7 ms·

Cables Discuss Vast Hacking by a China That Fears the Web

92 points by quan 16y ago

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
The cable goes on to quote this person as saying that the hacking of Google “had been coordinated out of the State Council Information Office with the oversight” of Mr. Li and another Politburo member, Zhou Yongkang.” Mr. Zhou is China’s top security official....But the person cited in the cable said he did not make that claim, and also doubted that Mr. Li directed a hacking attack... You can rest assured he also will never be making any further claims or providing further sensitive information to American diplomats. Not after this. I don't mean that as a good-bad thing. It simply is a statement of how things are -- and how they have changed. Draw your own conclusions.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Oh really? Whoever-it-was who leaked this ipso facto already knew that the Chinese were in the process of bugging the Americans. Why would this person expect that the information they were giving the Americas would remain secret?? Think about it for a minute. Sheesh. Edit: Rebutals?
- rgrieselhuber 16y ago
  I also found it interesting that the NYT didn't mention his name. If it's listed in the cables, the fact that they left it out would be a rather clear indication of policy. Makes me wish once again that newspapers were required to provide detailed bibliographies for their stories somewhere.
  - klbarry 16y ago
    Were they ever really required to do that? That would be amazing.
etherael 16y ago
I'm finding the degree to which the political establishment is clueless as to the actual hard technical details of what is happening with this entire episode quite interesting, for example a quote from a recent article on the arab press response to the incident; No one knows the truth of this WikiLeaks thing. Is it plausible that the United States with all its greatness, power and valor, cannot stop WikiLeaks and its millions of documents? Or have these documents been leaked by the Americans themselves to achieve a particular goal? Or has America simply turned a blind eye to the leak? China's paranoia and amusing conclusions about the "fundamentally controllable" nature of the web also betray a lack of understanding of how this all really works, and a lot of the US response seems to fail to grasp that the game is already over and wikileaks has already won regardless of any action they take from here on in short of turning off the internet. And even the effectiveness of that is questionable, disregarding the fact that it simply will not happen.
- sage_joch 16y ago
  Couldn't the web be controlled from a legal standpoint? What if people had to fear imprisonment for downloading classified documents? I'm not asking this rhetorically; I'm hoping someone can point out why I'm incorrect.
  - gintas 16y ago
    I don't think it's possible to control the internet when any sort of stronger encryption is available that prevents inspection of passing information by the routing nodes. Even then, you could use steganography to hide data. It would be very, very difficult to enforce this sort of legal restriction even if it were passed as a law.
  - etherael 16y ago
    As the web stands currently, no. Look at repressive regimes such as China where dissidents still get unfiltered net access via VPN, or at the other end of the spectrum technical measures such as freenet that make the current situation look like a locked down paradise for authorities. The fundamental architecture could be changed to the point where it actually was controllable, for example if all packets had to be encrypted with a key that was provided to the sender by a centralised authority. This would make all the unencrypted traffic stand out like a sore thumb, and the encrypted traffic would be amenable to deep packet inspection and the like by the centralised authority. Banning encryption that does not use an escrow key would of course also be necessary, but this would also stand out like a sore thumb. To say the technical challenges of actually implementing the aforementioned approach are non trivial however is to put it mildly, not to mention the necessary political hurdles and the degree of power the centralised authority in question would need to have to practically pull such a plan off. We're not there by a long shot, and it appears that the majority of people who want us to get there do not have the intellectual capital to pull it off or indeed even come up with it, or indeed even understand the reason that they would need to come up with it. And if you're watching, you can't steal mine, I've patented it. ;)
irq 16y ago
This article finally adds detail about how the Google hacks were carried out - something I've been waiting for since the first day of cablegate, when it was mentioned that there were cables discussing the event.
- trotsky 16y ago
  According to the wikileaks schedule, the raw cables on china are being released tomorrow (sunday).
  - davidmurphy 16y ago
    Where is the schedule? I've been looking for something like this.
    - trotsky 16y ago
      I'm pretty sure it was on cablegate.wikileaks.org the first day of the cable release, but I can't find it anywhere now. It's kind of moot though, as they only had a weeks worth of topics listed through today (sunday).
jfager 16y ago
The cables indicate that the American government has been fighting a pitched battle with intruders who have been clearly identified as using Chinese-language keyboards and physically located in China. Does anyone have insight into how keyboard language and physical location get clearly identified? I can't think of how you'd do that reliably. Keyboard language: can you build timing signatures for how people type on different keyboards? Then set up a keylogger on a known compromised host or a honeypot, watch the intruder type for a while, and match the signature? That seems pretty easily defeatable: do as much as you can via scripts, and if you ever need to type something, pass all your keystrokes through a filter that knows how to mimic each timing signature. I can't come up with a plausible way to pin down physical location, but I'm sure someone on here has a better working knowledge of that kind of thing than I do.
- riobard 16y ago
  There is no such thing as “Chinese-language keyboards”. Well there used to be some experimental prototypes designed to facilitate inputs, but they never gained any traction. Now it's all standard US keyboards. But it would be rather easy to know the language based on keyboard input: most likely the typed string will contain more of the user's mother tongue I assume?
