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This is why we need device to device encryption on top of all the security that a telco has. There is no excuse for any connection I make being unencrypted at a

This is why we need device to device encryption on top of all the security that a telco has. There is no excuse for any connection I make being unencrypted at any point except the receiver.

mike_d 2y ago
While you aren't wrong about needing end to end encryption, that would not have helped here. What China was after was meta data (who is communicating with who), which is a completely different problem to solve.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  the articles i saw said they could record phone calls at will
  - trollied 2y ago
    Yes, but not by man-in-the-middle attacks between the device and the network. There are systems internal to the provider that let you listen to any call.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Because the US government forces them to have these systems and to not encrypt the calls. There should be more attention on the fact that, essentially, the US government hacked US telecoms for China's benefit.
      - 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
        Since the 80s you can spy on anyone's calls using the telco's standard maintenance features. You dial up a number, you then dial another number, and you're basically patched in to the second number, can listen in on any current call. There was a different system required by the government for taps, but linemen have their own method so they can diagnose issues. At least that used to be the case through the 2010s. Stupidity and banality is a far greater threat than conspiracy.
      - bilbo0s 2y ago
        Let's not overstate it. The US government hacks telecom for the benefit of the US government. Now having said that, as someone above mentioned, the intelligence agencies of the top 50 national governments are obviously all keen to use those hacks for their own benefit. And the flip side of that is that the US government is very interested in stopping these other national governments from succeeding. Clearly, the counter-intel part of the US government effort has been less successful than the surveillance and intelligence gathering effort. But that doesn't mean that the US government wants all those other nations to be able to gather data from these systems. Our government wants nothing more than to be the only national government capable of gathering data from these systems.
      - sneak 2y ago
        Make your phone calls with Signal and you don't have this problem. So far the US government isn't forcing anyone to use unencrypted calling.
        int_19h 2y ago
        The hard part is making all the other people you need to regularly talk to use Signal.
        sneak 2y ago
        If getting people to download free apps and sign in to them with their phone number were hard, most of HN wouldn’t exist.
        int_19h 2y ago
        Getting people to download free apps is easy. Getting them to actually use them is hard, especially when the whole point of the app is to communicate with other people, and literally none of the people they regularly communicate with other than yourself use (or even know about) Signal.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Well obviously there is a good excuse, that users do not want to and cannot generally deal with key management. Even dealing with phone numbers is a hassle, and now you want to add a public key on top? One which cannot easily be written down, and is presumably tied to the handset so if you lose and replace your phone you stop being able to receive all phone calls until you manually somehow distribute your new key to everyone else? End to end encryption has proven to be unworkable in every context it's been tried. There are no end-to-end encrypted systems in the world today that have any use, and in fact the term has been repurposed by the tech industry to mean pseudo encrypted, where the encryption is done using software that is also controlled by the adversary, making it meaningless. But as nobody was doing real end-to-end encryption anyway, the engineers behind that decision can perhaps be forgiven for it.
- btown 2y ago
  > pseudo encrypted, where the encryption is done using software that is also controlled by the adversary I'd say there's a very real use for this, though, which is that with mobile applications it's more complicated to compromise a software deployment chain than it is to compromise a server-side system. If you're a state-level attacker and you want to coordinate a deployment of listening capabilities on Signal, say, you need to persistently compromise Signal's software supply chain and/or build systems, and do so in advance of other attacks you might want to coordinate with, because you need to wait for an entire App Store review cycle for your code to propagate to devices. The moment someone notices (say, a security researcher MITM'ing themselves) that traffic doesn't match the Signal protocol, your existence has been revealed. Whereas for the telcos in question, it seems it was possible to just compromise a server-side system to gain persistent listening capabilities, which could happen silently. Now, this can and should be a lot better, if, say, the Signal app was built not by Signal but by Apple and Google themselves, on build servers that provably create and release reproducible builds straight from a GitHub commit. It would remove the ability for Signal to be compromised in a non-community-auditable way. But even without this, it's a nontrivial amount of defense-in-depth.
  - knallfrosch 2y ago
    You can just force Google/Apple to roll out compromised versions to selected users and force them to keep their mouth shut about it.

