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What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

663 points by kungfudoi 10y ago

whatnotests 10y ago
Seriously - does it?
alister 10y ago
What a welcome shift in public sentiment. Mainstream media is starting to recommend end-to-end encryption, without back doors, for everybody. (Though the New York Times might represent the leading edge of the change in popular opinion.)
- jlebar 10y ago
  (Though the New York Times might represent the leading edge of the change in popular opinion.) Note this is an AP article.
- adventured 10y ago
  You tend to see that sort of change every eight years or so. The fake liberals come back around to pretending to support all civil liberties again. Ashcroft does X, it's evil and given intense scrutiny. Holder does X, it's mostly given a pass by the msm. Bush does X, it's evil. Obama does X (eg regime change in Syria; what, no million person protests?), it's mostly given a pass by the msm. That's how the media has functioned for decades. They'll get extremely loud during Trump's Presidency about domestic spying abuses, after eight years of giving the Obama Admin a sizable pass. The same will hold true about the egregious abuses directed at the press under Obama, when Trump does the same thing it'll be the end of the world.
  - scott_karana 10y ago
    > egregious abuses directed at the press under Obama I'm curious, because I haven't heard of these before. Examples?
tranv94 10y ago
Or is that what they want us to think
- NumberCruncher 10y ago
  Using wikileaks to leak falsified documents to make us feal secure would be so evil.
CapacitorSet 10y ago
I remember reading a poll where European Parliament members claimed that encryption (esp. HTTPS and E2E) was the biggest obstacle to espionage. I'm glad to see that this is a widespread sentiment.
dromenkoning 10y ago
The article mentions WhatsApp multiple times as a service that successfully made the transition to end-to-end encryption, but it always seemed to me that this claim is rather meaningless when we don't have the possibility of auditing their source code.
- xapata 10y ago
  How can you personally verify that any 3rd party service is doing what it claims? Unless you're a security expert with plenty of time to comb through someone else's code, you're still relying on others to be truthful and competent. Even then you're relying on layers upon layers of software and hardware. Far too much for an individual to verify.
  - holri 10y ago
    You rely on a net of diverse independent reviewers instead of a single entity with a particular interest. A peer reviewed distributed trust net is much more trustworthy.
    - homakov 10y ago
      There's no such net, nobody is signing the binaries.
      - holri 10y ago
        Signing is not necessary. Only a comprehensible bug report or patch.
        homakov 10y ago
        Without signing 1000 people can say it is secure but the maintainer can still send whatever they want
    - xapata 10y ago
      That single entity consists of many diverse individuals with differing ethics. As much as the law might try to pretend, companies are not people. Uh, except in the sense that they are compromised of people. So, they literally are people, people combined with capital.
twelvechairs 10y ago
It also tells us that Wikileaks is (still) important
espeed 10y ago
That's not what it tells us. Encryption works to the degree it has always worked -- and cracking ciphertext has never been the weakest link -- but that's not the message we should be taking. The real message is often only evident in hindsight, years later, after it has been shaped, after the effects have percolated through the system and the effect on behavior becomes evident. It's non-linear system dynamics. The cause and effect are rarely obvious.
- timClicks 10y ago
  However, it is getting at least easier to for a degree to opt-in to communicating in private over the Internet. HTTPS is easier to deploy than it ever has been, the Signal protocol seems to be holding up to scrutiny. Hopefully one of the messages that emerges is that encryption is not scary and another good one would be that privacy is not deceitful. The ability for the state to coerce you isn't going away though.
raymondh 10y ago
The CIA WikiLeaks dump might only tell us the breaking through other parts of the communication chain are easier than decryption.
- ents 10y ago
  that's literally the point
- moxious 10y ago
  Yes, this has always been the case: defenders put a foot of armor plating on all of the doors and windows, and attackers look for the key hidden in the fake rock outside, and simply come in the front door.
Synaesthesia 10y ago
Another thing is important: trust. As a naive user I have no idea what's going on on my phone, hardware or software wise We are essentially trusting these companies with everything. Encryption is no good if Apple and Google provide backdoors to their systems to the CIA or NSA.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- roywiggins 10y ago
  Encryption in transit defeats dragnet surveillance. Forcing the NSA et al to actually break into the phones they're interested in substantially reduces the amount of information they can actually collect. They can't just tap internet backbones and read everything, like they do with plaintext communication.
  - white-flame 10y ago
    But they can say "Hey, Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/etc, give us access on your end for our dragnet to work after it comes in from encrypted transit. Also, this is a NSL so neener neener."
Asdfbla 10y ago
So the same thing the Snowden leak told us years ago. The fact that governments can't break state-of-the-art encryption itself shouldn't come as a surprise nowadays.
developer2 10y ago
