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The NSA chief should be pro-encryption: the presence of backdoors in encryption (as demanded by some US law enforcement officials) creates a national security t

by exelius 11y ago

The NSA chief should be pro-encryption: the presence of backdoors in encryption (as demanded by some US law enforcement officials) creates a national security threat. Period. If law enforcement needs access to encrypted data, they already have a few different ways. They can subpoena the data and throw the person who controls the key in jail until they release it, or they can just brute-force the encryption in cases of extreme national interest (it's too expensive to do for run-of-the-mill crime, but they have the capability if they really need it). IMO the entire goal of encryption tech should be to make the government incur significant costs for every invasion of privacy they feel they have to perform. That way, they have the power to invade our privacy (and I don't think we as a populace can really stop them from having that power) but it's so expensive / cumbersome to use they really only use it in extreme cases. I'm fine with privacy being broken by the government on a case-by-case basis; the danger is when the government does a dragnet on everyone.

rosalinekarr 11y ago
Even on a case by case basis, the power to break encryption raises some serious questions. What if the current President or some future President goes digging through the emails of their opposition in an election year? What if the NSA starts investigating the records of politicians with a anti-NSA stance? With access to passwords and accounts, you even have to ask what if an agency like the GCHQ planted evidence in someone's email or tweeted an embarrassing photo on their behalf? [They have the tools to do so](http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/ghcqs-chinese-menu-of-tools-spread-disinformation-across-internet/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/ghcqs-chinese-menu-o...), and with power like that, they could basically destroy anyone who opposes them before they even start. I don't think perfect encryption is an impossible dream. I think it will be very hard to achieve, and we have a long way to go to getting there, but it's important work, and right now companies, governments and people should be pouring everything they can into making it a reality. We need a lot more research into encryption, especially [information theoretic secure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_security) algorithms.
- exelius 11y ago
  > What if the current President or some future President goes digging through the emails of their opposition in an election year? This has happened before with Watergate -- and the only reason Nixon got caught was because people talked. I would imagine something similar would happen. Politics can help create some balance here -- if they really were doing something that benefitted one side over another, someone from the other side would likely blow the whistle. Regardless though, that information wouldn't just be sitting there unencrypted if there was no request look at it: there would be a paper trail that a certain individual was targeted and records pulled. That's not always the case if you just have a huge database of unencrypted communications. > What if the NSA starts investigating the records of politicians with a anti-NSA stance? This is a danger I am actually concerned about, but I'm also pretty sure this has been going on for decades. If not with the NSA, then with the FBI (e.g. the Hoover era). > with power like that, they could basically destroy anyone who opposes them before they even start. You don't even need government power to do this; the major political parties are set up with this purpose in mind. And work in politics for even a little bit and you'll realize there's not a whole lot of separation between government work and party work. I don't know that this is really much different than the status quo over the last few decades.
  - click170 11y ago
    >there would be a paper trail that a certain individual was targeted and records pulled. I expected this too, and I was quite surprised to hear the us government had no idea exactly what Snowden had stolen. Kinda sheds light on the "protections" they have in place, in that they didn't seem to be very good at what they're supposed to do.
    - exelius 11y ago
      Yeah, and it was a fucking embarrassment to the NSA. Their security procedures were pretty lax, especially for a three-letter agency, but that seems par for the course given the budget climate in Washington. But the difference was that in this case, the default policy is collection. If you collect everyone's data, then no special effort has to be taken to snoop on an individual's data (besides accessing it). There might be access logs; there might not be. If there is a process that has to be followed to initiate data collection on a target, there will certainly be records of that process because they will be required to execute the process. It's at least better than having everyone's data sit in a datacenter somewhere ready to be searched by anyone with the proper security clearance.
