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Second Swiss firm allegedly sold encrypted spying devices
- thefounder 6y agoThis makes you give second thoughts when you see privacy and security services(i.e email, vpn) making a big deal they are based in Switzerland. The truth is that you cannot trust a 3rd party with your data. A zero trust mode is the only one that you should trust.
- hkon 6y agoNot only that, but any service advertising their security and privacy. You can't really know unless you roll your own. But what kind of rabbithole that could be is insane, iirc even consumer hardware is compromised to some extent.
- milofeynman 6y agoIt's why a lot of people had pause with the new owners of PIA, iirc
- lucb1e 6y agoZero trust, so... what about the chips in your system? What about the certificate authorities that Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, or Google deliver to your system? It's a nice thing to say but it doesn't work, at least not as a oneliner without further explanation of how you think this could work.
- vaccinator 6y agozero trust means no computer devices around you... (including TVs, toasters, etc...)
- machinelabo 6y agoYou trust your can of baked beans? The entire society runs on the concept of trust. At some point, you're gonna have to trust someone.
- hutzlibu 6y agoTrue. But I like to reinforce my trust with open and verifiable information. Meaning, I would prefer the can of baked beans from a company that is open about where their beans come from and in what conditions. That would be possible today, and is already done to some extend but in early stages. But getting your food from the local farmer, where you can actually visit the farm, it is much more easy to trust that it is good. And regarding software, well - open source, preferably with a open community (or company) around it, where you can at least look through the actual dev logs and git submits to see if they sound solid and if you have the time and skills, jump into it to verify that they do as promised. Then I can have trust. Otherwise the trust would have to be blind. And society has spoiled that for me, for various reasons.
- machinelabo 6y agoHuh? That's why we have regulations. Every country has one, in the US it is the FDA. Please don't try to shoehorn open source principles everywhere in life. It becomes a chore and a burden for a common citizen to verify the hazards of Baked Beans. Citizens offload this to a regulatory agency. You don't have the time to verify a fucking can of baked beans like a million other things in life. If you buy a measuring tape, do you ask for a NIST certificate? Where does the chain of trust end? Somewhere at the measurement standards in the pyramid of trust. Your personal role in this chain ends at the brand name "STANLEY", because you trust them to make a measuring tape that measures within specified tolerance. The whole movement around "I don't trust unless the information is freely available" is a pipe dream. It grinds the society to a halt. I urge you to look around 99% things in life that you just blindly trust. We need better mechanisms for building trust than "Don't trust unless verified". It is applicable in high risk situations, but the society pays a huge price for such an inefficient way to live.
- 6y ago
- fsflover 6y ago> what about the chips in your system? https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
- mhh__ 6y agoRISC-V is just a specification, you could quite happily sneak stuff into the RTL if you beat the right hands with a pipe.
- fsflover 6y agoPrecursor’s mainboard was designed for easy inspection as well, and even its LCD and keyboard were chosen specifically because they facilitate verification of proper construction with minimal equipment
- mhh__ 6y agoYou still have to trust both the verification procedure and the specification i.e. Given how a modern CPU has to have features to manage itself, it's relatively trivial to design a system to do what VW did and recognize when the device is under test. For example, if you've seen Christopher Domas's talk/s on finding undocumented features of CPUs, any backdoors in a modern CPU will be buried deep in the vendor-specific features or require an extremely esoteric combination of register values and the like.
- bobthebuilders 6y agoThe CPU architecture is open source for one, and the boards are designed in such a way as to make outside verification easier. Excited to get my hands on one!
- mhh__ 6y agoThe architecture isn't the chip itself.
- 6y ago
- unixhero 6y agoWell I often use G5 PowerPC
- matheusmoreira 6y ago> what about the chips in your system? We need a way to manufacture our own hardware. Just like we can already write our own software. Currently manufacturing processors costs billions of dollars. Consequently, the power to create computers is centralized in very few hands. They are easy targets for government regulation and compromise. What if we had technology that would let individual users fabricate their own hardware cheaply? That would give the power to create computers to everyone. We would then be able to create chips we could trust. Nobody would be able to interfere.
- nine_k 6y agoThere are hundreds if facilities which can produce computer chips, all over the world. The chips would be "old tech", though, e.g. 70 nm or even 120 nm.