This world we live in... the Associated Press permeates through nearly all of the US's media. They are the same reason you can find newscasts about some random throwaway story being repeated word-for-word verbatim. When you have dozens of news anchors across the country reading the exact same words from a teleprompter to push a story, something is very very wrong. I mean, it's nice that the NY Times specifies "By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS" at the top of the article, but why is it even considered acceptable for the NY Times to publish articles that don't originate from themselves? Sigh.
- espeed 10y ago
  The Associated Press is a wire service [1] -- writing and distributing articles to other news papers is what it does: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_agency
  - mcbits 10y ago
    In blog spammer terminology, the AP is a shallow content farm that subscribers can either copy verbatim or spin into new articles to avoid duplicate content filters, as long as they provide credit/backlinks.
    - espeed 10y ago
      Not exactly. The majority of local news organizations don't have the resources to investigate and report on all the events happening throughout the world and so the international wire services like AP and Reuters fill this gap. However, this means the majority of national/international stories being reported by the downstream local newspapers and media outlets throughout the nation/world come from just a few big upstream sources, like AP and Reuters. A criticism of this model is regardless of how impartial the content of the upstream stories may be, the wire services effectively select what stories get reported -- what gets attention vs what gets omitted -- out of the sea of millions of possible stories happening throughout the world each day. This puts them in position to control our window to the world -- to influence what we do and don't see -- what we're made aware of -- and thus they are in position to shape the world's perspective.
jfhcc 10y ago
It's possible defeating encryption is the responsibility of another top secret department whose work remains unleaked.
- ybaumes 10y ago
  I'm glad finally someone notifies it. Thank you and +1.
- patrickaljord 10y ago
  Breaking pgp like encryption would require a huge mathematical breakthrough in how prime numbers work and their discovery. It would also require unknown math geniuses to work for said secret department which is unlikely, most of the best mathematical geniuses are already known and tend to work at universities/public research/private research and publish their work there. Not saying this is impossible but it's really highly unlikely borderline crazy conspiracy. Also, the fact that most governments tend to hack at the pre-encryption level and use social engineering to hack devices on encrypted networks kind of confirms they do not have the capability to break encryption.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 10y ago
    The NSA is the single largest employer of mathematicians in the US. The Snowden leaks did not include any of the data from the departments actually involved in attacking cryptography. All we really know is that they don't have any breaks for their low-level mass surveillance tools. Likewise with the CIA. From the 1% of the documents leaked so far, there's no evidence that they have the ability to crack modern encryption. But the documents leaked seem to come from a contractor (or were shared with a contractor) so there are likely internal-use-only tools with greater capability than shown in this leak. That's not to say that they definitely have ways to break modern crypto, just that we can't prove that they don't given the material publicly known so far.
    - TillE 10y ago
      It's fairly difficult to do anything useful with ultra-secret magic decryption tools. You can passively observe, but taking any action, even subtle indirect action, means you're eventually going to alert a target to your capabilities. Anyway, these are extraordinarily difficult problems which may not have good solutions outside of quantum computing. You can throw all the smart people and computing power in the world at a problem and still come up with almost nothing.
Pica_soO 10y ago
Conclusion: Goverments always must push for centralization, monopols, weak clients and against free software, to keep control. Thus free software projects can not benefit from any longterm relationship with even a democratic state entity.
throw2016 10y ago
It's not just software but hardware. There have been persistent controversies about encryption, random number generators, standards, organized infiltration and things like Intel ME and basebands in phones. It's simply not possible for individuals or groups to vet this against nation state adversaries on an ongoing basis. I think its high time technologists accept this instead of trying to lull themselves and others into a false sense of security. There are multiple layers of social trust in action which are broken because security services are now brazen and face no consequences. There is no 'hacking' your way out of this. The solution is to try to restore the social trust by first understanding why its suddenly ok to run mass surveillance operations in a 'free democratic country' and refusing to accept it. And then try to restore some of the trust by making sure there are consequences, proper oversight and due process.
andai 10y ago
I don't see any mention of quantum computers in here so I thought I'd mention: the NSA themselves are concerned that quantum computing will be a great threat to encryption in the near future. Keep in mind that the NSA and god knows who else are storing encrypted communications to break them later. Quantum computing will defeat RSA, DH, ECC, asymmetric crypto, but it will only weaken symmetric crypto (eg. AES) by a factor of two. So according to my Internet research: if your symmetric crypto is twice as secure (key size) as needs be, it is future proof. Also (and please correct me if I'm wrong) I believe the triple encryption Serpent(Twofish(AES)) available in VeraCrypt (TrueCrypt fork) even protects against weaknesses which may be discovered in any of these cryptosystems: they would have to defeat all three.
