Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • July 13, 2023 11:19 AM

@ ALL,

Re : Use the standard Luke.

What @Winter forgot to mention is that the Five-Eyes “Finessed the standards” before mobile phones were a thing…

Under the ruse of “Health and Safety” since the earliest days of “Digital Telephony” via the British “General Post Office”(GPO) –later split to be British Telecom and Royal Mail– System-X development that migrated into ISDN and later GSM there has been a requirment “In the Standards” for “operators” to make Digital Phones “go off hook” as an extention for the earlier “listen in” facility of analog “Plain Old Telephone System”(POTS).

Because MI5 who stole the design of a device using RF to “jump the hook switch”[1] realised it would nolonger work with digital… So they had to “change the standards” which was almost trivial to do.

I’ve seen first hand this manipulation of standards, and have mentioned it before… I got the usuall “your imagining”, “your paranoid” and similar you always get. Then the NSA repeatedly over played their hand through NIST… And NIST highly embarrassed was forced to withdraw the standard and remove the NSA’s back-doored Digital Random Bit Generator.

The thing is humans are way to trusting especially hard engineering types. Those in the NSA and other SigInt etc agencies who have worked up the organisation over the bodies of more honourable folk see such trust as just another human weakness to exploite (look up what the acronym MICE is all about).

Such folks will use any crack they can to thrust a knife in as a rung to climb that little bit higher…

[1] Such a device is actually quite trivial to make, the hard part is keeping other RF out of the system. If you’ve ever seen a phone “hook switch” you will see it’s construction is a little odd. It uses “blade contacts” much like those in old style “Post Office”(PO) relays like the PO600 and similar. The down side of such construction is high contact capacitance… Now for those that do not know the effrctive impedence of a capacitor goes down with increasing frequency. So either a carbon granual resistive or moving coil inductive microphone will form a “series circuit” and the microphone will “Amplitude Modulate”(AM) any RF comming in on the phone line with the audio in the room. The hard part is filtering out interfering signals at the “RF Noise Bridge” you use to inject your RF signal and pull off it’s AM signal.

Clive Robinson • July 13, 2023 12:39 PM

@ sterling, ALL,

“Perhaps the bigger question is when the criminals outside of government and law enforcement will use these backdoors.”

They already have if you think “helicopter parents” and “Private Eyes” are criminals…

There have been several Apps/services that not just tracked phones, but also could have “silent calls auto-answered”. It’s known that Private Eyes have used them and they got discussed when Rupert “The Bear faced liar” Murdoch of News International was having his organs inspected by the UK Parliment and later criminal prosecutions of his direct and indirect employees.

But from arrests and convictions we might think that the average criminal does not use “Intelligence” in the “espionage” form.

However there is an assumption under there… It’s known from nearly a life time ago that it was the US Maffia bugging the FBI not the other way around for quite some time… Which is why the Maffia managed to avoid getting arrested by the FBI because “they knew in advance” so the FBI could not make cases that could lead to arrests of the top guys, hence the reliance on “Witness Protection” for the little guys who sold out their bosses. Aledgadly the inventor of the “Harmonica bug” or “Infinity bug”[1] was working for the Maffia.

[1] The original infinity bug used a vibrating reed tone detector and a relay to “latch up” then phone and keep it’s mic active, then drop out when the distant “call in” was dropped. This modern version works slightly differently in that it hust needs the phone line “pair” not the phone,

https://www.talkingelectronics.com/projects/InfinityBug/InfinityBug-P1.html

Note : the ‘secret sauce’ that makes you pay the money, is the “latch-up” which is not shown. If you want a full working circuit then you can find them on the internet or just build your own tone decoder and drop it in (I’ve picked this hobbled version to limmit the odds of it being removed by moderation).

Clive Robinson • July 14, 2023 12:32 AM

@ Wannabe techguy,

It’s complicated, but you have to step back a bit first to answer,

“IF NSA can suck up data from every phone, why can’t France?”

Firstly and most importantly the NSA can not suck up data from every phone, only the ones it has access to…

Thus the question more people should ask is,

“Who gives the NSA Access?”

