15 ms·

Reading between the lines on this, it's plainly apparent why there's been repeated attacks on encrpytion by the US government. From this, through RSA's Dual_EC_

by NamTaf 7y ago

Reading between the lines on this, it's plainly apparent why there's been repeated attacks on encrpytion by the US government. From this, through RSA's Dual_EC_DRBG, to the present day, it's obvious that the US highly values rigging the deck to aid their decryption, and that the current democratisation of encrpytion protocols is a threat to them. I mean, you only need to read their repeated admissions that without MINERVA their intelligence recovery would've dropped from ~80% to ~10% to see why they're trying to play the same game plan again and again. Whether that's through puppetmastering encryption companies like in this article, sneaking it in via bribes (RSA's Dual_EC_DRBG), or most recently trying to legislate it through (FB, Whatsapp, etc. E2E encryption), it's all essentially the same play. As a corollary to all this, it's another point of evidence that strong encryption really is beyond the reach of even the biggest three-letter-acronyms, and that there's no secret sauce technology out there letting them mass-decrypt everything. If there was, then perhaps there wouldn't be such a strong push to rig the deck in the first place. At least that's heartening.

edm0nd 7y ago
I'm pretty sure the US government is why the TrueCrypt devs stopped all work. They got hit with a national security letter (NSL) or heavily leaned on and pressured to stop making their product so awesome and un-breakable.
- tptacek 7y ago
  Of all the cryptographic tools to mythologize, a crappy last-generation full-disk encryption tool?
  - ameister14 7y ago
    I mean, Paul LeRoux is associated with it and he's been mythologized already himself
    - jonny_eh 7y ago
      Have people settled on whether he's also Satoshi or not?
      - alwayseasy 7y ago
        It's unlikely to be him given his style of immediate profit-seeking and immense risk taking in the years that surround the creation of Bitcoin.
      - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
        It’s quite obvious that he is not.
        jonny_eh 7y ago
        Why? Didn't Satoshi go quiet when Paul was arrested?
    - rofo1 7y ago
      To be clear, "associated" means absolutely nothing at all here. Zero proof or anything close.
      - eitland 7y ago
        He's not linked beyond reasonable doubt to TrueCrypt, but IIRC - there is clear evidence linking him to some earlier cryptographic software -and someone (the journalist who wrote the story?) tried to say that it was a precursor to TrueCrypt.
  - jonathanpierre 7y ago
    Is that just a rant or do you have an actual reason to call TrueCrypt crappy? It was at least somewhat solid and it definitely had a great mindshare at the time. It wasn't niche. Also, describing small-scale intervention in cryptography by services "mythologic" in a thread about news about large-scale intervention in cryptography by those services is a bit odd.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      I don't even understand the theory underneath this supposed conspiracy, since full-disk encryption is utterly mainstream at this point. I also don't need to get too deep into what I don't like about TrueCrypt; use it if you like it. The problem is with the model of full-disk encryption; outside of phones with deeply integrated hardware designs that support it, FDE is the least powerful form of encryption we use. It wasn't even a speed bump for the Ulbricht investigators. By all means: enable FDE. You have to turn it on. It's not optional. But the threat it defends against is not the threat many people think it defends against. It's hard to imagine it being such a priority that any government would launch a conspiracy to shut down an open source project.
      - barrkel 7y ago
        AIUI it was a speedbump for Ulbricht; didn't they need to ambush him in a library in order to ensure they had access to his laptop's contents? (I mean, sure, it didn't protect him in the end. But it was a speedbump.)
        nyolfen 7y ago
        this is true but i wouldnt count on it as evidence either way; fbi would not have nsa tools
        pvg 7y ago
        ambush him in a library Someone started talking to him while someone else snagged his laptop - a thing you and a friend can do to more or less anyone. It's not like people rappelled down from helicopters with guns drawn.
  - tomc1985 7y ago
    Why is it crappy?
  - 93po 7y ago
    It was the only non-microsoft option that was accessible and easy to use and free for Windows. And MS's FDE is likely compromised and backdoored.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  I'm sure they were pressured, but the USG has deep pockets if they wanted someone to stop doing something they just throw a few million at them and call it done, there's far less chance of PR blowback then. Even just reading this article should show you that they kill you with kindness when they want to keep things hush-hush. If someone is developing a free tool, and are offered a retirement-tier payoff to stop, they're going to stop.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    They didn't kill lavabit with kindness.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    If an average person got a huge windfall, that would raise a lot of attention, and people would wonder how they got the money. Police use sudden unexplained riches as a way to watch out for criminal activity, and everyone who knew the receiver of the windfall would ask questions. Between $10M and the other option, it may be easier to kill them with killing.
    - K0SM0S 7y ago
      Agencies routinely set up fake businesses for cover, with the cooperation of insiders at big names (e.g. Dell). So you set up a fake SaaS, have your big name client buy the big thing 25k / CPU x however many you need to reach payout, done. All legitimized by a fancy public stock name. If things really get too hot, it's easy to send a letter to any country's IRS via their local intell agency. You'd be surprised how simple it is to close files in this world. I'd suggest reading Snowden's autobiography, Permanent Record. Very eye-opening and a great read.
  - jhart99 7y ago
    I always assumed that this is exactly what happened to Skype and Whatsapp.
    - paganel 7y ago
- rebuilder 7y ago