- hendzen 10y ago
  Symmetric encryption not being broken doesn't really help you if the encryption key has been exchanged using a (presumably quantum-breakable) form of asymmetric encryption. Most encryption in the wild works this way.
  - praptak 10y ago
    One thing you could do is to exchange the keys in a nonstandard way. Phone or whatever. Obviously still breakable but at least not by a standard dragnet.
    - andai 10y ago
      If you're exchanging keys in person, I suggest looking into OTP, currently the only known mathematically unbreakable form of encryption, and so simple it has been used since at least World War I.
      - acjohnson55 10y ago
        Mathematically unbreakable if your pad is truly random
kakwa_ 10y ago
Crypto Won't Save You Either, Peter Gutmann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahcUuNO4so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahcUuNO4so
mtgx 10y ago
If it didn't you wouldn't see Comey all over the place trying to promote his encryption backdoors. Ironically enough, he's promoting them while saying "Americans don't have absolute privacy." Yes, we know. That's why we're trying to use encryption more...But thanks for reminding us, James.
andai 10y ago
Does anyone here have an air-gapped computer setup? I'm thinking of doing something with raspberry pi. I'm stuck at the part where it communicates (for my purposes, small amounts of ascii) with a non airgapped computer without using USB or networking. I'm thinking about giving both machines a little speaker and microphone and using high frequency pulses to transfer the text. Why, you may be wondering? 1. Airgapped system is impervious to penetration 2. Can be used for literally unbreakable communications.
- imaginenore 10y ago
  If it's airgapped, how do you use it for communication?
  - andai 10y ago
    I'm thinking about giving both machines a little speaker and microphone and using high frequency pulses to transfer the text. (modem) I don't know enough about computer security to understand whether a specially crafted piece of morse code audio (transferred through actual sound waves) could be used as an exploit, but I'm leaning towards "implausible".
    - danbruc 10y ago
      Have you considered light instead of sound, a simple optical link either through air or fiber? And it can be exploited in the same way it happens on any computer, somewhere in the path from reading the input through processing the message to sending the response is a bug and a specifically crafted sequence of inputs causes unintended things to happen, possibly allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code. However, if you specifically build a very simple interface and application, then you can keep the attack surface small as compared to your average computer. There will be no programmable NIC, no hardware driver, no TCP/IP stack, and probably only a single application processing messages and using the interface. But this of course also depends heavily on the implementation. Controlling the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi with a Python application build on top of a Python library, Python, a GPIO driver and Linux provides quite a bit of attack surface. If you use a microcontroller and a hand full lines of assembly to poll input and drive output pins, then the attack surface becomes really small.
how-bizarre 10y ago
The CIA Cyber Security division is a joke compared to the NSA and Mosad.
throwaaa 10y ago
You spoke of Signal? Have no fear, @tptacek will come and defend it at all costs! Moxie good! Me fatsec!
aburan28 10y ago
And the campaign against encryption Comey talked about last fall has begun. If the United States wants to maintain economic dominance over IT sector globally we must defend our data
Spooky23 10y ago
It only tells you that encryption works against the tools included in the leak. It doesn't seem credible to me that the US government's tooling in this area is pretty much the same as what is generally available, given the billions invested in cyber stuff. There are many reasons beyond self interest (like the viability of online commerce) that would lead an organization like the CIA to compartmentalize more advanced/strategic methods.
- fooker 10y ago
  >It doesn't seem credible to me that the US government's tooling in this area is pretty much the same as what is generally available, given the billions invested in cyber stuff. You can not throw money at mathematics and expect it to change. Some crypto techniques could very well be secure with the hardware available now. And it might also be true that quantum computers are not anywhere close to be useful.
bgrohman 10y ago
Original article on AP News in case your NY Times free article count is up: https://apnews.com/cf84bf54c2954de8baaa5fb6931a84d0/What-the-CIA-WikiLeaks-dump-tells-us:-Encryption-works https://apnews.com/cf84bf54c2954de8baaa5fb6931a84d0/What-the...
- j-conn 10y ago
  Please consider subscribing to high quality newspapers, donating to NPR, or otherwise supporting journalists. IMHO the last few months have driven home the vital public service they provide. I recently read that Tom Hanks sends an espresso machine to the White House press corps every year, while I've been reading their articles in incognito mode.
  - bgrohman 10y ago
    Thanks, that's a good message. In this case, though, the original article came from AP News, so I don't think there's anything wrong with reading it there.
