11 ms·

Why the heck don’t consumers have a seat at the table while all the 5G technology is being developed? I want open protocols and publicly documented cryptosyste

by efitz 5y ago

Why the heck don’t consumers have a seat at the table while all the 5G technology is being developed? I want open protocols and publicly documented cryptosystems based on published protocols. Instead we are just enabling the surveillance state.

oneplane 5y ago
Because of money and or mix of politics and imagined power. In addition, the systems are vast and complex, too big for one person to capture and understand. This means you get into the area of design teams, business teams, politics and geo stuff by default. Even re-implementing the specification (or most of it) in FOSS is extremely hard, and that's with all the information being publicly available. Designing it is an order of magnitude harder. Besides the systems in isolation, we also have to deal with various governments, businesses, and legacy and migration paths in both cases. Ironically, because all of this and the huge amount of people involved, consumers _are_ involved in this. It's not like the GSM, 3GPP etc. don't use their own stuff.
mindcrime 5y ago
I want open protocols and publicly documented cryptosystems based on published protocols. Instead we are just enabling the surveillance state. I think you just answered your own question.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago
  we don't tend to vote in our own best interest; whether it's politics, or economically.
gruez 5y ago
How does "open protocols and publicly documented cryptosystems" help when the carriers are mandated by law to have backdoors so they can fulfill "lawful intercept" requests? You're better off treating it as untrusted and using your own encryption on top (eg. Signal).
- corty 5y ago
  It doesn't help against the local authorities. But it will help against criminals and foreign authorities. E.g. most of the worlds capitals are packed with IMSI-catchers and passive eavesdropping devices operated from embassies. This spying on foreign soil would be impossible if mobile phones were any good with regards to security. And signal isn't really very helpful in this scenario, because it doesn't properly protect against MitM attacks.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    >And signal isn't really very helpful in this scenario, because it doesn't properly protect against MitM attacks. I suppose it depends on where exactly the Middle here is, but for basic MitM of the physical network, if nothing else shouldn't the TLS connection to Signal's servers be sufficient?
  - m4x 5y ago
    How does signal fail to protect against MITM attacks? Given that it's end-to-end encrypted, wouldn't an attacker have to force a change of keys to MITM you? In which case you should be notified by signal that the keys were recently changed.
    - corty 5y ago
      Signal only implements a very weak form of trust-on-first-use for keys. So there is no authentication and no security for a first contact. Subsequent communication can be protected by meeting in person and comparing keys, which nobody knows about. Signal doesn't ever tell you about this necessity and doesn't have any option to e.g. pin the key after manual verification or even just set a "verified contact" reminder. Being warned about a changed key is only sensible at all if the one before that was verified. Otherwise, how do you know everything wasn't MitMed in the first place? Also, most users ignore the warning if the next message is "sorry, new phone, Signal doesn't do key backups". Which everyone will understand and go along with because they either don't know about the danger there. Or because they know Signal really doesn't do shit to provide authentication continuity through proper backups. Signal is only suitable for casual communication. Against adversaries that do more than just passive dragnet surveilance, Signal is either useless or even dangerous to recommend. It is intentionally designed just for this one attack of passive dragnet surveilance, nothing else. Please don't endanger people by recommending unsuitable software.
admax88q 5y ago
