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One heartening aspect of the Snowden revelations as a whole is that they have pretty much just confirmed that the things we thought were strong (public crypto r

One heartening aspect of the Snowden revelations as a whole is that they have pretty much just confirmed that the things we thought were strong (public crypto research, tor) are in fact strong and the things that we thought were iffy are in fact iffy(Certificate Authorities, Unvetted Crypto, Cloud Services, The Wires, Implementations). This bodes well for the prospect of navigating out of this whole mess successfully since on the whole we seem to have good instincts about what is trustworthy and what is untrustworthy. I think that it actually has tended to clarify thinking about security so that fewer and fewer engineers are able to delude themselves into trusting something that they know deep down is really untrustworthy.

antocv 13y ago
not to be a downer but I do feel these systems and exploits are designed by us the hackers we so much want to belive are good, but it looks like most hackers have a price and probably derive joy from designing these systems for the government. we know what is trustworthy we know how to build and do the right thing. yet look there is tens of thousands of brilliant minds working for the nsa against everybody else.
anologwintermut 13y ago
Prior to this one should not have (and arguably should sill not) assumed Tor is safe against the NSA. Tor was explicitly not designed to protect against a global passive adversary. That's the price it pays for low latency. With the amount of network data the NSA has, they probably constitute such an adversary. It is actually rather surprising that Tor gives them this much trouble.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > It is actually rather surprising that Tor gives them this much trouble. I am not really convinced that what we have seen demonstrates conclusively that it does. There is the possibility that we are looking at parallel construction, or that these attacks are genuine but they are sitting on more dramatic capabilities for targets they think are worth it (perhaps because the Chinese continuing to trust and use Tor is a better situation for the NSA to be in than the Chinese doing everything the old fashioned way with microfilm and dead-drops). The best way to go forward is to continue to assume that Tor does not present any significant difficulty to the NSA.
- shawn-furyan 13y ago
  It's a question of opportunity cost. The NSA has extensive resources, but it's unlikely that they can employ overwhelming resources (such as would be theoretically necessary to break tor) for every situation where overwhelming resources specifically directed are a theoretical weakness. At the moment, implementations are a much easier target, and so I don't necessarily think that it's surprising that they do have trouble with strong but imperfect systems like tor. Perhaps once all implementation issues are removed from the security equation (I'll hold my breath while I wait...) it will be necessary to think up better systems. But right now, what's hard for us is hard for the NSA, and so that should be the guiding principle for strengthening current systems and developing new ones. I find that an empowering idea.
  - taftster 13y ago
    Yes - exactly. Opportunity cost is something that is not discussed enough. Conceivably, any "target" is vulnerable to every communication at the right price point. From technology solutions (provided by NSA), to in-field solutions (provided by CIA), we shouldn't believe that we can be totally "safe" from unwanted eavesdroppers. It's not "if" Tor (and friends) are vulnerable. We should assume and operate like they are, but with some level of acceptable tradeoff. It's like a safe or ATM - neither of these guarantees perfect security; they just provide enough security for the expected loss of their contents. The problem - it's just very hard to evaluate the opportunity cost, since we don't really know how wide-spread or "easy" it is for privacy to be breeched. These types of revelations help establish the "market price" for which we can use as a basis for evaluating our options for communications (including traditional man-to-man transport). I personally don't have any communication which I consider privileged enough to warrant the extra hassle of running Tor, etc. I consider a TLS connection with my bank secure enough for my concerns and I don't have the desire to pull otherwise questionable content from any type of onion router. Therefore, I enter the market with a different expectation of features and cost I'm willing to pay.
psn 13y ago
I agree with your post generally, but has Snowden said anything about CAs? I did expect to hear that at least one has signed anything the NSA put in front of them, but I don't recall Snowden providing "proof"* of this. * I'm in no position to verify anything Snowden leaks.
- shawn-furyan 13y ago
  The main thing is that CAs are centralized proxies for trust combined with the revelations that confirm that the NSA directly targets such central entities. There was a lot of general uneasiness about the reliance on CAs before the Snowden revelations, and I think the fact that NSA documents show that it leans on such central entities confirms the wisdom of that unease.
- jerf 13y ago
