Report on Syrian Malware
Fascinating report from Citizen Lab on the use of malware in the current Syrian conflict (EFF summary and Wired article).
Entries Tagged "EFF"
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Keeping Track of All the Snowden Documents
As more and more media outlets from all over the world continue to report on the Snowden documents, it’s harder and harder to keep track of what has been released. The EFF, ACLU, and Cryptome are all trying.
None of them is complete, I believe. Please post additions in the comments, and I will do my best to feed the information back to the compilers.
EDITED TO ADD (12/4): Here’s another compilation. And this mind map of the NSA leaks is very comprehensive.
EDITED TO ADD (12/5): Wikipedia also has an exhaustive list.
EDITED TO ADD (12/13): This is also good.
Fingerprinting Burner Phones
In one of the documents recently released by the NSA as a result of an EFF lawsuit, there’s discussion of a specific capability of a call records database to identify disposable “burner” phones.
Let’s consider, then, the very specific data this query tool was designed to return: The times and dates of the first and last call events, but apparently not the times and dates of calls between those endpoints. In other words, this tool is supporting analytic software that only cares when a phone went online, and when it stopped being used. It also gets the total number of calls, and the ratio of unique contacts to calls, but not the specific numbers contacted. Why, exactly, would this limited set of information be useful? And why, in particular, might you want to compare that information across a large number of phones there’s not yet any particular reason to suspect?
One possibility that jumps out at me—and perhaps anyone else who’s a fan of The Wire—is that this is the kind of information you would want if you were trying to identify disposable prepaid “burner” phones being used by a target who routinely cycles through cell phones as a countersurveillance tactic. The number of unique contacts and call/contact ratio would act as a kind of rough fingerprint—you’d assume a phone being used for dedicated clandestine purposes to be fairly consistent on that score—while the first/last call dates help build a timeline: You’re looking for a series of phones that are used for a standard amount of time, and then go dead just as the next phone goes online.
Consider this another illustration of the value of metadata.
I've Joined the EFF Board
I’m now on the board of directors of the EFF.
Government Secrets and the Need for Whistle-blowers
Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That’s everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted—for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners. This “metadata” allows the government to track the movements of everyone during that period, and build a detailed picture of who talks to whom. It’s exactly the same data the Justice Department collected about AP journalists.
The Guardian delivered this revelation after receiving a copy of a secret memo about this—presumably from a whistle-blower. We don’t know if the other phone companies handed data to the NSA too. We don’t know if this was a one-off demand or a continuously renewed demand; the order started a few days after the Boston bombers were captured by police.
We don’t know a lot about how the government spies on us, but we know some things. We know the FBI has issued tens of thousands of ultra-secret National Security Letters to collect all sorts of data on people—we believe on millions of people—and has been abusing them to spy on cloud-computer users. We know it can collect a wide array of personal data from the Internet without a warrant. We also know that the FBI has been intercepting cell-phone data, all but voice content, for the past 20 years without a warrant, and can use the microphone on some powered-off cell phones as a room bug—presumably only with a warrant.
We know that the NSA has many domestic-surveillance and data-mining programs with codenames like Trailblazer, Stellar Wind, and Ragtime—deliberately using different codenames for similar programs to stymie oversight and conceal what’s really going on. We know that the NSA is building an enormous computer facility in Utah to store all this data, as well as faster computer networks to process it all. We know the U.S. Cyber Command employs 4,000 people.
We know that the DHS is also collecting a massive amount of data on people, and that local police departments are running “fusion centers” to collect and analyze this data, and covering up its failures. This is all part of the militarization of the police.
Remember in 2003, when Congress defunded the decidedly creepy Total Information Awareness program? It didn’t die; it just changed names and split into many smaller programs. We know that corporations are doing an enormous amount of spying on behalf of the government: all parts.
We know all of this not because the government is honest and forthcoming, but mostly through three backchannels—inadvertent hints or outright admissions by government officials in hearings and court cases, information gleaned from government documents received under FOIA, and government whistle-blowers.