1001101 10y ago
The only encryption I truly trust is one-time pad. Discrete log may be NP-intermediate (if P!=NP, which is open), and we know from the Snowden disclosures that NSA was working with U Maryland on a quantum computer which will be a reality at some point (Shor's algorithm). With 'collect it all,' today's ciphertext is tomorrow's plaintext. Always be skeptical.
- notfed 10y ago
  If you trust a one-time pad---which no one actually uses---you can trust stream ciphers, which are actually practical.
  - im3w1l 10y ago
    That doesn't follow at all...
    - notfed 10y ago
      Sure it does. A stream cipher is essentially the practical version of a one-time pad. Neither system is vulnerable to quantum attacks. For both, the weak link is in keeping the key secure. If you can keep a one-time pad secure, you can keep a 256-bit key secure.
      - 1001101 10y ago
        By all means, continue using RC4, A5, etc.
- andai 10y ago
  Your downvotes courtesy of NSA's botnet ;) Do you use OTP? I've done some little experiments. I'm surprised at the lack of interest in the only form of encryption that is literally unbreakable, in this age of surveillance paranoia.
  - 1001101 10y ago
    I have not. I had discussed a theoretical len(CT) == len(key) system with a friend for about 30 mins as a thought experiment, but we immediately poked a number of holes in it -- not the least of which being that we couldn't say anything about the security of the system on which it was deployed. Other questions: what to do with the key material files (their remnants would no doubt be left intact in NAND by opaque eMMC and SD controller implementations - and if not, some signal processing on the charge of the cells themselves combined with the regularity of whatever language was being used would give it up anyway - encrypting the key material might solve this to a degree). Also: where to get quality key material in the first place, and how to exchange it (NFC was discussed). I'll certainly take Claude Shannon's word on the security :)
Traubenfuchs 10y ago
Does it? Maybe it's a huge false flag campaign. You should always operate under the assumption that "they" can see everything they want to see on your internet connected device if they deem you important enough. For example, what's with that one news story about government agencies being unable to break TrueCrypt. How did that get out? Sounds like a huge bullshit campaign to me, aimed at creating trust in TrueCrypt! (Yes thank you very much I know about VeraCrypt)
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  Cryptanalytic capabilities of academia are on par or are ahead of the government's abilities. In the past it might have been the case that governments were agreed of the curve, but academic crypto has progressed immensely in the past couple of decades.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
throwaway287391 10y ago
Not to suggest this is what's happening in this particular case, but if the CIA (or any other intelligence agency) did figure out a way to break some particular encryption protocol, wouldn't it be in their best interest to create fake internal documentation claiming they couldn't break that form of encryption, and "leak" that to Wikileaks?
- Klauster 10y ago
  Considering that Wikileaks allegedly has the new malwares that CIA has been using, I think something like that would be part of the slew of documents in Vault 7. Of course, it might be confidential enough for only a select few to know, but I'm just saying it looks to me that the leak is revealing pretty hush-hush stuff.
thedatamonger 10y ago
"Encryption has grown so strong that even the FBI had to seek Apple's help last year in cracking the locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers. " Nope, that was about setting precedent using a case that is very hard to argue against morally, so that they can erode privacy and protections on a wider scale.
ajay64 10y ago
I'm gay i remember when i was engaged with my ex boyfriend,i had already confirmed he was cheating on me but i needed proof so i went in search of a private investigator to follow my boyfriend's daily activities from his house to his office,his friends house everywhere!!!... but i noticed one time he was always on his phone, the private investigator couldn't get his phone from him so i couldn't see what was going on and who he was always talking too,then a friend introduce a 'CYBER MILF' to me his name is mutewizard@cyberservices.com... he hacked into my boyfriends phone and he showed me conversations my boyfriend had with his other lovers on his whatsapp,instagram,facebook i was so impressed i gave him twice the amount he asked for, i think you guys should try him out.regards from A-jay
ajay64 10y ago
I'm gay i remember when i was engaged with my ex boyfriend,i had already confirmed he was cheating on me but i needed proof so i went in search of a private investigator to follow my boyfriend's daily activities from his house to his office,his friends house everywhere!!!... but i noticed one time he was always on his phone, the private investigator couldn't get his phone from him so i couldn't see what was going on and who he was always talking too,then a friend introduce a 'CYBER MILF' to me his name is mutewizard@cyberservices.com... he hacked into my boyfriends phone and he showed me conversations my boyfriend had with his other lovers on his whatsapp,instagram,facebook i was so impressed i gave him twice the amount he asked for, i think you guys should try him out.regards from A-jay
guest 10y ago
Shouldn't the headline be that; if you have a safe system encryption can work? Because as long as encryption that has been broken (or systems that have been compromised) is used what you are basically doing is giving mr V is a receipt that you have made a transaction...

