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Neglecting the Lessons of Cypherpunk History
Nicola Hahn writes Over the course of the Snowden revelations there have been a number of high profile figures who've praised the merits of encryption as a remedy to the quandary of mass interception. Companies like Google and Apple have been quick to publicize their adoption of cryptographic countermeasures in an effort to maintain quarterly earnings. This marketing campaign has even convinced less credulous onlookers like Glenn Greenwald. For example, in a recent Intercept piece, Greenwald claimed:
"It is well-established that, prior to the Snowden reporting, Silicon Valley companies were secret, eager and vital participants in the growing Surveillance State. Once their role was revealed, and they perceived those disclosures threatening to their future profit-making, they instantly adopted a PR tactic of presenting themselves as Guardians of Privacy. Much of that is simply self-serving re-branding, but some of it, as I described last week, are genuine improvements in the technological means of protecting user privacy, such as the encryption products now being offered by Apple and Google, motivated by the belief that, post-Snowden, parading around as privacy protectors is necessary to stay competitive."
So, while he concedes the role of public relations in the ongoing cyber security push, Greenwald concurrently believes encryption is a "genuine" countermeasure. In other words, what we're seeing is mostly marketing hype... except for the part about strong encryption.
With regard to the promise of encryption as a privacy cure-all, history tells a markedly different story. Guarantees of security through encryption have often proven illusory, a magic act. Seeking refuge in a technical quick fix can be hazardous for a number of reasons.
"It is well-established that, prior to the Snowden reporting, Silicon Valley companies were secret, eager and vital participants in the growing Surveillance State. Once their role was revealed, and they perceived those disclosures threatening to their future profit-making, they instantly adopted a PR tactic of presenting themselves as Guardians of Privacy. Much of that is simply self-serving re-branding, but some of it, as I described last week, are genuine improvements in the technological means of protecting user privacy, such as the encryption products now being offered by Apple and Google, motivated by the belief that, post-Snowden, parading around as privacy protectors is necessary to stay competitive."
So, while he concedes the role of public relations in the ongoing cyber security push, Greenwald concurrently believes encryption is a "genuine" countermeasure. In other words, what we're seeing is mostly marketing hype... except for the part about strong encryption.
With regard to the promise of encryption as a privacy cure-all, history tells a markedly different story. Guarantees of security through encryption have often proven illusory, a magic act. Seeking refuge in a technical quick fix can be hazardous for a number of reasons.
Publicly available 'encryption' does little more than keep the kids off your lawn. It is snake oil. While you are on the company wire, there will never be any hope of this elusive 'privacy'. Give it up, and make the rest of the world transparent.
Posting AC because the mods don't like hearing the truth about their golden calf...
Welcome to the Jail called The USA land of freedom ROFL .. the USA is THE threat to the free world.
Man that government and it's agencies are keeping the nuts and bolts tight giving it a turn every time they have a chance on "We the People "
Never before in history , even in Russia , have we ever seen a People stay coy under such an attack to basic human rights violations and the absolute rape of it's Constitution.It is with great sorrow that the world watches the USA spiral down into a land of slavery and absolute State surveillance and control without it's people takign arms and revolt against the tyrants in power . The whole establishment is rotten to the core and there's no way out. Surveillance of a planetary infrastructure should get the USA kicked out of all the world's groups and associations and make them loose their seats in all bodies of governance. I hope the world will react strongly and really start to hurt the USA in their wallet. They cannot be trusted , period. They are the enemies to the world now. Putin looks like a good guy compared to the politicians ( whose elections are funded by company money (so much for the politicos representing the people ) ) that are adopting laws and regulations further putting the screws to their own people and the world. Wake up
The article's premise - exhaustively made - is that the tech companies are at best incapable of securing their networks and at worst co-conspirators with those surveilling them.
The renewed push for strong crytography is summarily dismissed as mere marketing, reassuring spooked users with the illusion of protection. On slim evidence, Silicon Valley is painted as a monolithic entity complicit with surveillance - because lawful orders were complied with, because vulnerabilities keep being found (surprise) and because Keith Alexander was on first name terms with some CEO's including at Google. The very real outrage from engineers and security professionals is not mentioned.
