Slashdot Mirror
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...
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
Why would "the IT guy" by which I assume you mean helpdesk have access to server level encryption at all? He doesn't know it, the end users don't know it.
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.
Ars Technica
New York Times
rt.com