8 ms·

Is this information the NSA could've attained left to their own devices, or is this sort of stuff only accessible with help from service providers, eg Facebook

by kyro 13y ago

Is this information the NSA could've attained left to their own devices, or is this sort of stuff only accessible with help from service providers, eg Facebook and Google? What I'm trying to ask is: with all the hullabaloo Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc have made about individual, manual reviews of information requests, are we still being lied to? I suspect that we obviously haven't been told the whole story by these companies, and that they are a lot more implicit in this than they let on, but this article seems almost like definitive proof that they did indeed allow unlimited access to user information. If this is saying what I think it's saying, then I feel seriously back stabbed by the startup darlings -- Zuckerberg, Brin and Page, etc -- that so many people here love and idolize. They should absolutely be held accountable.

jgrahamc 13y ago
If you can tap large Internet connections then you can siphon off all HTTP and SMTP traffic and from there it's trivial to reconstruct sessions and from there get application level stuff. I was doing similar things in the mid-1990s on shared Ethernet. It's really only a question of speed and scale and then of writing code that recognizes particular traffic (such as "this HTTP connection is a Facebook chat session").
- kyro 13y ago
  Interesting. So then this can be done with zero assistance from service providers? Could providers have taken any steps to render that stream of information inaccessible? And if so, is it a costly effort?
  - jonknee 13y ago
    Yes, use HTTPS for everything. It's not a surprise that all the logos in this PowerPoint have since moved large portions of their traffic to SSL. SSL isn't perfect (you can still see what domain someone is requesting), but it does prevent a lot of the snooping outlined in the presentation (without vendor participation, it's always possible that Facebook is siphoning off their messages).
    - jstalin 13y ago
      Why would we assume that TLS is safe? The NSA could just as easily compromise the CAs and get all the certificates they need.
      - nathan_long 13y ago
        Not exactly. Compromising a CA would let them fool a browser into thinking that a fake Google certificate is a real one. However, if Google were diligent, they could publish their valid cert signatures anywhere they like, and users could check the signatures of the certs that are presented as genuine. The TSA can't crack or impersonate a cert at will; they can only 1) try to trick you into accepting a phony one or 2) demand/steal the private key from the site.
        jstalin 13y ago
        Wouldn't having the private cert allow you to decrypt all communications encrypted using that cert?
        michaelt 13y ago
        Traditionally you generate an SSL public and private key, and send only the public key to the certificate authority for signing, so compromising the certificate authority doesn't give you the private key. It does however give you the ability to issue yourself new public keys to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks [1]. If you compromise the same CA as the site whose traffic you're trying to intercept, you can bypass certificate pinning which is supposed to detect MITM attacks. So for example you can MITM gmail without certificate pinning detecting it if you compromise Verisign, Equifax or GeoTrust [2] [1] http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/update-on-attempted-man-in-middle.html http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/update-on... [2] http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/transport_security_state_static.json http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/tra...
        jonknee 13y ago
        Google is actually quite diligent in this regard and have caught CAs with their pants down in the past. They're taking it a step further and using certificate pinning in Chrome to catch MITM attacks in real time across a large portion of the internet. http://blog.chromium.org/2011/06/new-chromium-security-features-june.html http://blog.chromium.org/2011/06/new-chromium-security-featu... It's not scalable at all, but cuts out a large attack vector for a lot of communications. It wouldn't take a ton of pinned certificates to make a big dent in these NSA programs--really just look at the logos and make sure that each has their certificates pinned.
- mrt0mat0 13y ago
  My question is, if they did this, why did each company have it's own join date in the prism timeline? wouldn't it just all happen at once? if they were tapping pipelines then the data would be collected regardless of the system, yet they all had very distinct dates that they were onboarded.
  - graedus 13y ago
    The PRISM program, which requires cooperation from service providers, is just one of the methods they use to collect user data. "Upstream" collection (beam splitters on fiber, etc) is separate and distinct from this, and yields a different set of data. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slide-you-havent-seen/2013/07/10/32801426-e8e6-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slide...
randac 13y ago
What makes you think they're even allowed to tell you the truth?
jcromartie 13y ago
> are we still being lied to? The answer will always be "yes".
- Intermernet 13y ago
  The answer will, in fact, always be "no". But they're lying.

