Obama Administration Explored Ways To Bypass Smartphone Encryption

An anonymous reader writes: According to a story at The Washington Post, an Obama Administration working group considered four backdoors that tech companies could adopt to allow the government to break encrypted communications stored on phones of suspected terrorists or criminals. The group concluded that the solutions were "technically feasible," but they group feared blowback. "Any proposed solution almost certainly would quickly become a focal point for attacks. Rather than sparking more discussion, government-proposed technical approaches would almost certainly be perceived as proposals to introduce 'backdoors' or vulnerabilities in technology products and services and increase tensions rather [than] build cooperation," said the unclassified memo. You can read the draft paper on technical options here.

Comments

It IS a backdoor

[phantomfive]

would almost certainly be perceived as proposals to introduce 'backdoors'

Yes, that is exactly the definition of a backdoor: a way to bypass the owner's security measures. Any suggestion that it isn't would mean that the government is the owner of the device, not you or me.

Obama is All About Transparency!

[Irate Engineer]

Unfortunately he was thinking of one-way glass with the ability to look into our affairs.

The backdoors are already in place

[Anonymous Coward]

Transceivers are often hooked directly into sensors such as microphones, and run very complex proprietary firmware that is given undue privileged access to the rest of the system's resources.

Furthermore, for nearly 15 years, Intel as been quietly introducing an entire, higher-priority computing system within your consumer laptops and desktops and probably now your tablets and smartphones: This is known as the Intel Management Engine, specifically the Intel Active Management Technology. If your computer's Intel sticker lists "vPro", then you've probably got it!

It's frightening stuff.

These systems involve their own little processors, memory, storage, network interfaces, and proprietary operating systems; as long as the machine is plugged into a power source and wired network—even if the user thinks that it's switched "off"—that little computer within "your" computer can be contacted and used to access the rest of the machine, including your storage drives (hard disks, SSDs, etc.), RAM, main CPU, GPU, etc. It has higher priority than "your" system, can take control of the display and keyboard/mouse/touchpad input so that Intel's AMT can provide VNC access from the moment the main system's boot process begins. It can do all of this while your system is running, including reading your private encryption keys from your RAM or twiddling bits on your hard disk.

Any attempt to remove or alter the proprietary software and hardware that composes the AMT can be made to and likely will be made to brick your system or make it otherwise unusable.

Re:The backdoors are already in place

[Kjella]

True we can't know everything it can or can't do without a full read on the capabilities from Intel but I trust that if it were capable of offline access by anyone as you claim it would be public knowledge and wouldn't have made it very far.

Part of AMT is remote management, including being able to boot a server that lost power, reboot a frozen machine, wake machines for nightly patching and so on. Obviously it can't reach a machine that doesn't have power, but from the moment you plug in a vPro machine it's live even when it's "off". Maybe it's not public knowledge but you only need to read the advertisement:

Find It. Fix It. Anywhere
Intel(R) Active Management Technology provides remote management over wired or wireless networks across devices. Access clients through a secure channel irrespective of power or OS state, address issues while user is online, patch, repair, and upgrade operating systems and applications, and inventory client-side software and hardware.

Of course it's only supposed to talk to your puppet master inside your enterprise and only when it's enabled. But if you had a secret knock backdoor to access AMT on any computer, even when it is allegedly disabled - and perhaps even on CPUs that don't advertise the feature since it's probably there in silicon - that would be the mother of all back doors.

Re:I predict the future of a government API

[rahvin112]

The paper covers this with a caveat that most encryption software is open source, freely available and has no central authority that can be compelled. The result of this is that even is some key recovery system is mandated users could simply encrypt their own data underneath the compromised encryption and render the device inaccessible and defeat the entire purpose of the law and international accords.

This caveat is actually on the first page of the document as a "technological limitation".