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This is a Type 1 argument and not even a good one because the effort required isn't even placed on those being regulated. Police can store keys inside HSMs. Te

by nvm0n2 3y ago

This is a Type 1 argument and not even a good one because the effort required isn't even placed on those being regulated. Police can store keys inside HSMs. Tech firms can give training and develop software stacks to ensure secure workflows if they want to. You can also use a targeted approach. Allow the police to request intercepts of specific phone numbers. Tech firm rotates the public key being served to the clients, replacing it with a police key. They add a special flag that says "don't put any sign this happened in the UI". Now police can intercept just that specific phone number. There's lots of ways to do this at different points in the security/usability spectrum, it's all just an engineering problem. Also, bear in mind that police and governments won't find this argument convincing because they can already access every other form of electronic communication and in reality mass leaks of private data have never been an issue.

TimTheTinker 3y ago
The tech companies themselves aren't able to read the messages, and no process exists to do so -- that's a necessary part of the security design and a core tenet of e2ee. Sure, iCloud backups and photos are technically readable (they're not under e2ee) but policies and procedures exist to allow law enforcement to access them as well. What you're asking for is that e2ee be eliminated in favor of a process-heavy solution. But at the end of the day, any human-dependent process can be broken by social engineering and a lack of vigilance. Yes, an e2ee session can be broken by shipping a hacked client update to an endpoint. But that's much harder to accomplish, human- and process-wise, than obtaining the right key from the right person.
- Spoom 3y ago
  Why can't the key switching code already be in the client?
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  I'm not asking for anything. I'm pointing out what's possible. As for the last sentence, we don't know what their internal procedures are so we don't know what's harder.
- fweimer 3y ago
  Having the key just isn't enough, you also need a traffic copy and break the transport encryption. The latter likely requires rewriting the data stream, and some cooperation from a vendor (maybe not the vendor whose service you are targeting, though). A one-time key leak without access to interception infrastructure is probably not that useful. Key leaks are also relatively easy to prevent because secret keys are not relevant to investigations, so they never have to leave the interception framework and handed to a human operator. Sure, the infrastructure could be compromised, but that's already an extremely severe issue if you just have metadata in it.
giaour 3y ago
> in reality mass leaks of private data have never been an issue. This is just wildly untrue. The 2015 OPM hack (in which an APT stole security clearance records) was a mass spill of private data. The Shadow Brokers leak put the NSA's most sensitive tools on the public internet for anyone to download. And of course we might never hear about collected intelligence that had been purloined by an adversary in the course of an offensive cyber operation.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Yes, obviously normal government agencies get hacked all the time, I was referring to places like the NSA. And I know about the Shadow Brokers. Not personal information.
  - giaour 3y ago
    > And I know about the Shadow Brokers. Not personal information. "Tools and methods" are in fact considered more sensitive than any personal information in the IC. The system you're proposing presumes the existence of at least one unhackable organization, and I regret to inform you that there is no such thing.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      I think this sub-thread is getting a bit confused. Firstly, nothing I've proposed demands unhackable organizations. That appears to be a requirement you invented. No security system presumes that! The so-called E2E encryption systems are hackable via several different organizations today: you could hack Meta client teams and insert code into the next releases, you could hack Google/Apple and tamper with the code as it gets shipped via the store, you could hack a phone OEM and insert a backdoor into the devices themselves. Secondly, if you think government agencies would get hacked more often than tech firms then you may be right, but that's also irrelevant to any points being made here. The goal here isn't to design a perfect system, it's just to point out that the claim that no system can exist at all isn't true. Responding to that with "but your comment doesn't contain a full design doc for a system I personally judge as perfect" isn't going to get us far. Governments don't care if the system is perfect, right? They're OK with some leaks from hacked police departments. Thirdly, I haven't even been making concrete proposals! Just pointing out how cryptography works as examples. If I was hired to implement these requirements tomorrow I wouldn't do things directly in those ways, they're oversimplified, hence the references to textbooks. Finally, the point about mass leaks was about "every other form of electronic communication" so responding with a staff database that was stolen by China and never leaked onto the internet isn't a great counter-example (not a leak from a police department, not private citizen communications). Police investigations are targeted anyway, so there's not much to leak. NSA isn't targeted but they apparently can keep their metadata databases secure enough, even if they've sometimes lost control of PowerPoints or malware caught in the wild.
pyrale 3y ago
> in reality mass leaks of private data have never been an issue. France, 1940, religious census data.
jjav 3y ago
> it's all just an engineering problem It's not at all, which is why your solution ideas miss the mark completely. It is fundamentally a "humans can be corrupted" problem. Everything you describe is a backdoor of various forms. Backdoors have nothing that prevent abuse other than triple pinky promise to only spy the bad guys (by whoever gets to define who is the bad guy, which changes over time). Whenever you have a system where people have access to bypass it, you'll soon enough have some of those people be corrupted to abuse it, or ordered by higher ups to abuse it or threatened by various way to abuse. Since people are involved, there is a 100% chance this will happen. As long as corruptible humans are in the loop (i.e. as long as humanity exists) the one and only way to avoid corrupted abuse of backdoors is to not have any backdoors.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Governments know that the police sometimes go rogue and don't care. It can be cleaned up when they do. Tech firms also know that programmers can make mistakes whilst implementing complex cryptography, or even be corrupted, yet this is not itself an argument against implementing cryptography! To repeat once again, we're not debating the ethics of E2E encryption here. Please don't waste time trying to convince me that E2E is encryption is a good idea, because (if it was real and worked) I'd agree with you! But your argument is a Type 1 No by the scheme presented in the article. It is a "we'd really rather not" social argument. The problem our industry has is typified by the article. Too many tech people argue that giving police access to WhatsApp encryption is actually a Type 3 "it can't be done for fundamental physical reasons so it doesn't matter who demands it" problem, but that isn't true. Remember that governments don't care about E2E encryption whatsoever in any way. They would much rather ban it as a source of unnecessary problems. If tech firms claim they can't turn it off completely, they're obviously lying and that will just enrage governments. If tech firms claim they can't keep it whilst providing targeted access, governments don't care about that either. After all, email isn't end-to-end encrypted, nor is SMS, nor are normal phone calls, nor are letters. Why should WhatsApp be any different? In reality it actually is possible to design a system that stops people with only server-side access to WhatsApp reading messages, whilst still breaking if the clients are compromised, and which allows police to have targeted levels of access without any risk of universal master key leaks. There are lots of ways to do that. You can use secure enclaves, zero knowledge proofs, or more exotic algorithms. But it's also not really relevant to the point I'm making, which is about the No Type being presented to governments. There was surely a better example that could have been chosen for a Type 3 No.
gymbeaux 3y ago
It’s naive to think that social engineering is so successful due to a lack of training, and that training will thwart it. My old boss and I were recently laid off because my company (Livingston International) has been doing massive layoffs, because the company has been losing clients and money over repeated phishing attacks. We always shat on the assumed tech-illiterate person or persons responsible for us now having to sign in multiple times per DAY with MFA. Right before we left he mentioned this suspicious email he got the other day… and he clicked on it. It was one of those internal “we got you! Be careful next time!” emails. Come on man.

