Schneier on Security

Roger • February 1, 2006 4:49 AM

It’s interesting alright, but if true[1] it actually seems to be quite badly designed. In particular:
* for its described capabilities, it is absolutely enormous and ridiculously heavy. Look at the video of the alleged agent picking it up. He struggles to lift it. What’s he supposed to do, stagger back to the embassy lugging an enormous boulder under his arm?
* the inclusion of the “door” (unless it was added by the FSB?) is idiocy. The exterior should be seamless, so that anyone examining the exterior can find nothing odd without smashing it to bits. If it does need repairs, just smash the casing to bits and later cast a new one.
* the supposed range is 25 metres which, we are told, is to make it difficult to intercept. But it also means the agent and handlers had to go within 25 metres of a particular spot, in a park, every time they wished to communicate. A pattern which was, in fact, spotted and led to their downfall. It should either have enough range to give a bit more flexibility in use, or there should be multiple sites active at once, or the sites should be mobile.
* Disguising it as a rock basically forces them to leave it in an open area — thus making it harder for the agent to approach it unnoticed, and also maximising the interception range.
* If they were in fact a lot smaller, perhaps cheaper, and had seamless exteriors, you could seed an area with dozens of them and never bother coming back to replace a defective one or change the batteries. Just leave it there for someone to unwittingly dispose of later. For example, just drop it in a rubbish bin near the agent’s bus stop, and make sure you come by for the upload before the garbage collectors remove it. (Or else have an excuse for wandering around a rubbish tip with a PDA!) Then you could also have a variety of disguises, and thus be able to leave them in any location the agent reports he could frequent more inconspicuously.
* A key point is people. Presumably the FSB shadow as many as possible of the embassy staff, so there is also a risk they will notice a “legal” agent dropping the device. If your illegal is then the only other person who regularly frequents that spot, he will soon be caught. So the device must be left in an area frequented by many people, and able to remain there undisturbed long enough to complete at least one data exchange. “Many” is defined to some degree by how long you leave it there, i.e. if you want to retrieve the data within an hour or so you’d better leave it at a train station, for weekly pickup a swimming pool or theatre might do, for monthly you might get away with a cafe or bar.
* One little trick to consider is vertical range, especially with wooden floors. So far as radio is concerned 25 metres straight up is the same as 25 m horizontally, but for humans 25 m horizontally is “nearby” whereas 25 m is quite a long way up. (People often claim their Class 2 Bluetooth stuff is OK because it only has a range of 10 metres which is entirely within the office, until you point out that with wooden floors that includes as much as 3 storeys above and 3 storeys below.) Once again, the rock disguise was their limitation here.
* the two biggest risks are that the agent be found with suspicious equipment, or that the handler be shadowed to the drop site and observed deploying the “letter box”. By making the letter box a massive great lumping rock, and then having its RF protocol (allegedly) some kind of special burst transmission mode, it effectively achieves the worst of both worlds.
* Finally, just as with Tolkachev, the fieldcraft training given to the (unnamed, alleged) agent appears to have been non-existent, and his handlers hardly any better. For example, it seems that everyone involved knew that the rock was the “letter box”, and directly interacted with it when it misbehaved. By compartmentalising deployment/recovery of the device, and giving the agent and handlers only the location where to perform uploads and downloads, the process would have been a lot more effective.

1. When this story first broke, most people in the West probably thought, “Ho hum, of course everyone spies on everyone else. Pity for the poor Russian they caught, though” and went back to their morning coffee. However, an increasing number of people are noting that there are quite a few holes in the story, such as:

• the alleged cost of the “spy rock” (supposedly cost ten million pounds!!) is completely ridiculous;
• the things which are supposedly batteries are absolutely massive for a device of such low power. People are already getting 3 months out of Class 2 Bluetooth devices powered by a pair of AA lithium batteries. This looks like about 5 D cells, should be good for approximately 5 years!
• the Russian government has apparently decided not to take any action against the alleged spies, even though most of them don’t even have diplomatic immunity!
• the secret video tape doesn’t actually show any illegal activity;
• people have noted that the supporting documentation allegedly seized from the NGOs is not in the correct format; and
• the rock shown on TV has an access panel which opens up beautifully to enable the electronic contents to be shown on TV, yet doesn’t actually provide any access for battery changes or repairs. It appears, in fact, to be made as a display window!