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The other members of the five eyes had better be careful about what they share with the U.S. while this is going on. Public key encryption, like Signal uses, o
by beloch 1y ago
The other members of the five eyes had better be careful about what they share with the U.S. while this is going on.
Public key encryption, like Signal uses, offers good security for most purposes. e.g. It's fantastic for credit card transactions. The problem with using it for transmitting state secrets is that you can't rely on it for long-term secrecy. Even if you avoid MITM or other attacks, a message sent via Signal today could be archived in ciphertext and attacked ten years from now with the hardware/algorithms of ten years in the future. Maybe Signal's encryption will remain strong in ten years. Maybe it will be trivial to crack. If the secrets contained in that message are still sensitive ten years from now, you have a problem.
Anything sent with Signal needs to be treated as published with an unknown delay. If you're sharing intelligence with the U.S., you probably shouldn't find that acceptable.
- DaiPlusPlus 1y ago> The other members of the five eyes had better be careful about what they share with the U.S. while this is going on. Right, but this is nothing new: Hegseth is only a recent example of Trump's camp mishandling sensitive docs; I'll bet there's been an inner secret Four Eyes group since the the Mar-a-Lago bathroom official-document-archive story dropped years ago. What surprises me is that I expected Tulsi Gabbard to be the centre of mishandling allegations, not SecDef.
- 20after4 1y agoMaybe Tulsi is just staying out of the spotlight while Hegseth was hired to be in the spotlight.
- Discordian93 1y agoTulsi is a competent mole, she knows better than to be this obvious.
- mapt 1y agoIt would be gauche to attack Tulsi Gabbard, because you would have to start with her connections to Russia's Assadist interests and to RT & the Russian web brigades, and we have established (we voted on it) that any connection to Russia is Old News and Not A Big Deal and Hillary's Dirty Tricks. But Hegseth? Hegseth leaked something to The Atlantic. A far greater threat than Russia.
- Spooky23 1y agoThe circus has only been in town for a few months. This thing is, as scandals go, an almost comically dumb scenario - even by Trump whack pack standards. Tulsi is by all appearances more experienced in operating under the radar. That said, I’m sure she won’t disappoint.
- femto 1y agoEven if Signal's encryption implementation is secure, the device on which it is running probably doesn't satisfy TEMPEST requirements. Most consumer crypto is vulnerable in some way to a side-channel attack.
- wickedsight 1y agoNone of that matters if Signal is running on what is effectively a personal device connected to the internet. That device is now the weak link and is what intelligence agencies in many countries are now probably trying to get into.
- nicce 1y agoPegasus all the way down as an example.
- wickedsight 1y agoExactly. And Pegasus is what we know about. I'm sure there's plenty we don't know about that's used for more high profile targets, like former Fox News hosts.
- LargeWu 1y agoIt has almost certainly already been breached.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoSignal has been used widely in US intelligence for many, many years. Nothing about this is new, though perhaps people that never paid attention are just now becoming aware of it. As for the rest of Five Eyes, they use WhatsApp the same way. I’m not sure that WhatsApp would be considered an improvement. It is clear there is a gap between how people imagine this works, or should work in theory, and how it actually works.
- HWR_14 1y ago> Signal has been used widely in US intelligence for many, many years. For lunch orders and office softball schedules. Not top secret information.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoThis is a factually incorrect and very naive take. The same topic has been in the news in European countries too about the widespread use of WhatsApp when discussing secret information. It isn’t just the US government, everyone is doing it.
- HWR_14 1y agoDo you have any sources? Because I don't see any information about secret information normally going through Signal or WhatsApp.
- 0xEF 1y agoThey're paying attention to Signal now because Hegseth doesn't know his ass from his elbow when it comes to tech and secrecy, instead acting like someone who has watched too many action films and thinks those are just like real life. The problem is not Signal. The problem is incompetence. Plain and simple. Because he blindly added persons to the group that probably didn't belong there, we now have the infamous "we have OPSEC" line, but instead of questioning why this idiot still has a job anywhere near the intelligence agencies, we're wasting our breath scrutinizing what is easily one of the best opens for secure comes if the user understands how it works.