The answer to which is US corporations via legal requirments, and US Gov Agency blackmail (there are a couple of cases where this latter point has been made clear even to the US public). Also the NSA is known to put “spin” on obscure legislation, the use it to threaten crypto researchers, the best known was via the then little known restriction on arms, sent to the IEEE in a letter from some “wonk at NSA”. Initially it worked, but when challenged by a single researcher the bluf fell apart and officially the NSA disowned the wonk and his letter as “his work only” (very unlikely to be true). What happened to the wonk after that is not exactly clear.

The same sort of blackmail behaviour is open to all sovereign nations, but France has lots of back history on having a real downer on Encryption and Communications. Look into the history of the A5/1 and A5/2 ciphers used for “privacy” in the original European Cellular Phone specifications and later GSM specifications. It probably was the driver to the NSA being behind the appaling “Wired Equivalent Privacy”(WEP) used in the early IEEE standards for WiFi (which the IEEE claimed had not happened, but events subsequent to that strongly suggest otherwise, the same as it did with NIST).

But you also have to consider one point that few do,

“Who watches over the watchers?”

Is the historic question. The SigInt agencies see themselves above not just political but legal control, (via Cicero’s observation of “Silent enim leges inter arma”). In most cases the former is true but the latter is not. To get around this second issue the National SigInt agencies have formed various Super-National coteries[1] of which the Five-Eyes[2] is the first and probably most widely known.

All Western nations of note have laws to prevent their citizens being spied upon by their own spies / SigInt agencies (except France untill a few decades ago). But obviously not foreign citizens, as a result most nations have two surveilance organisations the broader “foreign service” and the more limited “Domestic service”. In the UK that is nominally the SiS (MI6) and MI5 respectively and in the US the CIA and it’s assumed the FBI (though there are questions over that). The solution, the British SiS (MI6) out of Hanslope Park, and GCHQ out of Cheltenham, spied on US citizens for the NSA and CIA, in return the NSA and presumably CIA did the same for GCHQ, SiS, and MI5. And through them some very select parts of the Met Police “Special Branch” who got tasked with getting “Domestic spys for foreign hostile nations into court”, it sounds complex but gives “plausable debiability” and protection of “Methods and Sources” at every step, as well as by the modern name of “Parallel Construction” a method that goes back a long way in history due to the “Gentlemen do not read each others mail” notion of civility and heathens and “The Estates of Man”.

The French however have certainly since before the times of Cardinal Richelieu and even the Italian Machiavelli two centuries befor that, have had an attitude about the Court and Church and their place above all others locking them into “The three estates of man” (that most of Europe had effectively dropped by then). Seeing all others no matter “how noble” as nothing more than thieving banditry and peasant scum to be repressed and exploited (which might account for the Revolution nearly two centuries after and the rise of Napolian and all the troubles that caused not just in Europe but the Americas that gave rise to the 1812 war and the invasion of America by Britain and the formation of Canada as a true nation not a protectorate/collony of Britain and France).

Thus the French model for centuries was to repress the citizens by terroristic activities based on spying and other tactics fronted by unacountable “Guard Labour” behaviours we now ascribe to “Police States”, Tyrannies, and Dictatorships. Which if recent events are anything to go by is still the “on the ground” reality in many parts of France.

So yes France does “spy on it’s citizens and others in their teritories” as standard and passes legislation to enable it. However the obviousness of it sets France apart from much of the rest of Europe… Which in effect brings it into conflict with the European Union it in part founded for it’s own protection, from other European States (politics is never easy 😉

[1] More correctly a “clique” or when used as it is to transgress the law a “cabal” or “unlawful cartel”.