The author Bill Blunden draws the exceptionally paranoid conclusion that because the FBI - rightly or wrongly - have spoken out against the renewed push for strong encryption, they must be doing so as a feint, to reinforce the pretence of security made by the tech companies and thus make users feel fuzzy whilst carrying on with business as usual. It's almost a "wake up sheeple" moment.
In doing so, he ignores and diminishes real cypherpunk history - the very real and ongoing evolutionary struggle between those who secure networks and those who would seek to undermine that security.
A billion-bit encryption scheme is useless when you can 1) simply ask for a password, claiming to be the new IT guy, 2) install a screen caster or key logger through any number of means, 3) ... 4) profit.
Crypto everywhere isn't going to stop you specifically being watched, but it will stop strategic dragnet interception, and force a return to tactical decrypts.
Whilst the changes implemented by Apple, Google and others are a matter of record, the sad truth is that none of that matters.
There is simply no amount of encryption that a US complany can deploy which trumps an NSL - a "National Security Letter". The fact is, if a company receives an NSL from the US Government, it has *no choice* but to comply, and to do so without alerting the potential subject[s] to the fact that it has been subverted. So far I am aware of only one party - Lavabit - who stood up to demands for keying materials.
So Glenn is misguided at best, outright wrong at worst. At the moment, there are very few countries in the world where it is possible for a private citizen [or company] to set up a cryptoscheme that the government does not have the right to demand access. In most cases, witholding keys or pass phrases can result in instant censure, typically including jail time.
I think the lesson is: you can't trust your PC, or your government...
... they stem from WW2 and the Cold War.
Normally, countries police citizens by applying a rule of law. In the US' case, there is a written constitution which drives this, but in general across the West there is a written or unwritten set of standards which limit state's powers.
If you are in an extreme war, and your country is at risk of being invaded, with many citizens being killed, it is appropriate to throw the above protection away. The state will do anything it needs to to survive, and will not follow normal rules. Interning enemy aliens or anyone suspected of supporting them is a good example - this would not be appropriate during peacetime.
During WW2 the Western Powers (in particular the US and UK) set up state systems with these extra-legal powers. When WW2 finished, much of this apparatus was closed down, but the intelligence services managed to keep their jobs, on the grounds that they were fighting a Cold War with the Eastern Bloc.They maintained their extra-legal modus operandi, though no one cared very much, since the game was only being played between competing members of the two blocks security services.
Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall. And the end of the Eastern Bloc as a credible war enemy.
That should have spelled the end of the security services' extra-legal operations. But it didn't. Instead, they cast around for new threats to justify their existence and their continuing role. And they found them in Middle Eastern terrorism.
Our current foreign policy seems to be INTENDED to stoke up the threat of terrorism, and to destabilise the Middle East. This only started after 2001. Now you know why. It's to keep people in the jobs they have become accustomed to...
Phones in particular, with their many hidden CPUs that have encompassing access to the one system that the users perceive as the "main processor", are untrustworthy. No secure encryption can be implemented on phones. But modern PCs are hardly better: System management mode, separate coprocessors and external buses with full RAM access, UEFI, etc. make it impossible to verify that there isn't hidden functionality, even if you assume the hardware isn't malicious.
TFA is correct that simply thinking that, because there is a zillion-bit crypto algorithm thrown into the communication stream, that everything is good and security is guaranteed. There are many, many attack channels that do not involve brute-forcing the crypto. Keyloggers, for example.
But this is silly:
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a group of encryption mavens known as cypherpunks sought to protect individual privacy by making "strong" encryption available to everyone. To this end they successfully spread their tools far and wide such that there were those in the cypherpunk crowd who declared victory. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know how this story actually turned out. The NSA embarked on a clandestine, industry-spanning, program of mass subversion that weakened protocols and inserted covert backdoors into a myriad of products.