  - shareme 16y ago
    the miss-spoke not language keyboards but maybe reading text output in Chinese
  - jseliger 16y ago
    Well there used to be some experimental prototypes designed to facilitate inputs, but they never gained any traction. Now it's all standard US keyboards. This is interesting, and it's a problem I've never really thought about. Can you say more about it?
    - riobard 16y ago
      I cannot say much about those prototypes since I only heard about them long time ago and never touched a real one. In fact few people even know about those silly stuff anyway… Inputting Chinese on a keyboard is hard because of the sheer amount of characters. There is no feasible way to have enough physical keys mapping to even a very limited subset (think 2+k chars as the bottom line). So the way out is to use Input Method Editor (IME's) to map a sequence of keystrokes on an ordinary US keyboard to a single Chinese character or phrase. Currently in mainland China there are two families of IME's that are in wide use: Pinyin-based and Wubi-based. Pinyin-based IME's converts Pinyin, basically the sound of Chinese characters in Roman alphabet, to the corresponding chars. This family of IME's is the most popular one because almost any kid born after 70's knows Pinyin, and thus the learning curve to use Pinyin-based IME's is just mastering the keyboard itself. The shortcoming of Pinyin-based IME's is that a single sequence of Pinyin can translate into a lot more chars (1:50 ratio is quite common), and the user has to choose which one is intended. This is considered rather slow and error-prone. Most modern Pinyin-based IME's focus on NLP model to predict the correct chars, and I have to say it is now much much better than 10 years ago. Wubi-based IME's rely on a formal and rather complicated method to decompose Chinese chars into sub-components based on shape, then map the 26 alphabet keys on a standard US keyboard to these components. The user chooses the correct components to form the characters. The advantage is that a single char requires less than 4 keystrokes to input, which is considerably faster than Pinyin-based IME's which usually require more keystrokes. There is also much much less “hash collisions” in that a keystroke sequence usually maps to only one or two chars, thus no need to manually choose anymore. The downside though, is that the method to decompose chars into components must be memorized, which is very difficult, and the mapping of components on the keyboard must also be familiarized, which is even more confusion. Some keyboards come with extra labeling to help this, much like a typical Japanese keyboard. In addition, I have the feeling that this method is designed for professional typists instead of ordinary users because it is quite counter-intuitive to think how chars are written and then decompose them when you are just chatting with someone. Professional typists, on the other hand, are looking at existing documents and try to input them into a computer, which is quite different from the mental model of chatting. There are other less used IME's too. For example bank representatives used to use a method that map a 4~5 digit number into a char purely on the numpad because it is considerably faster once you master it. I don't think anyone is using this method anymore though. The learning curve is just insane. Other IME's try to combine both Pinyin and Wubi together with different tradeoffs, but few gain real traction. In Taiwan and Hongkong there exist different IME's because they use Traditional Chinese which have much more complex strokes than Simplified Chinese used in mainland. Also in Hongkong they speak Cantonese whose pronunciation is different than Mandarin, so normal Pinyin is not used there.
joe_the_user 16y ago
Let's put two and two together folks... First: Wouldn't the person who leaked the news of the Chinese hacking have a reasonable expectation that his leak would come back to the Chinese through their hacking? Second: Every nation is spying on every other nation all the time and diplomatic communication is one of the first targets. That is why diplomats are ... diplomatic. They know they are always being watched even when they supposedly aren't. Perhaps Wikileaks got far more than any other nation could expect to get through all the spying that goes on. But I doubt it. What's out so-far hasn't been especially embarrassing to the US. That could be because the US is all sweetness and light. Or it could be because there's difference between 'secure' and 'secret'. Secure channels for things that shouldn't get out but wouldn't be a disaster to let out. On the subject of Wikileaks itself, this brings up the point that whatever wikileaks winds up with through "humanitarian" leaking is going to be less than enemies of the US will wind-up through adversarial hacking. Shouldn't the US public know at least as much about US behavior and motivations as the Chinese Polit Bureau?
- GHFigs 16y ago
  Wouldn't the person who leaked the news of the Chinese hacking have a reasonable expectation that his leak would come back to the Chinese through their hacking? If the informant believed that the Chinese government had full access to US State Department communications, he forgot to mention it. On the contrary, the NYT article describes a failed phishing attack on State department employees, in what sounds distinctly like a tip-off. That's a few notches down from the movie-caliber pervasive espionage you suppose. Or it could be because there's difference between 'secure' and 'secret'. Secure channels for things that shouldn't get out but wouldn't be a disaster to let out. You seem to be implying that none of the information made public so far has been secret (or rather, classified "SECRET"). This is false. Most of the cables are unclassified, many are CONFIDENTIAL, and about 5% (IIRC) are SECRET. Those released thusfar are a mixture. whatever wikileaks winds up with through "humanitarian" leaking is going to be less than enemies of the US will wind-up through adversarial hacking This is nonsensical, as the two are additive.
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
shykes 16y ago
China's current advantage in "cyber-warfare" is temporary. As China keeps developing, the internet surface area of its corporations and institutions will be just as vast as the US. And it won't be magically immune to script-kiddies around the world, either.