- satanfirst 1y agoI'd give different advice. You shouldn't share state secrets with the US. They will be on or transferred between misconfigured cloud accounts. Some agency will eventually get authorization for analysis of them with an intention of financial espionage. The probable or confirmed loss of them will serve as a plausible deniability for the US when it misuses them.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoThe encryption is completely irrelevant if the information is sent directly to 3rd parties.
- concordDance 1y agoThis is silly, many countries use consumer messaging for internal communications. The UK government famously uses whatsapp for example.
- codethief 1y agoWhat other type of encryption would you use for state secrets? You seem to be implying that governments and three-letter agencies use some vastly superior cryptographic scheme, whereas AFAIK Signal is as close to the state of the art as it gets. Also, to be clear, Signal doesn't use public-key cryptography in the naive way (i.e. to encrypt/decrypt messages) as was/is possible with RSA. It uses asymmetric key pairs to first do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange, i.e. generate ephemeral symmetric keys, which are then used for encryption/decryption. This then also guarantees forward secrecy, see https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ . (Add to that they incorporate an additional post-quantum cryptographic scheme these days, and I'm probably omitting a lot of other details.)
- rocqua 1y agoStore now decrypt later still defeats diffie hellman if you capture the handshake. And quantum computers break diffie hellman as easily as RSA.
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoQuantum computers don't exist. If you want to talk about a hypothetical machine which might exist in the future you should state that plainly. Forcing the reader to parse thru the literary devices in order to get to the argument weakens the argument.
- BrawnyBadger53 1y agoNot them but you are replying on a thread talking about how it isn't safe in the longer future. That context was already built.
- kube-system 1y agoQuantum computers absolutely exist and are commercially available. They're just not very useful at the moment.
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- KennyBlanken 1y agoFive eyes have been 'careful' about what they share since they got burned during the first trump presidency.
- dboreham 1y agoThey've been careful since before Perl Harbour.
- fidotron 1y ago> Anything sent with Signal needs to be treated as published with an unknown delay. Oddly they have thought of that already, to the point all encryption systems in use in the gov are thought of in these terms. All that matters are the different assumed times to publication (weeks to years), and then treating the strength of measures involved differently based on what is reasonable for the given use. If you absolutely need something to never be published then encryption isn't the solution, and nor are computers generally.
- VWWHFSfQ 1y agoIt's the entire mandate of the NSA's Utah Data Center. Archive all the world's encrypted data until such a time as it can be decrypted when either the algorithms have been cracked or machines are powerful enough to brute-force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- rurban 1y agoMore like until they'll get the keys
- fidotron 1y agoOr maybe they found a way to outsource brute forcing the keys.
- poincaredisk 1y ago128 bits will never be bruteforced. There's nothing to outsource. The only actual risk is that the encryption algorithm is cracked.
- worik 1y ago> 128 bits will never be bruteforced Famous last words
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- morkalork 1y agoEven before thus, Ukraine learned painfully that it shouldn't share every plan and every detail with the US. It kind of looks like a sad, self-fulfilling proficy. Ukraine makes a plan, some details get leaked state side, plan goes disastrously. Ukraine plans another operation, doesn't say anything, the plan goes off ok. The US feels betrayed and Ukraine looks like an ungrateful ally abusing trust, the relationship is strained. The election happens and Trump points at how they're a bad partner yadda yadda. Ukraine is blamed for the outcome of what is originally an American problem, the US leaking like a sieve.
