Slashdot Mirror
Academics Should Not Remain Silent On Government Hacking
ananyo writes "The Guardian's technology editor, Charles Arthur, asks why researchers have remained largely silent in the wake of the revelation that the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's standard for random numbers used for cryptography had been weakened by the NSA: 'The nature of the subversions sounds abstruse: the random-number generator, the 'Dual EC DRBG' standard, had been hacked by the NSA and the UK's GCHQ so that its output would not be as random as it should have been. That might not sound like much, but if you are trying to break an encrypted message, the knowledge that it is hundreds or thousands of times weaker than advertised is a great encouragement.' Arthur attributes the silence of UK academics, at least, to pressure from GCHQ. He goes on to say: 'For those who do care, White and Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, have embarked on an ambitious effort to clean up the mess — one that needs help. They have created a non-profit organization called OpenAudit.org, which aims to recruit experts to provide technical assistance for security projects in the public interest, especially open-source security software.'"
At the very least, government hackers.
I agree as far as private institutions go. Of public institutions, I've only looked into the University of California system in detail, and it's definitely not true there. If you take the total UC system budget and divided by total undergraduates, per-student cost of education has gone down by about 20% since the 1980s. Why, then, you might ask, has tuition gone up? Because per-student state funding for the UC system has gone down by 60%. Tuition hikes make up the gap between cost reduction (20%) and funding reduction (60%). They aren't covering any kind of cost increase.
Most scientists live paycheck-to-paycheck
Only an elite handful possess the secret to being dead inbetween paychecks.
"Vlad Dracul, PHD" Mondays on Fox.
>> why researchers have remained largely silent in the wake of the revelation that (US gov does bad thing)
Just follow the money to...federal research grants. Even if an individual professor decided to rock the boat, their local university would do their best to shut them up.
Related: http://www.aipg.org/students/pdf/So%20you%20want%20to%20be%20a%20professor.pdf
George D. Klein - former professor: " A professor is viewed as a profit center by university administrators...Faculty members will survive as
a professor if she/he is awarded lots of grants with lots of over-head for the university coffers..."
Also: http://www.academicmatters.ca/2012/11/the-quiet-campus-the-anatomy-of-dissent-at-canadian-universities/
When this happens, I guarantee that some people are bilking the system.
We also know that whoever it is isn't the faculty: If you adjust for inflation, the change in faculty salaries over the last 5 years is somewhere between 0 and -5%.
The costs that have been going up dramatically include:
- Buildings, specifically the kinds of buildings that help sell a college to potential students like gyms and newer dorms that are more like living off campus rather than a small room to yourself + a roommate.
- Administration and student services. For example,
- Athletics, which are in some schools a huge business. In many states, the highest paid government employee is the head coach of the state university's football team (e.g. Ohio State's Urban Meyer rakes in $4.3 million a year, approximately 30 times the salary of the governor).
Also quite relevant for publicly funded institutions is that public funding for those institutions has been dropping like a rock.
I am officially gone from
Well, if you want to see research done without government (public) funding
He didn't say that. He said;
I want nothing more than to see academia liberated from government control
The idea behind public research, was to fund worthwhile research that would not otherwise get funding and then back off and let them do their ting without fear of reprisals. You know, independent. A noble ideal, that sadly, in this severely bifurcated society, is almost impossible.
Actually, it would.
The problem comes from bankruptcy laws. Banks were having a fit because students would get loans, and when they graduate, declare bankruptcy and have the loans forgiven. The showboat case for this was people graduating as medical doctors, declaring bankruptcy, then getting a high paying job. Banks went to the government to 'fix' this problem and the fix was: Student loans are immune to bankruptcy. If you get a student loan, you will pay it back, even if that means you will have your McPaycheck garnished.
This now means that banks have little to no risk to their loans. Why would they refuse any loan? If the student is successful or not, either way, they get paid. A kid that gets straight D's in school and wants to major in "Classical Nintendo" Sure! Here's money with a nice interest rate.
Now we have banks giving money anybody who wants it, demand for higher education goes up. When demand goes up and supply stays the same... prices go up. Prices go up? Get a loan!
