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Nobody's Cellphone Is Really That Secure, Bruce Schneier Reminds (theatlantic.com)
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that the Russians and the Chinese were eavesdropping on President Donald Trump's personal cellphone and using the information gleaned to better influence his behavior. This should surprise no one, writes Bruce Schneier. From a story: Security experts have been talking about the potential security vulnerabilities in Trump's cellphone use since he became president. And President Barack Obama bristled at -- but acquiesced to -- the security rules prohibiting him from using a "regular" cellphone throughout his presidency. Three broader questions obviously emerge from the story. Who else is listening in on Trump's cellphone calls? What about the cellphones of other world leaders and senior government officials? And -- most personal of all -- what about my cellphone calls?
There are two basic places to eavesdrop on pretty much any communications system: at the end points and during transmission. This means that a cellphone attacker can either compromise one of the two phones or eavesdrop on the cellular network. Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. The NSA seems to prefer bulk eavesdropping on the planet's major communications links and then picking out individuals of interest. In 2016, WikiLeaks published a series of classified documents listing "target selectors": phone numbers the NSA searches for and records. These included senior government officials of Germany -- among them Chancellor Angela Merkel -- France, Japan, and other countries.
Other countries don't have the same worldwide reach that the NSA has, and must use other methods to intercept cellphone calls. We don't know details of which countries do what, but we know a lot about the vulnerabilities. Insecurities in the phone network itself are so easily exploited that 60 Minutes eavesdropped on a U.S. congressman's phone live on camera in 2016. Back in 2005, unknown attackers targeted the cellphones of many Greek politicians by hacking the country's phone network and turning on an already-installed eavesdropping capability. The NSA even implanted eavesdropping capabilities in networking equipment destined for the Syrian Telephone Company. Alternatively, an attacker could intercept the radio signals between a cellphone and a tower. Encryption ranges from very weak to possibly strong, depending on which flavor the system uses. Don't think the attacker has to put his eavesdropping antenna on the White House lawn; the Russian Embassy is close enough.
There are two basic places to eavesdrop on pretty much any communications system: at the end points and during transmission. This means that a cellphone attacker can either compromise one of the two phones or eavesdrop on the cellular network. Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. The NSA seems to prefer bulk eavesdropping on the planet's major communications links and then picking out individuals of interest. In 2016, WikiLeaks published a series of classified documents listing "target selectors": phone numbers the NSA searches for and records. These included senior government officials of Germany -- among them Chancellor Angela Merkel -- France, Japan, and other countries.
Other countries don't have the same worldwide reach that the NSA has, and must use other methods to intercept cellphone calls. We don't know details of which countries do what, but we know a lot about the vulnerabilities. Insecurities in the phone network itself are so easily exploited that 60 Minutes eavesdropped on a U.S. congressman's phone live on camera in 2016. Back in 2005, unknown attackers targeted the cellphones of many Greek politicians by hacking the country's phone network and turning on an already-installed eavesdropping capability. The NSA even implanted eavesdropping capabilities in networking equipment destined for the Syrian Telephone Company. Alternatively, an attacker could intercept the radio signals between a cellphone and a tower. Encryption ranges from very weak to possibly strong, depending on which flavor the system uses. Don't think the attacker has to put his eavesdropping antenna on the White House lawn; the Russian Embassy is close enough.
The New York Times reported that the Russians and the Chinese were eavesdropping on President Donald Trump's personal cellphone and using the information gleaned to better influence his behavior. This should surprise no one, writes Bruce Schneier.
My $0.02 why I am not surprised: -
Our government does routinely spy on friends
Our friends in the Mideast once returned the favor!
I guess we are getting a taste of our own MO.
Remember all the whining and hand wringing over Hillary Clinton using an unsecured email server? Remember how people said she was giving away state secrets and should be in jail?
Funny how those same people are absolutely silent when the con artist gives away national secrets every day over an unsecured phone.
