Entries Tagged "CIA"

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WikiLeaks Releases CIA Hacking Tools

WikiLeaks just released a cache of 8,761 classified CIA documents from 2012 to 2016, including details of its offensive Internet operations.

I have not read through any of them yet. If you see something interesting, tell us in the comments.

EDITED TO ADD: There’s a lot in here. Many of the hacking tools are redacted, with the tar files and zip archives replaced with messages like:

::: THIS ARCHIVE FILE IS STILL BEING EXAMINED BY WIKILEAKS. :::

::: IT MAY BE RELEASED IN THE NEAR FUTURE. WHAT FOLLOWS IS :::
::: AN AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED LIST OF ITS CONTENTS: :::

Hopefully we’ll get them eventually. The documents say that the CIA—and other intelligence services—can bypass Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. It seems to be by hacking the end-user devices and grabbing the traffic before and after encryption, not by breaking the encryption.

New York Times article.

EDITED TO ADD: Some details from The Guardian:

According to the documents:

  • CIA hackers targeted smartphones and computers.
  • The Center for Cyber Intelligence is based at the CIA headquarters in Virginia but it has a second covert base in the US consulate in Frankfurt which covers Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
  • A programme called Weeping Angel describes how to attack a Samsung F8000 TV set so that it appears to be off but can still be used for monitoring.

I just noticed this from the WikiLeaks page:

Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

So it sounds like this cache of documents wasn’t taken from the CIA and given to WikiLeaks for publication, but has been passed around the community for a while—and incidentally some part of the cache was passed to WikiLeaks. So there are more documents out there, and others may release them in unredacted form.

Wired article. Slashdot thread. Two articles from the Washington Post.

EDITED TO ADD: This document talks about Comodo version 5.X and version 6.X. Version 6 was released in Feb 2013. Version 7 was released in Apr 2014. This gives us a time window of that page, and the cache in general. (WikiLeaks says that the documents cover 2013 to 2016.)

If these tools are a few years out of date, it’s similar to the NSA tools released by the “Shadow Brokers.” Most of us thought the Shadow Brokers were the Russians, specifically releasing older NSA tools that had diminished value as secrets. Could this be the Russians as well?

EDITED TO ADD: Nicholas Weaver comments.

EDITED TO ADD (3/8): These documents are interesting:

The CIA’s hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a “fingerprint” that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity.

This is analogous to finding the same distinctive knife wound on multiple separate murder victims. The unique wounding style creates suspicion that a single murderer is responsible. As soon one murder in the set is solved then the other murders also find likely attribution.

The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch‘s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.

UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.

This is being spun in the press as the CIA is pretending to be Russia. I’m not convinced that the documents support these allegations. Can someone else look at the documents. I don’t like my conclusion that WikiLeaks is using this document dump as a way to push their own bias.

Posted on March 7, 2017 at 9:08 AM • View Comments

A Comment on the Trump Dossier

Imagine that you are someone in the CIA, concerned about the future of America. You have this Russian dossier on Donald Trump, which you have some evidence might be true. The smartest thing you can do is to leak it to the public. By doing so, you are eliminating any leverage Russia has over Trump and probably reducing the effectiveness of any other blackmail material any government might have on Trump. I believe you do this regardless of whether you ultimately believe the document’s findings or not, and regardless of whether you support or oppose Trump. It’s simple game-theory.

This document is particularly safe to release. Because it’s not a classified report of the CIA, leaking it is not a crime. And you release it now, before Trump becomes president, because doing so afterwards becomes much more dangerous.

MODERATION NOTE: Please keep comments focused on this particular point. More general comments, especially uncivil comments, will be deleted.

Posted on January 13, 2017 at 11:58 AM •

CIA Director John Brennan Pretends Foreign Cryptography Doesn't Exist

Last week, CIA director John Brennan told a Senate committee that there wasn’t any strong cryptography outside of the US.

CIA director John Brennan told US senators they shouldn’t worry about mandatory encryption backdoors hurting American businesses.

And that’s because, according to Brennan, there’s no one else for people to turn to: if they don’t want to use US-based technology because it’s been forced to use weakened cryptography, they’ll be out of luck because non-American solutions are simply “theoretical.”