In actuality, the crypto implementations promoted by cypherpunks were exactly those that made it difficult or impossible for such a program of mass subversion to take place. Remember that the height of the cypherpunk movement was when the Clinton administration was pushing hard, really hard, for the NSA-sponsored Clipper Chip, which was, in a nutshell, crypto subverted by design and mandated by law. We now know that when the spooks found that was politically impossible, they went ahead and did it anyway, in secret. But the cypherpunk tools, most notably PGP (and later GPG, when PGP sold out and went corporate). Hell, even look at /dev/random: when it was revealed that the NSA had actually, and pretty amazingly, undermined hardware random number generators on widely available chips, /dev/random was still just fine, because it treats all sources of entropy as potentially untrustworthy, including the chip.
The first lesson we should learn from the history of the cypherpunks is that trusting your crypto to a closed product is always, always a bad idea. That was the lesson then, and it is still the lesson now.
The second lesson is that crypto, like any security, is all about the threat model. In that light, should we reject the widespread adoption of end-to-end crypto in commercial products? Of course not. If Apple and Google implement crypto by default, it will make efforts to dragnet information exponentially harder, even if the crypto is imperfect. This is why the spooks are beating the drum against it: it closes off that one particular threat model, which they have come to rely on. It doesn't close off other kinds of attack, but so what?
The third lesson is that crypto, by itself, is not a panacea. Nobody ever said it was. The cypherpunk message was not that we can write PGP, declare victory, and walk away. The message was that privacy changes the relationship between the citizen and the state in beneficial ways, and that, in a technological society, we need to embrace technological means of increasing our privacy, in ways that cannot be controlled by the state.
In the current political environment, encryption is not the answer. If you've been paying attention, there have been a number cases where a person was ordered to unlock the contents of a laptop or other device under the threat of being put in prison if they refuse. And that is the real problem. If you create some super-duper-encryption that is impossible to break, the various corrupt government agencies will simply declare you to be a terrorist, who can't possibly have any legitimate need for that encryption, and you will be ordered to decrypt or go to prison, and nobody will even know you are in prison thanks to secret laws enforced by secret courts.
Until THAT issue is addressed, encryption truly is just snake oil and feel-good public relations.
The author says that "cryptography is underhanded", but you will look in vain to find any technical meaning of that phrase anywhere in the article. What he really means is that the major corporations (Google, Apple, et al.) are underhanded because they are working with state spies to cripple algorithms and put in back doors, etc.
But trying to cripple cryptography this is something we already are aware of, and there are ways to shore up the technology to make it much, much harder for government to spy on us in bulk. Even using weak, crippled cryptography forces the spies to expend computing resources. Cryptography is all about raising the cost of spying, when dealing with government, not with preventing spying.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I think the article is conflating three things:
a) The limited amount of cooperation the tech firms provided
b) The heavy amount of cooperation the telco firms provided
c) The NSA successfully breaking some encryption systems because they are good at their job and (b).
Silicon Valley companies were not eager participants but rather reluctant participants. However they can't fully disclose the extent of their involvement because of secrecy laws. Yes encryption systems have been attacked in ways that are complex. Yes they are likely to be attacked. But that is far different from them being worthless. The situation is far better today than it would be if there were no encryption at all.
Hell, even look at /dev/random: when it was revealed that the NSA had actually, and pretty amazingly, undermined hardware random number generators on widely available chips, /dev/random was still just fine, because it treats all sources of entropy as potentially untrustworthy, including the chip.
this is the first time i've heard this claim. reference? i know of the hand wringing about if we can trust the h/w, but i didn't see any evidence that it was broken.
It's clear that there have been issues with current hashing and encryption tools, but they will get better. We are really just at the dawn of the internet, of digital communications. There will be ten thousand bugs, shakeups, discoveries, and sabotage acts; but each one will make things better. Eventually; whether it's ten, or a hundred years from how there will be unbreakable encryption and perfectly secure communication.