Is to deem your smartphone compromised by default and if you're really concerned about the privacy and security of your communications then you deal with the interested parties vis-a-vis or use off-the-shelf computers with trusted software like e.g. Linux/*BSD and communication software which is known to be secure, like ring.cx, signal or wire. In order to protect yourself from compromised hardware you need to set up an internet router (any Wi-Fi access point which supports *WRT) and make sure that your traffic goes exactly where you intended it to go and not to some third parties.
If you know you're being spied on (I find it hard to believe that the Times would find out before the U.S. government) wouldn't that just motivate you to feed bad information through those channels? Sure, you could try to block the spying, but that just means that the spy tries something else and you're uncertain as to whether or not they're intercepting your communication again. Also, they're faced with the difficulty of trying to determine if there's another line of communication that they don't have access to where all of the real information is being passed and have to question the value of all of the communications that they do intercept.
This can be extended to any network: they aren't secure. The purpose of a network is to communicate, not hide communications. It sounds strange, but true. You can attempt to add security to it, but the concept of a network means sharing information.
Everyone has got to know about this international intelligence sharing agreement Echelon UKUSA/SIGINT that created 5 eyes by now. Surely? It has been in operation since the 1940's. I shouldn't be surprised that not even the article mentions it. It is the governance document for this kind of telecommunications surveillance.
I have a scan of the agreement however I've found it difficult to find the text online. The NSA links to the UK/USA seems to be broken for me. Maybe they're just interested in who is interested. ;). However a bit more digging and I found this article from the guardian that link to UK National Archive copy of the agreement. It was not available online for some time after I got it - so I suggest you grab a copy to get some idea how this agreement works. After all that's one reason it was kept secret for so long.
Essentially agencies can't spy on domestic citizens so they ask a counterpart agency to spy for them. I read somewhere that even back as far as the 90's it was doing signal processing to "gist" (as in get the gist of) about 500,000 phone conversations using data centers the size of football fields and promote them to analysts automatically. They had two nuclear submarines that would be positioned over undersea fibre optic telecommunications nodes so I think you can surmise just how well funded this agreement is if five western nations are involved.
It is like a Berlin wall of surveillance for the western world.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Cell phones have been possible to listen in to, even by citizens (with some skills, and expensive equipment) for quite some time now.
The technology is the same that it has been using for the last 10-15 years, the encryption back then was too hard for that time, but today - with insanely strong GPU's and CPU's - heck...even FPGA's with a little specialized design - can crack that stream open like a tunnel wide gate, and there's even open source software so you can experiment with your "own" equipment and algorithms. Figure this - you can purchase a 2$ cellphone module complete with IMEI number, receiver/transceiver, data module, parser, encryption/decryption all-in-one-chips on eBay for the longest time. Did anyone really think these would have such processing capacity in 2018 that it couldn't be hacked today with our insane home computers (insane in comparison to 10+ years ago)?
There was even this instance where there were an old Nokia Telephone (33xx I think, not sure - but it's googleable), that had a bug that enabled you to get into monitoring mode, that phone was sought after for sinister purposes back then - and hard to find, but it was quite true.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Yes, despite his manifest personal weirdness rms is completely right about his: you don't control your phone. Google/Apple and any vendor you give access to your mic and camera could be listening in on you at any time it is on. I am not convinced that turning your phone off that's it's necessarily *really* off -- Snowden agrees. There is no physical way to distinguish between the phone being off and malware which emulates the phone being off, or in the case of actors with "national means", hacked firmware; after all the "power" button isn't connected to the actual battery.
I've said for years now phones need at a hardware switch that disconnects their mic and cameras, and in addition to the standard power button a battery disconnect slide switch. If you took those features and added them to an iPhone 6 you could market it as a security phone.
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The spies know that you know they are spying and likely feeding them bad info. They probably assign low value to anything heard on a Trump phone call unless they can corroborate it. It's still very useful intel though, because even knowing what they want you to know has value, not to mention all the stuff that is true and more general stuff like the President's mood/state of mind, speech patterns and unfiltered reactions. Well, okay, the latter is usually on Twitter 10 minutes later, but still...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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