nickik 11y ago
He should be, but that does not stop the NSA from trying to put backdoors into everything, standards, specifications, hardware and so on. The NSA wants to be able to easly read all traffic from everybody so they can figure out who the 'bad' people are, inside and outside of the country. The NSA is not actually primarly protecting the people, its protecting itself first, the government second and third, maybe the people a little bit.
- exelius 11y ago
  > The NSA wants to be able to easly read all traffic from everybody so they can figure out who the 'bad' people are, inside and outside of the country. I actually don't think the NSA cares about reading traffic from everyone; they know who their targets are, and no amount of software can replace good old-fashioned investigation. > The NSA is not actually primarly protecting the people, its protecting itself first, the government second and third, maybe the people a little bit. The NSA is a government agency tasked with the mission of intelligence gathering outside the US. Intelligence is far more valuable when you know something and others don't. Any widely-applicable exploit of a crypto algorithm would also make it easier for other countries to break encryption. The NSA has a huge advantage over those other countries' spy agencies in the form of resources; so to protect their exclusive ability to break encryption with brute force, they need to make sure the algorithms are sufficiently strong. It's about maintaining an exclusive capability that other countries don't have. A spy could leak information about how to exploit a crypto backdoor to other countries and render your advantage useless. A spy can leak your strategy (spend an epic fuck-ton of money on datacenters for brute forcing encryption) all they want, but that won't help your enemies break arbitrary crypto.
  - nickik 11y ago
    >I actually don't think the NSA cares about reading traffic from everyone; Im sorry but your assumtions are just wrong. We know from Snowden that they DO collect all the data and have suffisticated search and anlysis tools for things like social graphs. They want to know with whom the targets talk. Thats why they are doing it. > The NSA is a government agency tasked with the mission of intelligence gathering outside the US. That does not stop them from doing it inside. > Intelligence is far more valuable when you know something and others don't. Backdoors in crypto or hardware are extremly hard to find and if you pit them in, you have a huge advantage for a long time or forever. > The NSA has a huge advantage over those other countries' spy agencies in the form of resources; Breaking encryption with brute force just does not work. We know from the snowden leaks that they almost never go after the crypto directly. Even if they can break RSA 4096, try breaking all the millions of https connections a day. Its even worse if its not public key crypto. Its hard enough collect the data without breaking encryption first. You can also combine the too. They made sure that RSA used a weak default that they could break.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
The NSA chief shouldn't be pro-encryption if they're doing their legal job: collect anything needed to advance America's interests or advise on threats to national security; protect communication security of defense-related systems. Like Hayden said, you draw a box around him and he'll push straight to the edges of it to accomplish his mission. The problem is the NSA's mission is too broad, unrealistic, and essentially evil. It basically requires them to do what they're doing as there's no other option and the I.C. will get blamed by Americans and Congress if anything happens. Surveillance and security theater follow. I wrote it up in detail here: http://pastebin.com/J2kc9miz http://pastebin.com/J2kc9miz This is coming from someone whose alternatively imitated them (IAD Type 1 specifically) or attempted to counter them (high assurance security) for around a decade. What goes in determines what comes out. The problem is not the NSA: it's what they're required to do and lack of strong accountability in how they do it. That they were non-threatening to Americans before 9/11 & mission expansion supports my claim.
- willvarfar 11y ago
  Nickp on schneiers blog comments?
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    Yep! :) That's still where the master copies of my essays and designs stay. Aside from the text file of links to them I email people on occasion. Been more INFOSEC discussions over here, though, so that's where I've been if you were wondering.
DINKDINK 11y ago
>IMO the entire goal of encryption tech should be to make the government incur significant costs for every invasion of privacy The entire goal of encryption is to preserve the consent of whomever is using it. Two people wish to speak privately and don't consent to eavesdropping. Unfortunately, due to engineering realities, only the next best thing is for eavesdroppers to incur linearized costs to violate that consent. In effect this is theft of communication / information.