  I'm not sure that makes sense. The US could compel the devs to compromise their product but not keep them from issuing a cryptic statement and stopping work on the product?
  - criddell 7y ago
    It doesn't make sense for two reasons to me. For one, the government can't compel you to do work. That's slavery. Also, it's open source software. TrueCrypt going down didn't change the security landscape at all.
    - turk73 7y ago
      On the face of it sure, but then the key people start having heart attacks and mysterious accidents and suddenly the problem goes away. And that's the world we live in.
    - dboreham 7y ago
      They offer you a large contract to do <something>, then they require that <some guy> they nominate work with you on the project. That guy introduces the backdoor.
    - SkyBelow 7y ago
      The government can. For example, take how the police will turn individuals into informants by getting them on trumped up drug charges and then offering them a deal if they work for the government, including engaging in acts that put them at risk of being killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Hoffman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Hoffman The end result is "Work for us or go to prison."
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      > For one, the government can't compel you to do work. That's slavery. Slavery's perfectly legal. The 13th Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
- jimbob45 7y ago
  But the source-available VeraCrypt still exists and is maintained.
- turk73 7y ago
  That sucks. No fan of the intel agencies in this country, they are the Deep State and will harm us just as readily as they would harm communists or terrorists. They are as much responsible for destroying our freedom as they are protecting it. The world needs strong crypto, even if it enables evildoers because it also protects the little people. Strong crypto makes the playing field level, something that control freaks all despise.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  From the TrueCrypt webpage: http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/ http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/ > WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues The fact that they use awkward wording that contains words whose first letters that start with NSA (not secure as) is pretty suggestive that you are right.
  - pstuart 7y ago
    Wow. In a different timeline I'd dismiss that as tinfoil hat time, but in this one it seems spot on.
    - ta999999171 7y ago
      > tinfoil hat time This trope needs to die already.
      - pfundstein 7y ago
        What would you suggest instead? It's a good way to convey unfounded paranoia or to acknowledge that what you're saying sounds like a conspiracy theory.
        glitchdigger 7y ago
        > talking bout NSA “Unfounded” paranoia
        ta999999171 7y ago
        There's nothing wrong with conspiracy theory. They regularly turn into conspiracy fact. That's not a dirty phrase either - regardless of what the media memo said back then. That's what I'm suggesting.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      Is the idea that there would be consequences for a blatant message but not for a sort of more subtle one?
- fredgrott 7y ago
  no read the damn project notes on the ones that forked Truecrypt its obvious why as it needed fixes and someone clone and forked it to fix it. Not every action is NSA-CIA rigged..they are not hidden bogey men(women) and canni fact be defeated with light, truth, programming, and math
- vfclists 7y ago
  Why then aren't they able to do the same with LUKS, dm-crypt, cryfs, bitlocker etc? Does that mean they are only available because the 3 letter agencies can hack them?
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  You must have a low threshold for “pretty sure”, because there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest this. Also, it’s open source. Also, the author recommended bitlocker as a replacement. Also, the authors may not even be American (the original author of E4M wasn’t). Doesn’t really add up.
navidr 7y ago
What is MINERVA? Google didn’t give any related results.
- JorgeGT 7y ago
  The codename for Crypto AG.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  It's explained in the article.
  - sounds 7y ago
    The paywalled article? I didn't read it.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      "None are so blind as those who will not see." - Matthew 9:26
netsec_burn 7y ago
Putting my tinfoil hat on, after reading the Snowden disclosures I'm convinced that they do have limited means of attacking encrypted communication but they would rather rely on these (expendable) means. Once they lose their crypto vulnerabilities it will force them to be even more overt.
- dmix 7y ago
  The key difference is that decrypting something would likely need to be targeted and on a case-by-case basis, as it would take specialized work, as opposed to these sorts of attacks (much like tapping all of the pipes which transit data underseas or elsewhere, which still goes on in every country or working directly with the ISPs and mobile operators which happens in most countries) which allows mass dragnet surveillance. I think most of us would be fine with the NSA doing what they do if it was targeted, like the police getting warrants to break privacy only in important cases for public safety. The problem will always be mass interception. Not only domestically either, as there is nothing protecting any foreign communications being intercepted in the US (and I'm sure Five eyes+ bypasses these legal roadblocks whenever needed). Which is why the push for encrypt-everything is so important. But as we've seen repeatedly, even when investigating the president and his people, even the allegedly "significant domestic protections" offered by FISA are a joke and basically rubber-stamp. WhatsApp and iMessage and other non-SMS communication as well as email providers finally adopting proper transit encryption probably has reduced the amount of this sort of unfiltered "intelligence" gathering by 90%+. But I'm sure there's still tons of mobile apps and websites which aren't doing things properly and are filling up their databases.
  - einpoklum 7y ago