Because telecoms have this government supported oligopoly. It's always been fascinating to me how we have this parallel infrastructure between the open internet and the locked down telecoms. The free for all that is the internet has evolved much more robust protocols, but the telecoms continue to operate in their own parallel problem space, solving a lot of the same problems. They also fight tooth and nail to prevent being dumb pipes.
IncRnd 5y ago
The reason consumers don't have a seat at the table is that the techology has nothing to do with consumers, other than harvesting consumer's money and data.
ezekg 5y ago
> Instead we are just enabling the surveillance state. It's a sad state of affairs. I honestly believe people actually want this, or have at least been conned into wanting it. Giving up liberty (in this case, privacy) for the guise of safety is all the rage these days
throw0101a 5y ago
> Why the heck don’t consumers have a seat at the table while all the 5G technology is being developed? A lot of these standards are generally created by industry consortia, and participation in standards setting is limited to companies who are members. This isn't the IETF where any rando can join a mailing list and chime in on a proposed standard/draft. IEEE (Ethernet) is somewhere in the middle: you have to be an individual member (though may have a corporate affiliation), and make certain time/attendance commitments, but otherwise you can vote on drafts (and many mailing lists seem to have open archives): * https://www.ieee802.org/3/rules/member.html https://www.ieee802.org/3/rules/member.html * https://www.ieee802.org/3/ https://www.ieee802.org/3/
acdha 5y ago
I think you're mixing up a number of valid concerns which have different threat models: for example, the mass surveillance risks tend to involve things like carriers doing network traffic analysis or location monitoring, and things like open protocols or crypto don't really change the situation there since it doesn't depend on breaking encrypted traffic (unlike in the pre-TLS era when traffic wasn't encrypted). Similarly, you can develop and document a crypto system but unless you're publicly funding a lot of adversarial research that doesn't prevent something like Dual_EC_DRBG being submitted in bad faith. I haven't seen any indication that the NIST team thought they were developing open standards — it's not like they sent a pull request from nsa/add-secret-backdoorz — and the level of effort needed to uncover these things can be substantial, requiring highly-specialized reviewers. That also hits all of the usual concerns about whether the cryptographic algorithm is secure but used in an unsafe manner, which can be even harder to detect. The biggest win has simply been that these issues get a lot more public discussion and review now than they used to, and the industry has collectively agreed not to trust the infrastructure. Switching to things like TLS has done more to protect privacy than all of the lower level standards work and that's nice because e.g. a Signal or FaceTime user is still protected even if their traffic never touches a cellular network.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > something like Dual_EC_DRBG being submitted in bad faith. That's a poor example, because everyone (who both knew anything about cryptography and actually bothered to read it) knew or suspected it was garbage. As [0] put it: > > and Dual_EC_DRBG was an accepted and publicly scrutinized standard. > And every bit of public scrutiny said the same thing: this thing is broken! 0: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/20/rsa-warns-developers-against-its-own/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/20/rsa-warn... see also: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/18/the-many-flaws-of-dualecdrbg/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/18/the-many...
  - acdha 5y ago
    True: the angle I was focusing on is the demonstrated interest and willingness to spend time and credibility on it (see also Crypto AG). It’s safe to assume that will continue as society moves further online so we should assume well-funded concealed attempts to compromise implementations will continue.
