Entries Tagged "encryption"

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Judge Demands that Apple Backdoor an iPhone

A judge has ordered that Apple bypass iPhone security in order for the FBI to attempt a brute-force password attack on an iPhone 5c used by one of the San Bernardino killers. Apple is refusing.

The order is pretty specific technically. This implies to me that what the FBI is asking for is technically possible, and even that Apple assisted in the wording so that the case could be about the legal issues and not the technical ones.

From Apple’s statement about its refusal:

Some would argue that building a backdoor for just one iPhone is a simple, clean-cut solution. But it ignores both the basics of digital security and the significance of what the government is demanding in this case.

In today’s digital world, the “key” to an encrypted system is a piece of information that unlocks the data, and it is only as secure as the protections around it. Once the information is known, or a way to bypass the code is revealed, the encryption can be defeated by anyone with that knowledge.

The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that’s simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks ­ from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.

The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers ­ including tens of millions of American citizens ­ from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.

We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack. For years, cryptologists and national security experts have been warning against weakening encryption. Doing so would hurt only the well-meaning and law-abiding citizens who rely on companies like Apple to protect their data. Criminals and bad actors will still encrypt, using tools that are readily available to them.

Congressman Ted Lieu comments.

Here’s an interesting essay about why Tim Cook and Apple are such champions for encryption and privacy.

Today I walked by a television showing CNN. The sound was off, but I saw an aerial scene which I presume was from San Bernardino, and the words “Apple privacy vs. national security.” If that’s the framing, we lose. I would have preferred to see “National security vs. FBI access.”

Slashdot thread.

EDITED TO ADD (2/18): Good analysis of Apple’s case. Interesting debate. Nicholas Weaver’s comments. And commentary from some other planet.

EDITED TO ADD (2/19): Ben Adida comments:

What’s probably happening is that the FBI is using this as a test case for the general principle that they should be able to compel tech companies to assist in police investigations. And that’s pretty smart, because it’s a pretty good test case: Apple obviously wants to help prevent terrorist attacks, so they’re left to argue the slippery slope argument in the face of an FBI investigation of a known terrorist. Well done, FBI, well done.

And Julian Sanchez’s comments. His conclusion:

These, then, are the high stakes of Apple’s resistance to the FBI’s order: not whether the federal government can read one dead terrorism suspect’s phone, but whether technology companies can be conscripted to undermine global trust in our computing devices. That’s a staggeringly high price to pay for any investigation.

A New York Times editorial.

Also, two questions: One, what do we know about Apple’s assistance in the past, and why this one is different? Two, has anyone speculated on how much this will cost Apple? The FBI is demanding that Apple give them free engineering work. What’s the value of that work?

EDITED TO ADD (2/20): Jonathan Zdziarski writes on the differences between the FBI compelling someone to provide a service versus build a tool, and why the latter will 1) be difficult and expensive, 2) will get out into the wild, and 3) set a dangerous precedent.

This answers my first question, above:

For years, the government could come to Apple with a subpoena and a phone, and have the manufacturer provide a disk image of the device. This largely worked because Apple didn’t have to hack into their phones to do this. Up until iOS 8, the encryption Apple chose to use in their design was easily reversible when you had code execution on the phone (which Apple does). So all through iOS 7, Apple only needed to insert the key into the safe and provide FBI with a copy of the data.

EFF wrote a good technical explainer on the case. My only complaint is with the last section. I have heard directly from Apple that this technique still works on current model phones using the current iOS version.

I am still stunned by how good a case the FBI chose to push this. They have all the sympathy in the media that they could hope for.

EDITED TO ADD (2/20): Tim Cook as privacy advocate. How the back door works on modern iPhones. Why the average American should care. The grugq on what this all means.

EDITED TO ADD (2/22): I wrote an op ed for the Washington Post.

Posted on February 17, 2016 at 2:15 PM • View Comments

Worldwide Encryption Products Survey

Today I released my worldwide survey of encryption products.

The findings of this survey identified 619 entities that sell encryption products. Of those 412, or two-thirds, are outside the U.S.-calling into question the efficacy of any US mandates forcing backdoors for law-enforcement access. It also showed that anyone who wants to avoid US surveillance has over 567 competing products to choose from. These foreign products offer a wide variety of secure applications­—voice encryption, text message encryption, file encryption, network-traffic encryption, anonymous currency­—providing the same levels of security as US products do today.