- drivebycomment 6y agoJust as it's impossible to build skyscrapers or bridges or ships or cars or pretty much any modern sophisticated structures or machines without specialized equipments and skilled people and organizations - mostly companies, you can't build chips without companies. Modern semiconductor fab are a marvel. It takes amazing concentration of equipments and specialized folks to get a fab working. This "trust no one" is complete BS. A modern human society can not function without some trust.
- deeringc 6y agoAnd even if you fabricate your own hardware, you're still trusting the open source designs you download from the internet. Being able to audit them is much better than not being able to see them, but it's still very possible to have some incredibly subtle backdoor or vulnerability hiding in plain sight. This happens all the the time in complex systems. There is zero chance that you can design a functioning and useful chip and OS, from scratch without trusting something else along the way. That goes all the way to compilers, toolchains etc... And even if you could, chances are you've created hundreds of accidental security vulnerabilities that can be exploited. Zero trust is a fantasy.
- deleted 6y ago
- dragonelite 6y agoI just pretty much assume US spy agencies can track everything from all the logs they can gather and have access too. Want to keep a secret keep it in your head. Those so called neutral parties like Switzerland are just US proxies with a good imago that only recently got tarnished.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoThe US is able to do that now. Humanity as a whole should work to change that. Agencies like the CIA, NSA and whatever other group that does "clandestine" operations shouldn't even exist in the first place. We achieve this by making encryption easy, powerful and ubiquitous. That will take care of their dragnet espionage.
- sangnoir 6y ago> We achieve this by making encryption easy, powerful and ubiquitous Ubiquitous encryption will be pointless if the encryption itself is subverted, like it was for 50 years with the 2 leading Swiss encryption vendors. I imagine the CIA/NSA would target the PRNG hardware as the crown-jewel, and the next-best targets would be "enclaves", then back-dooring the algorithms themselves (or implementations thereof). Remember - their aim isn't to break encryption (which would be simple to spot) - it's to make it easier for them to break, while remaining hard for everyone else.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago> I imagine the CIA/NSA would target the PRNG hardware as the crown-jewel The cryptography community seems to already be aware of this risk. I've read about random number algorithms that mix the results of many randomness sources so that one compromised source cannot compromise the result. > and the next-best targets would be "enclaves" Yeah, we should watch out for this. Secure cryptoprocessors are a great thing but we need to be able to trust them. We already have hardware that runs free software but the chip itself can of course be compromised... > then back-dooring the algorithms themselves I trust that the worldwide cryptography community will never let that happen. From what I've read they no longer trust the NSA implicitly.
- kebman 6y agoThis is the trust level on some embassies around the world. Special typewriters and no computers, in a soundproof room.
- dredmorbius 6y agoBugged Selectrics: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/ https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/the-crazy-story-of-how-soviet-russia-bugged-an-american-embassys-typewriters https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/th...
- vmception 6y agoEmail and VPN is the most obvious even without this “proof” Will otherwise intelligent people want to fight tooth and nail if I mentioned any specific VPN provider being incapable having privacy assurances you can rely on? Of course so lets do it anyway Protonmail NordVPN ExpressVPN every one It doesnt matter what you want to believe, the entire concept doesnt do what people think it does. You would simply have no way of knowing if a VPN suddenly did start keeping logs.
- gruez 6y ago>Will otherwise intelligent people want to fight tooth and nail if I mentioned any specific VPN provider being incapable having privacy assurances you can rely on? I agree if your threat model requires that nobody eavesdrop/log your traffic, then a commercial VPN service probably isn't the right tool, and you should probably use tor instead. That said, it doesn't mean commercial VPNs are placebo/snakeoil. They still provide: * anonymity from the websites you visit: your home internet connection's IP typically uniquely identifies you/your household (assuming no CGNAT). Meanwhile, a VPN server might be used by tens of hundreds of people, which greatly increases your anonymity set. It's further improved if you rotate VPN servers, because a VPN service might be used by millions of people. * extra degree of separation: your ISP knows a lot of info about you (name, address, payment info, maybe even credit score), whereas a VPN service might only know your email and the ip you connect from. If your VPN service decides to go rogue and sell your browsing habits, they'll have a much harder time associating it with your real life identity.
