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Google encrypts data amid backlash against NSA spying
- ganeumann 13y agoBut if they can encrypt the data so the NSA can't read it--that is, if the NSA can't force them to reveal the data--then why were they revealing it in the first place?
- anxiousest 13y agoI assume you mean encrypting data at rest since this development takes care of all in transit encryption, well, because of ads, analytics, other predictive data intensive services like "Google Now" etc.
- packetslave 13y agoYou can still encrypt data at rest (on spinning or flash memory) and use it for jobs like these. It's just decrypted while in RAM for use.
- magic_haze 13y agoIt seems like they're either encrypting communication between each server or between each data center: the article is very vague. Either way, your data is still unencrypted inside a server (which is obvious: you can't search through your mail without knowing the plaintext.)
- chris_mahan 13y agoIt's theoretically impossible for the NSA to decrypt the data. In practice, however, it seems they can. So what's the point of encrypting then? Is Google thinking they are smarter than the NSA at cryptography?
- orblivion 13y agoI know what you're trying to say, but your wording is off. Something cannot be theoretically impossible but practically possible.
- inerte 13y agoDon't worry, your wording is also off, something can be theoretically impossible but practically possible. Things can not be impossible but also practically possible, but for every theory disproved, there was a contrarian thing possible :)
- orblivion 13y agoI suppose it depends on the context. The only way this could happen is if you're talking about a bad theory. Whereas something theoretically possible can be practically impossible, even for a good theory, if real life situations can't match the conditions of the theory. In this case the NSA didn't even do anything theoretically impossible. They did a workaround. They added backdoors, which violates the conditions of the theory. It's like saying I got through your unbreakable door by coming in through the window.
- chris_mahan 13y agoWell, it's all about the implementation. In theory, the implementation is flawless. In practice, it never is. It's sort of like saying there is software with no bugs: It's exceedingly rare.
- sjbach 13y agoA salient bit: [Eric] Grosse echoed comments from other Google officials, saying that the company resists government surveillance and has never weakened its encryption systems to make snooping easier — as some companies reportedly have, according to the Snowden documents detailed by the Times and the Guardian on Thursday. “This is a just a point of personal honor,” Grosse said. “It will not happen here.” Some folks are inclined to distrust Google, but there are people here who really, really care about security.
- newman314 13y agoOr so they say. I'm not convinced that this is not Google's version of "trust us". Keep in mind there is no PR loss for Google to adopt a pro-encryption stance now. If they are really serious about this, they would a) stop trawling emails and b) help develop tech for seamlessly encrypting both in-flight and at-rest email.
- 001sky 13y agoMeanwhile, Google Argues for Right to Continue Scanning Gmail "This company reads, on a daily basis, every email that's submitted, and when I say read, I mean looking at every word to determine meaning," said Texas attorney Sean Rommel, who is co-counsel suing Google. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/google-argues-continue-scanning-gmail-20161961 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/google-argues-con... http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24021944/google-argues-right-continue-scanning-gmail http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24021944/google-argue...
- mahyarm 13y agoThey have the infrastructure for a fully paid version set up now with being able to buy more space for your google account. Maybe add a client-side encryption option along with no ads. It will make things like server-side search incredibly more difficult although.
- magicalist 13y agoWhy are you posting this shit on HN? Everyone here knows how contextual advertising in gmail works, and excepting those too young to have been aware back then, have known about it since 2004. If you have a point, make it, but scare quotes specifically made to induce an emotional reaction from those without technical knowledge really have no place here.
- Zigurd 13y ago>Encrypting information flowing among data centers will not make it impossible for intelligence agencies to snoop on individual users of Google services, nor will it have any effect on legal requirements that the company comply with court orders or valid national security requests for data. How does this do anything about pervasive NSA spying? The NSA has broken SSL and VPNs by corrupting the CAs and the VPN vendors. What would really help is for Google to create a zero-knowledge tier of service and to charge users for using it to replace their ad revenue.
- zmmmmm 13y agoI would assume Google is big enough and smart enough to competently vet and deploy trusted encryption techniques.
- chris_mahan 13y agoAgainst the NSA? The same NSA we ask to intercept Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, and Iranian encrypted Internet traffic? (To name a few. I'm sure the French are in there too.) Russia and China, I am sure, have enough smart people working on their cyber defenses that the NSA would have to be very, very, very good to penetrate those defenses. And if indeed they are, then do you think Google stands a chance?
- ilyanep 13y agoDo we think that Google (which boasts among current and former employees: Joshua Bloch, Guido van Rossum, Sebastian Thrun, Luis von Ahn, and that's just off the top of my head) might have some superstar cryptologists in there with equal or greater talent than people working for the Russian government? Why would that be so unbelievable?