It's a self-feeding model that all started with crony-capitalism. Banks and Government got in bed together. Now I don't blame the banks for complaining... it is a problem. If I lent off a ton of money for students to become doctors, and they kept stiffing me, I'd be pissed. But the Government gave the Banks too sweet of a deal. They gave them a win-win.
What if the banks had a 10 year probation window on student loan bankruptcies instead? If a student declares bankruptcy, the loan is put on hold for 10 years with no interest. If during that 10 year time, the student finds a job that could may payments, the loan sticks. If they can't after 10 years, the loan is forgiven. Banks are protected from those "evil doctors" getting hefty loans then dumping them... Students are protected from not being able to find a job afterwards. The loan (and cost of the education) must reflect the job that is received in the end. Students with poor grades, and majors that aren't in demand are less likely to get loans, as they are now risky to the bank. All of this should lower costs of education.
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Every single one of us has felt the hesitation to speak out agianst what the NSA is doing lest be experience some sort of retaliation, typically being mechanically put on a "list" what is used in other contexts for other decisions. The most basic one is getting on the "no fly list" but one imagines that other lists exist also, for instance, the "do not fund research" list.
THAT'S what a chilling effect is. It's a self perpetuating thing, because the more dissent is stifled, the more the faux consensous becomes reality, the more license the chillers see themselves as having been given by society.
I'll never forget the CIA film of Saddam Hussein assembling Anyone Who's Anyone In Iraq into an auditorium then calling out names of individuals, who , when they appropriately stood up having been addressed, were escorted away by security personnel to their summary executions.
As soon as the luminaries understood what was happening, they all stood and started to applaud this monster, chanting his name, swearing fidelity at the top of their lungs, hoping that such would make it less likely that they would ever appear on any such list and, if their name was on The List, they might somehow induce a last minute change of mind.
That's the chilling effect of compiling lists of people and assigning them properties- "enemy", "hub", "individual of special concern should X Y or Z be happening".
Every single one of us, whether we admit it or not, has felt a pause, a fear, the need to calculate and perhaps somehow soften or even self censor what we're saying WRT the government and the NSA for fear of such lists and their possible future consequences.
This is one of the most insidious and well documented effects of surveillance and no one is immune, and- and this is significant- they know it.
This is why the ability to spy on anyone all the time without anyone outside of people you command, or who fear you, knowing what you're doing has to go. This is why total transparency into who does what when why for how long without a scintilla of exception needs to be implemented into the spy agencies. We need spies and spying because we have real enemies who really want to do unspeakably evil things and will given the chance. We have to stop those people. In order to achieve that, we need to stop the spy agencies using the spy agencies to undermine their own democracy however inadvertently. If they were capable of doing this, then they wouldn't have hounded Binney and Drake and Kiriakou ; they would have listened to them.
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2013/08/07/imprisoned-cia-whistleblower-john-kiriakou-totality-of-punishment-is-not-limited-to-a-prison-sentence/
Right now, the biggest threat to the continued effectiveness of our spy agencies is the culture which has ascended and become the dominant one in the those spy agencies.
So, I guess now would be an appropriate time to take that whole "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave" part out of the Pledge?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"Tell us how you feel. If you have any criticisms you've been bottling up, then please write about them in journals, or better yet discuss them with your friends over an electronic communications medium. We'd hate to go unaware of any people with 'interesting' viewpoints." - The NSA.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Not silent: drafting. Planning. Analysing. Discussing. Coding. Working.