    > I think most of us would be fine with the NSA doing what they do if it was targeted You think wrong. That fact that there are opposing world states engaging in this nefarious, oppressive, terrible acts and they're not all aligned doesn't legitimize any of these states' activities. The NSA should essentially be shut down, or cut down to a small agency operating in public with a much more limited mandate. And no secret FISA courts all of that spy-movie crap. That should just stop, period.
brightball 7y ago
That thought is one reason why I've always questioned this advice: "Don't roll your own encryption." I've always understood the arguments for it but that the advice is so widespread seemed a little counter intuitive. It always seemed, to me at least, that having millions of encryption algorithms out there would be inherently more secure than a lot of people standardized on one because the risk to any one would be so compartmentalized by comparison.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ninly 7y ago
  The "don't roll your own" argument isn't against having lots of encryption algorithms, though. It's because it's nearly impossible for a nonspecialist to implement tools that other specialists can't fairly easily recognize as broken and exploit (whether cryptologically broken or due to side-channel exploits).
  - bosswipe 7y ago
    > other specialists can't fairly easily recognize as broken and exploit Is there any supporting evidence for this claim? If I took an AES library and changed the order of some inner loop wouldn't it require extensive statistical analysis to notice the difference? Which means instead of throwing a bunch of compute at decrypting me, along with the masses 10 years from now, you would need to get a specialist to specifically target me and spend considerable time.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      I've wondered this as well. Are there tools that will automatically run through all kinds of existing cryptographic algorithms to figure out which ones you're dealing with? Because it sounds to me like throwing enough layers of shoddy algorithms would obfuscate things enough that somebody would actually have to look at it and try to explicitly figure out a way to bypass what you're doing.
    - 7y ago
garbage_88224 7y ago
Your cellular phone modem is both remotely programmable and has full root memory access 24/7. Let that sink in a bit.
- tptacek 7y ago
  Your "cellular phone" does not in fact have "full root memory access 24/7". In modern phone designs, the baseband is a USB peripheral. The notion that the closed, secret baseband is a DMA backdoor into AP memory is a message board meme, not engineering reality.
  - hjkgfdfgh 7y ago
    That may be true of Apple, and is true of the PinePhone and Librem, but for the majority of Android devices, that's blatantly false. On Qualcomm chipsets in particular heavily utilize shared memory for baseband to application processor communication.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      "The majority of Android devices" is a very wide net to cast.
      - hjkgfdfgh 7y ago
        Qualcomm alone covers 40%, and they're arguably the most likely to correctly implement their MMU (nevermind they've seen quite a few vulnerabilities in their MMU implementations over the years..) Meditek uses a similar architecture, and I sure as hell don't trust their MMU. Outside of Apple, Librem and Pine are just about the only way you're getting a USB attached baseband. edit - Here's a Mediatek Baseband->AP PoC even: https://comsecuris.com/blog/posts/path_of_least_resistance/ https://comsecuris.com/blog/posts/path_of_least_resistance/
        weeks 7y ago
        https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/10/over-air-vol-2-pt-3-exploiting-wi-fi.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/10/over-air-vol-... Even Apple's IOMMU has had vulnerabilities allowing for full memory access from the WiFi modem.
nimbius 7y ago
>the current democratisation of encrpytion protocols is a threat to them. This is absolutely true and nowhere was it more evident than the Speck fiasco. Watching the old guard of the NSA show up and hammer a crypto forum with stonewalling and smug G-Man hand-waving would have been acceptable in 1995, but watching it take place after the snowden revelations was just cringe-worthy. The answer from the community wasnt just no, but hell no. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nsa-speck-removed-linux-4-20,37747.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nsa-speck-removed-linux-4-... I suspect things like ED25519 and LetsEncrypt were probably a much more damning blow to the day-to-day business of warrantless telecom spying than we're led to believe, and its only going to get closer to that 10% pre-MINERVA figure as time rolls on. the Signal protocol has gained massive traction, and things like Tails are easy enough for a power user. Once someone rolls out a slick CSS frontend for wireguard its back to greasing the palms of guys like RSA in the hopes snooping corporate networks is just as fruitful as snooping the public internet. CryptoAG tips the governments hand on exactly why it disfavors crypto now. its not terrorists or posthumous parallel construction of $latest_shooter. its about control.
- mirimir 7y ago
  Yes, and it started with the development of minicomputers and PCs, which facilitated the process, starting in the late 70s.
chiefalchemist 7y ago
> If there was, then perhaps there wouldn't be such a strong push to rig the deck in the first place. At least that's heartening. Intelligence isn't about truth and transparency. It's about deception. They're not going to run a Super Bowl advert saying they can crack anything. That's not how it works.
_-___________-_ 7y ago
Given that the US has operations aiming to capture large amounts of Internet traffic, and given that most interesting Internet traffic is encrypted nowadays, doesn't it follow that they probably have a way to decrypt at least some of it? Capturing DNS queries and HTTP requests to aging websites that still haven't enabled TLS seems not worth the trouble.
- glitchdigger 7y ago
  It’s pretty straightforward. They 0day, hardware backdoor and infiltrate the ranks of root CA’s. This is covert information war from blank-check black op military agencies we’re talking about. They will kill people if they have to and sleep at night like babies because it is a utilitarian philosophy these people hold, not some Kantian dream.