- saalweachter 13y agoDon't forget Vint Cerf.
- 13y ago
- AceJohnny2 13y agoMeh. My most importance source of data in Google's control is my email. They aren't doing much to help me protect myself there. My only wish is that they provide a stable hook for tools like Firegpg [1] to encrypt the email's plaintext. Their constant tweaking of the textbox led FireGPG's developers to throw in the towel. I understand that Google wants to read your emails to power their ads. I doubt the fraction of power-users that would enable FireGPG would put a fraction of a dent in their systems. [1] http://getfiregpg.org/s/home http://getfiregpg.org/s/home
- jmillikin 13y agoInstead of trying to reverse-engineer a proprietary compressed Javascript codebase that changes daily, you should use Thunderbird and Enigmail. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ https://www.enigmail.net/ https://www.enigmail.net/
- mpyne 13y agoOr just use KMail (which integrates with GnuPG by default) on your shiny open-source Linux or BSD that you're surely using already. :)
- drivebyacct2 13y agoNo, seriously. If you're even remotely serious about protecting yourself, why would you use a closed source OS?
- ewoodrich 13y agodrivebyacct2, you are hell-banned, and have been for quite awhile. Several of your comments have been insightful with show-dead, and I feel you should be aware.
- mahyarm 13y agoWhat is the practical option for mobile devices? Everything I've found on iOS & Android is absolute awkward shit.
- adrianlmm 13y agoGoogle has been cooperating with the NSA, I distrust Google, this looks more like damage control to me.
- myko 13y agoWhat US company doesn't cooperate with the NSA? Google responds to lawful requests by the US government as appropriate. It's up to US citizens to change the law if they don't like it.
- adrianlmm 13y agoIf Google really wants to help then it should stop tracking their users, stop spying on me and stop trying to force me to sing up to G+, they cannot give data to the NSA if they stop getting it as simple as that, but, all the NSA has to do is buy the information from Google, after all, they sell it.
- cloudwalking 13y agoIf you don't want to be tracked and you don't want to use Google+, stop using Google products. Google does not sell data to anybody. They sell advertising slots.
- anxiousest 13y agoTheir business - like that of most tech companies - is built on data (so is every business to some degree) they can't forgo data, that is stupid. If the NSA is your main concern then it's government policy you want to be changed, not the engineering decisions of private companies. Also worth mentioning that unless you're speaking of telecom companies there is no profit motive to cooperating with government but mainly legal obligations.
- contextual 13y agoI already moved everything away from Google. There's no way I'm ever going back. Trust is gone.
- ams6110 13y agoWho are you trusting now?
- contextual 13y agoI'm using Riseup.net and an offshore email account. I won't recommend the offshore service by name until they upgrade their servers (it's been slow lately).
- astrange 13y agoTrust to do what, and why would you trust anyone else more?
- wbhart 13y agoFixing this problem may not stop suspicionless spying. But it will certainly make it more expensive. The public revelation that the data wasn't encrypted is surprising, though I had previously speculated on it. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6264415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6264415
- zmmmmm 13y agoMy main reaction to this was, ummm, wait - google isn't already encrypting its data internally?! -- off topic rant -- Such a weird discontinuity in all this ... Google was prosecuted and paid a fine, despite self-disclosing, falling on its own sword and issuing an abject apology, for accidentally sniffing some unencrypted data as they drove past. This was condemned at every level by government. Now the government is openly sniffing and capturing everything, including our encrypted traffic and deliberately trying to crack the encryption, ... and they don't think it is the slightest bit unreasonable? How can there be moral outrage about Google's offense and not about what the government is doing that is ten times worse?
- magicalist 13y agoWell, to be fair, it's not really the same people at the NSA looking at captured data who were doing the condemning. OTOH, you have senior administration members saying that they don't spy on Americans, when of course they do, or senior German administration officials outraged at the NSA's behavior, when of course they were participating all along. I really don't know how much of it is self delusion, how much of it is just perfectly logical mental gymnastics from their perspective, and how much is just the "this is what we have to do, even if it doesn't match what's in the law" perspective on display in the nytimes piece.
- MichaelGG 13y agoBecause most of the people outraged that Google supplied "-s 0" instead of "-s 64" when running tcpdump weren't quite bright or were not thinking it through? I've yet to hear of any intelligent reason to be upset about the WiFi collection thing. And more precisely, it's the NSA, who has the job to break encryption. There was outrage when Carnivore was made public (late 90s?), then that AT&T room the NSA tapped that was leaked in 2006. By now, it's just taken for granted (by technical people anyways) that unencrypted communications are going to be recorded. You don't even need a state-level adversary to achieve this on a limited scale.