There's a lot more to it than Dual_EC_DRBG: that's just the most obvious, neon-sign "HEY LOOK AT ME I'M A BACKDOOR" backdoor. Funding document leaked by Snowden specifically states public key algorithms. I can match that directly: The NIST/SecP curves were generated by Jerry Solinas of the NSA from SHA-1 hashes with no known source. Yeah, they're totally dodgy, although not perhaps in the obvious ways (it may be that they're specified in ways that make them excruciatingly hard to implement correctly without fucking up: timing attacks; random source; curve point validation; perhaps unknown attacks associated with discriminants? NSA do have a head-start on EC). ECDSA and DSA too; the big hole is very simply that pesky random number thing - as Sony know to their cost. Makes me wonder about a couple of other things too.
djb and Tanja Lange are working on new algorithms to replace them, which are 100% non-NSA and actually also really really fast. http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ - EdDSA with Ed25519 (aka Curve25519 - same Montgomery curve, more efficient/useful Twisted Edwards representation) and/or Curve3617 (pure Edwards, 414-bit size, 200-bit security) are absolutely top contenders to replace ECDSA and ECDHE and are better in every single way. Tanja's even come up with a way to turn encode curve points, on the safecurves, in a way that the output looks truly random, if we need that (explicitly stated use case: censorship/protocol fingerprinting evasion, could see uses in other areas too).
AES-128-GCM seems okay, if you have hardware implementations, but has difficulties running in O(1) free of timing attacks in software. ChaCha20_Poly1305 is a djb ciphersuite proposed by Adam Langley which does much better - it's a replacement for RC4 (which is definitely 100% no contest broken in realtime by Nation State Adversaries, we're quite sure about that now) and is probably a better AEAD, to be honest, than GCM, in my opinion. Live on Google servers, and in Chrome dev builds, right now. Draft in consideration. ChaCha20's Salsa20's successor, an eSTREAM finalist; ChaCha20 was used to build the SHA-3 finalist BLAKE and got a lot of cryptanalytic attention through that. Best attack (truncated differential cryptanalysis) 6 of 20 rounds, surprisingly simple ARX construct easy to analyse with no nasty surprises, fast as hell especially with any kind of SIMD, great differential and linear resistance: can't say fairer than that!
These are among the algorithms we're going to use to rebuild all this. We have trust models to fix, too, which are closer to the root of the Big Problem - more transparent auditing, pinning with DANE and DNSSEC, there's a lot of possible things we could do to harden all that, and we're going to do all that. And the protocols can be improved significantly too, and we're working on that: things like encrypting the ClientHello from the very beginning WILL be part of TLS 1.3, flying pigs be damned.
We have a lot of work ahead of us rebuilding all this, and it's going to take a long time. Needs to be done very carefully, openly, and transparently. Feel free to come and help (if you know what the fuck you're doing).
I'm not pulling my punches. (I haven't so far, as you might see if you look me up.) I want to make sure the right choices are made for the right reasons, and GCHQ and NSA can kiss my ass. As engineers, we try to be non-political, but that doesn't mean we can't be really pissed at literally being double-crossed and lied to, and attacked by the people (ostensibly) whose job it is to protect us. I am very, very bitterly angry with them for fucking up their COMSEC mission to further their SIGINT mission: it's nothing less than a billion-dollar funded betrayal of national and international security, from a technical perspective, and one that we have to go and fix - because they won't, and we could never trust them to anyway.
We're not silent. We're busy. Other people can talk about political ramifications. We'll work to solve the technical ones. We'll meet in the middle. /akr
This NSA document published at the NYT states explicitly that the NSA is attempting to "Influence policies, standards and specifications" for public key encryption, and given that the project described in that same document is about expanding the NSA's access to data, rather than increasing the security of that data, this proves that the NSA is working to weaken, not enhance, public key crypto. That NSA document doesn't specifically mention DUAL EC DRBG, but this NYT story does say that the Snowden documents somewhere list DUAL EC DRBG as one backdoored technology.
Of course DUAL EC DRBG is only one algorithm. How many other algorithms has NSA contributed to? At this point, they're all suspect, because it's obvious now that the NSA is more worried about decrypting communications it intercepts rather than protecting any communications transmitted. So what academics should be doing is independently vetting all widely used encryption technology, starting with anything the NSA is known to be involved with, even peripherally. That is a tall order, and it used to be tin-foil-hat thinking, but like a police officer caught lying under oath causing decades worth of court cases to be thoroughly redone or thrown out, there is no alternative if we want to be sure that nothing else got through.
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.