by nvm0n2 3y ago

TimTheTinker 3y ago

The tech companies themselves aren't able to read the messages, and no process exists to do so -- that's a necessary part of the security design and a core tenet of e2ee. Sure, iCloud backups and photos are technically readable (they're not under e2ee) but policies and procedures exist to allow law enforcement to access them as well. What you're asking for is that e2ee be eliminated in favor of a process-heavy solution. But at the end of the day, any human-dependent process can be broken by social engineering and a lack of vigilance. Yes, an e2ee session can be broken by shipping a hacked client update to an endpoint. But that's much harder to accomplish, human- and process-wise, than obtaining the right key from the right person.

Spoom 3y ago
Why can't the key switching code already be in the client?
nvm0n2 3y ago
I'm not asking for anything. I'm pointing out what's possible. As for the last sentence, we don't know what their internal procedures are so we don't know what's harder.
fweimer 3y ago
Having the key just isn't enough, you also need a traffic copy and break the transport encryption. The latter likely requires rewriting the data stream, and some cooperation from a vendor (maybe not the vendor whose service you are targeting, though). A one-time key leak without access to interception infrastructure is probably not that useful. Key leaks are also relatively easy to prevent because secret keys are not relevant to investigations, so they never have to leave the interception framework and handed to a human operator. Sure, the infrastructure could be compromised, but that's already an extremely severe issue if you just have metadata in it.

giaour 3y ago

> in reality mass leaks of private data have never been an issue. This is just wildly untrue. The 2015 OPM hack (in which an APT stole security clearance records) was a mass spill of private data. The Shadow Brokers leak put the NSA's most sensitive tools on the public internet for anyone to download. And of course we might never hear about collected intelligence that had been purloined by an adversary in the course of an offensive cyber operation.