Details:

  • There are at least 865 hardware or software products incorporating encryption from 55 different countries. This includes 546 encryption products from outside the US, representing two-thirds of the total.
  • The most common non-US country for encryption products is Germany, with 112 products. This is followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Sweden, in that order.
  • The five most common countries for encryption products­—including the US­—account for two-thirds of the total. But smaller countries like Algeria, Argentina, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, Chile, Cyprus, Estonia, Iraq, Malaysia, St. Kitts and Nevis, Tanzania, and Thailand each produce at least one encryption product.
  • Of the 546 foreign encryption products we found, 56% are available for sale and 44% are free. 66% are proprietary, and 34% are open source. Some for-sale products also have a free version.
  • At least 587 entities­—primarily companies—­either sell or give away encryption products. Of those, 374, or about two-thirds, are outside the US.
  • Of the 546 foreign encryption products, 47 are file encryption products, 68 e-mail encryption products, 104 message encryption products, 35 voice encryption products, and 61 virtual private networking products.

The report is here, here, and here. The data, in Excel form, is here.

Press articles are starting to come in. (Here are the previous blog posts on the effort.)

I know the database is incomplete, and I know there are errors. I welcome both additions and corrections, and will be releasing a 1.1 version of this survey in a few weeks.

EDITED TO ADD (2/13): More news.

Posted on February 11, 2016 at 11:05 AM • View Comments

AT&T Does Not Care about Your Privacy

AT&T’s CEO believes that the company should not offer robust security to its customers:

But tech company leaders aren’t all joining the fight against the deliberate weakening of encryption. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said this week that AT&T, Apple, and other tech companies shouldn’t have any say in the debate.

“I don’t think it is Silicon Valley’s decision to make about whether encryption is the right thing to do,” Stephenson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I understand [Apple CEO] Tim Cook’s decision, but I don’t think it’s his decision to make.”

His position is extreme in its disregard for the privacy of his customers. If he doesn’t believe that companies should have any say in what levels of privacy they offer their customers, you can be sure that AT&T won’t offer any robust privacy or security to you.

Does he have any clue what an anti-market position this is? He says that it is not the business of Silicon Valley companies to offer product features that might annoy the government. The “debate” about what features commercial products should have should happen elsewhere—presumably within the government. I thought we all agreed that state-controlled economies just don’t work.

My guess is that he doesn’t realize what an extreme position he’s taking by saying that product design isn’t the decision of companies to make. My guess is that AT&T is so deep in bed with the NSA and FBI that he’s just saying things he believes justify his position.

Here’s the original, behind a paywall.

Posted on February 10, 2016 at 1:59 PM • View Comments

Paper on the Going Dark Debate

I am pleased to have been a part of this report, part of the Berkman Center’s Berklett Cybersecurity project:

Don’t Panic: Making Progress on the “Going Dark” Debate

From the report:

In this report, we question whether the “going dark” metaphor accurately describes the state of affairs. Are we really headed to a future in which our ability to effectively surveil criminals and bad actors is impossible? We think not. The question we explore is the significance of this lack of access to communications for legitimate government interests. We argue that communications in the future will neither be eclipsed into darkness nor illuminated without shadow.

In short our findings are:

  • End-to-end encryption and other technological architectures for obscuring user data are unlikely to be adopted ubiquitously by companies, because the majority of businesses that provide communications services rely on access to user data for revenue streams and product functionality, including user data recovery should a password be forgotten.
  • Software ecosystems tend to be fragmented. In order for encryption to become both widespread and comprehensive, far more coordination and standardization than currently exists would be required.
  • Networked sensors and the Internet of Things are projected to grow substantially, and this has the potential to drastically change surveillance. The still images, video, and audio captured by these devices may enable real-time intercept and recording with after-the-fact access. Thus an inability to monitor an encrypted channel could be mitigated by the ability to monitor from afar a person through a different channel.
  • Metadata is not encrypted, and the vast majority is likely to remain so. This is data that needs to stay unencrypted in order for the systems to operate: location data from cell phones and other devices, telephone calling records, header information in e-mail, and so on. This information provides an enormous amount of surveillance data that was unavailable before these systems became widespread.
  • These trends raise novel questions about how we will protect individual privacy and security in the future. Today’s debate is important, but for all its efforts to take account of technological trends, it is largely taking place without reference to the full picture.

