What The CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works (ap.org)

"If the tech industry is drawing one lesson from the latest WikiLeaks disclosures, it's that data-scrambling encryption works," writes the Associated Press, "and the industry should use more of it." An anonymous reader quotes their report: Documents purportedly outlining a massive CIA surveillance program suggest that CIA agents must go to great lengths to circumvent encryption they can't break. In many cases, physical presence is required to carry off these targeted attacks. "We are in a world where if the U.S. government wants to get your data, they can't hope to break the encryption," said Nicholas Weaver, who teaches networking and security at the University of California, Berkeley. "They have to resort to targeted attacks, and that is costly, risky and the kind of thing you do only on targets you care about. Seeing the CIA have to do stuff like this should reassure civil libertarians that the situation is better now than it was four years ago"... Cindy Cohn, executive director for Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group focused on online privacy, likened the CIA's approach to "fishing with a line and pole rather than fishing with a driftnet."
The article points out that there are still some exploits that bypass encryption, according to the recently-released CIA documents. "Although Apple, Google and Microsoft say they have fixed many of the vulnerabilities alluded to in the CIA documents, it's not known how many holes remain open."

Comments

When can we expect a ban?

[Evtim]

Now the powers to be really have an incentive to outlaw encryption. Great!

Re:When can we expect a ban?

[bartjan]

The CIA is supposed to spy on foreign subjects. How will the US manage to ban encryption for foreigners?
Banning the export of encryption already has been tried, and we see how effective that was.

"if the U.S. government"

[Nutria]

This is what really pisses me off: the unstated assertion that *only* the US gubmint has these techniques.

No it doesn't

[TheRaven64]

The leaks tell us that encryption only works if the endpoints are secure, which they are not.

Re:No it doesn't

[AmiMoJo]

Security is more about defence in depth than worrying about one compromised endpoint. Encryption makes bulk interception not work, they have to expend far more effort going after the endpoints if they want to listen in. Going after endpoints is not without risk - all the really good zero day exploits are too valuable to waste on the little guys.

Sigh.

[ledow]

Not surprising, really, given that's exactly what encryption was invented for. To military standards. For military purposes. To prevent other militaries doing exactly what you don't want them to do.

All the scaremongering around encryption "being broken" by these "acres of datacentre" junk is just that - scaremongering. Hell, didn't the NSA recently ask for help breaking Skype? I'm sure there's a certain amount of misdirection there (I'm still not convinced on EC cryptography, which was brought along with the help of the NSA choosing certain curves), but nobody has yet shown practical attacks against large enough primes used in PKE.

So far, everything they've done is via side-channel attacks and those are present in every system anyway. And when you have these organisations paying for tools that can open up iPhones, you know that they are struggling to cope.

If you want to secure data, encrypt it and abide by all the necessary precautions for it (i.e. don't enter the passphrase on untrusted computers, etc.).

The whole point of encryption is that you can publish your data on the web and point EVERYONE at it (e.g. Wikileaks insurance file) and nobody can access it without the key. If you don't trust Google or similar to hold your files, only allow them access to the encrypted containers and not the decrypted files.

It's quite clear that encryption is doing its job. And if it wasn't, it would be fixed quite quickly (e.g. we're already preparing against quantum computing attacks).

Re:Sigh.

[jittles]

I'm still not convinced on EC cryptography, which was brought along with the help of the NSA choosing certain curves

There's nothing wrong with ECC. It has significant advantages over RSA, especially on low-power devices. There is a remote possibility that the NIST curves are weak in some way known to the NSA and not to the rest of the world, but if you're concerned about that you can simply choose different curves. Edd25519 is a particularly good choice (though Edwards curves work a little differently, so it's not a drop-in replacement for the NIST curves).

One should also note that when DES was being rolled out the NSA had specifically requested some tweaks be made to the algorithm that people were very skeptical of. Everyone thought the NSA was trying to do something sneaky then, too. It turned out that a known attack vector was discovered in the early 1970s and was not known to the public until the early 1990s. Whether or not the NSA is helping or hurting is something for the history books. There is no way for us to know at this point in time.

Re: Truecrypt..

[TheOuterLinux]

VeraCrypt is it's open source replacement.

Re:False assumption

[gnasher719]

The point is, getting around encryption is too costly to do it on a mass scale, so they can only really do it for the small portion of targets judged worth it.

As an example, when you use https some secret code is negotiated between you and the server. There are some random numbers that should be used in the process, and apparently lots of servers use the same random numbers and don't change them. As a result, about 10% of all https at some point used the same random numbers.

In this particular case, there is an unconfirmed rumour that the NSA with an investment > $100 million managed to "crack" this one random number so that any https using one of those servers becomes crackable. That's $100 million, and that investment can be wiped out in a second by using a different random number. That gives you an idea of the cost of breaking encryption.

Re:Truecrypt..

[Anonymous Coward]

There is literally no evidence to support any of what you claim. Please cite 1) Where it's plain as day the NSA owned it 2) Any evidence of a backdoor, especially given that we have the source code and people have compiled that source to match the published binaries 3) Who wrote it including when they won an obfuscated C contest

Stop spreading your infowars-esque conspiracy theory bullshit, people are libel to think you know what you are talking about.