663 points by kungfudoi 10y ago

Seriously - does it?

What a welcome shift in public sentiment. Mainstream media is starting to recommend end-to-end encryption, without back doors, for everybody. (Though the New York Times might represent the leading edge of the change in popular opinion.)

jlebar 10y ago
(Though the New York Times might represent the leading edge of the change in popular opinion.) Note this is an AP article.
adventured 10y ago
You tend to see that sort of change every eight years or so. The fake liberals come back around to pretending to support all civil liberties again. Ashcroft does X, it's evil and given intense scrutiny. Holder does X, it's mostly given a pass by the msm. Bush does X, it's evil. Obama does X (eg regime change in Syria; what, no million person protests?), it's mostly given a pass by the msm. That's how the media has functioned for decades. They'll get extremely loud during Trump's Presidency about domestic spying abuses, after eight years of giving the Obama Admin a sizable pass. The same will hold true about the egregious abuses directed at the press under Obama, when Trump does the same thing it'll be the end of the world.
- scott_karana 10y ago
  > egregious abuses directed at the press under Obama I'm curious, because I haven't heard of these before. Examples?

tranv94 10y ago

Or is that what they want us to think

NumberCruncher 10y ago
Using wikileaks to leak falsified documents to make us feal secure would be so evil.

CapacitorSet 10y ago

I remember reading a poll where European Parliament members claimed that encryption (esp. HTTPS and E2E) was the biggest obstacle to espionage. I'm glad to see that this is a widespread sentiment.

dromenkoning 10y ago

The article mentions WhatsApp multiple times as a service that successfully made the transition to end-to-end encryption, but it always seemed to me that this claim is rather meaningless when we don't have the possibility of auditing their source code.

xapata 10y ago
How can you personally verify that any 3rd party service is doing what it claims? Unless you're a security expert with plenty of time to comb through someone else's code, you're still relying on others to be truthful and competent. Even then you're relying on layers upon layers of software and hardware. Far too much for an individual to verify.
- holri 10y ago
  You rely on a net of diverse independent reviewers instead of a single entity with a particular interest. A peer reviewed distributed trust net is much more trustworthy.
  - homakov 10y ago
    There's no such net, nobody is signing the binaries.
    - holri 10y ago
      Signing is not necessary. Only a comprehensible bug report or patch.
      - homakov 10y ago
        Without signing 1000 people can say it is secure but the maintainer can still send whatever they want
  - xapata 10y ago
    That single entity consists of many diverse individuals with differing ethics. As much as the law might try to pretend, companies are not people. Uh, except in the sense that they are compromised of people. So, they literally are people, people combined with capital.

twelvechairs 10y ago

It also tells us that Wikileaks is (still) important

espeed 10y ago

That's not what it tells us. Encryption works to the degree it has always worked -- and cracking ciphertext has never been the weakest link -- but that's not the message we should be taking. The real message is often only evident in hindsight, years later, after it has been shaped, after the effects have percolated through the system and the effect on behavior becomes evident. It's non-linear system dynamics. The cause and effect are rarely obvious.

timClicks 10y ago
However, it is getting at least easier to for a degree to opt-in to communicating in private over the Internet. HTTPS is easier to deploy than it ever has been, the Signal protocol seems to be holding up to scrutiny. Hopefully one of the messages that emerges is that encryption is not scary and another good one would be that privacy is not deceitful. The ability for the state to coerce you isn't going away though.

raymondh 10y ago

The CIA WikiLeaks dump might only tell us the breaking through other parts of the communication chain are easier than decryption.

ents 10y ago
that's literally the point
moxious 10y ago
Yes, this has always been the case: defenders put a foot of armor plating on all of the doors and windows, and attackers look for the key hidden in the fake rock outside, and simply come in the front door.

Synaesthesia 10y ago

Another thing is important: trust. As a naive user I have no idea what's going on on my phone, hardware or software wise We are essentially trusting these companies with everything. Encryption is no good if Apple and Google provide backdoors to their systems to the CIA or NSA.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
roywiggins 10y ago
Encryption in transit defeats dragnet surveillance. Forcing the NSA et al to actually break into the phones they're interested in substantially reduces the amount of information they can actually collect. They can't just tap internet backbones and read everything, like they do with plaintext communication.
- white-flame 10y ago
  But they can say "Hey, Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/etc, give us access on your end for our dragnet to work after it comes in from encrypted transit. Also, this is a NSL so neener neener."

