4 ms·

The NSA have hooks in various data centers and internet backbones. They collect the intel indirectly giving the companies plausible deniability.

• uh_oh 13y ago
  Yes, but how would they do this exactly? To collect anything valuable from Google they would need to MITM SSL on a large scale. And Chrome actually ships with a list of pinned certificates, including those for Google, making it difficult to MITM even for the government.
  • deno 13y ago
    They wouldn’t do that, obviously, even if it was actually feasible. That kind of MITM would be easily detectable (though still effective, in short term)—we know when the Chinese do it. However the private keys have to deployed, on scale. So if as someone here is suggesting the NSA has infiltrated those companies, they could have got those keys and just decrypt the stream. I wouldn’t bet my money on that… but it’s more likely than breaking the encryption, and if they can get military secrets, I guess they could get the keys. Also those companies could have just volunteered them—that’s where the emphasis on ‘direct’ access comes in.
    • uh_oh 13y ago
      My understanding is that MITM (but in a perfect way, using the leaked private key) is still required, if ephemeral Diffie-Hellman is involved. You can't just passively record the stream and decrypt it, since you don't know the exchanged DH secret. The suggestion that the companies actually gave them the keys and this explains the "direct access" phrase makes a lot of sense!
• UnoriginalGuy 13y ago
  Right. But if you look at the slide why would companies slowly get "added" rather than just implicitly be being spied upon? I mean Apple only got added in 2011. If what you're saying is true then what does this date refer to?
  • dragonwriter 13y ago
    > But if you look at the slide why would companies slowly get "added" rather than just implicitly be being spied upon? Well, if they are intercepting data through backbones, and much of that data is encrypted, they need to defeat the encryption in a durable way to get a clear feed. While I don't suggest that this is what was going on, if it was, there would be know reason that each provider would necessarily be broken at the same time; there would likely both be prioritization of resources directed at each provider, differences in the security of each provider, and chance involved as to when each was broken.
  • Cthulhu_ 13y ago
    > I mean Apple only got added in 2011. If what you're saying is true then what does this date refer to? Growing popularity and usage of icloud and apple's own messaging system? iirc, before icloud, Apple didn't have that much user data.
  • bbbbbaaaaa 13y ago
    iMessage debuted in 2011.