There’s much more we don’t know, and often what we know is obsolete. We know quite a bit about the NSA’s ECHELON program from a 2000 European investigation, and about the DHS’s plans for Total Information Awareness from 2002, but much less about how these programs have evolved. We can make inferences about the NSA’s Utah facility based on the theoretical amount of data from various sources, the cost of computation, and the power requirements from the facility, but those are rough guesses at best. For a lot of this, we’re completely in the dark.
And that’s wrong.
The U.S. government is on a secrecy binge. It overclassifies more information than ever. And we learn, again and again, that our government regularly classifies things not because they need to be secret, but because their release would be embarrassing.
Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal—or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law—but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, and transparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we’re living in a police state.
We need whistle-blowers.
Leaking information without getting caught is difficult. It’s almost impossible to maintain privacy in the Internet Age. The WikiLeaks platform seems to have been secure—Bradley Manning was caught not because of a technological flaw, but because someone he trusted betrayed him—but the U.S. government seems to have successfully destroyed it as a platform. None of the spin-offs have risen to become viable yet. The New Yorker recently unveiled its Strongbox platform for leaking material, which is still new but looks good. This link contains the best advice on how to leak information to the press via phone, email, or the post office. The National Whistleblowers Center has a page on national-security whistle-blowers and their rights.
Leaking information is also very dangerous. The Obama Administration has embarked on a war on whistle-blowers, pursuing them—both legally and through intimidation—further than any previous administration has done. Mark Klein, Thomas Drake, and William Binney have all been persecuted for exposing technical details of our surveillance state. Bradley Manning has been treated cruelly and inhumanly—and possibly tortured—for his more-indiscriminate leaking of State Department secrets.
The Obama Administration’s actions against the Associated Press, its persecution of Julian Assange, and its unprecedented prosecution of Manning on charges of “aiding the enemy” demonstrate how far it’s willing to go to intimidate whistle-blowers—as well as the journalists who talk to them.
But whistle-blowing is vital, even more broadly than in government spying. It’s necessary for good government, and to protect us from abuse of power.
We need details on the full extent of the FBI’s spying capabilities. We don’t know what information it routinely collects on American citizens, what extra information it collects on those on various watch lists, and what legal justifications it invokes for its actions. We don’t know its plans for future data collection. We don’t know what scandals and illegal actions—either past or present—are currently being covered up.
We also need information about what data the NSA gathers, either domestically or internationally. We don’t know how much it collects surreptitiously, and how much it relies on arrangements with various companies. We don’t know how much it uses password cracking to get at encrypted data, and how much it exploits existing system vulnerabilities. We don’t know whether it deliberately inserts backdoors into systems it wants to monitor, either with or without the permission of the communications-system vendors.
And we need details about the sorts of analysis the organizations perform. We don’t know what they quickly cull at the point of collection, and what they store for later analysis—and how long they store it. We don’t know what sort of database profiling they do, how extensive their CCTV and surveillance-drone analysis is, how much they perform behavioral analysis, or how extensively they trace friends of people on their watch lists.
We don’t know how big the U.S. surveillance apparatus is today, either in terms of money and people or in terms of how many people are monitored or how much data is collected. Modern technology makes it possible to monitor vastly more people—yesterday’s NSA revelations demonstrate that they could easily surveil everyone—than could ever be done manually.
Whistle-blowing is the moral response to immoral activity by those in power. What’s important here are government programs and methods, not data about individuals. I understand I am asking for people to engage in illegal and dangerous behavior. Do it carefully and do it safely, but—and I am talking directly to you, person working on one of these secret and probably illegal programs—do it.
If you see something, say something. There are many people in the U.S. that will appreciate and admire you.
For the rest of us, we can help by protesting this war on whistle-blowers. We need to force our politicians not to punish them—to investigate the abuses and not the messengers—and to ensure that those unjustly persecuted can obtain redress.
Our government is putting its own self-interest ahead of the interests of the country. That needs to change.
This essay originally appeared on the Atlantic.
EDITED TO ADD (6/10): It’s not just phone records. Another secret program, PRISM, gave the NSA access to e-mails and private messages at Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Skype, AOL, and others. And in a separate leak, we now know about the Boundless Informant NSA data mining system.