Asdfbla 10y ago

So the same thing the Snowden leak told us years ago. The fact that governments can't break state-of-the-art encryption itself shouldn't come as a surprise nowadays.

developer2 10y ago

This world we live in... the Associated Press permeates through nearly all of the US's media. They are the same reason you can find newscasts about some random throwaway story being repeated word-for-word verbatim. When you have dozens of news anchors across the country reading the exact same words from a teleprompter to push a story, something is very very wrong. I mean, it's nice that the NY Times specifies "By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS" at the top of the article, but why is it even considered acceptable for the NY Times to publish articles that don't originate from themselves? Sigh.

espeed 10y ago
The Associated Press is a wire service [1] -- writing and distributing articles to other news papers is what it does: [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_agency
- mcbits 10y ago
  In blog spammer terminology, the AP is a shallow content farm that subscribers can either copy verbatim or spin into new articles to avoid duplicate content filters, as long as they provide credit/backlinks.
  - espeed 10y ago
    Not exactly. The majority of local news organizations don't have the resources to investigate and report on all the events happening throughout the world and so the international wire services like AP and Reuters fill this gap. However, this means the majority of national/international stories being reported by the downstream local newspapers and media outlets throughout the nation/world come from just a few big upstream sources, like AP and Reuters. A criticism of this model is regardless of how impartial the content of the upstream stories may be, the wire services effectively select what stories get reported -- what gets attention vs what gets omitted -- out of the sea of millions of possible stories happening throughout the world each day. This puts them in position to control our window to the world -- to influence what we do and don't see -- what we're made aware of -- and thus they are in position to shape the world's perspective.

jfhcc 10y ago

It's possible defeating encryption is the responsibility of another top secret department whose work remains unleaked.

ybaumes 10y ago
I'm glad finally someone notifies it. Thank you and +1.
patrickaljord 10y ago
Breaking pgp like encryption would require a huge mathematical breakthrough in how prime numbers work and their discovery. It would also require unknown math geniuses to work for said secret department which is unlikely, most of the best mathematical geniuses are already known and tend to work at universities/public research/private research and publish their work there. Not saying this is impossible but it's really highly unlikely borderline crazy conspiracy. Also, the fact that most governments tend to hack at the pre-encryption level and use social engineering to hack devices on encrypted networks kind of confirms they do not have the capability to break encryption.
- SAI_Peregrinus 10y ago
  The NSA is the single largest employer of mathematicians in the US. The Snowden leaks did not include any of the data from the departments actually involved in attacking cryptography. All we really know is that they don't have any breaks for their low-level mass surveillance tools. Likewise with the CIA. From the 1% of the documents leaked so far, there's no evidence that they have the ability to crack modern encryption. But the documents leaked seem to come from a contractor (or were shared with a contractor) so there are likely internal-use-only tools with greater capability than shown in this leak. That's not to say that they definitely have ways to break modern crypto, just that we can't prove that they don't given the material publicly known so far.
  - TillE 10y ago
    It's fairly difficult to do anything useful with ultra-secret magic decryption tools. You can passively observe, but taking any action, even subtle indirect action, means you're eventually going to alert a target to your capabilities. Anyway, these are extraordinarily difficult problems which may not have good solutions outside of quantum computing. You can throw all the smart people and computing power in the world at a problem and still come up with almost nothing.

Pica_soO 10y ago

Conclusion: Goverments always must push for centralization, monopols, weak clients and against free software, to keep control. Thus free software projects can not benefit from any longterm relationship with even a democratic state entity.

throw2016 10y ago

It's not just software but hardware. There have been persistent controversies about encryption, random number generators, standards, organized infiltration and things like Intel ME and basebands in phones. It's simply not possible for individuals or groups to vet this against nation state adversaries on an ongoing basis. I think its high time technologists accept this instead of trying to lull themselves and others into a false sense of security. There are multiple layers of social trust in action which are broken because security services are now brazen and face no consequences. There is no 'hacking' your way out of this. The solution is to try to restore the social trust by first understanding why its suddenly ok to run mass surveillance operations in a 'free democratic country' and refusing to accept it. And then try to restore some of the trust by making sure there are consequences, proper oversight and due process.

