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Ed Felten: Why Email Services Should Be Court-Order Resistant
Jah-Wren Ryel sends this excerpt from Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker:
"Commentators on the Lavabit case, including the judge himself, have criticized Lavabit for designing its system in a way that resisted court-ordered access to user data. They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access? The answer is simple but subtle: There are good reasons to protect against insider attacks, and a court order is an insider attack. To see why, consider two companies, which we’ll call Lavabit and Guavabit. At Lavabit, an employee, on receiving a court order, copies user data and gives it to an outside party—in this case, the government. Meanwhile, over at Guavabit, an employee, on receiving a bribe or extortion threat from a drug cartel, copies user data and gives it to an outside party—in this case, the drug cartel.
From a purely technological standpoint, these two scenarios are exactly the same: an employee copies user data and gives it to an outside party. Only two things are different: the employee’s motivation, and the destination of the data after it leaves the company."
So a court case that was created as a knee-jerk response to Snowden is arguing that organizations shouldn't take steps to prevent leaks like Snowden .....
This model describes the problem pretty well. Of course it can be extended: What if the judge or (given an over-broad wiretap order) the police is in league with the attacker, freely or by coercion? That is not unheard of either.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Only two things are different: the employee’s motivation, and the destination of the data after it leaves the company
The government won't generally kill you, just lock you up. The cartels won't generally lock you up, they just kill you. Not much difference really.
What next? Complaining about hidden compartment in desks?
Oh, I don't know...because of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? I don't know about you, Mr. Judge, but I personally don't want a court, court-ordered or not, snooping on my life--such inherently is a big way to disrupt my happiness. But, even if we forgo the DoI and move to the CotUS, it's "life, liberty, and property". Well, whether you view it as the user's property or Lavabit's property, they sure as fuck can do what they want with it. What part of any of that should be to make the court's job easier? Why would they seek to bend over backwards for any court?
Of course, the big one is liberty. The biggest liberty of all is exploring the possibilities of math and the universe. And that heavily flows into attempts to make functionally unbreakable encryption resistant to even the US government. And is also flows from the point of just being a general asshole, which God Bless the United States of America, is very much recognized as a Creator given right. Clearly the judge is exercising it when he shows contempt for other people daring to live their lives in ways he doesn't like.
Honestly, though, I do not try to be too much of an asshole. And I do recognize that there does need to be a means for courts and court-orders to function. The problem the judge seems to realize--and honestly why the NSA keeps getting the go ahead--is that criminals are most inclined to use those sorts of tools to hide their activities. The good response should be the obvious: most criminals don't go through the bother because they don't think they'll be caught and the rest are almost always found before the court-order (after all, you have to have evidence to get that far) or the court-order is a very inappropriate fishing expedition. All a court-order is there for is to solidify a case, not to make one. And so the very notion that there's something wrong with efforts to make their case inherently harder to prove is, well, fine by me. It almost always just means the prosecutor and the police have to work a bit harder to prove their case, if they care enough to go through the effort. The real limit of justice then is not the strength of encryption or the willingness of first or third parties to comply with handing over incrimination evidence. It has almost everything to do with running a decent investigation in the first place.
PS - *sigh* The NSA part was probably unnecessary, but it reeks of the same stupidity and with the same sorts of results. Trying to find a needle in a haystack is easier because at least then you know you're looking for a needle. And if, by analogy, you know you're looking for a specific terrorist plot in a general time frame with certain people, you're already 90% of your way towards having a prosecutable case and a pathway to find accomplices.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Actually, the employee's motivation is likely the same as well. And the destination seems to getting more similar every day.
As to his comment about turning over the master key, it would have made no difference if they had protections on their master key. They didn't turn over their master key anyway. They did shut down, and they would have had to shut down either way. Because if they didn't shut down and had their key secure (say in an RSA box), the government would have just compelled to give them access to their key to sign stuff or to present as a credential. In other words to impersonate them.
The only way to avoid all this was to just shut down so there could be no mistake. If that key is used again, you know it's the NSA doing it, not Lavabit.
I would love to hear how Ed Felten thinks a private key can be both kept inaccessible and used tens of thousands of times a day to secure SSL connections.
Even if you keep it in a box, if the box will gleefully operate on the key thousands or millions of times a day, then you can just virtualize the key to a remote location (like say NSA HQ) by forwarding any requests to use the key to the box across the net. No need to even have the key at all in that case.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
If you don't want someone else to see it, stop putting it on the internet.
Internet was NEVER EVER a means of private communication.. we've tried to make it that way for what, 20 years now? It's not going to happen. Keep your personal tidbits off the net if you don't want others finding them.
Try using the tried and true encryption method. A piece of paper inside an envelope, with a stamp and an address. It's slower, but it's a lot more private than you'll EVER GET on the internet, now or in the future.
They ask: If court orders are legitimate, why should we allow engineers to design services that protect users against court-ordered access?
The real answer question is, in what fucking world is it appropriate for courts to say what a private company programs?!? If the encryption is not illegal (it shouldn't be either way, but encryption is still legal in the US) the judiciary has no business saying whether it should be used or not.