The leaker for at least some of this is Edward Snowden. I consider him an American hero.
EFF has a great timeline of NSA spying. And this and this contain some excellent speculation about what PRISM could be.
Someone needs to write an essay parsing all of the precisely worded denials. Apple has never heard the word “PRISM,” but could have known of the program under a different name. Google maintained that there is no government “back door,” but left open the possibility that the data could have been just handed over. Obama said that the government isn’t “listening to your telephone calls,” ignoring 1) the meta-data, 2) the fact that computers could be doing all of the listening, and 3) that text-to-speech results in phone calls being read and not listened to. And so on and on and on.
Here are people defending the programs. And here’s someone criticizing my essay.
I’m sure there are lots more things out there that should be read. Please include the links in comments. Not only essays I would agree with; intelligent opinions from the other sides are just as important.
EDITED TO ADD (6/10): Two essays discussing the policy issues.
My original essay is being discussed on Reddit.
EDITED TO ADD (6/11): Three more good articles: “The Irrationality of Giving Up This Much Liberty to Fight Terror,” “If the NSA Trusted Edward Snowden with Our Data, Why Should We Trust the NSA?” and “Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere.”
EDITED TO ADD (6/11): NSA surveillance reimagined as children’s books.
EDITED TO ADD (7/1): This essay has been translated into Russian and French.
EDITED TO ADD (10/2): This essay has also been translated into Finnish.
Identifying People from Mobile Phone Location Data
Turns out that it’s pretty easy:
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Catholic University of Louvain studied 15 months’ worth of anonymised mobile phone records for 1.5 million individuals.
They found from the “mobility traces” – the evident paths of each mobile phone – that only four locations and times were enough to identify a particular user.
“In the 1930s, it was shown that you need 12 points to uniquely identify and characterise a fingerprint,” said the study’s lead author Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye of MIT.
“What we did here is the exact same thing but with mobility traces. The way we move and the behaviour is so unique that four points are enough to identify 95% of people,” he told BBC News.
Here’s the study.
EFF maintains a good page on the issues surrounding location privacy.
Drone Flights Over the US
The EFF has been prying data out of the government and analyzing it.
E-Mail Security in the Wake of Petraeus
I’ve been reading lots of articles discussing how little e-mail and Internet privacy we actually have in the U.S. This is a good one to start with:
The FBI obliged—apparently obtaining subpoenas for Internet Protocol logs, which allowed them to connect the sender’s anonymous Google Mail account to others accessed from the same computers, accounts that belonged to Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell. The bureau could then subpoena guest records from hotels, tracking the WiFi networks, and confirm that they matched Broadwell’s travel history. None of this would have required judicial approval—let alone a Fourth Amendment search warrant based on probable cause.
While we don’t know the investigators’ other methods, the FBI has an impressive arsenal of tools to track Broadwell’s digital footprints—all without a warrant. On a mere showing of “relevance,” they can obtain a court order for cell phone location records, providing a detailed history of her movements, as well as all people she called. Little wonder that law enforcement requests to cell providers have exploded—with a staggering 1.3 million demands for user data just last year, according to major carriers.
An order under this same weak standard could reveal all her e-mail correspondents and Web surfing activity. With the rapid decline of data storage costs, an ever larger treasure trove is routinely retained for ever longer time periods by phone and Internet companies.
Had the FBI chosen to pursue this investigation as a counterintelligence inquiry rather than a cyberstalking case, much of that data could have been obtained without even a subpoena. National Security Letters, secret tools for obtaining sensitive financial and telecommunications records, require only the say-so of an FBI field office chief.
And:
While the details of this investigation that have leaked thus far provide us all a fascinating glimpse into the usually sensitive methods used by FBI agents, this should also serve as a warning, by demonstrating the extent to which the government can pierce the veil of communications anonymity without ever having to obtain a search warrant or other court order from a neutral judge.