- vmception 6y agocorrect and those are valid use cases anything that requires a government not knowing is outside of the use case
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoDon't forget HN's favorite, Mullvad. Hey if Mozilla trusts them, it must totally mean they are not compromised by the government right?
- CleanMirage 6y agoZero trust mode is also the only way to keep secrets in real life. Share it with someone - friend or relative - & sooner or later it always gets out most of the time as relationships/priorities change.
- LeonB 6y agoIt’s much cheaper for society to be just generally quite trusting, and then shoot any spies it finds.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoNo private company can be trusted with anything related to encryption. They are either already in bed with the government or can be coerced by force, and that's assuming they aren't themselves interested in people's data.
- upofadown 6y agoI think the big deal they are making is that Switzerland has reasonably good privacy laws, not that Swiss people are somehow more resistant to subversion by national intelligence agencies. It's a fundamentally different thing. People avoiding entities that consider themselves above national laws have the advantage that they don't have to care about privacy laws either.
- schoen 6y agoThe other big thing is the Swiss neutrality policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_neutrality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_neutrality which has also contributed to diplomatic meetings often being held there, treaties often being negotiated there, and headquarters or offices of international and intergovernmental organizations often being based there. Just in Geneva you have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva#International_organisations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva#International_organisat... and that doesn't include all the treaties, one-off diplomatic conferences and meetings, or confidential diplomatic interactions. The Swiss neutrality policy would seem to imply that you would be safer overall meeting there or that you could trust the government not to have an alliance which would mean it was helping some other country undermine your activities in Switzerland. So this reporting on Crypto AG as well as this company can be seen as a criticism that the Swiss government failed to uphold its principles of neutrality, or perhaps (depending on the degree to which the government was involved or aware or not) that the companies were getting a benefit from the international perception of the famous Swiss neutrality while themselves having political dealings with particular governments. I think Snowden also mentions in his autobiography that, because there is so much international activity and discussion in Switzerland, other countries' spy agencies also like to spy on Switzerland and goings-on there -- including him when he was working for the CIA. People who are trying to rely on Switzerland's neutrality might hope that Switzerland succeeds in deterring much of that spying activity, and at least doesn't participate in, condone, or encourage it.
- _trampeltier 6y agoA couple of years ago, there was a discussion here in switzerland about the US embassy had antennas on the roof for spying. But of course, the swiss gouverment said, there is nothing. Just first best Link: https://www.20min.ch/story/spionage-verdacht-gegen-die-berner-us-botschaft-731169929693 https://www.20min.ch/story/spionage-verdacht-gegen-die-berne...
- caymanjim 6y agoIf hardware is compromised, can you even trust yourself? It's not like you can build your own in any meaningful sense.
- astrophysics 6y agoMakes one wonder about too good to be true services like ProtonMail, ProtonVPN and ProtonDrive. I was so excited about those, but recently I've started wondering whether they are just the continuation of Switzerland taking money to act as a facade for the CIA...
- powerapple 6y agoThe question is who do you want to have access to your data. I am fairly confident that the only reason Huawei is such a threat to US national security is that it will lose its power to go through your data. It is far difficult to have Huawei doing something dirty in Europe or US. Store your data with western companies if you are in China, and store your data with Chinese/Russian companies if you are in Europe seems to be the least worse idea to me XD
- est31 6y agoIf you are a high value target, then "hackers" will get access to your data anyways, and will extort you. Those "hackers" will just speak different accents :).
- nix23 6y ago>will get access to your data anyways No they don't, if you know in the first place that your a "high value target" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network
- skipnup 6y agoThanks for that information, never heard of data diodes before. Crazy, that such a seemingly simple idea was only realized as recently as 2015.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- est31 6y agoThat's my point. Don't just use one of the unprotected services that get unencrypted data. They will use your data for their gains. The goals they use them for will just be different, depending on which country it is.
- 6y ago
- dannyw 6y agoSpecifically calling out ProtonMail here especially after they started basically requesting all new signups through VPNs give their phone number; email; etc and they say it will be "deleted".
- stunt 6y agoTalking sarcastically, perhaps the next time we will hear about Swiss luxury smart watches, since they are often given as a gift to executives and politicians.
- cybralx 6y agoLinked to US intelligence services. Makes you wonder how many VPN services are run by governments?
- java-man 6y agopretty much all of them, no?