- tlrobinson 13y agoAre they suggesting the NSA is tapping intra-data center communications? I hadn't seen that suggested before. That's interesting. I hadn't considered that could be how Prism works, but it would make sense if these companies weren't encrypting those connections previously. Somehow I assumed they were.
- aaron42net 13y agoMost companies have historically considered dark fiber (where nobody else's network gear is involved) to be secure enough. Passively decoding dumps of hundreds of gigabits or terabits spread over many colors of light (DWDM) into useful data was generally thought of as prohibitively expensive and therefore not a viable threat. The routers that can handle those speeds don't encrypt the link itself, so the most common solution is to do per-connection encryption between hosts with SSL or SSH or similar. Do you run SSL when talking to all of your internal APIs, databases, etc? What about between nodes in EC2, particularly between availability zones? Those are potentially subject to the same sort of sniffing without Amazon's involvement.
- Create 13y agoAmazon does have certification by said agency.
- thrownaway2424 13y agoGoogle has datacenters all over the world, including in hyper-intrusive surveillance states like India. The NSA is not the only reason to encrypt long-haul private traffic.
- Spooky23 13y agoSome datacenters consider things like MPLS labels as a secure boundary. That isn't an issue at Google scale, but google almost certainly uses public fiber at between many connection points.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ariwilson 13y agoJust to clarify the discussion here, since the NSA is involved in snooping on internet users along many different dimensions, I think what is being discussed here is encrypting internal Google data being transmitted from datacenter to datacenter via private fiber optic cables. Recent revelations seem to indicate the NSA has set up fiber taps on various company's networks. This encryption would frustrate those tapping efforts. Legal requests to Google for user data are not affected by this change. Neither is private data at rest, which is still presumably encrypted. Neither are other extralegal avenues the NSA has to infiltrate Google (employee co-operation or intimidation, exploiting zero days to get into corporate networks, hijacking security protocol construction, etc).
- zurn 13y agoThis language is pretty problematic especially in context of these third party hosted services. If Google have the keys and the encrypted data, what do we know about the security properties.
- grandalf 13y agoI think it's too late. Google has shown that it can't be trusted, especially about privacy.
- autoexec 13y agoNo company that makes it's money gathering and making money off of your personal information should be trusted when it comes to privacy.
- aniket_ray 13y agoWhat do you mean? Care to share more details? AFAICT, Google has been completely transparent about giving users control about how their data is shared. It's been ahead of the pack in protecting its users rights even going to courts to protect users. Disclaimer:I am an Engineer@Google.
- reirob 13y agoCan you provide some insights why the connections between Google's data centers was NOT encrypted until now?
- aniket_ray 13y agoUnfortunately, I'm not sure I'm the right person to share more insight. I don't work on the network team but data between data centers flow on our own network. Data between a client's machine (machines on external networks) and machines on our networks has been encrypted for a while. Data at rest on servers has been encrypted. Before these revelations, the tech community in general didn't expect that we needed to encrypt all traffic flowing on our home/office LANs. Like the rest of the world, these spying revelations have taught us that we need to be much more paranoid than we were earlier and are now encrypting data on our own networks. As a user of a lot of web services that are deployed on the cloud, I'd actually beseech my fellow tech community to do this too. All and any user data passed between any two servers (even on a backend, internal, local network) needs to encrypted.
- rayiner 13y agoI can't believe traffic between data centers wasn't already encrypted.
- Zigurd 13y agoEh. If you own the whole fiber from place to place, you might be lulled into thinking the data never leaves your premises.
- saalweachter 13y agoYeah, there's always a dividing line. Between two servers in the same rack? Between two racks in the same datacenter? Between two datacenters in the same physical complex? Between two complexes connected by fiber you installed yourself? If the security state keeps on keeping on, I expect companies which care about privacy to keep tightening it in. One day not long from now it might be considered ludicrous to transfer data from one server to another server within the same datacenter unencrypted. One day not long after that we may perfect secure multi-party computation, and a server might perform meaningful computation upon an encrypted dataset without any ability to decrypt it. The goalposts are moving.
- MichaelGG 13y agoIf you own the entire datacenter (like I'm sure Google does in most scenarios) and you're having racks compromised, then you probably have much larger issues that crypto won't solve.
- saalweachter 13y agoDatacenters aren't poofed into existence. The networking hardware could be compromised at the factory, which would compromise the datacenter's network security without compromising its physical security or any of the servers.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
- randartie 13y agoRegarding people making comments about not seeing why google wasn't already doing this, it's common for datacenters to do DB replication over unencrypted channels, which is what was going on here.
- lawnchair_larry 13y agoDo you trust Google to be able to secure your data more than you trust the NSA to be able to secure their own data from a single twentysomething? If so, what you are saying is equivalent to Google being more secure than the NSA.