by NamTaf 7y ago

edm0nd 7y ago

I'm pretty sure the US government is why the TrueCrypt devs stopped all work. They got hit with a national security letter (NSL) or heavily leaned on and pressured to stop making their product so awesome and un-breakable.

tptacek 7y ago
Of all the cryptographic tools to mythologize, a crappy last-generation full-disk encryption tool?
- ameister14 7y ago
  I mean, Paul LeRoux is associated with it and he's been mythologized already himself
  - jonny_eh 7y ago
    Have people settled on whether he's also Satoshi or not?
    - alwayseasy 7y ago
      It's unlikely to be him given his style of immediate profit-seeking and immense risk taking in the years that surround the creation of Bitcoin.
    - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
      It’s quite obvious that he is not.
      - jonny_eh 7y ago
        Why? Didn't Satoshi go quiet when Paul was arrested?
  - rofo1 7y ago
    To be clear, "associated" means absolutely nothing at all here. Zero proof or anything close.
    - eitland 7y ago
      He's not linked beyond reasonable doubt to TrueCrypt, but IIRC - there is clear evidence linking him to some earlier cryptographic software -and someone (the journalist who wrote the story?) tried to say that it was a precursor to TrueCrypt.
- jonathanpierre 7y ago
  Is that just a rant or do you have an actual reason to call TrueCrypt crappy? It was at least somewhat solid and it definitely had a great mindshare at the time. It wasn't niche. Also, describing small-scale intervention in cryptography by services "mythologic" in a thread about news about large-scale intervention in cryptography by those services is a bit odd.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    I don't even understand the theory underneath this supposed conspiracy, since full-disk encryption is utterly mainstream at this point. I also don't need to get too deep into what I don't like about TrueCrypt; use it if you like it. The problem is with the model of full-disk encryption; outside of phones with deeply integrated hardware designs that support it, FDE is the least powerful form of encryption we use. It wasn't even a speed bump for the Ulbricht investigators. By all means: enable FDE. You have to turn it on. It's not optional. But the threat it defends against is not the threat many people think it defends against. It's hard to imagine it being such a priority that any government would launch a conspiracy to shut down an open source project.
    - barrkel 7y ago
      AIUI it was a speedbump for Ulbricht; didn't they need to ambush him in a library in order to ensure they had access to his laptop's contents? (I mean, sure, it didn't protect him in the end. But it was a speedbump.)
      - nyolfen 7y ago
        this is true but i wouldnt count on it as evidence either way; fbi would not have nsa tools
      - pvg 7y ago
        ambush him in a library Someone started talking to him while someone else snagged his laptop - a thing you and a friend can do to more or less anyone. It's not like people rappelled down from helicopters with guns drawn.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Why is it crappy?
- 93po 7y ago
  It was the only non-microsoft option that was accessible and easy to use and free for Windows. And MS's FDE is likely compromised and backdoored.
Someone1234 7y ago
I'm sure they were pressured, but the USG has deep pockets if they wanted someone to stop doing something they just throw a few million at them and call it done, there's far less chance of PR blowback then. Even just reading this article should show you that they kill you with kindness when they want to keep things hush-hush. If someone is developing a free tool, and are offered a retirement-tier payoff to stop, they're going to stop.
- monocasa 7y ago
  They didn't kill lavabit with kindness.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  If an average person got a huge windfall, that would raise a lot of attention, and people would wonder how they got the money. Police use sudden unexplained riches as a way to watch out for criminal activity, and everyone who knew the receiver of the windfall would ask questions. Between $10M and the other option, it may be easier to kill them with killing.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    Agencies routinely set up fake businesses for cover, with the cooperation of insiders at big names (e.g. Dell). So you set up a fake SaaS, have your big name client buy the big thing 25k / CPU x however many you need to reach payout, done. All legitimized by a fancy public stock name. If things really get too hot, it's easy to send a letter to any country's IRS via their local intell agency. You'd be surprised how simple it is to close files in this world. I'd suggest reading Snowden's autobiography, Permanent Record. Very eye-opening and a great read.