tialaramex 5y ago
Consumers don't have anything useful to bring to this table. Historically the realisation that you need outside Cryptographers (not consumers) if you actually want to do anything novel with cryptography† was slow to arrive. Even on the Internet, for PGP and SSL there was no real outside cryptographic design input. In SSL's case a few academics looked at the design of SSLv1, broke it and that's why SSLv2 is the first version shipped. Only TLS 1.2 finally had a step where they ask actual cryptographers "Is this secure?" and that step was after the design work was finished. TLS 1.3 (just a few years ago) is the first iteration where they have cryptographers looking at the problem from the outset and the working group rejected things that cryptographers said can't be made to fly. And TLS 1.3 also reflects something that was effectively impossible last century, rather than just a bad mindset. Today we have reasonably good automated proof systems. An expert mathematician can tell a computer "Given A, B and C are true, is D true?" and have it tell them either that D is necessarily true or that in fact it can't be true because -something- and that helps avoid some goofs. So TLS 1.3 has been proven (in a specific and limited model). You just could not do that with the state of the art in say 1995 even if you'd known you wanted to. Now, we need to get that same understanding into unwieldy SDOs like ISO, and also into pseudo SDOs like EMVco (the organisation that makes "Chip and pin" and "Contactless payment" work) none of which are really getting the cryptographers in first so far. † "But what I want to do isn't novel". Cool, use one of the existing secure systems. If you can't, no matter why then you're wrong you did want to do something novel, start at the top.
- tptacek 5y ago
  I don't think that's true about SSL/TLS. SSLv2, the Netscape protocol, was a shitshow, but SSL3, its successor and the basis for TLS, has Paul Kocher's name on the RFC. The mixed MD5/SHA1 construction is apparently Kocher's doing.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    If you're claiming that Kocher's involvement in SSLv3 is enough, note that SSLv2 which you called a "shitshow" is the work of Taher Elgamal, who is also a famous cryptographer. I claim the correct approach isn't "We should hire a cryptographer" although that wouldn't hurt a lot designs, but "We need a lot of cryptographers beating on this". Because of that problem about the easiest person to fool being yourself. That means the outside world needs a good look, and that's one reason the IETF was able to get there first because it's all on a mailing list in public view (well these days it's on GitHub, but if you're allergic that's summarised to the list periodically). One of the hidden advantages TLS 1.3 has over SSLv2 is that of course today TLS is famous. If you're an academic in the area TLS 1.3 work was potentially a series of high impact journal papers, and thus would do your career good, whereas I can't think even Hellman (who had worked with both Elgamal and Kocher at Stanford) would have had a lot of time for SSL in the 1990s.
firebaze 5y ago
"Consumers" as an opaque crowd wouldn't be able to judge anything this involved. The discussion partners we're talking about are mostly politicians, who are primarily educated in the field of convincing despite having no background at all, referring to higher authority et al. Our typical, maybe even scientifically educated consumer wouldn't be able in the least of realistically forming an opposing opinion, and even if she/he did, it would be a very hard sell against battle-hardened politicians. This field is too complex even for quite a few if not most IT-centric professions. From my point of view, we have to put the blame on us. We should treat anyone supporting invasive technologies (in the sense of subverting privacy and basic human rights) as an outcast. The impression I get (maybe not primarily from HN) is the opposite. We'd not take that job (pay...), but still we appear to honor their efforts. Or we _do_ take that job because of pay on the opposite spectrum.
BTCOG 5y ago
Because, it's purposely this way.