- fakedang 6y agoWell.... Tor started off as a government tech right?
- lucb1e 6y agoThat a government funded mixnet research in the 80s doesn't mean that VPNs are government-run, if that's what you are trying to say (honestly I'm not sure what exactly you're saying, the two have very little to do with each other).
- schoen 6y agoBy the way, you're off by a decade on when NRL did the onion routing research -- it was in the 90s rather than the 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing#Development_and_implementation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing#Development_and_...
- lucb1e 6y agoThanks, I didn't know that. It was meant more illustratively than as an accurate time indication, but nevertheless it's good to be correct and now I know.
- _threads 6y agoIt’s terrible because I don’t trust ProtonMail & ProtonVPN entirely anymore because of this
- rch 6y agoIf you're worried about state agencies intercepting your communications, you're going to have to give up certain conveniences, like web based email and consumer VPN. The services you mentioned should have superficial security that's at least on par with dominant providers, and will hopefully keep your information from being intercepted for the sake of advertising. I think that's still worth something.
- upofadown 6y ago>...web based email... https://www.mailvelope.com/en/ https://www.mailvelope.com/en/
- bitL 6y agoJust get one crypto device from the US, one from Russia and one from China, and then encrypt your stuff using all of them, one by one. Then no single secret service could decrypt it all.
- machinelabo 6y agoWhat does this mean in practice? Can you walk us through how to secure email using such a process?
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoWhat he's describing only works for symmetric encryption. Assymetric is the problematic one. There is no real way to verify the trustworthiness of VPN/proxy systems.
- DethNinja 6y agoHow do you know rulers of China, Russia and USA aren’t best friends ever and share information at top levels? You simply cannot trust a third party vendor anymore, no matter where they reside and this includes your cpu too. Any information that needs security from nation state level requires physical data diodes. I guess you can use the method you mentioned for protection against lower level actors.
- PradeetPatel 6y agoAs naive as this may sound, but is there an internationally recognised ethics framework for signal intelligence? Something similar to the Geneva Convention perhaps?
- lucb1e 6y agoCertain things are illegal to do even to the actual soldiers of a country you're at war with. I'd be interested to learn if these rules have been updated since the Internet (or ARPANET for that matter) created a whole new realm of possibilities and connections, but I assume not. I think you're right in saying that conventions for this sort of thing are a good idea. The rules will have to be very permissive for aggressors or even friendly nations to actually follow them to some degree, but it could still cover things that directly cost civilian lives like hacking a hospital in a way that risks lives. (Recently someone in Germany died because of malware in a hospital, though the public prosecutor concluded--as expected--there was too little causal evidence to press charges, even if they could find the perpetrator in the first place.)
- alecco 6y agoIf you were a spy agency with virtually unlimited resources, wouldn't you try to infiltrate it? Or even start one from scratch?
- raincom 6y agoHow does ethics framework help? In every country, almost all politicians and bureaucrats engage in lawful yet unethical acts.
- slim 6y agothere could never be one. since (non open source) intelligence is by definition outside the realm of ethics
- thinkingemote 6y agoThis firm and their competitor ran by spies both made physical devices like secure fax machines, pagers and the like from the cold war to relatively recently. Are there still companies that do that, or is all the attention on software these days?
- vmception 6y agoMy favorite part of these stories is where the employees across decades keep finding the super nuanced cryptographic flaws and get told not to fix that specific thing by higher ups On to the next sprint! Its just Technical debt! Not sus
- octoberfranklin 6y agoThis article fails completely to state exactly what an "OC-500" does. Google is unhelpful because (a) it's a 30-year-old device and (b) there are a bajillion copies of this news story flooding the search results. Poor journalism is poor.
- gadtfly 6y agoLooks like encrypted fax systems: https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/omnisec/index.htm https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/omnisec/index.htm
- andreasley 6y agoHere's PDF that has specs for some Omnisec products: http://www.universal-defense.com/UD/Communication_files/11_Comm.pdf http://www.universal-defense.com/UD/Communication_files/11_C... It's probably 20 years old, but still interesting I think. They also seem to have sold a VPN client.
- upofadown 6y agoIt is interesting to consider how profoundly obsolete such devices are these days. We live in a world where anyone with a bit of knowledge can establish encrypted communications anywhere in the world without having to trust any third party. This state of affairs is recent enough that we still don't know the long term ramifications.
