7 ms·

2016: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/keystroke_recog.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/keystroke_rec... It's not much of a st

by rl3 8y ago

2016: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/keystroke_recog.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/08/keystroke_rec... It's not much of a stretch to imagine that intelligence agencies have been heavily invested in this area and are far ahead of public research, given signals intelligence has basically been their bread and butter since forever. Moreover, Stuxnet was so advanced for the time that its existence stunned the world. Keystrokes can be captured indirectly via audio analysis, electromagnetic emissions from wiring, and now RF imaging techniques looking at finger movements. Wouldn't be surprised if they can create multi-modal composite models to attain higher accuracy, or if RF imaging is able to capture lip/jaw movements these days. The really sexy part is probably what they're able to do with fixed wing airborne platforms, where you can afford to pack ridiculously high-end sensors and local computing power on board. It still weirds me out to think that a gimmick from 2008's The Dark Knight is more or less a reality now, or will be soon if it already isn't.

hueving 8y ago
>Moreover, Stuxnet was so advanced for the time that its existence stunned the world. Not technically advanced. It was using a collection of 0-day exploits to get into a PC via a USB drive. Any basic hacker could accomplish that with existing exploit tooling. What was so advanced about it was the coordination to enable it. The collection of 0-day exploits, the knowledge of the architecture of the centrifuge, and the engineering expertise to compromise the centrifuges in a non-obvious way. Stuxnet was incredibly simple technologically, but it was distilled down to exactly what it needed to do and delivered to just the right people by an advanced vast intelligence apparatus. It did not depend on any breakthroughs in signals, encoding, hardware, etc. I'm not suggesting they aren't capable of technological breakthroughs, but stuxnet definitely isn't an example of one.
- rl3 8y ago
  >I'm not suggesting they aren't capable of technological breakthroughs, but stuxnet definitely isn't an example of one. Never suggested it was. My point still stands that the world was shocked it existed, if only for precisely the reasons you described. It was an indicator of the degree to which intelligence agencies had their shit together at the time. Things that advanced had never really been publicly seen nor pulled off before. As an aside, one can likewise argue that imaging people via RF isn't really a breakthrough unto itself, but merely putting existing technology and knowledge together in a complicated but exacting fashion.
  - hueving 8y ago
    But it wasn't advanced technologically though. Any blackhat with a stash of 0 days and instructions from the right plc engineer could have put together the payload to do this. When it comes to seeing through walls, these are new techniques. It's not about knowing the right target through intelligence gathering, etc. It requires new state of the art methods not already available to the public.
    - saiya-jin 8y ago
      hmm, what holds more informational value - thousands of articles and detailed analysis from experts all over the world, or one presumably disgruntled anonymous user on public internet forum that keeps repeating itself?
      - throwaway2048 8y ago
        The truth is not a vote.
      - hueving 8y ago
        There are not thousands of articles saying that it was a technological breakthrough. Most sophisticated doesn't mean a new technique was used, etc. > presumably disgruntled anonymous user I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not disgruntled at all. I'm pointing out that it was not a technological breakthrough in any regard so it's wrong to identify it as one. If someone unexpectedly accumulates the largest amount of gold in the world, it's impressive, but it's not a breakthrough in gold-mining technology.
- glenneroo 8y ago
  You make it sound much simpler than reality, have you read any of the technical reports or just the latest CNN report? I would highly recommend at least reading the Wikipedia entry for Stuxnet, particularly under "Operation" [0] before brushing it off as a job any script kiddie with access to zero-days could accomplish.... never mind that using four zero-days is "unprecedented". Also you are ignoring the fact that they just didn't hack Windows, but also a number of very specific Siemens custom software packages and PLCs. All technical analysis of Stuxnet that I have read until now have said it could only be a government actor with enough resources and time to build something of this magnitude, targeted so specifically as to only affect centrifuges in Iran, although it was discovered in various countries. If you need more technical details, Symantic wrote up a ~60 page dossier with lots more technical details[1]. You would be surprised how insanely detailed this thing is. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Operation [1]: https://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/w32_stuxnet_dossier.pdf https://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/secu...