eevilspock 11y ago
Not to mention that you cannot outlaw mathematics. Because the only way to prevent people from sharing open source code for end-to-end encryption that takes back-doorable companies like Apple and Google out of the loop is by outlawing the math behind encryption.
- recursive 11y ago
  I think there's some precedent for this. I remember export controls on web browsers because their encryption was too strong or something.
  - CyberDildonics 11y ago
    That doesn't make it any less ridiculous.
  - eevilspock 11y ago
    That was before we had open source. It only prevented companies like Netscape and Microsoft from distributing better encryption. It can't stop individuals sharing encryption code and algorithms. All it takes is one copy to get outside the "borders"...
derefr 11y ago
> They can subpoena the data and throw the person who controls the key in jail until they release it I think, a lot of the time, they want to read data from a device owned by someone who's not jailable any more—i.e., dead people. Reading data off the phones of murder victims—the activity you'd expect "digital forensics" to properly refer to—would be pretty useful, if it were possible. I imagine a lot of police work has gotten harder in the move from "little black books" and feature-phone contact lists to everything about a person's contacts/calendar/call history/etc. being on an FDE-ed smartphone. Manufacturer key escrow services seem almost sensible in this light. The other use is in reading data off devices of someone who's already dead because law enforcement just killed them. I can see both good and bad outcomes of that: if it were quick to do, it would help to map e.g. a hired hitman to their client, or a gang-member to the gang-leader. But it would also encourage/enable "shoot first, ask questions [to devices] later" tactics, which is just plain horrible.
- cgearhart 11y ago
  > Manufacturer key escrow services seem almost sensible in this light. I understand your position, but I could not disagree more strongly with your conclusion. Many of the techniques law enforcement is complaining about losing didn't exist before cell phones (and smart phones in particular). The challenges they face in a world with FDE-by-default are not new, their biggest frustration is in losing capabilities that they feel have been valuable. The problem with something like key escrow is that while there might be value in occasionally providing access to law enforcement, there is absolute certainty of damage in cases where the keys are lost, stolen, or compromised -- all of which happen with alarming regularity already. You can't un-ring the bell of a data loss due to compromised encryption - so the only real question is how many abuses we should be expected to endure in order to realize marginal benefits in some circumstances. It is understandably inconvenient & frustrating for law enforcement to lose access to the contents of smartphones, but that alone is not sufficient justification for universally compromising one of the layers responsible for protecting our data.
  - derefr 11y ago
    Note that I said almost sensible. As in, "that motorcycle almost jumped that gorge." :) And the techniques didn't exist, certainly. I'm more interested in the information itself, though. Before computers existed, all of a person's personal information was likely held on paper somewhere, either on their person or in their car or home or bank. At worst, the papers of a dead person would be locked in a safe—and law enforcement could always get a subpoena to have a safe cracked open. Computers made the safe figurative, but FDE made the safe uncrackable, and put everything the person owns in there rather than just the stuff they think needs protecting. We really did lose something, and it's not just convenience for law enforcement; many people's entire life histories now evaporate upon their death, having been held entirely as digital artifacts on FDEed devices. I'm not sure what to do about that. Manufacturer key escrow is obviously not the solution. I have a feeling that having a culture of peer key escrow might be, though. Teaching children that having escrowed backup keys is important, in the same way that having an emergency contact number for hospitalization is important, might help quite a bit. (We could also teach them the value of good passwords, while we're wishing for a pony.)
meowface 11y ago
Correct. They support it purely for pragmatic reasons. If there was any feasible way they could implement a perfectly secure backdoor, and that it could apply to most encryption that most people use, they'd do it in a heartbeat. But they know it's not possible and never will be. The real question is what "clever" new methods they'll invent to deal with a post-end-to-end-encryption world.
DennisP 11y ago
With AES-256, if you had a billion GPUs, it would take much longer than the age of the universe to brute-force the key. https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1x50xl/time_and_energy_required_to_bruteforce_a_aes256/ https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1x50xl/time...