New York Times coverage. Lots more news coverage here. Slashdot thread. BoingBoing post.

EDITED TO ADD (2/8): Eleven news articles: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven.

Posted on February 2, 2016 at 2:20 PM • View Comments

UK Government Promoting Backdoor-Enabled Voice Encryption Protocol

The UK government is pushing something called the MIKEY-SAKKE protocol to secure voice. Basically, it’s an identity-based system that necessarily requires a trusted key-distribution center. So key escrow is inherently built in, and there’s no perfect forward secrecy. The only reasonable explanation for designing a protocol with these properties is third-party eavesdropping.

Steven Murdoch has explained the details. The upshot:

The design of MIKEY-SAKKE is motivated by the desire to allow undetectable and unauditable mass surveillance, which may be a requirement in exceptional scenarios such as within government departments processing classified information. However, in the vast majority of cases the properties that MIKEY-SAKKE offers are actively harmful for security. It creates a vulnerable single point of failure, which would require huge effort, skill and cost to secure ­ requiring resource beyond the capability of most companies. Better options for voice encryption exist today, though they are not perfect either. In particular, more work is needed on providing scalable and usable protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, and protection of metadata for contact discovery and calls. More broadly, designers of protocols and systems need to appreciate the ethical consequences of their actions in terms of the political and power structures which naturally follow from their use. MIKEY-SAKKE is the latest example to raise questions over the policy of many governments, including the UK, to put intelligence agencies in charge of protecting companies and individuals from spying, given the conflict of interest it creates.

And GCHQ previously rejected a more secure standard, MIKEY-IBAKE, because it didn’t allow undetectable spying.

Both the NSA and GCHQ repeatedly choose surveillance over security. We need to reject that decision.

Posted on January 22, 2016 at 2:23 PM • View Comments

El Chapo's Opsec

I’ve already written about Sean Penn’s opsec while communicating with El Chapo. Here’s the technique of mirroring, explained:

El chapo then switched to a complex system of using BBM (Blackberry’s Instant Messaging) and Proxies. The way it worked was if you needed to contact The Boss, you would send a BBM text to an intermediary (who would spend his days at a public place with Wi-Fi) this intermediary (or “mirror”) would then transcribe the text to an I-Pad and then send that over a Wi-Fi network (not cellular networks which were monitored constantly by law enforcement). This WiFi text was then sent to another cut-out who would finally transcribe the message into a Blackberry BBM text and transmit it to Guzman. Although Guzman continued to use his Blackberry, it was almost impossible to analyze the traffic because it now only communicated with one other device. This “mirror” system is difficult to crack because the intermediaries or proxies, can constantly change their location by moving to new WiFi spots.

This article claims he was caught because of a large food order:

After construction was complete, the safehouse was quiet. Until 7 January 2016, when a car arrives carrying unknown passengers. Security forces suspected that this was Guzman. There was one final indicator that someone important enough to require an entourage was inside. A white van went off, at midnight, to fetch enough tacos to feed a large group of people. The police raided the house 4 hours later.

Here’s more detail about El Chapo’s opsec at the time of his previous capture.

EDITED TO ADD (2/11): More on his opsec.

Posted on January 21, 2016 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

France Rejects Backdoors in Encryption Products

For the right reasons, too:

Axelle Lemaire, the Euro nation’s digital affairs minister, shot down the amendment during the committee stage of the forthcoming omnibus digital bill, saying it would be counterproductive and would leave personal data unprotected.

“Recent events show how the fact of introducing faults deliberately at the request—sometimes even without knowing—the intelligence agencies has an effect that is harming the whole community,” she said according to Numerama.

“Even if the intention [to empower the police] is laudable, it also opens the door to the players who have less laudable intentions, not to mention the potential for economic damage to the credibility of companies planning these flaws. You are right to fuel the debate, but this is not the right solution according to the Government’s opinion.”

France joins the Netherlands on this issue.

And Apple’s Tim Cook is going after the Obama administration on the issue.

EDITED TO ADD (1/20): In related news, Congress will introduce a bill to establish a commission to study the issue. This is what kicking the can down the road looks like.