The guest lists from hotels, IP login records, as well as the creative request to email providers for “information about other accounts that have logged in from this IP address” are all forms of data that the government can obtain with a subpoena. There is no independent review, no check against abuse, and further, the target of the subpoena will often never learn that the government obtained data (unless charges are filed, or, as in this particular case, government officials eagerly leak details of the investigation to the press). Unfortunately, our existing surveillance laws really only protect the “what” being communicated; the government’s powers to determine “who” communicated remain largely unchecked.
This is good, too.
The EFF tries to explain the relevant laws. Summary: they’re confusing, and they don’t protect us very much.
My favorite quote is from the New York Times:
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the chain of unexpected disclosures was not unusual in computer-centric cases.
“It’s a particular problem with cyberinvestigations —they rapidly become open-ended because there’s such a huge quantity of information available and it’s so easily searchable,” he said, adding, “If the C.I.A. director can get caught, it’s pretty much open season on everyone else.”
And a day later:
“If the director of central intelligence isn’t able to successfully keep his emails private, what chance do I have?” said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-liberties advocacy group.
In more words:
But there’s another, more important lesson to be gleaned from this tale of a biographer run amok. Broadwell’s debacle confirms something that some privacy experts have been warning about for years: Government surveillance of ordinary citizens is now cheaper and easier than ever before. Without needing to go before a judge, the government can gather vast amounts of information about us with minimal expenditure of manpower. We used to be able to count on a certain amount of privacy protection simply because invading our privacy was hard work. That is no longer the case. Our always-on, Internet-connected, cellphone-enabled lives are an open door to Big Brother.
Remember that this problem is bigger than Petraeus. The FBI goes after electronic records all the time:
In Google’s semi-annual transparency report released Tuesday, the company stated that it received 20,938 requests from governments around the world for its users’ private data in the first six months of 2012. Nearly 8,000 of those requests came from the U.S. government, and 7,172 of them were fulfilled to some degree, an increase of 26% from the prior six months, according to Google’s stats.
So what’s the answer? Would they have been safe if they’d used Tor or a regular old VPN? Silent Circle? Something else? This article attempts to give advice; this is the article’s most important caveat:
DON’T MESS UP It is hard to pull off one of these steps, let alone all of them all the time. It takes just one mistake —forgetting to use Tor, leaving your encryption keys where someone can find them, connecting to an airport Wi-Fi just once —to ruin you.
“Robust tools for privacy and anonymity exist, but they are not integrated in a way that makes them easy to use,” Mr. Blaze warned. “We’ve all made the mistake of accidentally hitting ‘Reply All.’ Well, if you’re trying to hide your e-mails or account or I.P. address, there are a thousand other mistakes you can make.”
In the end, Mr. Kaminsky noted, if the F.B.I. is after your e-mails, it will find a way to read them. In that case, any attempt to stand in its way may just lull you into a false sense of security.
Some people think that if something is difficult to do, “it has security benefits, but that’s all fake—everything is logged,” said Mr. Kaminsky. “The reality is if you don’t want something to show up on the front page of The New York Times, then don’t say it.”
The real answer is to rein in the FBI, of course:
If we don’t take steps to rein in the burgeoning surveillance state now, there’s no guarantee we’ll even be aware of the ways in which control is exercised through this information architecture. We will all remain exposed but the extent of our exposure, and the potential damage done to democracy, is likely to remain invisible.
“Hopefully this [case] will be a wake-up call for Congress that the Stored Communications Act is old and busted,” Mr Fakhoury says.
I don’t see any chance of that happening anytime soon.
EDITED TO ADD (12/12): E-mail security might not have mattered.
The Vulnerabilities Market and the Future of Security
Recently, there have been several articles about the new market in zero-day exploits: new and unpatched computer vulnerabilities. It’s not just software companies, who sometimes pay bounties to researchers who alert them of security vulnerabilities so they can fix them. And it’s not only criminal organizations, who pay for vulnerabilities they can exploit. Now there are governments, and companies who sell to governments, who buy vulnerabilities with the intent of keeping them secret so they can exploit them.