by exelius 11y ago

rosalinekarr 11y ago

Even on a case by case basis, the power to break encryption raises some serious questions. What if the current President or some future President goes digging through the emails of their opposition in an election year? What if the NSA starts investigating the records of politicians with a anti-NSA stance? With access to passwords and accounts, you even have to ask what if an agency like the GCHQ planted evidence in someone's email or tweeted an embarrassing photo on their behalf? [They have the tools to do so](http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/ghcqs-chinese-menu-of-tools-spread-disinformation-across-internet/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/ghcqs-chinese-menu-o...), and with power like that, they could basically destroy anyone who opposes them before they even start. I don't think perfect encryption is an impossible dream. I think it will be very hard to achieve, and we have a long way to go to getting there, but it's important work, and right now companies, governments and people should be pouring everything they can into making it a reality. We need a lot more research into encryption, especially [information theoretic secure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_security) algorithms.

exelius 11y ago
> What if the current President or some future President goes digging through the emails of their opposition in an election year? This has happened before with Watergate -- and the only reason Nixon got caught was because people talked. I would imagine something similar would happen. Politics can help create some balance here -- if they really were doing something that benefitted one side over another, someone from the other side would likely blow the whistle. Regardless though, that information wouldn't just be sitting there unencrypted if there was no request look at it: there would be a paper trail that a certain individual was targeted and records pulled. That's not always the case if you just have a huge database of unencrypted communications. > What if the NSA starts investigating the records of politicians with a anti-NSA stance? This is a danger I am actually concerned about, but I'm also pretty sure this has been going on for decades. If not with the NSA, then with the FBI (e.g. the Hoover era). > with power like that, they could basically destroy anyone who opposes them before they even start. You don't even need government power to do this; the major political parties are set up with this purpose in mind. And work in politics for even a little bit and you'll realize there's not a whole lot of separation between government work and party work. I don't know that this is really much different than the status quo over the last few decades.
- click170 11y ago
  >there would be a paper trail that a certain individual was targeted and records pulled. I expected this too, and I was quite surprised to hear the us government had no idea exactly what Snowden had stolen. Kinda sheds light on the "protections" they have in place, in that they didn't seem to be very good at what they're supposed to do.
  - exelius 11y ago
    Yeah, and it was a fucking embarrassment to the NSA. Their security procedures were pretty lax, especially for a three-letter agency, but that seems par for the course given the budget climate in Washington. But the difference was that in this case, the default policy is collection. If you collect everyone's data, then no special effort has to be taken to snoop on an individual's data (besides accessing it). There might be access logs; there might not be. If there is a process that has to be followed to initiate data collection on a target, there will certainly be records of that process because they will be required to execute the process. It's at least better than having everyone's data sit in a datacenter somewhere ready to be searched by anyone with the proper security clearance.

nickik 11y ago

He should be, but that does not stop the NSA from trying to put backdoors into everything, standards, specifications, hardware and so on. The NSA wants to be able to easly read all traffic from everybody so they can figure out who the 'bad' people are, inside and outside of the country. The NSA is not actually primarly protecting the people, its protecting itself first, the government second and third, maybe the people a little bit.

exelius 11y ago
> The NSA wants to be able to easly read all traffic from everybody so they can figure out who the 'bad' people are, inside and outside of the country. I actually don't think the NSA cares about reading traffic from everyone; they know who their targets are, and no amount of software can replace good old-fashioned investigation. > The NSA is not actually primarly protecting the people, its protecting itself first, the government second and third, maybe the people a little bit. The NSA is a government agency tasked with the mission of intelligence gathering outside the US. Intelligence is far more valuable when you know something and others don't. Any widely-applicable exploit of a crypto algorithm would also make it easier for other countries to break encryption. The NSA has a huge advantage over those other countries' spy agencies in the form of resources; so to protect their exclusive ability to break encryption with brute force, they need to make sure the algorithms are sufficiently strong. It's about maintaining an exclusive capability that other countries don't have. A spy could leak information about how to exploit a crypto backdoor to other countries and render your advantage useless. A spy can leak your strategy (spend an epic fuck-ton of money on datacenters for brute forcing encryption) all they want, but that won't help your enemies break arbitrary crypto.
- nickik 11y ago
  >I actually don't think the NSA cares about reading traffic from everyone; Im sorry but your assumtions are just wrong. We know from Snowden that they DO collect all the data and have suffisticated search and anlysis tools for things like social graphs. They want to know with whom the targets talk. Thats why they are doing it. > The NSA is a government agency tasked with the mission of intelligence gathering outside the US. That does not stop them from doing it inside. > Intelligence is far more valuable when you know something and others don't. Backdoors in crypto or hardware are extremly hard to find and if you pit them in, you have a huge advantage for a long time or forever. > The NSA has a huge advantage over those other countries' spy agencies in the form of resources; Breaking encryption with brute force just does not work. We know from the snowden leaks that they almost never go after the crypto directly. Even if they can break RSA 4096, try breaking all the millions of https connections a day. Its even worse if its not public key crypto. Its hard enough collect the data without breaking encryption first. You can also combine the too. They made sure that RSA used a weak default that they could break.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

The NSA chief shouldn't be pro-encryption if they're doing their legal job: collect anything needed to advance America's interests or advise on threats to national security; protect communication security of defense-related systems. Like Hayden said, you draw a box around him and he'll push straight to the edges of it to accomplish his mission. The problem is the NSA's mission is too broad, unrealistic, and essentially evil. It basically requires them to do what they're doing as there's no other option and the I.C. will get blamed by Americans and Congress if anything happens. Surveillance and security theater follow. I wrote it up in detail here: http://pastebin.com/J2kc9miz http://pastebin.com/J2kc9miz This is coming from someone whose alternatively imitated them (IAD Type 1 specifically) or attempted to counter them (high assurance security) for around a decade. What goes in determines what comes out. The problem is not the NSA: it's what they're required to do and lack of strong accountability in how they do it. That they were non-threatening to Americans before 9/11 & mission expansion supports my claim.

willvarfar 11y ago
Nickp on schneiers blog comments?
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  Yep! :) That's still where the master copies of my essays and designs stay. Aside from the text file of links to them I email people on occasion. Been more INFOSEC discussions over here, though, so that's where I've been if you were wondering.