andai 10y ago

I don't see any mention of quantum computers in here so I thought I'd mention: the NSA themselves are concerned that quantum computing will be a great threat to encryption in the near future. Keep in mind that the NSA and god knows who else are storing encrypted communications to break them later. Quantum computing will defeat RSA, DH, ECC, asymmetric crypto, but it will only weaken symmetric crypto (eg. AES) by a factor of two. So according to my Internet research: if your symmetric crypto is twice as secure (key size) as needs be, it is future proof. Also (and please correct me if I'm wrong) I believe the triple encryption Serpent(Twofish(AES)) available in VeraCrypt (TrueCrypt fork) even protects against weaknesses which may be discovered in any of these cryptosystems: they would have to defeat all three.

hendzen 10y ago
Symmetric encryption not being broken doesn't really help you if the encryption key has been exchanged using a (presumably quantum-breakable) form of asymmetric encryption. Most encryption in the wild works this way.
- praptak 10y ago
  One thing you could do is to exchange the keys in a nonstandard way. Phone or whatever. Obviously still breakable but at least not by a standard dragnet.
  - andai 10y ago
    If you're exchanging keys in person, I suggest looking into OTP, currently the only known mathematically unbreakable form of encryption, and so simple it has been used since at least World War I.
    - acjohnson55 10y ago
      Mathematically unbreakable if your pad is truly random

kakwa_ 10y ago

Crypto Won't Save You Either, Peter Gutmann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahcUuNO4so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahcUuNO4so

mtgx 10y ago

If it didn't you wouldn't see Comey all over the place trying to promote his encryption backdoors. Ironically enough, he's promoting them while saying "Americans don't have absolute privacy." Yes, we know. That's why we're trying to use encryption more...But thanks for reminding us, James.

andai 10y ago

Does anyone here have an air-gapped computer setup? I'm thinking of doing something with raspberry pi. I'm stuck at the part where it communicates (for my purposes, small amounts of ascii) with a non airgapped computer without using USB or networking. I'm thinking about giving both machines a little speaker and microphone and using high frequency pulses to transfer the text. Why, you may be wondering? 1. Airgapped system is impervious to penetration 2. Can be used for literally unbreakable communications.

imaginenore 10y ago
If it's airgapped, how do you use it for communication?
- andai 10y ago
  I'm thinking about giving both machines a little speaker and microphone and using high frequency pulses to transfer the text. (modem) I don't know enough about computer security to understand whether a specially crafted piece of morse code audio (transferred through actual sound waves) could be used as an exploit, but I'm leaning towards "implausible".
  - danbruc 10y ago
    Have you considered light instead of sound, a simple optical link either through air or fiber? And it can be exploited in the same way it happens on any computer, somewhere in the path from reading the input through processing the message to sending the response is a bug and a specifically crafted sequence of inputs causes unintended things to happen, possibly allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code. However, if you specifically build a very simple interface and application, then you can keep the attack surface small as compared to your average computer. There will be no programmable NIC, no hardware driver, no TCP/IP stack, and probably only a single application processing messages and using the interface. But this of course also depends heavily on the implementation. Controlling the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi with a Python application build on top of a Python library, Python, a GPIO driver and Linux provides quite a bit of attack surface. If you use a microcontroller and a hand full lines of assembly to poll input and drive output pins, then the attack surface becomes really small.

how-bizarre 10y ago

The CIA Cyber Security division is a joke compared to the NSA and Mosad.

throwaaa 10y ago

You spoke of Signal? Have no fear, @tptacek will come and defend it at all costs! Moxie good! Me fatsec!

aburan28 10y ago

And the campaign against encryption Comey talked about last fall has begun. If the United States wants to maintain economic dominance over IT sector globally we must defend our data

Spooky23 10y ago

It only tells you that encryption works against the tools included in the leak. It doesn't seem credible to me that the US government's tooling in this area is pretty much the same as what is generally available, given the billions invested in cyber stuff. There are many reasons beyond self interest (like the viability of online commerce) that would lead an organization like the CIA to compartmentalize more advanced/strategic methods.

fooker 10y ago
>It doesn't seem credible to me that the US government's tooling in this area is pretty much the same as what is generally available, given the billions invested in cyber stuff. You can not throw money at mathematics and expect it to change. Some crypto techniques could very well be secure with the hardware available now. And it might also be true that quantum computers are not anywhere close to be useful.

bgrohman 10y ago

Original article on AP News in case your NY Times free article count is up: https://apnews.com/cf84bf54c2954de8baaa5fb6931a84d0/What-the-CIA-WikiLeaks-dump-tells-us:-Encryption-works https://apnews.com/cf84bf54c2954de8baaa5fb6931a84d0/What-the...

j-conn 10y ago
Please consider subscribing to high quality newspapers, donating to NPR, or otherwise supporting journalists. IMHO the last few months have driven home the vital public service they provide. I recently read that Tom Hanks sends an espresso machine to the White House press corps every year, while I've been reading their articles in incognito mode.
- bgrohman 10y ago
  Thanks, that's a good message. In this case, though, the original article came from AP News, so I don't think there's anything wrong with reading it there.