[2] What became the Five-Eyes was the realisation of three people at Bletchly Park during WWII that for a short while Briton had a stronger “intelligence” hand than the US, but importantly that situation would not last, so it was best to make the most of it or “finesse it”[3] whilst Briton could. This gave rise officialy to the two page BRUSA letter that later became UKUSA. What was agreed in the letter was actually quite unimportant it was how it could be leveraged that was. The result was Briton gave the US agencies that later became the NSA and to a lesser extent the CIA access to places that the US did not have. This was via the old colonial now commonwealth nations of Australia, Canada and New Zeland (and other Middle East and other areas of interest like India and Singapore). Why were the NSA interested, well it was because Briton had turned them into the worlds major communications nodes or “choke points”. Arising from the early Victorian Sub-Sea cables through satellite ground stations and modern Sub-Sea cables something like 97% of international traffic goes through them (though this is dropping quite rapidly now). The NSA wanted access as the Cold War developed and that ment going “cap in hand” to the British for quite a few things (see the “Berlin Tunnel” or Operation Gold / StopWatch as one well known example, and Elint from British Aircraft and Submarines and later “boots on the ground” work that the US pulled out of due to the U2 incident Mayday 1960 and coincidental founding of the NRO just under four months later. The NRO is sometimes called “The Son of Rand” as it was a rush job and had virtually no “Federal Employees” primarily to try and stop “turf wars”).

[3] Finesse is a term from the card game “Contract Bridge” for a specific “play” or strategy. Bridge is basically the card game whist with a strong stratigic biding/gambling system slapped on top hence “contract”. Thus it has a very high cognative input and was thus as popular in the general Bletchley population as chess is with mathmaticians and theoretic scientists. The term “To Finesse” is also used by SigInt people because of Bletchly and because of what the strategy is,

“A finesse in bridge is a technique for taking tricks with lower honor cards (jacks, queens, and kings) when your opponents have higher honor cards (queens, kings, and aces). You need to finesse your lower honor cards past your opponents’ big-bully higher honors.”

(From : The Art of the ‘Finesse’ in Bridge, published online by ‘dummies’).

And it’s odds are 50/50 or “so-so” of working… So you can see why the expression started as a short hand term for certain inteligence stratagies in Britain and just stuck… The NSA getting the Dual EC RBG past the NIST standards body was thus a “finesse”, as was WEP with the IEEE. With the combined effort of the Five-Eyes getting the “Silent call” equivalent of a “Harmonica Bug” in the Phone Standards that moved forward into the international ISDN standards, then cellular, then mobile phone standards which have give us the globe spanning GSM networks, on the excuse of “Health and Safety”. An excuse which the US SigInt agencies also used to get a GPS chip in every phone to be used in the US into legislation. Thus by market preasure in all GSM Smart phones world wide and any Smart Pads/Tablets etc with Mobile Connectivity… Also called “The Domino Effect” or “Line your ducks up”. The latter having also made it into “Managment Speak” with the oft useless saying by incompetent managers to juniors of,

“Line your ducks up, double down then, sink your teeth in and tear out a deal.”

Which is perhaps better than the G.D.Awful “Make it so” perloined from “StarTreck Next Generation” in the 1990’s…

Clive Robinson • July 14, 2023 12:44 PM

@ PaulBart, ALL,

“So, democracy is a sham”

No actuall democracy is not a sham.

But have you ever seeb actualk democracy anywhere?

Overly simplifified in a “Democracy” you “Vote on substantive issues” directly.

In the shams we call “democracy” like “representational democracy” you “Vote for a monkey in a suit”.

The thing is the monkey does what “the organ grinder wants” not what “the audiance wants”.

In the US the monkey grinder is “special interests” working through “corporations”.

Untill you get that fully cognativrly you will keep saying the incorrect things such as,

“yet so many on this board want to give away more of their choices (health, money, taxes) to ever larger more totalitarian regimes…because “corporations” are evil and the state loves me.”

Which is realy just silly, because in the US “health care” comes from corporations not the “state” and interestingly for about three times better individual outcomes European States spend way less than half what US Corps charge per person.

It’s why mother and baby mortality rates in the US are worse than some African Nations, and unlike the majority of other Western nations where the average age of death is rising and around 80years, in the US it’s falling twice as fast and is down below 70years in more places than you could name with a map in front of you.

As someone who has lived not just most of their life outside the US and has traveled to many many nations on business and pleasure I can tell you for free in most places in the US it’s realy not what the people who live there –and have been indoctrinated since birth– think it is.

Oh you might want to look up the stats, on US “registered political orientation” and who on average has traveled wider, further and more frequently… Likewise their average age of death and financial circumstances…

I think most of the readers here can take a reasonable guess about you.