  We didn't need these revelations to know CAs are not generally trustworthy. We already had proof. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority#CA_compromise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority#CA_compro...
- dsl 13y ago
  I don't know about the NSA, but I've personally negotiated a deal with a CA to add whatever domains we wanted to a certificate without validation. They just "trusted us."
return0 13y ago
The disheartening things is, though, we don't really have novel technologies (quantum crypto?) to guarantee security anymore and the existing ones will soon be exploitable on a mass scale. This is bad for internet commerce, and for internet itself as a medium. In the eyes of the layman, the internet is untrustworthy. I won't be surprised if in the future we will see closed, privately owned physical networks that guarantee security to their customers.
- subdane 13y ago
  I think Facebook proves definitively that the layman doesn't care about "trustworthiness of the internet".
  - return0 13y ago
    They do for anything that requires money and beyond. That's why banks etc. try hard to persuade people they have high security standards.
    - XorNot 13y ago
      That will be a problem once you can by a quantum computer from the local IT shop, not while their are 5 of them in the world and you need a team of physicists to operate them.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  quantum crypto is going to be available to governments first and to civilians later, if at all, ever. we should be be making plans on how to protect ourselves from the cracking powers of quantum computers with our traditional computers instead: http://www.pqcrypto.org/ http://www.pqcrypto.org/
guelo 13y ago
The weak point as usual are the endpoints. The attack vector described in these documents is JavaScript via some library called E4X. Makes me wonder why Tor bundle doesn't come with NoScript enabled by default.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  There is an answer about this in their FAQ that basically states that having NoScript on by default breaks too much of the web.
- simgidacav 13y ago
  Utopistically, how nice would be if the whole web provided no-javascript versions of the sites? In the end 90% of the cases javascript is used just to do fancy things, while actual functionalities could be achieved with much less pain (and vulnerability).
  - jdgiese 13y ago
    I think this would have been true a few years back, but I think more and more web-sites are using javascript in irreplaceable waves. I suspect javascript will become increasingly necessary as frameworks like angularjs become more popular. That said, if you are just interested in buying a pizza, or reading a blog post, then maybe javascript will never be really necessary.
belorn 13y ago
One iffy part I would like to add is government itself. It was generally thought that government would not keep security vulnerabilities hidden, prioritizing to protect citizens rather than having a minor advantage in hacking. Together with the earlier leaks regarding sabotaged security standard, US government is the most damaging entity to computer security today. Anything they do need to be viewed under the understanding that NSA primary priority is to be able to hack other peoples computers. Be that a encryption algorithm, or a kernel module, NSA priority is 100% clear. That used to be a tin-foil hat idea just a few months ago, and we know better now. If NSA comes carrying gifts, it warrant being very careful in accepting them from a party with such hostile priorities.
- akjj 13y ago
  > It was generally thought that government would not keep security vulnerabilities hidden Was that what people thought? Were there vulnerability reports in open-source software that were coming from the NSA or thought to be coming from the NSA? Surely everyone knew that the NSA was capable of finding exploits in software, and I would think that it would be hard to keep secret whether or not they're being reported. > That used to be a tin-foil hat idea just a few months ago, and we know better now. It's well-known that the NSA pushed to have DES limited to 56-bit keys. There were suspicions about Dual_EC_DRBG long before there were any leaks from Snowden. In the 90s, they pushed the Clipper chip, in which they'd engineered a back door. I think that everyone understood that the NSA had somewhat of an interest in weaker cryptography. That's why the cryptographic standardization processes happened in the open and when constants were needed, they were taken from the digits of pi or some such sequence.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    DES was about speed. DES was in an age when computers were slow, DES was slow, and the NSA was already helping defeat a cryptanalysis attack on it. Limiting the keys to a sensible number means it can be used in a practical sense.
  - HoochTHX 13y ago
    > It was generally thought that government would not keep security vulnerabilities hidden It depends on which they find it on, according to this talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Zx5rQFk4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Zx5rQFk4U , If vulnerabilities are found on secure systems they are immediately classified, For them to be able to report they have to refind and document the vulnerability on a non secured system.

