encryption Archives - Page 23 of 56

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Page 23 of 56

Companies Handing Source Code Over to Governments

ZDNet has an article on US government pressure on software companies to hand over copies of their source code. There’s no details because no one is talking on the record, but I also believe that this is happening.

When asked, a spokesperson for the Justice Dept. acknowledged that the department has demanded source code and private encryption keys before.

These orders would probably come from the FISA Court:

These orders are so highly classified that simply acknowledging an order’s existence is illegal, even a company’s chief executive or members of the board may not be told. Only those who are necessary to execute the order would know, and would be subject to the same secrecy provisions.

Given that Federighi heads the division, it would be almost impossible to keep from him the existence of a FISA order demanding the company’s source code.

It would not be the first time that the US government has reportedly used proprietary code and technology from American companies to further its surveillance efforts.

Top secret NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reported in German magazine Der Spiegel in late-2013, have suggested some hardware and software makers were compelled to hand over source code to assist in government surveillance.

The NSA’s catalog of implants and software backdoors suggest that some companies, including Dell, Huawei, and Juniper—which was publicly linked to an “unauthorized” backdoor—had their servers and firewall products targeted and attacked through various exploits. Other exploits were able to infiltrate firmware of hard drives manufactured by Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, and Samsung.

Last year, antivirus maker and security firm Kaspersky later found evidence that the NSA had obtained source code from a number of prominent hard drive makers—a claim the NSA denied—to quietly install software used to eavesdrop on the majority of the world’s computers.

“There is zero chance that someone could rewrite the [hard drive] operating system using public information,” said one of the researchers.

The problem is, of course, is that any company forced by the US to hand over their source code would also be forbidden from talking about it.

It’s the sort of thing China does:

For most computing and networking equipment, the chart says, source code must be turned over to Chinese officials. But many foreign companies would be unwilling to disclose code because of concerns about intellectual property, security and, in some cases, United States export law.

The chart also calls for companies that want to sell to banks to set up research and development centers in China, obtain permits for workers servicing technology equipment and build “ports” to allow Chinese officials to manage and monitor data processed by their hardware.

The draft antiterrorism law pushes even further, calling for companies to store all data related to Chinese users on servers in China, create methods for monitoring content for terror threats and provide keys to encryption to public security authorities.

Slashdot thread.

Posted on March 18, 2016 at 11:27 AM • View Comments

New NIST Encryption Guidelines

NIST has published a draft of their new standard for encryption use: “NIST Special Publication 800-175B, Guideline for Using Cryptographic Standards in the Federal Government: Cryptographic Mechanisms.” In it, the Escrowed Encryption Standard from the 1990s, FIPS-185, is no longer certified. And Skipjack, NSA’s symmetric algorithm from the same period, will no longer be certified.

I see nothing sinister about decertifying Skipjack. In a world of faster computers and post-quantum thinking, an 80-bit key and 64-bit block no longer cut it.

ETA: My essays from 1998 on Skipjack and KEA.

Posted on March 17, 2016 at 9:54 AM • View Comments

The Importance of Strong Encryption to Security

Encryption keeps you safe. Encryption protects your financial details and passwords when you bank online. It protects your cell phone conversations from eavesdroppers. If you encrypt your laptop—and I hope you do—it protects your data if your computer is stolen. It protects our money and our privacy.

Encryption protects the identity of dissidents all over the world. It’s a vital tool to allow journalists to communicate securely with their sources, NGOs to protect their work in repressive countries, and lawyers to communicate privately with their clients. It protects our vital infrastructure: our communications network, the power grid and everything else. And as we move to the Internet of Things with its cars and thermostats and medical devices, all of which can destroy life and property if hacked and misused, encryption will become even more critical to our security.

Security is more than encryption, of course. But encryption is a critical component of security. You use strong encryption every day, and our Internet-laced world would be a far riskier place if you didn’t.

Strong encryption means unbreakable encryption. Any weakness in encryption will be exploited—by hackers, by criminals and by foreign governments. Many of the hacks that make the news can be attributed to weak or—even worse—nonexistent encryption.

The FBI wants the ability to bypass encryption in the course of criminal investigations. This is known as a “backdoor,” because it’s a way at the encrypted information that bypasses the normal encryption mechanisms. I am sympathetic to such claims, but as a technologist I can tell you that there is no way to give the FBI that capability without weakening the encryption against all adversaries. This is crucial to understand. I can’t build an access technology that only works with proper legal authorization, or only for people with a particular citizenship or the proper morality. The technology just doesn’t work that way.

If a backdoor exists, then anyone can exploit it. All it takes is knowledge of the backdoor and the capability to exploit it. And while it might temporarily be a secret, it’s a fragile secret. Backdoors are how everyone attacks computer systems.

This means that if the FBI can eavesdrop on your conversations or get into your computers without your consent, so can cybercriminals. So can the Chinese. So can terrorists. You might not care if the Chinese government is inside your computer, but lots of dissidents do. As do the many Americans who use computers to administer our critical infrastructure. Backdoors weaken us against all sorts of threats.

Either we build encryption systems to keep everyone secure, or we build them to leave everybody vulnerable.

Even a highly sophisticated backdoor that could only be exploited by nations like the United States and China today will leave us vulnerable to cybercriminals tomorrow. That’s just the way technology works: things become easier, cheaper, more widely accessible. Give the FBI the ability to hack into a cell phone today, and tomorrow you’ll hear reports that a criminal group used that same ability to hack into our power grid.