92 points by quan 16y ago

The cable goes on to quote this person as saying that the hacking of Google “had been coordinated out of the State Council Information Office with the oversight” of Mr. Li and another Politburo member, Zhou Yongkang.” Mr. Zhou is China’s top security official....But the person cited in the cable said he did not make that claim, and also doubted that Mr. Li directed a hacking attack... You can rest assured he also will never be making any further claims or providing further sensitive information to American diplomats. Not after this. I don't mean that as a good-bad thing. It simply is a statement of how things are -- and how they have changed. Draw your own conclusions.

joe_the_user 16y ago
Oh really? Whoever-it-was who leaked this ipso facto already knew that the Chinese were in the process of bugging the Americans. Why would this person expect that the information they were giving the Americas would remain secret?? Think about it for a minute. Sheesh. Edit: Rebutals?
rgrieselhuber 16y ago
I also found it interesting that the NYT didn't mention his name. If it's listed in the cables, the fact that they left it out would be a rather clear indication of policy. Makes me wish once again that newspapers were required to provide detailed bibliographies for their stories somewhere.
- klbarry 16y ago
  Were they ever really required to do that? That would be amazing.

etherael 16y ago

I'm finding the degree to which the political establishment is clueless as to the actual hard technical details of what is happening with this entire episode quite interesting, for example a quote from a recent article on the arab press response to the incident; No one knows the truth of this WikiLeaks thing. Is it plausible that the United States with all its greatness, power and valor, cannot stop WikiLeaks and its millions of documents? Or have these documents been leaked by the Americans themselves to achieve a particular goal? Or has America simply turned a blind eye to the leak? China's paranoia and amusing conclusions about the "fundamentally controllable" nature of the web also betray a lack of understanding of how this all really works, and a lot of the US response seems to fail to grasp that the game is already over and wikileaks has already won regardless of any action they take from here on in short of turning off the internet. And even the effectiveness of that is questionable, disregarding the fact that it simply will not happen.