- tatersolid 6y agoThere was plenty of strong crypto available to non-governments back in the late 80s and early 90s. We’re 30 years in; the ramifications are clear: one just compromises the insecure memory-and-type-unsafe code on all the endpoint devices instead of trying to bug or break the crypto.
- upofadown 6y agoThat is why we have air gapping now. Added: ... and to be clear, these days, air gapping could look like PGP running on something like a Yubikey.
- ummonk 6y agoI don't see how this is possible. Will you exchange one-time pads in person? That has always been possible. Any of the modern convenient ways to establish encrypted communications certainly require trusting a third party.
- upofadown 6y agoDunno. Checking a number over the phone is pretty darn convenient compared to securely shipping one time pads and/or machines.
- ummonk 6y agoIf you're referring to Signal, there are multiple third parties you need to trust - from the phone manufacturer could be logging your keystrokes to the App Store owner that could be substituting a spyware binary (most people don't verify package signatures) to the Signal developers one of whom could be introducing a backdoor security flaw into the code that wasn't noticed by others.
- slater 6y agogopfridli!
- nix23 6y agoGopfridstuetzli namal!!! Noed scho widder die Schaffseckel :)
- ketsa 6y agoHow much trust can you still give a company like ProtonMail, The "secure encrypted Swiss" email service...? Zéro.
- nix23 6y agoAs a swiss, and after that second accident i would say ZERO.
- Shacklz 6y agoI was at first very disappointed to read Ueli Maurer's name in the article; I attended quite a few of his lectures. According to the interview with him on the "Rundschau" (unfortunately in Swiss German), he hasn't known about anything and was certain himself that Omnisec didn't have anything to do with the NSA. However, I still struggle to see what exactly his involvement was with them - he was a "Berater" (consultant), but says that he didn't really have any insight into the algorithms etc. and couldn't have possibly known about their issues; so what exactly did he do for them, just sell his name? I really appreciated him as a prof (even though he was known to be a complete hard ass when it came to exams with high bars to pass) and would be surprised if anything turned up that would question his integrity further; still, it does leave a bit of a bad taste after all his preaching... And as a Swiss, this is a complete fiasco. That the issue with Crypto AG didn't send a few heads in the NDB rolling was an absolute disgrace, they didn't even pretend to be humbled by this or anything of that sort. And now another such story emerges, and while I do hope that we finally see some action now, I wouldn't be surprised if nothing happened again.
- feralimal 6y agoWhat kind of action do you expect to see? You do realise that governance is how corporations manage the people, not how people manage corporations, right?
- nix23 6y ago>And as a Swiss, this is a complete fiasco. Yes, and whats even worse, the politicians where kind of proud what they achieved with CryptoAG and called it a "grand coup". It's disgusting, first Switzerland is neutral, and second, trust in any security related product are absolutely smashed now.
- vages 6y agoI thought the article never really stated in cleartext (sic) what Omnisec's actual misdeed was. Have I gotten it right?: - Omnisec sold devices it claimed would encrypt stuff. - The company was really just the CIA. - Omnisec's devices would encrypt the data in such a way that the CIA could decrypt it.
- durnygbur 6y agoThis reminds how deceitful are American intelligence agencies with their industrial impersonation. Other example being Soviet Union providing raw materials for the production of SR-71.
- pablooliva 6y ago"The CIA is a Terrorist Organisation" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2khAmMTAjI&feature=emb_logo Kinda related.
- durnygbur 6y agoIf you believe in the "privacy marketing" coming from any of the DACH countries and buy their "privacy" products and services, it only means you are not familiar with the 20th century history.
- FreshFries 6y agoThe fact that this happened / happens does not bother or shock me. What really does grind my gears is that my government does not go full HAM on these that participate in these games. This is not just bad for our image as neutral country, but really puts the current (security related) tech market in a very bad spot light.
- bogomipz 6y ago>"In reality, the firm belonged to the CIA and Germany intelligence service, which could freely read what it encrypted. Information intercepted with the help of Crypto’s devices changed the course of events, including the Iran hostage crisis of 1979." Does anyone have any further information on how exactly the Crypto AG device affected this event?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Stierlitz 6y agoAnd water is wet :]