- jhart99 7y ago
  I always assumed that this is exactly what happened to Skype and Whatsapp.
  - paganel 7y ago
rebuilder 7y ago
I'm not sure that makes sense. The US could compel the devs to compromise their product but not keep them from issuing a cryptic statement and stopping work on the product?
- criddell 7y ago
  It doesn't make sense for two reasons to me. For one, the government can't compel you to do work. That's slavery. Also, it's open source software. TrueCrypt going down didn't change the security landscape at all.
  - turk73 7y ago
    On the face of it sure, but then the key people start having heart attacks and mysterious accidents and suddenly the problem goes away. And that's the world we live in.
  - dboreham 7y ago
    They offer you a large contract to do <something>, then they require that <some guy> they nominate work with you on the project. That guy introduces the backdoor.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    The government can. For example, take how the police will turn individuals into informants by getting them on trumped up drug charges and then offering them a deal if they work for the government, including engaging in acts that put them at risk of being killed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Hoffman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rachel_Hoffman The end result is "Work for us or go to prison."
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    > For one, the government can't compel you to do work. That's slavery. Slavery's perfectly legal. The 13th Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
jimbob45 7y ago
But the source-available VeraCrypt still exists and is maintained.
turk73 7y ago
That sucks. No fan of the intel agencies in this country, they are the Deep State and will harm us just as readily as they would harm communists or terrorists. They are as much responsible for destroying our freedom as they are protecting it. The world needs strong crypto, even if it enables evildoers because it also protects the little people. Strong crypto makes the playing field level, something that control freaks all despise.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
From the TrueCrypt webpage: http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/ http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/ > WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues The fact that they use awkward wording that contains words whose first letters that start with NSA (not secure as) is pretty suggestive that you are right.
- pstuart 7y ago
  Wow. In a different timeline I'd dismiss that as tinfoil hat time, but in this one it seems spot on.
  - ta999999171 7y ago
    > tinfoil hat time This trope needs to die already.
    - pfundstein 7y ago
      What would you suggest instead? It's a good way to convey unfounded paranoia or to acknowledge that what you're saying sounds like a conspiracy theory.
      - glitchdigger 7y ago
        > talking bout NSA “Unfounded” paranoia
      - ta999999171 7y ago
        There's nothing wrong with conspiracy theory. They regularly turn into conspiracy fact. That's not a dirty phrase either - regardless of what the media memo said back then. That's what I'm suggesting.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    Is the idea that there would be consequences for a blatant message but not for a sort of more subtle one?
fredgrott 7y ago
no read the damn project notes on the ones that forked Truecrypt its obvious why as it needed fixes and someone clone and forked it to fix it. Not every action is NSA-CIA rigged..they are not hidden bogey men(women) and canni fact be defeated with light, truth, programming, and math
vfclists 7y ago
Why then aren't they able to do the same with LUKS, dm-crypt, cryfs, bitlocker etc? Does that mean they are only available because the 3 letter agencies can hack them?
lawnchair_larry 7y ago
You must have a low threshold for “pretty sure”, because there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest this. Also, it’s open source. Also, the author recommended bitlocker as a replacement. Also, the authors may not even be American (the original author of E4M wasn’t). Doesn’t really add up.