antocv 13y ago

not to be a downer but I do feel these systems and exploits are designed by us the hackers we so much want to belive are good, but it looks like most hackers have a price and probably derive joy from designing these systems for the government. we know what is trustworthy we know how to build and do the right thing. yet look there is tens of thousands of brilliant minds working for the nsa against everybody else.

anologwintermut 13y ago

Prior to this one should not have (and arguably should sill not) assumed Tor is safe against the NSA. Tor was explicitly not designed to protect against a global passive adversary. That's the price it pays for low latency. With the amount of network data the NSA has, they probably constitute such an adversary. It is actually rather surprising that Tor gives them this much trouble.

jlgreco 13y ago
> It is actually rather surprising that Tor gives them this much trouble. I am not really convinced that what we have seen demonstrates conclusively that it does. There is the possibility that we are looking at parallel construction, or that these attacks are genuine but they are sitting on more dramatic capabilities for targets they think are worth it (perhaps because the Chinese continuing to trust and use Tor is a better situation for the NSA to be in than the Chinese doing everything the old fashioned way with microfilm and dead-drops). The best way to go forward is to continue to assume that Tor does not present any significant difficulty to the NSA.
shawn-furyan 13y ago
It's a question of opportunity cost. The NSA has extensive resources, but it's unlikely that they can employ overwhelming resources (such as would be theoretically necessary to break tor) for every situation where overwhelming resources specifically directed are a theoretical weakness. At the moment, implementations are a much easier target, and so I don't necessarily think that it's surprising that they do have trouble with strong but imperfect systems like tor. Perhaps once all implementation issues are removed from the security equation (I'll hold my breath while I wait...) it will be necessary to think up better systems. But right now, what's hard for us is hard for the NSA, and so that should be the guiding principle for strengthening current systems and developing new ones. I find that an empowering idea.
- taftster 13y ago
  Yes - exactly. Opportunity cost is something that is not discussed enough. Conceivably, any "target" is vulnerable to every communication at the right price point. From technology solutions (provided by NSA), to in-field solutions (provided by CIA), we shouldn't believe that we can be totally "safe" from unwanted eavesdroppers. It's not "if" Tor (and friends) are vulnerable. We should assume and operate like they are, but with some level of acceptable tradeoff. It's like a safe or ATM - neither of these guarantees perfect security; they just provide enough security for the expected loss of their contents. The problem - it's just very hard to evaluate the opportunity cost, since we don't really know how wide-spread or "easy" it is for privacy to be breeched. These types of revelations help establish the "market price" for which we can use as a basis for evaluating our options for communications (including traditional man-to-man transport). I personally don't have any communication which I consider privileged enough to warrant the extra hassle of running Tor, etc. I consider a TLS connection with my bank secure enough for my concerns and I don't have the desire to pull otherwise questionable content from any type of onion router. Therefore, I enter the market with a different expectation of features and cost I'm willing to pay.

psn 13y ago

I agree with your post generally, but has Snowden said anything about CAs? I did expect to hear that at least one has signed anything the NSA put in front of them, but I don't recall Snowden providing "proof"* of this. * I'm in no position to verify anything Snowden leaks.

shawn-furyan 13y ago
The main thing is that CAs are centralized proxies for trust combined with the revelations that confirm that the NSA directly targets such central entities. There was a lot of general uneasiness about the reliance on CAs before the Snowden revelations, and I think the fact that NSA documents show that it leans on such central entities confirms the wisdom of that unease.
jerf 13y ago
We didn't need these revelations to know CAs are not generally trustworthy. We already had proof. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority#CA_compromise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority#CA_compro...
dsl 13y ago
I don't know about the NSA, but I've personally negotiated a deal with a CA to add whatever domains we wanted to a certificate without validation. They just "trusted us."

