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Learning from the Enemy: The Gunman Project (2007) [pdf]
- JupiterMoon 11y agoIs there anyone else reluctant to open a pdf from the NSA?
- cstross 11y ago(a) It's from their museum facility (if you ever get the chance to visit the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland TAKE IT TAKE IT TAKE IT)[1], not the NSA itself. (b) It's a scan of a 30-year-old report on a completed project, redacted heavily. Nothing more. (c) If they want your inside leg measurement they've got better ways to find it without feeding you a PDF they overtly created. [1] Where else will you find a teaching exhibit for visiting schoolkids that lets them cypher a message on a no-shit four rotor WW2 German Enigma machine, hand it to a friend, and watch them decrypt it on another Engima machine at the other side of the room? (Hint: valuable museum pieces.) Also, working (or at least blinkenlights powered up) exhibits like a CM1 Connection Machine and a Cray X-MP, and a history of their amazing linguistics branch[2] ... [2] Who have the world's largest collection of bible translations. Want to know why? It's worth your while to pay them a visit.
- pilsetnieks 11y agoI'd wager a guess that [2] was necessary for messages using it as a code, e.g., page number+word number, or page number and then the Nth word or letter.
- cstross 11y agoNope. The real answer is, the NSA is all about communications -- which isn't just electronics: it includes a huge element of linguistics. The Bible angle: when a new tribe or culture is contacted, the very first thing that happens is that Christian missionaries get all excited and do their best to go there to spread the gospel. To do this, they have to learn the language sufficiently well to translate the Bible. So you've got this one text (with a quantifiably-variant or de-facto invariant baseline) that gets translated into every language on the planet as fast as is humanly possible after that language is discovered. It's a Rosetta stone. I forget the number that was given for how many different-language Bibles the NSA has in their library, but it was impressive -- something over 900 languages.
- kabdib 11y agoLooks like there are folks working on the Klingon version of the Bible. This is pretty optimistic, in quite a few dimensions... :-)
- cstross 11y agoThere's a translation into Polari: http://www.josephrichardson.tv/polari-bible.html http://www.josephrichardson.tv/polari-bible.html (Implications guaranteed to set a few Church-men's heads exploding.)
- JupiterMoon 11y agoIn response: (a) I wish I could but I doubt I ever will. I've heard so much bad stuff about US border guards being annoying and transiting through the US being slow and painful that I won't even use a US hub anymore. (b) Cool I guess I can't know if this is true without opening it though? This is partly the fault of the pdf spec itself. Maybe a more transparent document format would help (does that even exist)?. (c) I suspect that they already have them. Furthermore. I actually really want to read it. I'd really like to trust the NSA. However, their record is not good on being trustworthy.
- leni536 11y agoHow is PDF not as transparent as any other open binary format (though PDF is more like mixed)? Edit: > Maybe a more transparent document format would help (does not even exist). I don't know if more transparent, but djvu exists for scanned documents. Postscript also exists but I would doubt that it's safer than PDF.
- JupiterMoon 11y agoI am aware that the pdf specific is open. However pdf does a lot of things and is somewhat complex. I argue more than is needed for transmitting documents. Can you personally verify that a given pdf does nothing malicious?
- leni536 11y agoCan you personally verify that a given jpeg does nothing malicious? Same thing, you trust (or not) your reader and its parser and hope it doesn't have any remote code execution vulnerability. Or you stop reading PDF files and stop viewing images.
- JupiterMoon 11y agoNope I can't. In reality how many exploits have actually been contained in jpegs vs pdf though?
- markc 11y ago>TAKE IT Seconded. I went midweek around noon and it was pretty quiet so I got a personal 90 minute tour by an NSA retiree. He was very knowledgeable about crypto history, esp. as used in the cold war and WWII. They had Turing's "bombe", multiple Enigma variants, many lesser-known crypto machines, historic correspondence, a Cray YMP, codetalkers exhibit, spy satellites, and tons of other good stuff. Everything is free - except merchandise in the gift shop, which is also pretty unique.
