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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."
"one kernel developer"
Names please? And was it really only one - or one do the actual blocking and the rest kept silent as they were instructed? Seriously we need more whistlblowers, it is an urgent social obligation at this point. People stepping forward with this kind of analysis and stories - have *you* been pressured or blocked when trying to imrpove security? Otherwise how are we the engineers ever "going to take back" the Internet?
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?
Well with this guy all but naming nanes, perhaps it's time to name names.
There was a call recently for those who put back doors in critical code, to come forward and speak up.
While some may put themselves at seriously legal risk for doing so you wouldn't expect to see such risk in open source projects.
We could then review their work very carefully.
Should we look more closely at SELinux? Are we prepared to find which of our heros have been in the NSA's pocket?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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
"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.
..."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.
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
— 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.
Even better is to change the behaviour to a "No Trust" model as I have and add exceptions for those sites you actually need. Remember the Diginotar mess? Since then, I've changed the trust of all Certificates by marking all of the Root CA's as untrusted. Sometimes it does create a bit of an issue since Firefox tends to be resistent to adding the needed exceptions but considering that I only have a couple of dozen exceptions out of how many certificates? I don't feel it's as big of an problem as folks think to add them. The main advantage is, none of the god damn advertisers or other idiots forcing https connections can infect my system by default as I get a warning about an invalid certificate chain as soon as the connection is made and yes, I've seen that in regards to some of the advertisers and other folks that I don't need to connect to.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
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.
It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA "tweaks" actually improved the security of DES.
The S-box tweak made DES resistant (well, more resistant) to differential attacks. The shortened key length did not improve security, it reduced security.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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."
. If I were in his shoes, I do not think I would want to out an undercover NSA operative.
Get the pitchforks! Let the rampant speculation begin!
I think it's Stallman, no way could he be real. He's obviously a agent provocateur plant set out to gather info on anyone who'd actually listen to his ramblings. Rather cunning too, it's always the last you'd expect.
Waiting for an amusing sig.