return0 13y ago

The disheartening things is, though, we don't really have novel technologies (quantum crypto?) to guarantee security anymore and the existing ones will soon be exploitable on a mass scale. This is bad for internet commerce, and for internet itself as a medium. In the eyes of the layman, the internet is untrustworthy. I won't be surprised if in the future we will see closed, privately owned physical networks that guarantee security to their customers.

subdane 13y ago
I think Facebook proves definitively that the layman doesn't care about "trustworthiness of the internet".
- return0 13y ago
  They do for anything that requires money and beyond. That's why banks etc. try hard to persuade people they have high security standards.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    That will be a problem once you can by a quantum computer from the local IT shop, not while their are 5 of them in the world and you need a team of physicists to operate them.
tripzilch 13y ago
quantum crypto is going to be available to governments first and to civilians later, if at all, ever. we should be be making plans on how to protect ourselves from the cracking powers of quantum computers with our traditional computers instead: http://www.pqcrypto.org/ http://www.pqcrypto.org/

guelo 13y ago

The weak point as usual are the endpoints. The attack vector described in these documents is JavaScript via some library called E4X. Makes me wonder why Tor bundle doesn't come with NoScript enabled by default.

steveklabnik 13y ago
There is an answer about this in their FAQ that basically states that having NoScript on by default breaks too much of the web.
simgidacav 13y ago
Utopistically, how nice would be if the whole web provided no-javascript versions of the sites? In the end 90% of the cases javascript is used just to do fancy things, while actual functionalities could be achieved with much less pain (and vulnerability).
- jdgiese 13y ago
  I think this would have been true a few years back, but I think more and more web-sites are using javascript in irreplaceable waves. I suspect javascript will become increasingly necessary as frameworks like angularjs become more popular. That said, if you are just interested in buying a pizza, or reading a blog post, then maybe javascript will never be really necessary.

belorn 13y ago

One iffy part I would like to add is government itself. It was generally thought that government would not keep security vulnerabilities hidden, prioritizing to protect citizens rather than having a minor advantage in hacking. Together with the earlier leaks regarding sabotaged security standard, US government is the most damaging entity to computer security today. Anything they do need to be viewed under the understanding that NSA primary priority is to be able to hack other peoples computers. Be that a encryption algorithm, or a kernel module, NSA priority is 100% clear. That used to be a tin-foil hat idea just a few months ago, and we know better now. If NSA comes carrying gifts, it warrant being very careful in accepting them from a party with such hostile priorities.

akjj 13y ago
> It was generally thought that government would not keep security vulnerabilities hidden Was that what people thought? Were there vulnerability reports in open-source software that were coming from the NSA or thought to be coming from the NSA? Surely everyone knew that the NSA was capable of finding exploits in software, and I would think that it would be hard to keep secret whether or not they're being reported. > That used to be a tin-foil hat idea just a few months ago, and we know better now. It's well-known that the NSA pushed to have DES limited to 56-bit keys. There were suspicions about Dual_EC_DRBG long before there were any leaks from Snowden. In the 90s, they pushed the Clipper chip, in which they'd engineered a back door. I think that everyone understood that the NSA had somewhat of an interest in weaker cryptography. That's why the cryptographic standardization processes happened in the open and when constants were needed, they were taken from the digits of pi or some such sequence.
- XorNot 13y ago
  DES was about speed. DES was in an age when computers were slow, DES was slow, and the NSA was already helping defeat a cryptanalysis attack on it. Limiting the keys to a sensible number means it can be used in a practical sense.
- HoochTHX 13y ago
  > It was generally thought that government would not keep security vulnerabilities hidden It depends on which they find it on, according to this talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Zx5rQFk4U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4Zx5rQFk4U , If vulnerabilities are found on secure systems they are immediately classified, For them to be able to report they have to refind and document the vulnerability on a non secured system.