7 ms·

Assuming that time travel is impossible, NSA can't break into something that does not exist anymore. Hence the idea when facing such adversary is to provide the

by aj3 5y ago

Assuming that time travel is impossible, NSA can't break into something that does not exist anymore. Hence the idea when facing such adversary is to provide them a constantly moving target. Although NSA might be able to break any full disc encryption given enough time, they aren't able to decrypt something that no longer exists. This principle isn't scalable to every computer system out there and will definitely go against other requirements in most organizations, but if you are an individual, it's not hard to pull it off.

imwillofficial 5y ago
This ignores the obvious. What parts are not changing with a distro hop? Are those parts vulnerable to the NSA? I believe due to what was made public, that they do have that capability. I would suggest more research. If you are actually changing distros every month, that seems like a very manual process, with many points to use an insecure config. I think your time could be better spent hardening a current system. And yes the NSA could own your box every month (and would) if it suited them. Check out this link, this stuff is fascinating. > In some cases, the NSA has modified the firmware of computers and network hardware—including systems shipped by Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, and Juniper Networks—to give its operators both eyes and ears inside the offices the agency has targeted. In others, the NSA has crafted custom BIOS exploits that can survive even the reinstallation of operating systems. And in still others, the NSA has built and deployed its own USB cables at target locations—complete with spy hardware and radio transceiver packed inside. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/inside-the-nsas-leaked-catalog-of-surveillance-magic/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/insid...
- aj3 5y ago
  You pose the questions but do not answer them. Assuming distros are selected purposefully you do get quite a lot of variability. Recompiling the kernel with different hardening options alone makes many exploits impractical. The threat modeling that you see in this thread is laughable. Nobody has infinite resources, not even NSA. They can't throw all their capability at you alone. In fact they are not even interested in any one individual. They might be interested in some groups of people like "terrorist leadership" but even in that case they don't have the need to hack all people matching that group. So at every step of the decision making process there is a cost benefit analysis. And in the end NSA will only hack some terrorist leaders, the ones deemed sufficiently significant but not any more risky then is necessary. The amount of meetings and paperwork required for carrying out offensive action is significant and everyone involved is very risk averse. Getting superiors to sign up for an operation against an individual capable of detecting attack and thus risking attribution would only be possible if the proposed techniques can be shown to be extraordinarily stealthy. That requires replicating the system in the lab and rigorously testing methodology beforehand. Yeah, it is hard to protect organizations from nation states. Because all sufficiently complex systems have bugs and given long enough time persistent attackers will find & exploit these bugs. But that's because organizations have other real-world priorities besides fighting NSA. These organizations can't change protocols overnight and replace core systems just for fun of it. Individuals actually have an advantage here because they can rotate systems at will and have much higher control over their personal lives than any CEO/CTO/CISO has over their organization. As a result, yes you can raise the cost of an attack against you high enough that NSA won't bother hacking you - either because there are other people who are less protected but hacking them would fulfill the same objective or because your ass gets handed to another agency which is able to present more cost-effective solution. Your link demonstrates this dichotomy between options that NSA has available for hacking organizations vs individuals. Individuals rarely have well documented procurement processes available for third party auditing you know.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    > You pose the questions but do not answer them. I literally answer directly after the questions. Read for comprehension. I can tell you with 100% certainty that your assumptions are 100% wrong. Interpret that statement as you may and update your threat model accordingly.
nix23 5y ago
You sir have no clue what you talking about, a payload geter in your ssd-firmware survives your distro-hop and can adapt to every OS (if your information is worth the work). And an encrypted disk...on man i stop arguing, it's obvious that you really don't have a clue.
- aj3 5y ago
  You just keep talking straight past my points without even trying to understand them. Why bother writing answers at all? I'm not advocating for installing a fresh OS on an exploited hardware and calling it a day, no matter how hard you try to present my words this way. The point is to keep any single environment around only for a short period of time so that adversaries don't have enough time for replicating your systems and crafting a targeted exploit chain. It is not meant to be the only line of defense. You would still harden every system you own, putting particular focus on tamper & intrusion detection (including retrospective analysis). Couple that with strong compartmentalization (e.g. using different hardware for different purposes, Qubes OS style virtualization approaches) and defense in depth (exploit mitigations, traffic anonymization). Here, I have spelled it out for you. Feel free to outline how you would approach attacking such individual adversary, even with NSA level team at your disposal. Silent assumptions being that 1) if person's physical location is known, CIA is a cheaper option than NSA and 2) failed offensive operation leaving attributable evidence is considered by NSA worse than missed opportunity. Please, stop low effort ad hominem attacks.
  - nix23 5y ago
    Wow you change your meaning pretty fast, yes if you trow your laptop away after 1 hour you are pretty safe...well if the laptop is from a secure source...like amazon ;)
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    > adversaries don't have enough time for replicating your systems and crafting a targeted exploit chain. Is this how you think it works?