sage_joch 16y ago
Couldn't the web be controlled from a legal standpoint? What if people had to fear imprisonment for downloading classified documents? I'm not asking this rhetorically; I'm hoping someone can point out why I'm incorrect.
- gintas 16y ago
  I don't think it's possible to control the internet when any sort of stronger encryption is available that prevents inspection of passing information by the routing nodes. Even then, you could use steganography to hide data. It would be very, very difficult to enforce this sort of legal restriction even if it were passed as a law.
- etherael 16y ago
  As the web stands currently, no. Look at repressive regimes such as China where dissidents still get unfiltered net access via VPN, or at the other end of the spectrum technical measures such as freenet that make the current situation look like a locked down paradise for authorities. The fundamental architecture could be changed to the point where it actually was controllable, for example if all packets had to be encrypted with a key that was provided to the sender by a centralised authority. This would make all the unencrypted traffic stand out like a sore thumb, and the encrypted traffic would be amenable to deep packet inspection and the like by the centralised authority. Banning encryption that does not use an escrow key would of course also be necessary, but this would also stand out like a sore thumb. To say the technical challenges of actually implementing the aforementioned approach are non trivial however is to put it mildly, not to mention the necessary political hurdles and the degree of power the centralised authority in question would need to have to practically pull such a plan off. We're not there by a long shot, and it appears that the majority of people who want us to get there do not have the intellectual capital to pull it off or indeed even come up with it, or indeed even understand the reason that they would need to come up with it. And if you're watching, you can't steal mine, I've patented it. ;)

irq 16y ago

This article finally adds detail about how the Google hacks were carried out - something I've been waiting for since the first day of cablegate, when it was mentioned that there were cables discussing the event.

trotsky 16y ago
According to the wikileaks schedule, the raw cables on china are being released tomorrow (sunday).
- davidmurphy 16y ago
  Where is the schedule? I've been looking for something like this.
  - trotsky 16y ago
    I'm pretty sure it was on cablegate.wikileaks.org the first day of the cable release, but I can't find it anywhere now. It's kind of moot though, as they only had a weeks worth of topics listed through today (sunday).

jfager 16y ago

The cables indicate that the American government has been fighting a pitched battle with intruders who have been clearly identified as using Chinese-language keyboards and physically located in China. Does anyone have insight into how keyboard language and physical location get clearly identified? I can't think of how you'd do that reliably. Keyboard language: can you build timing signatures for how people type on different keyboards? Then set up a keylogger on a known compromised host or a honeypot, watch the intruder type for a while, and match the signature? That seems pretty easily defeatable: do as much as you can via scripts, and if you ever need to type something, pass all your keystrokes through a filter that knows how to mimic each timing signature. I can't come up with a plausible way to pin down physical location, but I'm sure someone on here has a better working knowledge of that kind of thing than I do.