- frank_boyd 13y agoThat's ridiculous. As everybody knows: It has been revealed that Google is one of the NSA partner companies (which should have been obvious to begin with, given the fact that Google is probably the biggest data hoover ever built). This fact terminates even the last tiny little bit of "trust" we could have had in Google. And that's really all there is to say.
- Sagat 13y agoI think it's still rational to distrust Google. Until there is more proof I will act as if I am watched at all times when using Google services.
- devx 13y agoI upvoted this because I want it to kickstart a movement among companies, so everyone increases their security, end to end. But at least on my part, this doesn't begin to "impress me". So far they're only talking about encrypting data between servers and they've also recently talked about encrypting Drive storage data (why wasn't it encrypted in the first place?!) They need to implement OTR or some form of end to end encryption with PFS for Hangouts, and it would be nice if they at least gave the option to have encrypted calls and voice calls with ZRTP in Hangouts. The button should be right there and obvious for everyone who wants to use it. But I'm saying it's optional only because I'm not sure how it could impact what they're trying to do with Hangouts, and if ZRTP works with multiple people at once. But if they can do that, then it should be by default for everyone. I'm also not sure exactly what kind of forward secrecy they are using for Google search - is it really a new key being generated per session - or is it like a few weeks? Because I think I read something about "a few weeks". I think all SSL/TLS encryption is almost useless without PFS so everyone should use it, when we're talking about the government. A single order from them and they could get your key for everything. That's just completely unacceptable! So every service should be using PFS. If I were them I'd also seriously evaluate whether RSA 2048 bits is enough, and if there's any doubt that it is, then they should move to more bits, or if the whole RSA algorithm is in danger, then they should be looking for alternatives quickly. When Google and others start doing that, then I will begin to have some trust in them again. All of these press releases so far, and the lawsuit to fight to only disclose (not stop) the mass requests aren't fooling me, and I hope they aren't fooling many others either. Until then I'll be on the lookout for any new great service that promises that type of security, and I'll switch to them as soon as they're available, and recommend others to do it, too, both offline and online. I hope Google and Microsoft and others aren't thinking that because I haven't "ragequit" their services yet, it means the whole NSA thing doesn't bother me. It just means I'm anxiously waiting for the alternatives to appear - which will appear. There is a crypto war (again), and I do believe the security community will win again, so it's only a matter of time.
- remosi 13y ago</dev/null openssl s_client -showcerts -connect www.google.com:443 Includes in the output: Server public key is 2048 bit ... Protocol : TLSv1.2 Cipher : ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 (ie: not RC4, as long as your client supports non RC4 ciphers, uses ECDHE for PFS) and: TLS session ticket lifetime hint: 100800 (seconds) (session keys are discarded by the client every 1d4h, so presumably the server rotates them every 24 hours or so (4hrs to allow for clock skew, I assume, or to allow for the fact that people might be slightly late on something they check every 24 hours (eg when the wake up each morning))) Nobody is going to make the change from 1024 bit keys to something else without first verifying that the new bit length is "secure enough" for a reasonable enough time (if nothing else, you don't want to have to go through the expense of the process of getting everything upgraded more often than you have to). Although you're right, it would be nice if they published their reasoning. I don't know how to verify the security of hangouts. Looking at the webrtc standard, it doesn't appear to support encryption. There is also a lot of opposition to standardising encryption for webRTC because of "DRM" concerns. So I guess it's probably not encrypted, but don't quote me on that. Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee.
- g3orge 13y agoCan someone enlighten me, what is going on with NSA these last days (besides Snowden of course) ? I hear about new leads that they can break mainstream internet encryption methods. Is this true, and if so in what level? What about open source encryption?
- bowlofpetunias 13y agoGoogle has full unencrypted access to all private data from their users (because collating that data is the foundation of their core business) and the NSA has the power to lean on Google to provide them full access. Not to mention that at the very heart of the NSA spying story is the allegation that Google e.a. provides access to said data willingly. And the only denial from both parties has been a mixture of partial admission ("but we're using proper procedure") and carefully crafted lawyer-speak (the infamous "no direct access" boilerplate denials). This is just internal security enhancements being abused as a PR exercise. Google is trying use the latest revelations about the NSA to deflect attention away from it's own complicity.
- eyeareque 13y agoThat is great and all, but if the government wants some data from google.. they will get it one way or another.
- ck2 13y agoGoogle still "only" uses RC4 128bit to talk to virtually every browser. Makes me wonder. Is RC4 strong enough? Is it their professional conclusion? Or something else?
- Justsignedup 13y agothe problem with google is simple: the government demands data, google provides because it must. encryption means the government at least has to demand.