by aj3 5y ago

imwillofficial 5y ago

This ignores the obvious. What parts are not changing with a distro hop? Are those parts vulnerable to the NSA? I believe due to what was made public, that they do have that capability. I would suggest more research. If you are actually changing distros every month, that seems like a very manual process, with many points to use an insecure config. I think your time could be better spent hardening a current system. And yes the NSA could own your box every month (and would) if it suited them. Check out this link, this stuff is fascinating. > In some cases, the NSA has modified the firmware of computers and network hardware—including systems shipped by Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, and Juniper Networks—to give its operators both eyes and ears inside the offices the agency has targeted. In others, the NSA has crafted custom BIOS exploits that can survive even the reinstallation of operating systems. And in still others, the NSA has built and deployed its own USB cables at target locations—complete with spy hardware and radio transceiver packed inside. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/inside-the-nsas-leaked-catalog-of-surveillance-magic/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/insid...

aj3 5y ago
You pose the questions but do not answer them. Assuming distros are selected purposefully you do get quite a lot of variability. Recompiling the kernel with different hardening options alone makes many exploits impractical. The threat modeling that you see in this thread is laughable. Nobody has infinite resources, not even NSA. They can't throw all their capability at you alone. In fact they are not even interested in any one individual. They might be interested in some groups of people like "terrorist leadership" but even in that case they don't have the need to hack all people matching that group. So at every step of the decision making process there is a cost benefit analysis. And in the end NSA will only hack some terrorist leaders, the ones deemed sufficiently significant but not any more risky then is necessary. The amount of meetings and paperwork required for carrying out offensive action is significant and everyone involved is very risk averse. Getting superiors to sign up for an operation against an individual capable of detecting attack and thus risking attribution would only be possible if the proposed techniques can be shown to be extraordinarily stealthy. That requires replicating the system in the lab and rigorously testing methodology beforehand. Yeah, it is hard to protect organizations from nation states. Because all sufficiently complex systems have bugs and given long enough time persistent attackers will find & exploit these bugs. But that's because organizations have other real-world priorities besides fighting NSA. These organizations can't change protocols overnight and replace core systems just for fun of it. Individuals actually have an advantage here because they can rotate systems at will and have much higher control over their personal lives than any CEO/CTO/CISO has over their organization. As a result, yes you can raise the cost of an attack against you high enough that NSA won't bother hacking you - either because there are other people who are less protected but hacking them would fulfill the same objective or because your ass gets handed to another agency which is able to present more cost-effective solution. Your link demonstrates this dichotomy between options that NSA has available for hacking organizations vs individuals. Individuals rarely have well documented procurement processes available for third party auditing you know.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  > You pose the questions but do not answer them. I literally answer directly after the questions. Read for comprehension. I can tell you with 100% certainty that your assumptions are 100% wrong. Interpret that statement as you may and update your threat model accordingly.

nix23 5y ago

You sir have no clue what you talking about, a payload geter in your ssd-firmware survives your distro-hop and can adapt to every OS (if your information is worth the work). And an encrypted disk...on man i stop arguing, it's obvious that you really don't have a clue.

aj3 5y ago
You just keep talking straight past my points without even trying to understand them. Why bother writing answers at all? I'm not advocating for installing a fresh OS on an exploited hardware and calling it a day, no matter how hard you try to present my words this way. The point is to keep any single environment around only for a short period of time so that adversaries don't have enough time for replicating your systems and crafting a targeted exploit chain. It is not meant to be the only line of defense. You would still harden every system you own, putting particular focus on tamper & intrusion detection (including retrospective analysis). Couple that with strong compartmentalization (e.g. using different hardware for different purposes, Qubes OS style virtualization approaches) and defense in depth (exploit mitigations, traffic anonymization). Here, I have spelled it out for you. Feel free to outline how you would approach attacking such individual adversary, even with NSA level team at your disposal. Silent assumptions being that 1) if person's physical location is known, CIA is a cheaper option than NSA and 2) failed offensive operation leaving attributable evidence is considered by NSA worse than missed opportunity. Please, stop low effort ad hominem attacks.
- nix23 5y ago
  Wow you change your meaning pretty fast, yes if you trow your laptop away after 1 hour you are pretty safe...well if the laptop is from a secure source...like amazon ;)
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  > adversaries don't have enough time for replicating your systems and crafting a targeted exploit chain. Is this how you think it works?