Posted on January 20, 2016 at 5:02 AM • View Comments

Sean Penn's Opsec

This article talks about the opsec used by Sean Penn surrounding his meeting with El Chapo.

Security experts say there aren’t enough public details to fully analyze Penn’s operational security (opsec). But they described the paragraph above as “incomprehensible” and “gibberish.” Let’s try to break it down:

  • Penn describes using “TracPhones,” by which he likely means TracFones, which are cheap phones that take calling cards so they’re not linked to a credit card or account. They’re often called burners, but you don’t actually throw it in the trash after a call; instead you might swap out the SIM card or use different calling cards for different people. Hollywood loves these! Katie Holmes reportedly used one to plan her divorce from Tom Cruise. They’re a reasonable security measure, but it still creates phone records that live with, and can be requested from, cell phone carriers.
  • Penn says he “mirror[ed] through Blackphones,” which are relatively expensive phones sold by Silent Circle that offer a more secure operating system than a typical off-the-shelf phone. It runs Internet through a VPN (to shield the user’s IP address and encrypt their Web traffic) and end-to-end encrypts calls and messages sent to other Blackphones. Unlike with the TracFone, Penn would have a credit card tied to the account on this phone. It’s unclear what Penn means when he says he “mirrored” through the phone; the phrase “mirrored” typically means to duplicate something. As he wrote it, it sounds like he duplicated messages on the secure Blackphone that were being sent some other, potentially less secure, way, which would be dumb, if true. “I’m not sure what he means.” said Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke via email. “It’s a strange term and most likely he doesn’t know what he is saying.”
  • Penn says he used “anonymous” email addresses and that he and his companions accessed messages left as drafts in a shared email account. That likely means the emails were stored unencrypted, a bad security practice. If he were sharing the account with a person using an IP address that was the target of an investigation, i.e. any IP address associated with El Chapo’s crew, then all messages shared this way would be monitored. For the record, that did not work out very well for former CIA director David Petraeus, who used draft messages to communicate with his mistress and got busted when her IP address was targeted in an online harassment investigation.
  • Elsewhere in the article, Penn says Guzman corresponded with Mexican actress Kate del Castillo via BBMs (Blackberry messages). Those only have unique end-to-end encryption if a user has opted for BBM Protected. Law enforcement has been able to intercept BBMs in the past. And Mexican officials have told the media that they were monitoring del Castillo for months, following a meeting she had last summer with El Chapo’s lawyers, before she had reached out to Penn. Law enforcement even reportedly got photos of Penn’s arrival at the airport in Mexico.
  • In the most impressive operational, if not personal, security on display, Sean Penn says that when he traveled to Mexico, he left all of his electronics in Los Angeles, knowing that El Chapo’s crew would force him to leave them behind.

There has been lots of speculation about whether this was enough, or whether Mexican officials tracked El Chapo down because of his meeting with Penn.

Posted on January 14, 2016 at 6:32 AM • View Comments

Michael Hayden and the Dutch Government Are against Crypto Backdoors

Last week, former NSA Director Michael Hayden made a very strong argument against deliberately weakening security products by adding backdoors:

Americans’ safety is best served by the highest level of technology possible, and that the country’s intelligence agencies have figured out ways to get around encryption.

“Before any civil libertarians want to come up to me afterwards and get my autograph,” he explained at a Tuesday panel on national security hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, “let me tell you how we got around it: Bulk data and metadata [collection].”

Encryption is “a law enforcement issue more than an intelligence issue,” Hayden argued, “because, frankly, intelligence gets to break all sorts of rules, to cheat, to use other paths.”

[…]

“I don’t think it’s a winning hand to attempt to legislate against technological progress,” Hayden said.

[…]

“It’s a combination of technology and business,” Hayden said. “Creating a door for the government to enter, at the technological level, creates a very bad business decision on the parts of these companies because that is by definition weaker encryption than would otherwise be available … Both of those realities are true.”

This isn’t new, and is yet another example of the split between the law-enforcement and intelligence communities on this issue. What is new is Hayden saying, effectively: Hey FBI, you guys are idiots for trying to get back doors.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Dutch government has come out against backdoors in security products, and in favor of strong encryption.

Meanwhile, I have been hearing rumors that “serious” US legislation mandating backdoors is about to be introduced. These rumors are pervasive, but without details.

Posted on January 12, 2016 at 1:22 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.