1001101 10y ago

The only encryption I truly trust is one-time pad. Discrete log may be NP-intermediate (if P!=NP, which is open), and we know from the Snowden disclosures that NSA was working with U Maryland on a quantum computer which will be a reality at some point (Shor's algorithm). With 'collect it all,' today's ciphertext is tomorrow's plaintext. Always be skeptical.

notfed 10y ago
If you trust a one-time pad---which no one actually uses---you can trust stream ciphers, which are actually practical.
- im3w1l 10y ago
  That doesn't follow at all...
  - notfed 10y ago
    Sure it does. A stream cipher is essentially the practical version of a one-time pad. Neither system is vulnerable to quantum attacks. For both, the weak link is in keeping the key secure. If you can keep a one-time pad secure, you can keep a 256-bit key secure.
    - 1001101 10y ago
      By all means, continue using RC4, A5, etc.
andai 10y ago
Your downvotes courtesy of NSA's botnet ;) Do you use OTP? I've done some little experiments. I'm surprised at the lack of interest in the only form of encryption that is literally unbreakable, in this age of surveillance paranoia.
- 1001101 10y ago
  I have not. I had discussed a theoretical len(CT) == len(key) system with a friend for about 30 mins as a thought experiment, but we immediately poked a number of holes in it -- not the least of which being that we couldn't say anything about the security of the system on which it was deployed. Other questions: what to do with the key material files (their remnants would no doubt be left intact in NAND by opaque eMMC and SD controller implementations - and if not, some signal processing on the charge of the cells themselves combined with the regularity of whatever language was being used would give it up anyway - encrypting the key material might solve this to a degree). Also: where to get quality key material in the first place, and how to exchange it (NFC was discussed). I'll certainly take Claude Shannon's word on the security :)

Traubenfuchs 10y ago

Does it? Maybe it's a huge false flag campaign. You should always operate under the assumption that "they" can see everything they want to see on your internet connected device if they deem you important enough. For example, what's with that one news story about government agencies being unable to break TrueCrypt. How did that get out? Sounds like a huge bullshit campaign to me, aimed at creating trust in TrueCrypt! (Yes thank you very much I know about VeraCrypt)

Ar-Curunir 10y ago
Cryptanalytic capabilities of academia are on par or are ahead of the government's abilities. In the past it might have been the case that governments were agreed of the curve, but academic crypto has progressed immensely in the past couple of decades.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

throwaway287391 10y ago

Not to suggest this is what's happening in this particular case, but if the CIA (or any other intelligence agency) did figure out a way to break some particular encryption protocol, wouldn't it be in their best interest to create fake internal documentation claiming they couldn't break that form of encryption, and "leak" that to Wikileaks?

Klauster 10y ago
Considering that Wikileaks allegedly has the new malwares that CIA has been using, I think something like that would be part of the slew of documents in Vault 7. Of course, it might be confidential enough for only a select few to know, but I'm just saying it looks to me that the leak is revealing pretty hush-hush stuff.

thedatamonger 10y ago

"Encryption has grown so strong that even the FBI had to seek Apple's help last year in cracking the locked iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers. " Nope, that was about setting precedent using a case that is very hard to argue against morally, so that they can erode privacy and protections on a wider scale.

ajay64 10y ago

I'm gay i remember when i was engaged with my ex boyfriend,i had already confirmed he was cheating on me but i needed proof so i went in search of a private investigator to follow my boyfriend's daily activities from his house to his office,his friends house everywhere!!!... but i noticed one time he was always on his phone, the private investigator couldn't get his phone from him so i couldn't see what was going on and who he was always talking too,then a friend introduce a 'CYBER MILF' to me his name is mutewizard@cyberservices.com... he hacked into my boyfriends phone and he showed me conversations my boyfriend had with his other lovers on his whatsapp,instagram,facebook i was so impressed i gave him twice the amount he asked for, i think you guys should try him out.regards from A-jay

ajay64 10y ago

guest 10y ago

Shouldn't the headline be that; if you have a safe system encryption can work? Because as long as encryption that has been broken (or systems that have been compromised) is used what you are basically doing is giving mr V is a receipt that you have made a transaction...