  - hueving 8y ago
    I am completely aware of how it worked and you seem to have ignored what I said. The organizational effort to collect the 0 days, target the right centrifuges, etc is what was impressive but there was nothing new technological there. Putting together multiple 0 days is how hackers win sandbox busting competitions for browsers. Stuxnet has been analyzed in detail and there were no new special hacking techniques like unknown ASLR vulnerabilities or arbitrary unprivileged memory reads like spectre. It was just some 0-days wrapped up with a laser focused task that took years of effort to research. It's shockingly impressive how much effort went into researching what needed to be done, not the actual mechanism thag was used to do it. If someone plans out a super elaborate assassination of the hardest target in the world and completes it with a homemade shiv, you don't comment on how impressive the shiv itself was. It was the ability to know when/where/how that was impressive.
    - snovv_crash 8y ago
      Yeah, if Stuxnet had been using something like Spectre or Meltdown the world really would have exploded. And without the source/whitepaper I'm not sure people would have even figured out what it was doing for quite a while.
kopo 8y ago
Who cares? They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. Fake WMDs, never ending wars against goat herders, snowden, not to mention 13 Russians who apparently swung an election. If someone is busy triggering mail bombers and lunatic shooters just by targeting and upvoting their posts on social media what's all this sci-fi stuff good for? The more complex the world gets the more pointless all this superficial gimmickry looks. Just look at the budgets thrown at these agencies. Its frankly sickening.
- typon 8y ago
  The incentives aren't there to perform better. Even after all these failures you mentioned, they haven't really been punished in any significant way whatsoever, so why improve?
  - acct1771 8y ago
    Correct. The incentives are only truly there, generally, as an organization, for intelligence agencies to do what retains them capabilities, and their budget. And when every department is granularly information insulated, it's easy for an individual to get caught in a task that serves the above while not even realizing.
- madengr 8y ago
  Hillary Clinton swung the election, not 13 Russians.
- TausAmmer 8y ago
  Well, looks like everything is functioning as expected. You get the drama that you are obliged to throw money at.
- marcusjt 8y ago
  > They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. They weren't snoring of course, there's no shortage of evidence showing foreknowledge about 9/11 that was consciously ignored by the Bush administration and the intelligence services prior to the event and then (only half-successfully) covered up afterwards.
ww520 8y ago
Elevate side channel attack to another level.
EGreg 8y ago
I full expect that our online speech from bunkers will be eventually the only thing that is hard to decrypt. We will be tracked 24/7 by our gait and shape and facial recognition with handoffs between drones and tiny street level cameras, or perhaps to make things easier we may just be tagged eventually with a non invasive RF sensor or coating. Metadata of who you visited or interacted with will be analyzed for patterns with machine learning. Items you order will be tagged and possibly interdicted as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to do so. People won’t be able to organize anything dangerous because the state (which at that time will be 99% just AI) will already have predicted that the same way AlphaGo would predict any chess combination. Any uprising will be pre emptively quelled using pinpoint nanobots which were deposited to lie dormant in everyone’s bodies until activated. States will endure forever. Speaking of those nanobots, once you have them in people’s bodies they can report back all your whereabouts and activities. It’s easy enough to get them in via people’s food and water supply. The main hiccups will be in the early years as the nanobot swarms are still clumsy and may reveal themselves before they learn how to stay in an organism without getting washed out so easily and without triggering an immune response.
- jimjansen 8y ago
  > Any uprising will be pre emptively quelled using pinpoint nanobots which were deposited to lie dormant in everyone’s bodies until activated. Nanotech is so far away from this capability that it's pretty pointless to worry about.
- ghthor 8y ago
  A large solar flare/CME and/or comet impact will destroy a system like this.
- redblacktree 8y ago
  All the stuff you're talking about doesn't really require nanobots. Most of us carry cell phones already.