by kyro 13y ago

jgrahamc 13y ago

If you can tap large Internet connections then you can siphon off all HTTP and SMTP traffic and from there it's trivial to reconstruct sessions and from there get application level stuff. I was doing similar things in the mid-1990s on shared Ethernet. It's really only a question of speed and scale and then of writing code that recognizes particular traffic (such as "this HTTP connection is a Facebook chat session").

kyro 13y ago
Interesting. So then this can be done with zero assistance from service providers? Could providers have taken any steps to render that stream of information inaccessible? And if so, is it a costly effort?
- jonknee 13y ago
  Yes, use HTTPS for everything. It's not a surprise that all the logos in this PowerPoint have since moved large portions of their traffic to SSL. SSL isn't perfect (you can still see what domain someone is requesting), but it does prevent a lot of the snooping outlined in the presentation (without vendor participation, it's always possible that Facebook is siphoning off their messages).
  - jstalin 13y ago
    Why would we assume that TLS is safe? The NSA could just as easily compromise the CAs and get all the certificates they need.
    - nathan_long 13y ago
      Not exactly. Compromising a CA would let them fool a browser into thinking that a fake Google certificate is a real one. However, if Google were diligent, they could publish their valid cert signatures anywhere they like, and users could check the signatures of the certs that are presented as genuine. The TSA can't crack or impersonate a cert at will; they can only 1) try to trick you into accepting a phony one or 2) demand/steal the private key from the site.
      - jstalin 13y ago
        Wouldn't having the private cert allow you to decrypt all communications encrypted using that cert?
        michaelt 13y ago
        Traditionally you generate an SSL public and private key, and send only the public key to the certificate authority for signing, so compromising the certificate authority doesn't give you the private key. It does however give you the ability to issue yourself new public keys to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks [1]. If you compromise the same CA as the site whose traffic you're trying to intercept, you can bypass certificate pinning which is supposed to detect MITM attacks. So for example you can MITM gmail without certificate pinning detecting it if you compromise Verisign, Equifax or GeoTrust [2] [1] http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/update-on-attempted-man-in-middle.html http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/update-on... [2] http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/transport_security_state_static.json http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/net/http/tra...
      - jonknee 13y ago
        Google is actually quite diligent in this regard and have caught CAs with their pants down in the past. They're taking it a step further and using certificate pinning in Chrome to catch MITM attacks in real time across a large portion of the internet. http://blog.chromium.org/2011/06/new-chromium-security-features-june.html http://blog.chromium.org/2011/06/new-chromium-security-featu... It's not scalable at all, but cuts out a large attack vector for a lot of communications. It wouldn't take a ton of pinned certificates to make a big dent in these NSA programs--really just look at the logos and make sure that each has their certificates pinned.
mrt0mat0 13y ago
My question is, if they did this, why did each company have it's own join date in the prism timeline? wouldn't it just all happen at once? if they were tapping pipelines then the data would be collected regardless of the system, yet they all had very distinct dates that they were onboarded.
- graedus 13y ago
  The PRISM program, which requires cooperation from service providers, is just one of the methods they use to collect user data. "Upstream" collection (beam splitters on fiber, etc) is separate and distinct from this, and yields a different set of data. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slide-you-havent-seen/2013/07/10/32801426-e8e6-11e2-aa9f-c03a72e2d342_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-nsa-slide...

randac 13y ago

What makes you think they're even allowed to tell you the truth?

jcromartie 13y ago

> are we still being lied to? The answer will always be "yes".

Intermernet 13y ago
The answer will, in fact, always be "no". But they're lying.