This is why we need device to device encryption on top of all the security that a telco has. There is no excuse for any connection I make being unencrypted at any point except the receiver.

mike_d 2y ago

While you aren't wrong about needing end to end encryption, that would not have helped here. What China was after was meta data (who is communicating with who), which is a completely different problem to solve.

whimsicalism 2y ago
the articles i saw said they could record phone calls at will
- trollied 2y ago
  Yes, but not by man-in-the-middle attacks between the device and the network. There are systems internal to the provider that let you listen to any call.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Because the US government forces them to have these systems and to not encrypt the calls. There should be more attention on the fact that, essentially, the US government hacked US telecoms for China's benefit.
    - 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
      Since the 80s you can spy on anyone's calls using the telco's standard maintenance features. You dial up a number, you then dial another number, and you're basically patched in to the second number, can listen in on any current call. There was a different system required by the government for taps, but linemen have their own method so they can diagnose issues. At least that used to be the case through the 2010s. Stupidity and banality is a far greater threat than conspiracy.
    - bilbo0s 2y ago
      Let's not overstate it. The US government hacks telecom for the benefit of the US government. Now having said that, as someone above mentioned, the intelligence agencies of the top 50 national governments are obviously all keen to use those hacks for their own benefit. And the flip side of that is that the US government is very interested in stopping these other national governments from succeeding. Clearly, the counter-intel part of the US government effort has been less successful than the surveillance and intelligence gathering effort. But that doesn't mean that the US government wants all those other nations to be able to gather data from these systems. Our government wants nothing more than to be the only national government capable of gathering data from these systems.
    - sneak 2y ago
      Make your phone calls with Signal and you don't have this problem. So far the US government isn't forcing anyone to use unencrypted calling.
      - int_19h 2y ago
        The hard part is making all the other people you need to regularly talk to use Signal.
        sneak 2y ago
        If getting people to download free apps and sign in to them with their phone number were hard, most of HN wouldn’t exist.
        int_19h 2y ago
        Getting people to download free apps is easy. Getting them to actually use them is hard, especially when the whole point of the app is to communicate with other people, and literally none of the people they regularly communicate with other than yourself use (or even know about) Signal.

mike_hearn 2y ago

Well obviously there is a good excuse, that users do not want to and cannot generally deal with key management. Even dealing with phone numbers is a hassle, and now you want to add a public key on top? One which cannot easily be written down, and is presumably tied to the handset so if you lose and replace your phone you stop being able to receive all phone calls until you manually somehow distribute your new key to everyone else? End to end encryption has proven to be unworkable in every context it's been tried. There are no end-to-end encrypted systems in the world today that have any use, and in fact the term has been repurposed by the tech industry to mean pseudo encrypted, where the encryption is done using software that is also controlled by the adversary, making it meaningless. But as nobody was doing real end-to-end encryption anyway, the engineers behind that decision can perhaps be forgiven for it.

btown 2y ago
> pseudo encrypted, where the encryption is done using software that is also controlled by the adversary I'd say there's a very real use for this, though, which is that with mobile applications it's more complicated to compromise a software deployment chain than it is to compromise a server-side system. If you're a state-level attacker and you want to coordinate a deployment of listening capabilities on Signal, say, you need to persistently compromise Signal's software supply chain and/or build systems, and do so in advance of other attacks you might want to coordinate with, because you need to wait for an entire App Store review cycle for your code to propagate to devices. The moment someone notices (say, a security researcher MITM'ing themselves) that traffic doesn't match the Signal protocol, your existence has been revealed. Whereas for the telcos in question, it seems it was possible to just compromise a server-side system to gain persistent listening capabilities, which could happen silently. Now, this can and should be a lot better, if, say, the Signal app was built not by Signal but by Apple and Google themselves, on build servers that provably create and release reproducible builds straight from a GitHub commit. It would remove the ability for Signal to be compromised in a non-community-auditable way. But even without this, it's a nontrivial amount of defense-in-depth.
- knallfrosch 2y ago
  You can just force Google/Apple to roll out compromised versions to selected users and force them to keep their mouth shut about it.