This market is larger than most people realize, and it’s becoming even larger. Forbes recently published a price list for zero-day exploits, along with the story of a hacker who received $250K from “a U.S. government contractor” (At first I didn’t believe the story or the price list, but I have been convinced that they both are true.) Forbes published a profile of a company called Vupen, whose business is selling zero-day exploits. Other companies doing this range from startups like Netragard and Endgame to large defense contractors like Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Raytheon.
This is very different than in 2007, when researcher Charlie Miller wrote about his attempts to sell zero-day exploits; and a 2010 survey implied that there wasn’t much money in selling zero days. The market has matured substantially in the past few years.
This new market perturbs the economics of finding security vulnerabilities. And it does so to the detriment of us all.
I’ve long argued that the process of finding vulnerabilities in software systems increases overall security. This is because the economics of vulnerability hunting favored disclosure. As long as the principal gain from finding a vulnerability was notoriety, publicly disclosing vulnerabilities was the only obvious path. In fact, it took years for our industry to move from a norm of full-disclosure—announcing the vulnerability publicly and damn the consequences—to something called “responsible disclosure”: giving the software vendor a head start in fixing the vulnerability. Changing economics is what made the change stick: instead of just hacker notoriety, a successful vulnerability finder could land some lucrative consulting gigs, and being a responsible security researcher helped. But regardless of the motivations, a disclosed vulnerability is one that—at least in most cases—is patched. And a patched vulnerability makes us all more secure.
This is why the new market for vulnerabilities is so dangerous; it results in vulnerabilities remaining secret and unpatched. That it’s even more lucrative than the public vulnerabilities market means that more hackers will choose this path. And unlike the previous reward of notoriety and consulting gigs, it gives software programmers within a company the incentive to deliberately create vulnerabilities in the products they’re working on—and then secretly sell them to some government agency.
No commercial vendors perform the level of code review that would be necessary to detect, and prove mal-intent for, this kind of sabotage.
Even more importantly, the new market for security vulnerabilities results in a variety of government agencies around the world that have a strong interest in those vulnerabilities remaining unpatched. These range from law-enforcement agencies (like the FBI and the German police who are trying to build targeted Internet surveillance tools, to intelligence agencies like the NSA who are trying to build mass Internet surveillance tools, to military organizations who are trying to build cyber-weapons.
All of these agencies have long had to wrestle with the choice of whether to use newly discovered vulnerabilities to protect or to attack. Inside the NSA, this was traditionally known as the “equities issue,” and the debate was between the COMSEC (communications security) side of the NSA and the SIGINT (signals intelligence) side. If they found a flaw in a popular cryptographic algorithm, they could either use that knowledge to fix the algorithm and make everyone’s communications more secure, or they could exploit the flaw to eavesdrop on others—while at the same time allowing even the people they wanted to protect to remain vulnerable. This debate raged through the decades inside the NSA. From what I’ve heard, by 2000, the COMSEC side had largely won, but things flipped completely around after 9/11.
The whole point of disclosing security vulnerabilities is to put pressure on vendors to release more secure software. It’s not just that they patch the vulnerabilities that are made public—the fear of bad press makes them implement more secure software development processes. It’s another economic process; the cost of designing software securely in the first place is less than the cost of the bad press after a vulnerability is announced plus the cost of writing and deploying the patch. I’d be the first to admit that this isn’t perfect—there’s a lot of very poorly written software still out there—but it’s the best incentive we have.
We’ve always expected the NSA, and those like them, to keep the vulnerabilities they discover secret. We have been counting on the public community to find and publicize vulnerabilities, forcing vendors to fix them. With the rise of these new pressures to keep zero-day exploits secret, and to sell them for exploitation, there will be even less incentive on software vendors to ensure the security of their products.
As the incentive for hackers to keep their vulnerabilities secret grows, the incentive for vendors to build secure software shrinks. As a recent EFF essay put it, this is “security for the 1%.” And it makes the rest of us less safe.
This essay previously appeared on Forbes.com.
Edited to add (6/6): Brazillian Portuguese translation here.
EDITED TO ADD (6/12): This presentation makes similar points as my essay.
Protecting Your Privacy at International Borders
The EFF has published a good guide.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.