DINKDINK 11y ago

>IMO the entire goal of encryption tech should be to make the government incur significant costs for every invasion of privacy The entire goal of encryption is to preserve the consent of whomever is using it. Two people wish to speak privately and don't consent to eavesdropping. Unfortunately, due to engineering realities, only the next best thing is for eavesdroppers to incur linearized costs to violate that consent. In effect this is theft of communication / information.

eevilspock 11y ago

Not to mention that you cannot outlaw mathematics. Because the only way to prevent people from sharing open source code for end-to-end encryption that takes back-doorable companies like Apple and Google out of the loop is by outlawing the math behind encryption.

recursive 11y ago
I think there's some precedent for this. I remember export controls on web browsers because their encryption was too strong or something.
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  That doesn't make it any less ridiculous.
- eevilspock 11y ago
  That was before we had open source. It only prevented companies like Netscape and Microsoft from distributing better encryption. It can't stop individuals sharing encryption code and algorithms. All it takes is one copy to get outside the "borders"...

derefr 11y ago

> They can subpoena the data and throw the person who controls the key in jail until they release it I think, a lot of the time, they want to read data from a device owned by someone who's not jailable any more—i.e., dead people. Reading data off the phones of murder victims—the activity you'd expect "digital forensics" to properly refer to—would be pretty useful, if it were possible. I imagine a lot of police work has gotten harder in the move from "little black books" and feature-phone contact lists to everything about a person's contacts/calendar/call history/etc. being on an FDE-ed smartphone. Manufacturer key escrow services seem almost sensible in this light. The other use is in reading data off devices of someone who's already dead because law enforcement just killed them. I can see both good and bad outcomes of that: if it were quick to do, it would help to map e.g. a hired hitman to their client, or a gang-member to the gang-leader. But it would also encourage/enable "shoot first, ask questions [to devices] later" tactics, which is just plain horrible.

cgearhart 11y ago
> Manufacturer key escrow services seem almost sensible in this light. I understand your position, but I could not disagree more strongly with your conclusion. Many of the techniques law enforcement is complaining about losing didn't exist before cell phones (and smart phones in particular). The challenges they face in a world with FDE-by-default are not new, their biggest frustration is in losing capabilities that they feel have been valuable. The problem with something like key escrow is that while there might be value in occasionally providing access to law enforcement, there is absolute certainty of damage in cases where the keys are lost, stolen, or compromised -- all of which happen with alarming regularity already. You can't un-ring the bell of a data loss due to compromised encryption - so the only real question is how many abuses we should be expected to endure in order to realize marginal benefits in some circumstances. It is understandably inconvenient & frustrating for law enforcement to lose access to the contents of smartphones, but that alone is not sufficient justification for universally compromising one of the layers responsible for protecting our data.
- derefr 11y ago
  Note that I said almost sensible. As in, "that motorcycle almost jumped that gorge." :) And the techniques didn't exist, certainly. I'm more interested in the information itself, though. Before computers existed, all of a person's personal information was likely held on paper somewhere, either on their person or in their car or home or bank. At worst, the papers of a dead person would be locked in a safe—and law enforcement could always get a subpoena to have a safe cracked open. Computers made the safe figurative, but FDE made the safe uncrackable, and put everything the person owns in there rather than just the stuff they think needs protecting. We really did lose something, and it's not just convenience for law enforcement; many people's entire life histories now evaporate upon their death, having been held entirely as digital artifacts on FDEed devices. I'm not sure what to do about that. Manufacturer key escrow is obviously not the solution. I have a feeling that having a culture of peer key escrow might be, though. Teaching children that having escrowed backup keys is important, in the same way that having an emergency contact number for hospitalization is important, might help quite a bit. (We could also teach them the value of good passwords, while we're wishing for a pony.)

meowface 11y ago

Correct. They support it purely for pragmatic reasons. If there was any feasible way they could implement a perfectly secure backdoor, and that it could apply to most encryption that most people use, they'd do it in a heartbeat. But they know it's not possible and never will be. The real question is what "clever" new methods they'll invent to deal with a post-end-to-end-encryption world.

DennisP 11y ago

With AES-256, if you had a billion GPUs, it would take much longer than the age of the universe to brute-force the key. https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1x50xl/time_and_energy_required_to_bruteforce_a_aes256/ https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1x50xl/time...