Here’s the quote:

“US companies dominate the international market as far as encryption technologies that are available through these various apps, and I think we will continue to dominate them,” Brennan said.

“So although you are right that there’s the theoretical ability of foreign companies to have those encryption capabilities available to others, I do believe that this country and its private sector are integral to addressing these issues.”

Is he actually lying there? I suppose it is possible that he’s simply that ignorant. Strong foreign cryptography hasn’t been “theoretical” for decades. And earlier this year, I released a survey of foreign cryptography products, listing 546 non-theoretical products from 54 countries outside the US.

I know Sen. Wyden knows about my survey. I hope he asks Brennan about it.

Slashdot thread. HackerNews thread.

EDITED TO ADD (6/22): Herb Lin comments.

Posted on June 20, 2016 at 12:24 PM • View Comments

Underage Hacker Is behind Attacks against US Government

It’s a teenager:

British police have arrested a teenager who allegedly was behind a series of audacious—and, for senior U.S. national security officials, embarrassing—hacks targeting personal accounts or top brass at the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security Department, the White House and other federal agencies, according to U.S. officials briefed on the investigation.

[…]

The prominent victims have included CIA Director John Brennan, whose personal AOL account was breached, the then FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, and James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence.

This week, the latest target became apparent when personal details of 20,000 FBI employees surfaced online.

By then a team of some of the FBI’s sharpest cyber experts had homed in on their suspect, officials said. They were shocked to find that a “16-year-old computer nerd” had done so well to cover his tracks, a U.S. official said. a

Not really surprised, but underscores how diffuse the threat is.

Posted on February 18, 2016 at 6:02 AM • View Comments

The Rise of Political Doxing

Last week, CIA director John O. Brennan became the latest victim of what’s become a popular way to embarrass and harass people on the Internet. A hacker allegedly broke into his AOL account and published e-mails and documents found inside, many of them personal and sensitive.

It’s called doxing­—sometimes doxxing­—from the word “documents.” It emerged in the 1990s as a hacker revenge tactic, and has since been as a tool to harass and intimidate people, primarily women, on the Internet. Someone would threaten a woman with physical harm, or try to incite others to harm her, and publish her personal information as a way of saying “I know a lot about you­—like where you live and work.” Victims of doxing talk about the fear that this tactic instills. It’s very effective, by which I mean that it’s horrible.

Brennan’s doxing was slightly different. Here, the attacker had a more political motive. He wasn’t out to intimidate Brennan; he simply wanted to embarrass him. His personal papers were dumped indiscriminately, fodder for an eager press. This doxing was a political act, and we’re seeing this kind of thing more and more.

Last year, the government of North Korea did this to Sony. Hackers the FBI believes were working for North Korea broke into the company’s networks, stole a huge amount of corporate data, and published it. This included unreleased movies, financial information, company plans, and personal e-mails. The reputational damage to the company was enormous; the company estimated the cost at $41 million.

In July, hackers stole and published sensitive documents from the cyberweapons arms manufacturer Hacking Team. That same month, different hackers did the same thing to the infidelity website Ashley Madison. In 2014, hackers broke into the iCloud accounts of over 100 celebrities and published personal photographs, most containing some nudity. In 2013, Edward Snowden doxed the NSA.

These aren’t the first instances of politically motivated doxing, but there’s a clear trend. As people realize what an effective attack this can be, and how an individual can use the tactic to do considerable damage to powerful people and institutions, we’re going to see a lot more of it.

On the Internet, attack is easier than defense. We’re living in a world where a sufficiently skilled and motivated attacker will circumvent network security. Even worse, most Internet security assumes it needs to defend against an opportunistic attacker who will attack the weakest network in order to get­—for example­—a pile of credit card numbers. The notion of a targeted attacker, who wants Sony or Ashley Madison or John Brennan because of what they stand for, is still new. And it’s even harder to defend against.

What this means is that we’re going to see more political doxing in the future, against both people and institutions. It’s going to be a factor in elections. It’s going to be a factor in anti-corporate activism. More people will find their personal information exposed to the world: politicians, corporate executives, celebrities, divisive and outspoken individuals.

