a framework where incumbents can be challenged in free elections, ensuring that better ideas and better leaders will become available to guide the nation. But nobody can win an election against an incumbent with unlimited access to the communications of its rivals. We're not there yet, but the trend is in that direction.
It is high time that members of both parties in Congress get off of their high horses and address this growing threat to our democracy. Technical and legal hurdles must be cleared, and it may even be necessary to make significant changes in the way the internet works. But time passes very quickly in the technology world, and the clock has already been ticking for quite a long time."
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !