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John Gilmore Analyzes NSA Obstruction of Crypto In IPSEC
New submitter anwyn writes "In a recent article posted on the cryptography mailing list, long time civil libertarian and free software entrepreneur John Gilmore
has analyzed possible NSA obstruction of cryptography in IPSEC. He suggests that packet processing in the Linux kernel had been obstructed by one kernel developer. Gilmore suggests that the NSA has been plotting against strong cryptography on mobile phones."
Given the recent hoo-ha with the NSA listening in, and then also admitting that (along with GCHQ) they have "broken" most commonly used encryption, it looks as though the "don't use anything that we can't either backdoor or crack" is, if not NSA itself, certainly from one of their supporters.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
Shit, the FBI and NSA, et al put the kibosh on that before the damn things hit the streets. Instead they made a law that prohibits the sale of full spectrum scanners to the public, like was supposed to make them secure...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It seems pretty clear that John Gilmore has clearly identified what's going on. He spotted many instances of NSA-directed sabotage,and has called it out.
Of the multiple examples John calls out, the most poignant is probably the needlessly complicated IPSEC standards. Overly complicated standards lead to bugs and flaws. He and Bruce Schneier describe a process that certainly sounds like NSA sabotage of security standards.
What should be the upshot of this? Perhaps people involved in security research should recognize that [b]anyone affiliated with NSA is a likely saboteur[/b]? Is such sabotage, which deliberately cripples the security of USA electronic infrastructure, a form of treason? Since this sort of deliberate sabotage of technology is the sort of thing terrorists might do, perhaps the NSA, and every person associated with that organization, should be placed on a Terrorist Watch List?
In all seriousness, how should the technical and geek community deal with this sort of sabotage? Is it sufficient to respond,or is proactive behavior called for? What would Sun Tzu have to say about this situation?
Encryption is one thing, but I suppose one of the principal spying techniques at the diverse intelligence agencies' disposal is the SSL MITM. We must assume the private signing keys of the CAs are also held by government authorities so they can spoof any website.
Here's the idea: have the web browser display the flag of the CA's jurisdiction. So if you can see, say, the Chinese flag next to the URL, you can be reasonably certain the NSA isn't listening in (although the Chinese authorities might).
This post needs repeating.
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The destruction of trust (Score:5, Insightful)
by Arrogant-Bastard (141720) on 7:08 Friday 06 September 2013 (#44773249)
The worst part of the damage done by this isn't technical. It's human.
The reporting on this latest disclosure reveals that the NSA has systematically inserted itself into the standard-crafting process, in order to deliberately weaken those standards. It also reveals that the NSA has bypassed the management of communications providers and recruited technical staff directly. In both cases it's reasonable to assume that the people involved have been through a security clearance process and are thus barred for life from disclosing what they know.
I must now ask myself how many people I've worked with weren't doing so in good faith. When they argued that such-and-such a fine point of a network protocol standard didn't need improvement or that it should be changed in a certain way, were they doing so because it was their principled engineering opinion, or because it served some other purpose? Or when they were recommending that one of the many operations I've run move its colocation point or change its router hardware, was that good customer service, or was it to facilitate easier traffic capture?
Will anyone be asking themselves the same questions about me? (They probably should.)
The Internet was built on, and runs on, trust. Every postmaster, every network engineer, every webmaster, every system admin, every hostmaster, everyone crafting standards, everyone writing code, trusts that everyone else -- no matter how vehemently they disagree on a technical point -- is acting in good faith. The NSA, in its enormous arrogance, has single-handedly destroyed much of that trust overnight.
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--
BMO
Your choice: big bully or idiot.
"In all seriousness, how should the technical and geek community deal with this sort of sabotage?"
Identify who is doing the sabotaging and shun them. Professionally shun them. Expel such people from committees.
--
BMO
For many years, I just felt that something was wrong, and would do "silly things" (I was an admin, whoops) like setup VPN tunnel, then require everyone to use SSL and client certs to access a service. So people would laugh at usage of VPN + SSL (and then certs on top of it) and ridicule it.
Spent more than a decade trying to explain to *technical* people why self-signed certs are much more secure than 'commercial' certs, and I could never understand why people couldn't understand what I am saying. Well now I know, they simply couldn't beleive any government would do things we're seeing done.
Been laughed at quite few times, but I can tell you that noone is laughing right now.
And now I finally know that I am not a fucking lunatic.
Thank you Edward Snowden.
Read all (4 pages) of chapter 13 basically, but in this case perhaps specifically;
"Spies cannot be usefully employed without a certain intuitive sagacity. Before using spies we must assure ourselves as to their integrity of character and the extent of their experience and skill."
"Without subtle ingenuity of mind, one cannot make certain of the truth of their reports."
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
"Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate."
Sun Tzu
This! Yes! I was hoping someone would say this. Yes, this is [part of] what needs to happen.
..."backdoor":
bsd.slashdot.org/story/10/12/15/004235/fbi-alleged-to-have-backdoored-openbsds-ipsec-stack
Many people laughed at this at the time.
Guess they're not laughing now.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of_d.html
When IBM submitted DES as a standard, no one outside the National Security Agency had any expertise to analyze it. The NSA made two changes to DES: It tweaked the algorithm, and it cut the key size by more than half.
The NSA's changes caused outcry among the few who paid attention, both regarding the "invisible hand" of the NSA--the tweaks were not made public, and no rationale was given for the final design--and the short key length.
It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA "tweaks" actually improved the security of DES.
We live in an Open Source world now. So why don't the cryptographers who said IPSEC was too complicated not draft a simpler protocol that can be scrutinised by their peers? It won't matter if corporations don't rally round it, if you can get support from the open source community to implement it in things like the Linux kernel it will be adopted in preference to IPSEC anyway. Corporate users who have concerns about IPSEC might prefer it too.
After all, PGP didn't need a standards body behind it. The Blowfish encryption algorithm (developed by Bruce Schneier) is still more trusted than most variants of AES.
The great thing about this is that you wind up kicking out the incompetents simultaneously.
Someone who is shit at maintaining a security module? NSA hack or incompetent, doesn't matter. Find someone else to do it.
--
BMO
Or, is John Gilmore actually doing exactly what the NSA wants? Are there a bunch of other "contributors" whose code was rejected, who actually work for the NSA and are trying to slip their own backdoor updates into the codebase?
I can easily see the NSA playing both sides of this. In fact, I can't NOT see them playing both sides of this.
PGP comes to mind. Cant an application developer just create a 1024-bit public key encrypted chat program?
First of all, this is a substantial claim that requires substantial evidence. You may think standards are "needlessly complicated", but each of those complexities had a use-case behind it and was discussed among experts who concluded it's a good idea to do it that way. I don't deny NSA can subtly influence the standardization process, but surely it can't be all a grand conspiracy to make standards useless, I much rather believe the issue they are dealing with is very complex and lacking sufficient geniuses the standardization group created a complex solution, with or without NSA's assistance.
Secondly, this sounds too much of an 80's cipherpunk wet dream, "if only everything was encrypted... but the government won't let us". Practical encryption is a very hard problem. Key distribution is hard. Interoperable, secure and non-patented implementations are hard. It's not simply about flipping a switch, changing a standard and everything is all of a sudden encrypted with 1 gazillion bit encryption; secure communication requires significant changes up and including the user's level who must change his behavior. And IPSEC with all it's complexity does very little to address those far reaching problems.
When it comes to international standards I should remind everyone that the NSA doesn't need to do much to make those complicated and unwieldily. Look at SOAP or UML. For some reason when you gather an international consortium together to make a standard it is natural for it to be a huge WTF by the time it eventually becomes finalised. People feel the need to cater for every conceivable use case even if they're unlikely to be practical or real-world and often those pushing for things have very little grasp of the implications. Crypto related standards are different though, because you actually need people who know what they're doing. So apply the same approach to security and the resulting standard is bound to contain weaknesses. I would bet money that the NSA probably saved the IPSEC standards committee from making it overly weak (much like they enhanced DES when it was first created). Is there an open source alternative to IPSEC that has been scrutinised by cryptographers?
Until recently, the public hasn't cared about cryptography's political/privacy ramifications, let alone about crypto itself. As a technical person, I concede that the learning curve is steep; to even make basic judgements on the safety of others' cryptosystems like, "well, does it use AES?" typically takes several months of training that don't always sink in. One of the better jinns to emerge from the NSA Spying Pandora's Box has been increased public interest in crypto/general information security. In my present personal opinion, a better project for the EFF et al. to engage in rather than continue to prop up the fairly vulnerable and incriminating Tor system (given the people intent on breaking it) is launch a policy to educate laymen on principles of encryption use (things like what a public-private cryptosystem is, what a digital signature is, general advice on what to use and what not to use--that sort of stuff).
Email was created around a time when it was used by a few thousand academicians and not expected to carry messages between business partners, political activists, and loved ones. Its lack of inherent security has driven the layering of security ameliorations on top of the basic protocol, most of which don't work terribly well (PGP is fractured, hard to use, doesn't support rich email, and is generally hard to use, for example). The same goes for HTTP. I agree that it's probably time for a new spec, but I don't know where or how to begin the creation of one, let alone how to get the public on board to transition, though again, the spying fiasco may generate the the impetus needed.
It's still interesting to me that mail, which I'd generally consider far less inherently secure than secured electronic communications and as having a far lower "reasonable expectation of privacy," receives all kinds of legal protections that, say, even email exchanged purely through Gmail (which has all kinds of security precautions like DMARC, SSL/TLS, and STARTTLS) doesn't. I think this reflects a long-term interest in western policy-making to incrementally convert "free societies" into police states, as others have observed. It looks like the governments of the US, UK and collaborators are simply waiting for mail to become completely obsolete so all communications are fair game for eavesdropping. It brings to mind what Ray Bradbury said in Farenheit 451: the government didn't have to outlaw books until most people were so fed up with them that no one noticed when the crackdown began.
Either the other countries don't (then the NSA is the big bully), or the other countries are much better at not getting caught (then the NSA is the idiot).
Or other countries do, but not to the extent that the NSA does, so nobody's been as motivated as Edward Snowden to leak the information or look for ways in which those other countries' equivalents might have affected things (which amounts to "NSA is the big bully, some other countries have their own bullies but they're not as big as the NSA").
One person claims that the A5 encryption algorithm for GSM wasn't as strong as the Germans thought it should be; if true, it doesn't explicitly indicate which countries objected to the stronger encryption (it speaks of it being a French algorithm, but that doesn't ipso facto mean that the French spearheaded that).
BS. In line with ACs having nothing worthwhile to say...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Or other countries do
E.g. the UK (GCHQ). Not as big a bully as the NSA, but....
WE can cause them to completely fail. How? Make this like SETI, or the RC4 competition, in reverse!
They find needles in haystacks. Our job is MORE, BIGGER HAYSTACKS!
Create more crypto-garbage for them to sift. Expensive to crack and useless, when decrypted. Start by upgrading to Tor 2.4, and running a non-exit-node relay.
Add your own ideas. We can chaff the net with more problems than they can manage, even with their stadiums full of Xeons!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Indeed. IPsec is a terrible, terrible mess. I always wondered how the IETF could mess up so badly when doing reasonable work otherwise. Now I know, intentional sabotage of critical infrastructure by the NSA is to blame.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I think most useful to the public would be a list of what security standards and methods are presently believed to be most secure and those known to be insecure and/or backdoored.
— George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (1903)
What would the NSA do confronted with an individual so high-minded and abrasive as to be relatively immune to the bullying tactics of the second-largest bullhead in the room? They would plant and nurture the meme that Theo sucks as a human being and that one's choice of OS and security software deployed rests on social morality rather than logic.
Who's looking like the reasonable man in the room now?
It's almost tautological than anyone abrasive enough to successfully push back against covert and well-funded NSA assholerly is not going to be a poster child for harmonious cooperation.
I've followed this little soap opera avidly (but with a relatively small corner of my mind) since Bamford's Puzzle Palace in 1982. I was then enrolled in an undergraduate mathematics program at a university famous for its cryptographers and I heard a few stories directly. I suspect I've read twenty books on the origins of these agencies before, during, and after WWII, ranging from espionage to black budgets to the ITAR fiasco.
I'm surprised by exactly none of this. I just didn't know the specifics of how it was done. The peculiar part was that the NSA seemed to have a very low appetite for taking this fight to the courts in the Clipper chip era. Now we know that they had a giant Plan B, much more to their taste than entering into a public process where things get written down.
Seems like another witch hunt to me. Good ol' McCarthy would have been proud.
Instead of searching for culprits, get the community to examine the compromised code and improve it.
If you think the whole community is in the hands of the NSA then we've already lost.
You/we need to do both. Fixing the compromised code without finding and removing the culprit(s) is a short term solution at best. The unknown culprit would be free to compromise other code repeatedly, unless they are outed to the community at large.
For a permanent solution, the mole MUST be found.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I know it's difficult sometimes, but if you had read the comment before you tried to justify the USA's wrongdoing by pointing out other nations' potential wrongdoing, you would have recognized that my indignation wasn't so much about the spying but about the fucking sabotage. We're without a practical ubiquitous network encryption solution because the NSA would have had to work harder, so they made sure it wasn't created. The USA intentionally and actively made the internet less safe to make their spying easier. If you can come up with information that other countries have actively sabotaged standards committees to make the job easier for their spying operations, do come forward, but it's still not right for the USA to have done this.
Yeah, I was wondering about this. It's SSL-based, which might be an issue if the NSA can actually break the encryption; but it is in line with Schneier's advice to use standard, interoperable protocols. And the source code is available, so one would assume any attempts to back door the actual code base would get caught.
OpenVPN available cross platform - there's even a free iOS app (which works well if you have the know-how to configure .ovpn packages). And setting up a server is straightforward.
#DeleteChrome
Maybe we in the USA are the only ones conscious of these egregious violations of the American ideal and tradition of open and accountable government?
Or maybe we're not. (Perhaps, in that case, more like the German ideal of open and accountable government, due to somewhat recent memories of other traditions.)
In response to the current situation, I've been researching random number generators - especially the builtin one in Intel processors.
It's impossible to tell in general whether there's a vulnerability in a random number generator. It's a "computationally infeasible" problem, the best we can do is check for known deviations from randomness. If you know how it deviates, it's easy to check but beyond that there's no way to tell.
If the NSA has modified devices to reduce the entropy of random keys, then eventually two keys will have the same factors. This is easy to determine: The GCD algorithm will very quickly tell you what factors two keys have in common. ...and this is exactly what is seen in practice! Some 0.3% of keys tested had common factors: statistically, a *huge* percentage.
With a very large number of keys, you don't need to try N*(N-1) pairs of keys: partition the keys into two sets, multiply all the keys in the first set together, multiply all the keys in the second set together, then calculate GCD(Set1,Set2). In one calculation, you've determined whether any single key in the first set has factors in common with the any key from the second set.
Bruce Schneier believes that the algorithms are robust, and that the NSA is using other methods to break the encryption. Here's one likely way that they are doing it - they weaken the random number generator on a class of devices, harvest all the encryption keys they can find, then look for common factors.
From this article talking about the study: "[Researchers from the linked paper found] “vulnerable devices from 27 manufacturers. These include enterprise-grade routers from Cisco; server management cards from Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM; VPN devices; building security systems; network attached storage devices; and several kinds of consumer routers and VoIP products [1]."
The upshot is this: even locally-generated RSA keys are not guaranteed to be safe, nor will they ever be. When you can't trust the hardware, all bets are off.
Honestly, after having dealt with these standards committees. I wouldn't say these acts of "sabotage" are the NSA trying to weaken security.
Null algorithms help alot with validating security protocols and should be disabled in actual use. TLS supports NULL crypto, but it should never be allowed in production systems.
Weaker algorithms have been used in committees for many reasons. Usually it is either a vendor has low end equipment and they want to claim support of a protocol, or to encourage adoption of a protocol or use case earlier.
I've seen big name companies not related with the NSA do more to damage security or add complexity to problems more than an official from any government agency(US or foreign). I had a protocol I was working on explode in complexity because Microsoft, IBM and Cisco wanted to minimize the differences between their home brewed implementations and the standard I was working on creating. This made the protocol go from something reasonable to something that took me months to develop a reference implementation since there were soo many edge cases now.
Reference: I worked with the IETF for years.
Yeah, I'd use some obscure USSR crypto (GOST), crypted by some obscure India crypto (Trinetra), crypted by some obscure chinese crypto (you tell me).... That way they'd need the UN Security Council to approve the eavesdropping of my communication. Simple, really.
becomes more relevant with every passing day.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
You might want to click the wikipedia link in the fine summary.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The problem is, that openVPN is also backdoored.
Please supply us with some evidence or a link to something to support your assertion.
(which is the amazing part - how do all the non US security professionals and their respective countries sign themselves up to a NSA destroyed security standard?):
Because (a part of) the standards comittee meetings are kept in the USA. And even EU citizens need a de-facto visa (issued under the highly irocnically named "visa vaiver" programme) to enter the USA. If you read recent NSA statements about whom they may and may not spy on, a "foreinger" has a bit less rights than a "human". Add this all up, and traveling in and out of USA might not be the nicest experience after you vocally accuse some delegates of being agent saboteurs.
Parent post was also modded down [by NSA sockpuppets]. It went up to a 5, then down, then up again. Then it was stable at a 5 for while. Just now, about an hour after the story was first posted (when traffic to this thread is dropping, and a forum slide has been initiated on the front page) it was quietly modded back down. Who besides NSA sockpuppets would do that? Here's an exercise: how much would it cost to station paid sockpuppet moderators at every popular online watering hole? Is this number more or less than the available budget?
Who wants an empire? I don't.
Who are we at war with? No one that matters as far as I know. Farm animals kill more Americans than terrorists.
No. You misunderstood what Em Adespoton wrote. He wasn't stating or implying that Gilmore is somehow connected to the NSA; only that he may be doing what they were hoping someone with enough clout would do. OTOH, Em Adespoton.might be NSA ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Probably with the abolition of committees. One genius can come up with a spec and even make a program that uses it all by themselves, they do not need committees that invite NSA operatives and corporate representatives in. One person, can come up with the best way to do something, and then just do it. Creating software is not that hard.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Parent post was also modded down [by NSA sockpuppets].
Would the NSA need sockpuppets? Wouldn't they have some backdoor that allows directly rating every single post?
Why would they choose to backdoor such an obscure OS?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Within the context of war and empire, I'm afraid it is the right thing to do.
Then "war and empire" are the wrong things to pursue.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Seems unlikely since you can be your own CA for the OpenVPN certs. You don't have to trust anyone. It's funny, though, I started using it myself for all my mobile gear (IoS and Android), with the openvpn server under my control on a colocated box. But not because I am paranoid about U.S. telcos. I did it because I mistrust public Wifi, hotel wifi, and foreign telcos when I'm not in country. But my habit now is to just leave the VPN on all the time.
-Matt
Other countries did and do spy on their citizens, mostly the Soviet Union and it's allies. North Korea also comes to mind.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
OpenVPN consists of: xx@yy:~/openvpn-2.2.1$ cat *.c | wc
58973 179450 1502171
Quite easy to validate a mere 58k lines of code actually, especially since many of them are blank lines and comments.
The Soviet Union did and where is it now? In the graveyard of empires, the same place this country heading at full speed. In my mind it's not will the American Empire will break up, its when.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
No, it doesn't really. Do you speak any of them? If not, the answer is no.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
Sabotage and incompetence look the same.
Either should not be tolerated.
"Any advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
Me, butchering a quote from Arthur C. Clarke.
--
BMO
It's impossible to tell in general whether there's a vulnerability in a random number generator. It's a "computationally infeasible" problem, the best we can do is check for known deviations from randomness. If you know how it deviates, it's easy to check but beyond that there's no way to tell.
Unless the NIST tools are compromised as well, then yes, it's completely possible to verify how good hardware RNGs are. Also, few intel processors have built-in RNGs, at least not ones the Linux kernel can use. None of the machines we've bought in the last 5 years have them. When was the last major intel x86 processor to have one? P2/P3 based systems?
I always wondered why; now I think I know *exactly* why. Hardware RNGs increase crypto security; by removing them, the NSA can influence/corrupt OS-level pseudo-RNG routines.
I wonder how many of the software RNG projects like haveged are compromised...
Please help metamoderate.
If NSA has a backdoor to anything, it simply allows for a backdoor to everybody. It is not like the backdoor would be wired to an NSA IP address. Ultimately it creates a disservice for the country.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
NULL algorithms are also handy when you just want to do secure authentication but nothing else. I have an SSH implementation with the none cipher enabled because it means I get packet verification and secure authentication without the overhead of AES when I'm just moving a bunch of non-secure log files (or don't want to install a totally different daemon on a machine on a local network).
If only we had two the NSA and a meta-NSA... the meta-NSA's job is to spy on the NSA. Then we could listen to the NSA and accept advice from them only when the meta-NSA tried to undermine it -- because then we would know that it was a suggestion that actually made the meta-NSA's job harder. We could set it up such that however many files the NSA has in its possession, the meta-NSA's job is to copy as many as possible, and the more documents that the meta-NSA does copy, their pay goes up and the NSA's pay goes down. That way we maintain enmity between them.
Maybe the comber was an informant?
It seems pretty clear that John Gilmore has clearly identified what's going on. He spotted many instances of NSA-directed sabotage,and has called it out.
Does he have prove that it's intentional sabotage and not overengineering?
Seth Vidal, creator of “yum” open source software, killed in bike accident: http://www.businessinsider.com/36-year-old-seth-vidal-tragically-killed-2013-7
His last words were: "don't track things. Just ride," Vidal
Who wants an empire?
An emperor, or a wannabe. As long as anybody can draw up a big enough army they will have one.
I don't.
Doesn't matter. You will either live in an empire or its colony. Choose the most benevolent one you can. That's just the way things will stay for the foreseeable future.
Who are we at war with?
Cold or hot, competing empires have been at war throughout all of history, each one replaced by or morphed into another. The natural desire for domination is not going anywhere, and war is its natural state.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Then "war and empire" are the wrong things to pursue.
Right and wrong are irrelevant. Somebody is always pursuing them. Choose your weapon to defend yourself.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
..."Off-topic"?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
So you're basically saying, "TRUST NO ONE!"
I guess there might be some wisdom in that, but if you truly trusted no one, it'd be impossible to get anything done.
Maybe we need to be more careful to not put all our eggs in one basket. Standards are great, but what if AES-n turns out to be backdoored or intentionally weak someday? Maybe the runners-up should continue being developed and used as well.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I read it as, rather than have a useful, usable, implementable standard, they kept tacking things on for corner cases until it was an unruly behemoth that no one could even comprehend. It would have been better to have something that supported fewer use cases but did a few of them well, and was actually widely used. And that seems believable to me.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Interesting. Is it actually noticably faster when SCPing files?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Mod parent up.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
You're talking about Gilmore? I was under the impression that he was actually involved in the processes he is talking about, and therefore that he ought to know what he's talking about. If you read some more of the thread under his message, you'll find responses from people who were indeed involved in the processes he mentioned. I don't think these folks are journalists who are in over their heads.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I think his point is that it was sabotage in the form of overengineering. You know, hiding in plain sight, subtle, etc.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
What a genius idea; it must have been thought up by a true vigenèry.
False dichotomy.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Calming the fears of the masses that we have nothing to worry about with backdoor in RNG, IPSEC or SeLinux?
Depends on whether your bottleneck is the network or the CPU. If you've got more than about 100 MB/sec between the hosts (and don't have hardware-accelerated encryption) the crypto speed could be a limiting factor. But for most over-the-Internet applications the network tops out well before the CPU.
In all seriousness, how should the technical and geek community deal with this sort of sabotage? Is it sufficient to respond,or is proactive behavior called for? What would Sun Tzu have to say about this situation?
Replace IPsec with an open and non-pathological standard.
I'm sure you have used OpenSSH and/or OpenVPN, they are simple, elegant, cross platform, and come with mountains of features. IPsec is a confused nightmare in comparison.
I heard the same discussion on reddit. Their conclusion was that some kind of psyops operation is going on to game reddit's moderation but it's only partially successful due to the number of genuine viewers.
Wrong question. The question is, why wouldn't they?
Besides, you're begging the question: is OpenBSD obscure? I'd suggest that since it is reputed to be so secure, it's more likely to be used for installations that want or need high security, and so a backdoor in it could be quite valuable.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Indeed. OpenVPN has 'null encryption'. Just authentication network traffic, or even just tunneling, serves its own purposes.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I'm sure it was not your intention, but right now you're leaving the impression that their (the FBI's, assumed) plan actually worked. For the record: it didn't, it was discovered before it could do any damage, they made a big stink about it, and it was never tried again.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Paying someone an insane amount of money to do this would make this person easy to spot. How much kernel developers do you know have three houses, a private plane and a collection of racing cars? You can't pay them money without them being able to spend it.
A way more likely scenario would be to set them up for something criminal and then make them "an offer they can't refuse". It would be way cheaper and they would hold control over this person for the rest of their lives, not until they spent all the money.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
...says the Anonymous Coward.
Yeah right - says the NSA...
On my LAN it is a lot faster - it's part of HPN-SSH which speeds up SSH over a gigabit network enormously for me (2 mb/s -> 30 mb/s with parallel AES ciphers). If I then use the none cipher I get 80-90 mb/s, which is closing in on the practical line speed for the network.
No because enough people with the necessary level of mathematical expertise are not available here. Any such are busy now working for the US govt and companies in return for fat paycheck, and that happened because the government is made up of people who never even completed high school and are rouges, and don't know or care about the wider implications of science and technology for humanity, and are in general content with milking money of lucrative deals, securing their office and living their decadent lives. Not saying things couldn't improve, but I can't see who are what can kickstart this ground-up sea change that needs to happen.
'Code' isn't even really the crux of the issue here. The entire standard is flawed and hopeless because the committee process required to create it was itself exploitable by the NSA, which they did with little restraint. So you have to critically examine ANY human process involved in creating software security standards as if the process ITSELF is code, and improve upon that process to eliminate 'exploits' within it. One of those steps must be to expose anyone who would try to exploit the process and shun them professionally, which will marginalize their ability to do it in the future. Improving the process to eliminate them in the first place would be helpful, but unfortunately to do that 100% effectively would require becoming the very thing you're trying to prevent. More attention needs to be given to John's analysis by the software security community at large, so they can recognize future attempts to sabotage standards efforts like IPsec and prevent them, much like we already do with security software itself (at least in the open source world).
Yep, there is an XMPP spec for using PGP with it. It works quite well if the client does it right too. A friend and I used it very frequently.
You might prefer to use OTR instead. OTR offers perfect forward secrecy, and it's constantly re-keying. It's also widely available.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
AES is not secure because of NSA (Rijndael supports up to 2048 bit keys but in AES it is limited to 256 bit)
eh? Rijndael supports block and key sizes of any multiple of 32 bits between 128 and 256. AES selected three cycle counts for standardization (10,12,14) to meet the arbitrary military concept of three levels of security.
There's even some cryptanalytical evidence that the extra rounds weaken the security and the 128-bit 10-round variant might be the best option at this point.
Back in '98 was the first time I went to a conference panel on elliptic curve crypto, and even then there was concern about which group to use. The current problem seems to be that everybody has settled on groups that the NSA helped to select because they thought that the NSA had some insights into which would be the best groups to use.
<cartman>goddammit</cartman>
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
At this point, Redhat pretty much needs to fork SELinux, call it Enterprise Linux Security, or some such (permission granted) and let the NSA go their own way. I think we trust Dan more than we trust the NSA guys on the list. If they want to quit the NSA then maybe we'd trust their commits again, after Dan reviews them.
Actually, I'd trust a guy who does *not* have clearance more than somebody who does at this point.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
And so you think that hasn't already happened ... in the OSS world ... but suddenly now we can do so?
So basically the leading tenet of OSS 'that many eyes can catch the bad guys' is completely false and has failed to catch said bad guys in the most important bits that have the most eyes looking at them?
If you haven't caught them by now, you aren't going to.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Because slashdot is such an important part of the world to bother with them trolling it? Seriously?
I'm sorry, but any down voting is just that, normal '-1 disagree' on slashdot from someone who ... disagrees. Go figure.
Slashdot, while popular among a limited selection of minor geeks, is hardly important in the grand scheme of things. Very few high level geeks have anything to do with slashdot, its mostly people wanting to pretend they are more than they are so the vote swings are nothing more than your typical 'I agree/I disagree' crap.
You of course inject some silly statement and everyones drooling to bitch about the NSA and you get voted up ... then down ... oh look, same thing.
Silly conspiracy theories you have. slashdot isn't worth their time.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No, you don't. You only think you know.
You're making assumptions as if they are fact. Until you find actual proof, 'knowing' based on assumptions is a good way to waste a bunch of time.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I was under the impression that he was actually involved in the processes he is talking about
That would be the emotional blind spot he was mentioning.
What you need is proof. Some one saying 'I helped fuck it up' (which is not what gilmore said) but not showing how is just as unbelievable as the NSA saying 'no we didn't!'
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
He has as much evidence as anyone else for any other software.
Funny how you pick and choose who you believe and who you don't.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
One time pads are unbreakable if used properly.
For that you need a good random noise generator (that has not been corrupted by someone), a way to distribute the key material and relatively trivial amount of code. (XOR may be good enough.)
I don't know what is being used recently for random noise. I might want the key generator to be a dedicated hardware box with a couple of storage devices plugged into it, though for a start, a program to run on PCs might be ok.
One problem is key management. You want to delete the used part of the key store, both so you don't reuse it and to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. The obvious way would be to make up USB sticks with files of key material and delete/overwrite the used file blocks. The problem is that secure erasing of files on a USB stick is hard to do.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/21/flash_drive_erasing_peril/
http://www.usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf
For casual use for unimportant matters, it might be ok. A more secure method would be to put the key files on a hard drive and use multiple overwrites to erase the used key material.
Eventually someone might make dedicated read once sticks with automatic erasure. Then you would only have to worry about physical security.
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
It can be yourself or whoever. If none of the pre-printed choices on the ballot are satisfactory, then write someone in. That is the surest way to tarnish the establishment's democratic halo. Staying at home just tells the world you're lazy or apathetic.
And don't be fooled about the president's power. Why do you think Republicans have used their gerrymandered privilege to block him? They don't represent the people, and they want all the bad things the president wants and then some... under *their* banner and generating revenue and power for *their* lilly-white relatives and neighbors.
Gerrymandering needs to be abolished just about more than anything.
Sorry to hear that. I'm curious, how do you manage to keep track of replies to your AC comments?
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Aaaaand wrong. Have you read the story? Apparently not. Also there is a bit of a difference between an expert opinion and a WAG.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A very patient man you are to keep checking for replies. Kind of like APK. (Kidding!)
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I'd be surprised if it was that. I was mod-bombed by what I assumed was a bunch of Apple fanboys not so long ago. I contacted Slashdot and they investigated and turned out it was one guy with multiple accounts, all now banned from moderating.
I don't think it's a psyops operation, I think there are some people that are such zealous defenders of their unpopular opinions, that are so sick of being wrong that rather than evaluate their position go to the extreme of creating multiple accounts that they use to mod bomb people they disagree with.
I think some people really are just the extreme form of losers, they can't handle "defeat" and being wrong, I don't think it's any more complicated than that - just like the folks that use aimbots in online games and so forth. They just have to "win" at all costs because they have absolutely nothing else.
Did you not hear about the Verona intercepts? It turns out Mccarthy was right, the US Government at the time was full of Russian spies and had been since before WW2.
Hey, APK. Haven't seen you for a while.
How are your mental imbalances holding up?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
I'm APK..I kicked your ass, fool!...zzzzt..
You're starting...no...not starting...continuing to sound like a broken record.
Do you really get any satisfaction from stalking people who've beaten you in arguments, and trying to rewrite the debate to make it seem like you won? How much effort does that take, compared to what it would take to just learn the subject you're bullshitting about? You'd probably win many more arguments if you had a clue, and I'm betting it would be less effort than the amount you must put in doing all this following and trolling bullshit that you currently do.
Tell me one more thing: How much caffeine do you consume in a day?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I agree that Gilmore's hypotheses aren't proof, per se. However, in light of recent revelations, I think the NSA is less credible than he is. His comments deserve serious consideration.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
The rest of us knows that -l is the first column above anyways...