"If court orders are legitimate..." -- see there Mr Judge, you've answered your own question.
Technically, the sequence was a little more complicated.
They were ordered to insert a backdoor. They ignored the order. The government then asked to get the master key. At that point they consented to putting the backdoor in, but it was too late. When they were ordered to hand the master key, they quit.
Shachar
Feds asked without a court-sanctioned warrant to insert a backdoor. When LavaBit didn't respond, Feds got a warrant, but this time to hand over the SSL private key. That''s when LavaBit decided that it was useless trying to fight, and quit instead.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Imagine that one wishes to prevent subversion by drug cartels but honour (or appeal) court orders. This is the problem that public libraries have dealt with since their creation. Someone always wants to know what person X has been reading, in hopes of using it against them....
Library software is normally written to preserve privacy, and discard the record that "X has book Y" when the book is returned. It can be written this way because several of the countries where it is sold require privacy as part of their legal system. Purchasers in other countries get privacy as a side-effect.
Countries prohibiting privacy would require a special version for a quite limited market, and the library software companies aren't motivated to deal with them: just doing an internationalization/localization to get into a small market is hard enough!
When an individual library is served with a court order, they can honour it by doing a lookup once a day and writing X's new books down on a piece of paper. As this doesn't scale, and is also a credible cost, the willingness of courts to order it is reduced, and the damage to privacy is limited.
Applying this to email, one wishes to keep routing data only until a message is delivered to the next host and we get a "250 OK" from SMTP. If a court wishes to collect that metadata, they can station an officer with a laptop at the ISP and gobble up the packets routed to/from him. This is onerous, and in Canada at least requires a "wiretap warrant", which the courts restrict more than ordinary search warrants.
The person wishing to provide this kind of information to a drug cartel has the same hard task, and is also more likely to be detected by the ISP.
To oversimplify, we're keeping far too much information about email: an author or vendor should take notice of the privacy laws of their preferred markets and discard debugging/diagnostic information at the end of a successful delivery. If they wish to cover themselves against customer complaints, they might send delivery notices that the customer can read or filter out at their convenience.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
As much as I may not like invasions of privacy, the fact is that this summary provides a bullshit excuse for the need of making court order resistant services. This kind of issue has been addressed numerous times in the past and is actually quite easy. You just have to have a system that breaks the files up through multiple keys required to unlock it. It's called separation of duties and has been done in any good security system for decades (centuries?) This way, a legitimate order can be processed because everyone is on board with a legal order, but an illegal action, such as a bribe can not happen without having to get numerous people on-board with the action.
AJ Henderson
Or alarm systems? Safes? Etc? The exact same logic would apply. Why is this not blindingly obvious to everyone???
How many government employees combing through Lavabit's customer data are delivering it to the drug cartels?
Court orders help because it forces crooked government employees to go before a third party to explain themselves.
The primary problem most people have with the NSA data dragnet is that there is no system of checks to prevent such access. Once the data has been scooped up, nothing can stop an insider from misusing it. Look at Snowden. Only his motives differed from those of crooked employees.
Have gnu, will travel.
Feds asked without a court-sanctioned warrant to insert a backdoor. When LavaBit didn't respond, Feds got a warrant, but this time to hand over the SSL private key. That''s when LavaBit decided that it was useless trying to fight, and quit instead.
and this is why the Lavabit Design was inferior. They held a Master Key to all of their users encryption, thus any government/employee could access what you considered private. The main point is that Lavabit held the Private Keys that could decrypt any/all messages sent through their system and this is what People need to scream about due to the security violations it created by design. A better use of the Defective by Design tag
One thing that folks haven't thought of though I doubt the Feds haven't missed is both the potential SarBox and Insider Trading issues. By Lavabit having a private key that could decrypt everything, they had the potential to scan any corporate mail for confidential information that could/would affect the share price - thus the insider trading issue. The SarBox issue comes from the same ability to decrypt information at will as it gave employees the oppurtunity to sell information that allowed a competitor an advantage, thus decreasing profits and they could be tied up in court for the rest of their lives while the sharks go through discovery.
Anyone that used Lavabit for any reason had better consider this as any and all information that was exchanged using their service will be decrypted and read by the Courts, Lawyers and everyone else. In other words, all Lavabit users are "Screwed, Blued and Tattooed".
Fast Turtle
"democratically elected" in a democracy where congress has a 10% approval rate, and a 90% incumbency rate.
"law enforcement" by a government that can't even obey its own laws.
"judicial approval" by secret courts ruling on secret evidence and secret laws.
None of those things you wish were true about America are actually true. We are a nation ruled by thugs. It's not criminals we need to be secure against, it's our own government.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Elsewhere, at Favabit, an employee receiving a court order for user data takes the encrypted user data to the three trusted employees who each know part of the decryption key. Together they verify the court order, decrypt the data, and pass it on to the court. A week later, one of the three trusted employees is forced to refuse a cartel bribe to get user data, because she does not have the power to unilaterally hand it over.
If you can't think of a way to allow legitimate access while protecting against illegitimate access, you simply aren't thinking creatively enough.