by rl3 8y ago

hueving 8y ago

>Moreover, Stuxnet was so advanced for the time that its existence stunned the world. Not technically advanced. It was using a collection of 0-day exploits to get into a PC via a USB drive. Any basic hacker could accomplish that with existing exploit tooling. What was so advanced about it was the coordination to enable it. The collection of 0-day exploits, the knowledge of the architecture of the centrifuge, and the engineering expertise to compromise the centrifuges in a non-obvious way. Stuxnet was incredibly simple technologically, but it was distilled down to exactly what it needed to do and delivered to just the right people by an advanced vast intelligence apparatus. It did not depend on any breakthroughs in signals, encoding, hardware, etc. I'm not suggesting they aren't capable of technological breakthroughs, but stuxnet definitely isn't an example of one.

rl3 8y ago
>I'm not suggesting they aren't capable of technological breakthroughs, but stuxnet definitely isn't an example of one. Never suggested it was. My point still stands that the world was shocked it existed, if only for precisely the reasons you described. It was an indicator of the degree to which intelligence agencies had their shit together at the time. Things that advanced had never really been publicly seen nor pulled off before. As an aside, one can likewise argue that imaging people via RF isn't really a breakthrough unto itself, but merely putting existing technology and knowledge together in a complicated but exacting fashion.
- hueving 8y ago
  But it wasn't advanced technologically though. Any blackhat with a stash of 0 days and instructions from the right plc engineer could have put together the payload to do this. When it comes to seeing through walls, these are new techniques. It's not about knowing the right target through intelligence gathering, etc. It requires new state of the art methods not already available to the public.
  - saiya-jin 8y ago
    hmm, what holds more informational value - thousands of articles and detailed analysis from experts all over the world, or one presumably disgruntled anonymous user on public internet forum that keeps repeating itself?
    - throwaway2048 8y ago
      The truth is not a vote.
    - hueving 8y ago
      There are not thousands of articles saying that it was a technological breakthrough. Most sophisticated doesn't mean a new technique was used, etc. > presumably disgruntled anonymous user I don't think you understand what I'm saying. I'm not disgruntled at all. I'm pointing out that it was not a technological breakthrough in any regard so it's wrong to identify it as one. If someone unexpectedly accumulates the largest amount of gold in the world, it's impressive, but it's not a breakthrough in gold-mining technology.
glenneroo 8y ago
You make it sound much simpler than reality, have you read any of the technical reports or just the latest CNN report? I would highly recommend at least reading the Wikipedia entry for Stuxnet, particularly under "Operation" [0] before brushing it off as a job any script kiddie with access to zero-days could accomplish.... never mind that using four zero-days is "unprecedented". Also you are ignoring the fact that they just didn't hack Windows, but also a number of very specific Siemens custom software packages and PLCs. All technical analysis of Stuxnet that I have read until now have said it could only be a government actor with enough resources and time to build something of this magnitude, targeted so specifically as to only affect centrifuges in Iran, although it was discovered in various countries. If you need more technical details, Symantic wrote up a ~60 page dossier with lots more technical details[1]. You would be surprised how insanely detailed this thing is. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet#Operation [1]: https://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/w32_stuxnet_dossier.pdf https://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/secu...
- hueving 8y ago
  I am completely aware of how it worked and you seem to have ignored what I said. The organizational effort to collect the 0 days, target the right centrifuges, etc is what was impressive but there was nothing new technological there. Putting together multiple 0 days is how hackers win sandbox busting competitions for browsers. Stuxnet has been analyzed in detail and there were no new special hacking techniques like unknown ASLR vulnerabilities or arbitrary unprivileged memory reads like spectre. It was just some 0-days wrapped up with a laser focused task that took years of effort to research. It's shockingly impressive how much effort went into researching what needed to be done, not the actual mechanism thag was used to do it. If someone plans out a super elaborate assassination of the hardest target in the world and completes it with a homemade shiv, you don't comment on how impressive the shiv itself was. It was the ability to know when/where/how that was impressive.
  - snovv_crash 8y ago
    Yeah, if Stuxnet had been using something like Spectre or Meltdown the world really would have exploded. And without the source/whitepaper I'm not sure people would have even figured out what it was doing for quite a while.

kopo 8y ago

Who cares? They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. Fake WMDs, never ending wars against goat herders, snowden, not to mention 13 Russians who apparently swung an election. If someone is busy triggering mail bombers and lunatic shooters just by targeting and upvoting their posts on social media what's all this sci-fi stuff good for? The more complex the world gets the more pointless all this superficial gimmickry looks. Just look at the budgets thrown at these agencies. Its frankly sickening.

typon 8y ago
The incentives aren't there to perform better. Even after all these failures you mentioned, they haven't really been punished in any significant way whatsoever, so why improve?
- acct1771 8y ago
  Correct. The incentives are only truly there, generally, as an organization, for intelligence agencies to do what retains them capabilities, and their budget. And when every department is granularly information insulated, it's easy for an individual to get caught in a task that serves the above while not even realizing.
madengr 8y ago
Hillary Clinton swung the election, not 13 Russians.
TausAmmer 8y ago
Well, looks like everything is functioning as expected. You get the drama that you are obliged to throw money at.
marcusjt 8y ago
> They were busy snoring when it came to 9/11. They weren't snoring of course, there's no shortage of evidence showing foreknowledge about 9/11 that was consciously ignored by the Bush administration and the intelligence services prior to the event and then (only half-successfully) covered up afterwards.

ww520 8y ago

Elevate side channel attack to another level.

EGreg 8y ago

I full expect that our online speech from bunkers will be eventually the only thing that is hard to decrypt. We will be tracked 24/7 by our gait and shape and facial recognition with handoffs between drones and tiny street level cameras, or perhaps to make things easier we may just be tagged eventually with a non invasive RF sensor or coating. Metadata of who you visited or interacted with will be analyzed for patterns with machine learning. Items you order will be tagged and possibly interdicted as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to do so. People won’t be able to organize anything dangerous because the state (which at that time will be 99% just AI) will already have predicted that the same way AlphaGo would predict any chess combination. Any uprising will be pre emptively quelled using pinpoint nanobots which were deposited to lie dormant in everyone’s bodies until activated. States will endure forever. Speaking of those nanobots, once you have them in people’s bodies they can report back all your whereabouts and activities. It’s easy enough to get them in via people’s food and water supply. The main hiccups will be in the early years as the nanobot swarms are still clumsy and may reveal themselves before they learn how to stay in an organism without getting washed out so easily and without triggering an immune response.

jimjansen 8y ago
> Any uprising will be pre emptively quelled using pinpoint nanobots which were deposited to lie dormant in everyone’s bodies until activated. Nanotech is so far away from this capability that it's pretty pointless to worry about.
ghthor 8y ago
A large solar flare/CME and/or comet impact will destroy a system like this.
redblacktree 8y ago
All the stuff you're talking about doesn't really require nanobots. Most of us carry cell phones already.