Of course they won’t all be doxed, but some of them will. Some of them will be doxed directly, like Brennan. Some of them will be inadvertent victims of a doxing attack aimed at a company where their information is stored, like those celebrities with iPhone accounts and every customer of Ashley Madison. Regardless of the method, lots of people will have to face the publication of personal correspondence, documents, and information they would rather be private.

In the end, doxing is a tactic that the powerless can effectively use against the powerful. It can be used for whistleblowing. It can be used as a vehicle for social change. And it can be used to embarrass, harass, and intimidate. Its popularity will rise and fall on this effectiveness, especially in a world where prosecuting the doxers is so difficult.

There’s no good solution for this right now. We all have the right to privacy, and we should be free from doxing. But we’re not, and those of us who are in the public eye have no choice but to rethink our online data shadows.

This essay previously appeared on Vice Motherboard.

EDITED TO ADD: Slashdot thread.

Posted on November 2, 2015 at 6:47 AM • View Comments

Can the NSA Break Microsoft's BitLocker?

The Intercept has a new story on the CIA’s—yes, the CIA, not the NSA—efforts to break encryption. These are from the Snowden documents, and talk about a conference called the Trusted Computing Base Jamboree. There are some interesting documents associated with the article, but not a lot of hard information.

There’s a paragraph about Microsoft’s BitLocker, the encryption system used to protect MS Windows computers:

Also presented at the Jamboree were successes in the targeting of Microsoft’s disk encryption technology, and the TPM chips that are used to store its encryption keys. Researchers at the CIA conference in 2010 boasted about the ability to extract the encryption keys used by BitLocker and thus decrypt private data stored on the computer. Because the TPM chip is used to protect the system from untrusted software, attacking it could allow the covert installation of malware onto the computer, which could be used to access otherwise encrypted communications and files of consumers. Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

This implies that the US intelligence community—I’m guessing the NSA here—can break BitLocker. The source document, though, is much less definitive about it.

Power analysis, a side-channel attack, can be used against secure devices to non-invasively extract protected cryptographic information such as implementation details or secret keys. We have employed a number of publically known attacks against the RSA cryptography found in TPMs from five different manufacturers. We will discuss the details of these attacks and provide insight into how private TPM key information can be obtained with power analysis. In addition to conventional wired power analysis, we will present results for extracting the key by measuring electromagnetic signals emanating from the TPM while it remains on the motherboard. We will also describe and present results for an entirely new unpublished attack against a Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) implementation of RSA that will yield private key information in a single trace.

The ability to obtain a private TPM key not only provides access to TPM-encrypted data, but also enables us to circumvent the root-of-trust system by modifying expected digest values in sealed data. We will describe a case study in which modifications to Microsoft’s Bitlocker encrypted metadata prevents software-level detection of changes to the BIOS.

Differential power analysis is a powerful cryptanalytic attack. Basically, it examines a chip’s power consumption while it performs encryption and decryption operations and uses that information to recover the key. What’s important here is that this is an attack to extract key information from a chip while it is running. If the chip is powered down, or if it doesn’t have the key inside, there’s no attack.

I don’t take this to mean that the NSA can take a BitLocker-encrypted hard drive and recover the key. I do take it to mean that the NSA can perform a bunch of clever hacks on a BitLocker-encrypted hard drive while it is running. So I don’t think this means that BitLocker is broken.

But who knows? We do know that the FBI pressured Microsoft to add a backdoor to BitLocker in 2005. I believe that was unsuccessful.

More than that, we don’t know.

EDITED TO ADD (3/12): Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft removed the Elephant Diffuser from BitLocker. I see no reason to remove it other than to make the encryption weaker.

Posted on March 10, 2015 at 2:34 PM • View Comments

Leaked CIA Documents

I haven’t seen much press mention about the leaked CIA documents that have appeared on WikiLeaks this month.

There are three:

These documents are more general than what we’ve seen from Snowden, but—assuming they’re real—these are still national-security leaks. You’d think there would be more news about this, and more reaction from the US government.

Posted on December 29, 2014 at 6:22 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.