by efitz 5y ago

oneplane 5y ago

Because of money and or mix of politics and imagined power. In addition, the systems are vast and complex, too big for one person to capture and understand. This means you get into the area of design teams, business teams, politics and geo stuff by default. Even re-implementing the specification (or most of it) in FOSS is extremely hard, and that's with all the information being publicly available. Designing it is an order of magnitude harder. Besides the systems in isolation, we also have to deal with various governments, businesses, and legacy and migration paths in both cases. Ironically, because all of this and the huge amount of people involved, consumers _are_ involved in this. It's not like the GSM, 3GPP etc. don't use their own stuff.

mindcrime 5y ago

I want open protocols and publicly documented cryptosystems based on published protocols. Instead we are just enabling the surveillance state. I think you just answered your own question.

Pokepokalypse 5y ago
we don't tend to vote in our own best interest; whether it's politics, or economically.

gruez 5y ago

How does "open protocols and publicly documented cryptosystems" help when the carriers are mandated by law to have backdoors so they can fulfill "lawful intercept" requests? You're better off treating it as untrusted and using your own encryption on top (eg. Signal).

corty 5y ago
It doesn't help against the local authorities. But it will help against criminals and foreign authorities. E.g. most of the worlds capitals are packed with IMSI-catchers and passive eavesdropping devices operated from embassies. This spying on foreign soil would be impossible if mobile phones were any good with regards to security. And signal isn't really very helpful in this scenario, because it doesn't properly protect against MitM attacks.
- xxpor 5y ago
  >And signal isn't really very helpful in this scenario, because it doesn't properly protect against MitM attacks. I suppose it depends on where exactly the Middle here is, but for basic MitM of the physical network, if nothing else shouldn't the TLS connection to Signal's servers be sufficient?
- m4x 5y ago
  How does signal fail to protect against MITM attacks? Given that it's end-to-end encrypted, wouldn't an attacker have to force a change of keys to MITM you? In which case you should be notified by signal that the keys were recently changed.
  - corty 5y ago
    Signal only implements a very weak form of trust-on-first-use for keys. So there is no authentication and no security for a first contact. Subsequent communication can be protected by meeting in person and comparing keys, which nobody knows about. Signal doesn't ever tell you about this necessity and doesn't have any option to e.g. pin the key after manual verification or even just set a "verified contact" reminder. Being warned about a changed key is only sensible at all if the one before that was verified. Otherwise, how do you know everything wasn't MitMed in the first place? Also, most users ignore the warning if the next message is "sorry, new phone, Signal doesn't do key backups". Which everyone will understand and go along with because they either don't know about the danger there. Or because they know Signal really doesn't do shit to provide authentication continuity through proper backups. Signal is only suitable for casual communication. Against adversaries that do more than just passive dragnet surveilance, Signal is either useless or even dangerous to recommend. It is intentionally designed just for this one attack of passive dragnet surveilance, nothing else. Please don't endanger people by recommending unsuitable software.

admax88q 5y ago

Because telecoms have this government supported oligopoly. It's always been fascinating to me how we have this parallel infrastructure between the open internet and the locked down telecoms. The free for all that is the internet has evolved much more robust protocols, but the telecoms continue to operate in their own parallel problem space, solving a lot of the same problems. They also fight tooth and nail to prevent being dumb pipes.

IncRnd 5y ago

The reason consumers don't have a seat at the table is that the techology has nothing to do with consumers, other than harvesting consumer's money and data.

ezekg 5y ago

> Instead we are just enabling the surveillance state. It's a sad state of affairs. I honestly believe people actually want this, or have at least been conned into wanting it. Giving up liberty (in this case, privacy) for the guise of safety is all the rage these days

throw0101a 5y ago

> Why the heck don’t consumers have a seat at the table while all the 5G technology is being developed? A lot of these standards are generally created by industry consortia, and participation in standards setting is limited to companies who are members. This isn't the IETF where any rando can join a mailing list and chime in on a proposed standard/draft. IEEE (Ethernet) is somewhere in the middle: you have to be an individual member (though may have a corporate affiliation), and make certain time/attendance commitments, but otherwise you can vote on drafts (and many mailing lists seem to have open archives): * https://www.ieee802.org/3/rules/member.html https://www.ieee802.org/3/rules/member.html * https://www.ieee802.org/3/ https://www.ieee802.org/3/

acdha 5y ago

I think you're mixing up a number of valid concerns which have different threat models: for example, the mass surveillance risks tend to involve things like carriers doing network traffic analysis or location monitoring, and things like open protocols or crypto don't really change the situation there since it doesn't depend on breaking encrypted traffic (unlike in the pre-TLS era when traffic wasn't encrypted). Similarly, you can develop and document a crypto system but unless you're publicly funding a lot of adversarial research that doesn't prevent something like Dual_EC_DRBG being submitted in bad faith. I haven't seen any indication that the NIST team thought they were developing open standards — it's not like they sent a pull request from nsa/add-secret-backdoorz — and the level of effort needed to uncover these things can be substantial, requiring highly-specialized reviewers. That also hits all of the usual concerns about whether the cryptographic algorithm is secure but used in an unsafe manner, which can be even harder to detect. The biggest win has simply been that these issues get a lot more public discussion and review now than they used to, and the industry has collectively agreed not to trust the infrastructure. Switching to things like TLS has done more to protect privacy than all of the lower level standards work and that's nice because e.g. a Signal or FaceTime user is still protected even if their traffic never touches a cellular network.