- fallat 11y agoDownload it, block all ports, run pdf reader in a chroot...B)
- leni536 11y agoAnd on a separate X server. It's more like trusting your reader than the PDF file itself.
- casualhner 11y ago>destroy computer after reading.
- ptaipale 11y agoPerfectly common, of course. Usually the way to do this is to use a virtual machine which you then throw away.
- beagle3 11y agobut why do you trust your hypervisor? QEMU had a floppy controller escape bug published last month. Xen has one today.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- JupiterMoon 11y agoBy doing this the chain of things that have to be broken for an exploit to escape is getting longer.
- leni536 11y agoSo the best thing you can do is to nest different kind of VM hypervisors with different OS guests and read the pdf in the innermost machine.
- wslh 11y agoYou can use http://www.zamzar.com/url/ http://www.zamzar.com/url/ and then convert it to an image file.
- nandhp 11y agoThere's also online viewers like Google Docs, which I think basically do this server-side: https://docs.google.com/gview?url=https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_histories/learning_from_the_enemy.pdf https://docs.google.com/gview?url=https://www.nsa.gov/public...
- ptaipale 11y agoNot really. If the NSA would feed me a harmful pdf, it would come so I wouldn't know it is from NSA.
- AUmrysh 11y agoI'll open it on my work computer, they surely already have access to anything important anyway.
- doki_pen 11y agoIf you are that paranoid, then you shouldn't open any pdf that you find on the internet. The NSA has the ability to proxy any file you download and inject anything they want.
- jpatokal 11y agoThe article mentions the listening bug in the Great Seal in a side note, but it's arguably an even better hack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%...
- acqq 11y agoI was glad to learn that "The Thing" was apparently designed by Léon Theremin who invented in 1928 (!) the famous "electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin
- varjag 11y agoHe invented it earlier than that, as he personally demoed it to Lenin (who died in 1924).
- unbehagen 11y ago"As a totalitarian society, the Soviet Union valued eavesdropping and thus developed ingenious methods to accomplish it." (page 2)
- robin_reala 11y agoAs opposed to the US, which developed no eavesdropping methods or bugs at all.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- megalodon 11y ago"The GUNMAN project had a major impact on the intelligence community as a whole. It brought about a greater understanding of the thinking and operations in a totalitarian society. The community became more aware of the hostile electronic threat against the U.S. As <redacted> explained, "If any other agency such as CIA or the State Department had discovered the bug, this change would not have occurred because they would not have publicized the incident." NSA, however, briefed all levels of government to warn them of the danger. NSA was not out to assess blame; it took the problem-solving approach." (p. 17)
- phkahler 11y agoI stopped reading, copied the exact same text to post as a comment and see it's already at the top...
- deleted 11y ago
- adriancooney 11y ago"Keeping track of all the various software was hard enough, but keeping track of all of the variations [in the software] was a nightmare." Sounds all too familiar.
- tempodox 11y agoThe dates associated with this document seem confusing and contradictory. I can only assume that's intentional. I'll also not be surprised if it makes my computer self-destruct via spontaneous self-combustion after reading.
- huhtenberg 11y agoThe "How it worked" part is in "Implant Characteristics" section, Page 16 of the PDF and forward.
- logfromblammo 11y agoFor those too paranoid to open a .PDF from the NSA, several solid parts in the typewriter were replaced by solid-looking parts with embedded circuits and altered magnetic characteristics. These circuits magnetically detected the motion of the arms that carried and moved the character ball. So non-printing keystrokes, like space, tab, and backspace, and the character that did not rotate the ball, '-', were not detectable. The circuits had a tiny buffer, so would transmit the detected characters as they were being typed. Early models used batteries. Later bugs diverted some of the AC mains power from the typewriter. It is likely that a relay antenna was employed to increase the detection range of the transmitted signals, which used the same frequencies as local television broadcasts. That's really about it. The bugs were largely undetectable without x-raying every single part in the typewriter, which is how they were eventually found.
- wglb 11y agoAh, when your adversary knows more about your stuff than you do.