riobard 16y ago
There is no such thing as “Chinese-language keyboards”. Well there used to be some experimental prototypes designed to facilitate inputs, but they never gained any traction. Now it's all standard US keyboards. But it would be rather easy to know the language based on keyboard input: most likely the typed string will contain more of the user's mother tongue I assume?
- shareme 16y ago
  the miss-spoke not language keyboards but maybe reading text output in Chinese
- jseliger 16y ago
  Well there used to be some experimental prototypes designed to facilitate inputs, but they never gained any traction. Now it's all standard US keyboards. This is interesting, and it's a problem I've never really thought about. Can you say more about it?
  - riobard 16y ago
    I cannot say much about those prototypes since I only heard about them long time ago and never touched a real one. In fact few people even know about those silly stuff anyway… Inputting Chinese on a keyboard is hard because of the sheer amount of characters. There is no feasible way to have enough physical keys mapping to even a very limited subset (think 2+k chars as the bottom line). So the way out is to use Input Method Editor (IME's) to map a sequence of keystrokes on an ordinary US keyboard to a single Chinese character or phrase. Currently in mainland China there are two families of IME's that are in wide use: Pinyin-based and Wubi-based. Pinyin-based IME's converts Pinyin, basically the sound of Chinese characters in Roman alphabet, to the corresponding chars. This family of IME's is the most popular one because almost any kid born after 70's knows Pinyin, and thus the learning curve to use Pinyin-based IME's is just mastering the keyboard itself. The shortcoming of Pinyin-based IME's is that a single sequence of Pinyin can translate into a lot more chars (1:50 ratio is quite common), and the user has to choose which one is intended. This is considered rather slow and error-prone. Most modern Pinyin-based IME's focus on NLP model to predict the correct chars, and I have to say it is now much much better than 10 years ago. Wubi-based IME's rely on a formal and rather complicated method to decompose Chinese chars into sub-components based on shape, then map the 26 alphabet keys on a standard US keyboard to these components. The user chooses the correct components to form the characters. The advantage is that a single char requires less than 4 keystrokes to input, which is considerably faster than Pinyin-based IME's which usually require more keystrokes. There is also much much less “hash collisions” in that a keystroke sequence usually maps to only one or two chars, thus no need to manually choose anymore. The downside though, is that the method to decompose chars into components must be memorized, which is very difficult, and the mapping of components on the keyboard must also be familiarized, which is even more confusion. Some keyboards come with extra labeling to help this, much like a typical Japanese keyboard. In addition, I have the feeling that this method is designed for professional typists instead of ordinary users because it is quite counter-intuitive to think how chars are written and then decompose them when you are just chatting with someone. Professional typists, on the other hand, are looking at existing documents and try to input them into a computer, which is quite different from the mental model of chatting. There are other less used IME's too. For example bank representatives used to use a method that map a 4~5 digit number into a char purely on the numpad because it is considerably faster once you master it. I don't think anyone is using this method anymore though. The learning curve is just insane. Other IME's try to combine both Pinyin and Wubi together with different tradeoffs, but few gain real traction. In Taiwan and Hongkong there exist different IME's because they use Traditional Chinese which have much more complex strokes than Simplified Chinese used in mainland. Also in Hongkong they speak Cantonese whose pronunciation is different than Mandarin, so normal Pinyin is not used there.

joe_the_user 16y ago

Let's put two and two together folks... First: Wouldn't the person who leaked the news of the Chinese hacking have a reasonable expectation that his leak would come back to the Chinese through their hacking? Second: Every nation is spying on every other nation all the time and diplomatic communication is one of the first targets. That is why diplomats are ... diplomatic. They know they are always being watched even when they supposedly aren't. Perhaps Wikileaks got far more than any other nation could expect to get through all the spying that goes on. But I doubt it. What's out so-far hasn't been especially embarrassing to the US. That could be because the US is all sweetness and light. Or it could be because there's difference between 'secure' and 'secret'. Secure channels for things that shouldn't get out but wouldn't be a disaster to let out. On the subject of Wikileaks itself, this brings up the point that whatever wikileaks winds up with through "humanitarian" leaking is going to be less than enemies of the US will wind-up through adversarial hacking. Shouldn't the US public know at least as much about US behavior and motivations as the Chinese Polit Bureau?

GHFigs 16y ago
Wouldn't the person who leaked the news of the Chinese hacking have a reasonable expectation that his leak would come back to the Chinese through their hacking? If the informant believed that the Chinese government had full access to US State Department communications, he forgot to mention it. On the contrary, the NYT article describes a failed phishing attack on State department employees, in what sounds distinctly like a tip-off. That's a few notches down from the movie-caliber pervasive espionage you suppose. Or it could be because there's difference between 'secure' and 'secret'. Secure channels for things that shouldn't get out but wouldn't be a disaster to let out. You seem to be implying that none of the information made public so far has been secret (or rather, classified "SECRET"). This is false. Most of the cables are unclassified, many are CONFIDENTIAL, and about 5% (IIRC) are SECRET. Those released thusfar are a mixture. whatever wikileaks winds up with through "humanitarian" leaking is going to be less than enemies of the US will wind-up through adversarial hacking This is nonsensical, as the two are additive.
- joe_the_user 16y ago

shykes 16y ago

China's current advantage in "cyber-warfare" is temporary. As China keeps developing, the internet surface area of its corporations and institutions will be just as vast as the US. And it won't be magically immune to script-kiddies around the world, either.