navidr 7y ago

What is MINERVA? Google didn’t give any related results.

JorgeGT 7y ago
The codename for Crypto AG.
reaperducer 7y ago
It's explained in the article.
- sounds 7y ago
  The paywalled article? I didn't read it.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    "None are so blind as those who will not see." - Matthew 9:26

netsec_burn 7y ago

Putting my tinfoil hat on, after reading the Snowden disclosures I'm convinced that they do have limited means of attacking encrypted communication but they would rather rely on these (expendable) means. Once they lose their crypto vulnerabilities it will force them to be even more overt.

dmix 7y ago
The key difference is that decrypting something would likely need to be targeted and on a case-by-case basis, as it would take specialized work, as opposed to these sorts of attacks (much like tapping all of the pipes which transit data underseas or elsewhere, which still goes on in every country or working directly with the ISPs and mobile operators which happens in most countries) which allows mass dragnet surveillance. I think most of us would be fine with the NSA doing what they do if it was targeted, like the police getting warrants to break privacy only in important cases for public safety. The problem will always be mass interception. Not only domestically either, as there is nothing protecting any foreign communications being intercepted in the US (and I'm sure Five eyes+ bypasses these legal roadblocks whenever needed). Which is why the push for encrypt-everything is so important. But as we've seen repeatedly, even when investigating the president and his people, even the allegedly "significant domestic protections" offered by FISA are a joke and basically rubber-stamp. WhatsApp and iMessage and other non-SMS communication as well as email providers finally adopting proper transit encryption probably has reduced the amount of this sort of unfiltered "intelligence" gathering by 90%+. But I'm sure there's still tons of mobile apps and websites which aren't doing things properly and are filling up their databases.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  > I think most of us would be fine with the NSA doing what they do if it was targeted You think wrong. That fact that there are opposing world states engaging in this nefarious, oppressive, terrible acts and they're not all aligned doesn't legitimize any of these states' activities. The NSA should essentially be shut down, or cut down to a small agency operating in public with a much more limited mandate. And no secret FISA courts all of that spy-movie crap. That should just stop, period.

brightball 7y ago

That thought is one reason why I've always questioned this advice: "Don't roll your own encryption." I've always understood the arguments for it but that the advice is so widespread seemed a little counter intuitive. It always seemed, to me at least, that having millions of encryption algorithms out there would be inherently more secure than a lot of people standardized on one because the risk to any one would be so compartmentalized by comparison.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ninly 7y ago
The "don't roll your own" argument isn't against having lots of encryption algorithms, though. It's because it's nearly impossible for a nonspecialist to implement tools that other specialists can't fairly easily recognize as broken and exploit (whether cryptologically broken or due to side-channel exploits).
- bosswipe 7y ago
  > other specialists can't fairly easily recognize as broken and exploit Is there any supporting evidence for this claim? If I took an AES library and changed the order of some inner loop wouldn't it require extensive statistical analysis to notice the difference? Which means instead of throwing a bunch of compute at decrypting me, along with the masses 10 years from now, you would need to get a specialist to specifically target me and spend considerable time.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    I've wondered this as well. Are there tools that will automatically run through all kinds of existing cryptographic algorithms to figure out which ones you're dealing with? Because it sounds to me like throwing enough layers of shoddy algorithms would obfuscate things enough that somebody would actually have to look at it and try to explicitly figure out a way to bypass what you're doing.
  - 7y ago