a1369209993 5y ago
> something like Dual_EC_DRBG being submitted in bad faith. That's a poor example, because everyone (who both knew anything about cryptography and actually bothered to read it) knew or suspected it was garbage. As [0] put it: > > and Dual_EC_DRBG was an accepted and publicly scrutinized standard. > And every bit of public scrutiny said the same thing: this thing is broken! 0: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/20/rsa-warns-developers-against-its-own/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/20/rsa-warn... see also: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/18/the-many-flaws-of-dualecdrbg/ https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/09/18/the-many...
- acdha 5y ago
  True: the angle I was focusing on is the demonstrated interest and willingness to spend time and credibility on it (see also Crypto AG). It’s safe to assume that will continue as society moves further online so we should assume well-funded concealed attempts to compromise implementations will continue.

tialaramex 5y ago

Consumers don't have anything useful to bring to this table. Historically the realisation that you need outside Cryptographers (not consumers) if you actually want to do anything novel with cryptography† was slow to arrive. Even on the Internet, for PGP and SSL there was no real outside cryptographic design input. In SSL's case a few academics looked at the design of SSLv1, broke it and that's why SSLv2 is the first version shipped. Only TLS 1.2 finally had a step where they ask actual cryptographers "Is this secure?" and that step was after the design work was finished. TLS 1.3 (just a few years ago) is the first iteration where they have cryptographers looking at the problem from the outset and the working group rejected things that cryptographers said can't be made to fly. And TLS 1.3 also reflects something that was effectively impossible last century, rather than just a bad mindset. Today we have reasonably good automated proof systems. An expert mathematician can tell a computer "Given A, B and C are true, is D true?" and have it tell them either that D is necessarily true or that in fact it can't be true because -something- and that helps avoid some goofs. So TLS 1.3 has been proven (in a specific and limited model). You just could not do that with the state of the art in say 1995 even if you'd known you wanted to. Now, we need to get that same understanding into unwieldy SDOs like ISO, and also into pseudo SDOs like EMVco (the organisation that makes "Chip and pin" and "Contactless payment" work) none of which are really getting the cryptographers in first so far. † "But what I want to do isn't novel". Cool, use one of the existing secure systems. If you can't, no matter why then you're wrong you did want to do something novel, start at the top.

tptacek 5y ago
I don't think that's true about SSL/TLS. SSLv2, the Netscape protocol, was a shitshow, but SSL3, its successor and the basis for TLS, has Paul Kocher's name on the RFC. The mixed MD5/SHA1 construction is apparently Kocher's doing.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  If you're claiming that Kocher's involvement in SSLv3 is enough, note that SSLv2 which you called a "shitshow" is the work of Taher Elgamal, who is also a famous cryptographer. I claim the correct approach isn't "We should hire a cryptographer" although that wouldn't hurt a lot designs, but "We need a lot of cryptographers beating on this". Because of that problem about the easiest person to fool being yourself. That means the outside world needs a good look, and that's one reason the IETF was able to get there first because it's all on a mailing list in public view (well these days it's on GitHub, but if you're allergic that's summarised to the list periodically). One of the hidden advantages TLS 1.3 has over SSLv2 is that of course today TLS is famous. If you're an academic in the area TLS 1.3 work was potentially a series of high impact journal papers, and thus would do your career good, whereas I can't think even Hellman (who had worked with both Elgamal and Kocher at Stanford) would have had a lot of time for SSL in the 1990s.

firebaze 5y ago

"Consumers" as an opaque crowd wouldn't be able to judge anything this involved. The discussion partners we're talking about are mostly politicians, who are primarily educated in the field of convincing despite having no background at all, referring to higher authority et al. Our typical, maybe even scientifically educated consumer wouldn't be able in the least of realistically forming an opposing opinion, and even if she/he did, it would be a very hard sell against battle-hardened politicians. This field is too complex even for quite a few if not most IT-centric professions. From my point of view, we have to put the blame on us. We should treat anyone supporting invasive technologies (in the sense of subverting privacy and basic human rights) as an outcast. The impression I get (maybe not primarily from HN) is the opposite. We'd not take that job (pay...), but still we appear to honor their efforts. Or we _do_ take that job because of pay on the opposite spectrum.

BTCOG 5y ago

Because, it's purposely this way.