- dgrin91 1y agoIsn't that true for basically everything though? I'm not familiar with what other encrypted messaging systems security agencies use, but either (1) they store ciphertexts that can in theory be attacked later or (2) they delete their data after some time, but signal has that option was well. Obviously using signal here is a terrible opsec failure, I'm just not sure how what you are saying changes anything
- lxgr 1y agoThere are significantly fewer concerns about symmetric encryption, and while it doesn't scale to the size or budget of a service like Signal, it's exactly the type of thing the military is good at: Distribute a bunch of physical artifacts (smartcards) across the globe; guard a central facility (a symmetric key exchange center) extremely well etc. The military can also afford to run its (encrypted or plaintext) communications over infrastructure it fully controls. The same isn't true for a service provided out of public clouds, on the public Internet.
- perfmode 1y agoThe most secure method of communication is a one-time pad, a pre-shared private key. "A one-time pad (OTP) is considered theoretically the most secure method of communication — when it’s implemented correctly. That means: 1. The key (pad) is truly random. 2. The key is at least as long as the message. 3. The key is used only once. 4. The key is securely shared in advance and kept completely secret. When all these conditions are met, a one-time pad provides perfect secrecy — an eavesdropper cannot learn anything about the message, even with infinite computing power."
- nicce 1y agoAnd you need to do that on paper, not on consumer device.
- velocity3230 1y agohttps://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
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- acdha 1y agoSignal’s encryption algorithm is fine. The problem is the environment in which it runs: a consumer device connected to the general internet (and it’s hard to believe that someone who does this installs patches promptly). He’s one zero day or unwise click away from an adversary getting access to those messages and potentially being able to send them. Signal’s disappearing message feature at least helps with the former risk but runs afoul of government records laws. The reason why the policies restrict access to government systems isn’t because anyone thinks that those systems are magically immune to security bugs, but that there are entire teams of actually-qualified professionals monitoring them and proactively securing them. His phone is at risk to, say, a dodgy SMS/MMS message sent by anyone in the world who can get his number, potentially not needing more than a commercial spyware license, but his classified computer on a secure network can’t even receive traffic from them, has locked down configuration, and is monitored so a compromise would be detected a lot faster. That larger context is what really matters. What they’re doing is like the owner of a bank giving his drunken golf buddy the job of running the business, and the first thing he does is start storing the ledger in his car because it’s more convenient. Even if he’s totally innocent and trying to do a good job, it’s just so much extra risk he’s not prepared to handle for no benefit to anyone else.
- crowcroft 1y agoAn obvious issue that I noticed. He sent the exact same message to two different group chats. I assume he copy pasted the message on his unsecured device. How many apps had access to that text in his clipboard? To me this isn't a technical problem with Signal, it's an opsec problem, and that's quite a lot harder to explain to people.
- acdha 1y agoSignal does have a forward feature which would look the same but I don’t know if he uses it.
- qingcharles 1y agoYikes. Especially if it's been near a Windows PC. If I have link-to-PC switched on then I have a shared clipboard between phone and PC...
- ajross 1y ago> Even if you avoid MITM or other attacks, a message sent via Signal today [...] That's not the threat model. The threat model is that Signal is a tiny LLC making an app on behalf of a foundation and open source software project. It's a small group of human beings. Small groups of human beings can be coerced or exploited by state-level actors in lots of ways that can't feasibly be prevented. I mean, if someone walks up to you and offers $2M (or blackmails you with whatever they found in your OneDrive, etc...[1]) to look the other way while you hand them your laptop, are you really going to say no to that keylogger? Would everyone? At scale, there are auditing techniques to address this. The admins at e.g. github are (hopefully) not as vulnerable. But Signal is too small. [1] Edit: Or, because let's be honest that's the scale we're playing at: straight up threatens to Novichok you or your family.
- Spooky23 1y agoThere’s a million threats. These are not particularly bright people. They are busy and not aware of or concerned with much beyond limiting their own accountability for when they inevitably get burned by their bosses. You and I know that. So do the adversaries. The biggest issue for them is going to be not tripping over the intelligence collecting agencies (or corps) already on their devices.
- cryptonector 1y agoSignal's crypto is quite good. The problem with it is that it has zero authorization functionality, otherwise the government could use something like Signal internally. The lack of military-grade IM solutions is a problem.