garbage_88224 7y ago

Your cellular phone modem is both remotely programmable and has full root memory access 24/7. Let that sink in a bit.

tptacek 7y ago
Your "cellular phone" does not in fact have "full root memory access 24/7". In modern phone designs, the baseband is a USB peripheral. The notion that the closed, secret baseband is a DMA backdoor into AP memory is a message board meme, not engineering reality.
- hjkgfdfgh 7y ago
  That may be true of Apple, and is true of the PinePhone and Librem, but for the majority of Android devices, that's blatantly false. On Qualcomm chipsets in particular heavily utilize shared memory for baseband to application processor communication.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    "The majority of Android devices" is a very wide net to cast.
    - hjkgfdfgh 7y ago
      Qualcomm alone covers 40%, and they're arguably the most likely to correctly implement their MMU (nevermind they've seen quite a few vulnerabilities in their MMU implementations over the years..) Meditek uses a similar architecture, and I sure as hell don't trust their MMU. Outside of Apple, Librem and Pine are just about the only way you're getting a USB attached baseband. edit - Here's a Mediatek Baseband->AP PoC even: https://comsecuris.com/blog/posts/path_of_least_resistance/ https://comsecuris.com/blog/posts/path_of_least_resistance/
      - weeks 7y ago
        https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/10/over-air-vol-2-pt-3-exploiting-wi-fi.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/10/over-air-vol-... Even Apple's IOMMU has had vulnerabilities allowing for full memory access from the WiFi modem.

nimbius 7y ago

>the current democratisation of encrpytion protocols is a threat to them. This is absolutely true and nowhere was it more evident than the Speck fiasco. Watching the old guard of the NSA show up and hammer a crypto forum with stonewalling and smug G-Man hand-waving would have been acceptable in 1995, but watching it take place after the snowden revelations was just cringe-worthy. The answer from the community wasnt just no, but hell no. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nsa-speck-removed-linux-4-20,37747.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nsa-speck-removed-linux-4-... I suspect things like ED25519 and LetsEncrypt were probably a much more damning blow to the day-to-day business of warrantless telecom spying than we're led to believe, and its only going to get closer to that 10% pre-MINERVA figure as time rolls on. the Signal protocol has gained massive traction, and things like Tails are easy enough for a power user. Once someone rolls out a slick CSS frontend for wireguard its back to greasing the palms of guys like RSA in the hopes snooping corporate networks is just as fruitful as snooping the public internet. CryptoAG tips the governments hand on exactly why it disfavors crypto now. its not terrorists or posthumous parallel construction of $latest_shooter. its about control.

mirimir 7y ago
Yes, and it started with the development of minicomputers and PCs, which facilitated the process, starting in the late 70s.

chiefalchemist 7y ago

> If there was, then perhaps there wouldn't be such a strong push to rig the deck in the first place. At least that's heartening. Intelligence isn't about truth and transparency. It's about deception. They're not going to run a Super Bowl advert saying they can crack anything. That's not how it works.

_-___________-_ 7y ago

Given that the US has operations aiming to capture large amounts of Internet traffic, and given that most interesting Internet traffic is encrypted nowadays, doesn't it follow that they probably have a way to decrypt at least some of it? Capturing DNS queries and HTTP requests to aging websites that still haven't enabled TLS seems not worth the trouble.

glitchdigger 7y ago
It’s pretty straightforward. They 0day, hardware backdoor and infiltrate the ranks of root CA’s. This is covert information war from blank-check black op military agencies we’re talking about. They will kill people if they have to and sleep at night like babies because it is a utilitarian philosophy these people hold, not some Kantian dream.