nvm0n2 3y ago
Yes, obviously normal government agencies get hacked all the time, I was referring to places like the NSA. And I know about the Shadow Brokers. Not personal information.
- giaour 3y ago
  > And I know about the Shadow Brokers. Not personal information. "Tools and methods" are in fact considered more sensitive than any personal information in the IC. The system you're proposing presumes the existence of at least one unhackable organization, and I regret to inform you that there is no such thing.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    I think this sub-thread is getting a bit confused. Firstly, nothing I've proposed demands unhackable organizations. That appears to be a requirement you invented. No security system presumes that! The so-called E2E encryption systems are hackable via several different organizations today: you could hack Meta client teams and insert code into the next releases, you could hack Google/Apple and tamper with the code as it gets shipped via the store, you could hack a phone OEM and insert a backdoor into the devices themselves. Secondly, if you think government agencies would get hacked more often than tech firms then you may be right, but that's also irrelevant to any points being made here. The goal here isn't to design a perfect system, it's just to point out that the claim that no system can exist at all isn't true. Responding to that with "but your comment doesn't contain a full design doc for a system I personally judge as perfect" isn't going to get us far. Governments don't care if the system is perfect, right? They're OK with some leaks from hacked police departments. Thirdly, I haven't even been making concrete proposals! Just pointing out how cryptography works as examples. If I was hired to implement these requirements tomorrow I wouldn't do things directly in those ways, they're oversimplified, hence the references to textbooks. Finally, the point about mass leaks was about "every other form of electronic communication" so responding with a staff database that was stolen by China and never leaked onto the internet isn't a great counter-example (not a leak from a police department, not private citizen communications). Police investigations are targeted anyway, so there's not much to leak. NSA isn't targeted but they apparently can keep their metadata databases secure enough, even if they've sometimes lost control of PowerPoints or malware caught in the wild.

pyrale 3y ago

> in reality mass leaks of private data have never been an issue. France, 1940, religious census data.

jjav 3y ago

> it's all just an engineering problem It's not at all, which is why your solution ideas miss the mark completely. It is fundamentally a "humans can be corrupted" problem. Everything you describe is a backdoor of various forms. Backdoors have nothing that prevent abuse other than triple pinky promise to only spy the bad guys (by whoever gets to define who is the bad guy, which changes over time). Whenever you have a system where people have access to bypass it, you'll soon enough have some of those people be corrupted to abuse it, or ordered by higher ups to abuse it or threatened by various way to abuse. Since people are involved, there is a 100% chance this will happen. As long as corruptible humans are in the loop (i.e. as long as humanity exists) the one and only way to avoid corrupted abuse of backdoors is to not have any backdoors.

nvm0n2 3y ago
Governments know that the police sometimes go rogue and don't care. It can be cleaned up when they do. Tech firms also know that programmers can make mistakes whilst implementing complex cryptography, or even be corrupted, yet this is not itself an argument against implementing cryptography! To repeat once again, we're not debating the ethics of E2E encryption here. Please don't waste time trying to convince me that E2E is encryption is a good idea, because (if it was real and worked) I'd agree with you! But your argument is a Type 1 No by the scheme presented in the article. It is a "we'd really rather not" social argument. The problem our industry has is typified by the article. Too many tech people argue that giving police access to WhatsApp encryption is actually a Type 3 "it can't be done for fundamental physical reasons so it doesn't matter who demands it" problem, but that isn't true. Remember that governments don't care about E2E encryption whatsoever in any way. They would much rather ban it as a source of unnecessary problems. If tech firms claim they can't turn it off completely, they're obviously lying and that will just enrage governments. If tech firms claim they can't keep it whilst providing targeted access, governments don't care about that either. After all, email isn't end-to-end encrypted, nor is SMS, nor are normal phone calls, nor are letters. Why should WhatsApp be any different? In reality it actually is possible to design a system that stops people with only server-side access to WhatsApp reading messages, whilst still breaking if the clients are compromised, and which allows police to have targeted levels of access without any risk of universal master key leaks. There are lots of ways to do that. You can use secure enclaves, zero knowledge proofs, or more exotic algorithms. But it's also not really relevant to the point I'm making, which is about the No Type being presented to governments. There was surely a better example that could have been chosen for a Type 3 No.

gymbeaux 3y ago

It’s naive to think that social engineering is so successful due to a lack of training, and that training will thwart it. My old boss and I were recently laid off because my company (Livingston International) has been doing massive layoffs, because the company has been losing clients and money over repeated phishing attacks. We always shat on the assumed tech-illiterate person or persons responsible for us now having to sign in multiple times per DAY with MFA. Right before we left he mentioned this suspicious email he got the other day… and he clicked on it. It was one of those internal “we got you! Be careful next time!” emails. Come on man.