With most western governments being so intimately involved in commerce, in conjunction with (and because of) their deep level of corruption, no major player in the tech industry is going to take an antagonistic stance against the spooks. Particularly speaking of my country (US), the government's shadow agencies are going to get what they want. They hold all the levers of power, and therefore the means to determine the very existence of Apple/Google/MS as they exist today. Passing new laws, or perverting existing ones through parliamentary tricks, is already being used to put the screws to an array of "powerful" industries (healthcare, energy, insurance, financial, auto). The tech companies are no different - they will play ball or they will cease to exist. I'm not sure if there is a viable solution unless the vast majority of people wake up and resist. As long as people are camping out for 3 days in order to get the latest i-Phone, it ain't going to happen.
That is hard to reconcile with the facts presented thus far. Levels of corporate management were kept in the dark (gagged internally and externally) while others were forced into compliance with threats that were beyond the pale. When it was all behind closed doors there was little that many thought could be done. Now the cat is out of the bag it is easier to be braver and stand up. It isn't just PR. Although it would make it a great reason to buy his book.
But encryption is not the panacea as linked in the summary, Greenwald is entitled to his own opinions of course. However, he has no technical skills that I am aware of. Indeed, just the opposite. He would serve us best is he was to stick to journalism.
You can use all your "strong crypto". They will then routinely obtain the keys by means of a weakness they have put into the OS or the hardware itself.
These folks operate under the rule "whatever goes over the wire is ours" since 1920 or so. Read Herbert Yardley.
"You can use all your "strong crypto". They* will then routinely obtain the keys by means of a weakness they have put into the OS or the hardware itself.
These folks operate under the rule "whatever goes over the wire is ours" since 1920 or so. Read Herbert Yardley.
"
* Armed Forces General Staff
There is no "struggle". They have pwned everything AT THE CORE. Your funny GPG is useless because they can run their own stuff right inside your Intel and ARM processor. Lets call it "microcode".
"Europe" is mostly a bunch of fucked-up countries on their economic and social deathbed. You can have a chemistry PHD here and dont get a job for your entire life. I know because I live and work here.
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/18/18371/1.html
You are vulnerable to Social Engineering (and almost everyone is), no security of any kind will ever work. Become a Scottish crofter, it's your only hope of a life.
You are a private individual, see all XKCD coverage. Same remedy.
You are Sony, abandon hope now. You wouldn't even make it as a crofter.
You are anyone else, encryption is not enough. You want segmentation, active NIDS, proxies and firewalls at the gateways, HIDS on the machines, role-based access controls, host-to-host IPSec, security labels on packets, total removal of all vulnerable protocols, disk encryption, strong authentication and Neuromancer's Black Ice. A platoon of extreme freediving Ninja with enhanced magnetic sensors in their eyeballs would help, too.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
... you can't organize a mass political movement or broad cultural change by hiding what you are doing. You need to convince people to believe in a cause and be willing to commit resources to support it. And overall that requires broad mass communications and engaging more and more people, any one of whom could report you to "authorities". Successful broad change in a democracy is going to be focused on legal & non-violent means to change public opinion. Encryption is generally about hiding communications and their contents, which is the opposite of what you need to be doing to make large scale social change.
Encryption to ensure security is like the same argument for personal handgun ownership. While you can make arguments for such things and personal protection as individual solutions, neither do much by themselves to change the societal culture (including changing spending policies and laws) to make the community healthier and safer. An emphasis on such shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the core social problems that confront us related to building healthier communities around shared values.
Encrypted communications also don't help much when the person you are communicating with forwards everything to someone you don't know. And as an XKCD comic shows, a pipe wrench can defeat most encryption fairly straightforwardly. Encrypted communications can also be compromised in practice any number of ways, which then leaves you with a false sense of security and depending on something you should not be trusting. So, not only is a focus on encryption misleading, it is dangerous.
Sure, encryption may enhance privacy and in that sense affect a balance of power between individual and state, and it is useful for protecting commercial transactions against criminals. It has its place. But that place is not at the heart of making social change of the kind we need for the 21st century -- which I feel relate more to making the most of abundant modern technology despite a culture and habits of mind adapted for scarcity.
Or as I've said elsewhere: ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
"As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card tabulators] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intellig
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.