The FBI paints this as a trade-off between security and privacy. It’s not. It’s a trade-off between more security and less security. Our national security needs strong encryption. I wish I could give the good guys the access they want without also giving the bad guys access, but I can’t. If the FBI gets its way and forces companies to weaken encryption, all of us—our data, our networks, our infrastructure, our society—will be at risk.

This essay previously appeared in the New York Times “Room for Debate” blog. It’s something I seem to need to say again and again.

Posted on February 25, 2016 at 6:40 AM • View Comments

Practical TEMPEST Attack

Four researchers have demonstrated a TEMPEST attack against a laptop, recovering its keys by listening to its electrical emanations. The cost for the attack hardware was about $3,000.

News article:

To test the hack, the researchers first sent the target a specific ciphertext—in other words, an encrypted message.

“During the decryption of the chosen ciphertext, we measure the EM leakage of the target laptop, focusing on a narrow frequency band,” the paper reads. The signal is then processed, and “a clean trace is produced which reveals information about the operands used in the elliptic curve cryptography,” it continues, which in turn “is used in order to reveal the secret key.”

The equipment used included an antenna, amplifiers, a software-defined radio, and a laptop. This process was being carried out through a 15cm thick wall, reinforced with metal studs, according to the paper.

The researchers obtained the secret key after observing 66 decryption processes, each lasting around 0.05 seconds. “This yields a total measurement time of about 3.3 sec,” the paper reads. It’s important to note that when the researchers say that the secret key was obtained in “seconds,” that’s the total measurement time, and not necessarily how long it would take for the attack to actually be carried out. A real world attacker would still need to factor in other things, such as the target reliably decrypting the sent ciphertext, because observing that process is naturally required for the attack to be successful.

For half a century this has been a nation-state-level espionage technique. The cost is continually falling.

Posted on February 23, 2016 at 5:49 AM • View Comments

Decrypting an iPhone for the FBI

Earlier this week, a federal magistrate ordered Apple to assist the FBI in hacking into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple will fight this order in court.

The policy implications are complicated. The FBI wants to set a precedent that tech companies will assist law enforcement in breaking their users’ security, and the technology community is afraid that the precedent will limit what sorts of security features it can offer customers. The FBI sees this as a privacy vs. security debate, while the tech community sees it as a security vs. surveillance debate.

The technology considerations are more straightforward, and shine a light on the policy questions.

The iPhone 5c in question is encrypted. This means that someone without the key cannot get at the data. This is a good security feature. Your phone is a very intimate device. It is likely that you use it for private text conversations, and that it’s connected to your bank accounts. Location data reveals where you’ve been, and correlating multiple phones reveals who you associate with. Encryption protects your phone if it’s stolen by criminals. Encryption protects the phones of dissidents around the world if they’re taken by local police. It protects all the data on your phone, and the apps that increasingly control the world around you.

This encryption depends on the user choosing a secure password, of course. If you had an older iPhone, you probably just used the default four-digit password. That’s only 10,000 possible passwords, making it pretty easy to guess. If the user enabled the more-secure alphanumeric password, that means a harder-to-guess password.

Apple added two more security features on the iPhone. First, a phone could be configured to erase the data after too many incorrect password guesses. And it enforced a delay between password guesses. This delay isn’t really noticeable by the user if you type the wrong password and then have to retype the correct password, but it’s a large barrier for anyone trying to guess password after password in a brute-force attempt to break into the phone.

But that iPhone has a security flaw. While the data is encrypted, the software controlling the phone is not. This means that someone can create a hacked version of the software and install it on the phone without the consent of the phone’s owner and without knowing the encryption key. This is what the FBI and now the court is demanding Apple do: It wants Apple to rewrite the phone’s software to make it possible to guess possible passwords quickly and automatically.

The FBI’s demands are specific to one phone, which might make its request seem reasonable if you don’t consider the technological implications: Authorities have the phone in their lawful possession, and they only need help seeing what’s on it in case it can tell them something about how the San Bernardino shooters operated. But the hacked software the court and the FBI wants Apple to provide would be general. It would work on any phone of the same model. It has to.

Make no mistake; this is what a backdoor looks like. This is an existing vulnerability in iPhone security that could be exploited by anyone.

There’s nothing preventing the FBI from writing that hacked software itself, aside from budget and manpower issues. There’s every reason to believe, in fact, that such hacked software has been written by intelligence organizations around the world. Have the Chinese, for instance, written a hacked Apple operating system that records conversations and automatically forwards them to police? They would need to have stolen Apple’s code-signing key so that the phone would recognize the hacked as valid, but governments have done that in the past with other keys and other companies. We simply have no idea who already has this capability.

And while this sort of attack might be limited to state actors today, remember that attacks always get easier. Technology broadly spreads capabilities, and what was hard yesterday becomes easy tomorrow. Today’s top-secret NSA programs become tomorrow’s PhD theses and the next day’s hacker tools. Soon this flaw will be exploitable by cybercriminals to steal your financial data. Everyone with an iPhone is at risk, regardless of what the FBI demands Apple do

What the FBI wants to do would make us less secure, even though it’s in the name of keeping us safe from harm. Powerful governments, democratic and totalitarian alike, want access to user data for both law enforcement and social control. We cannot build a backdoor that only works for a particular type of government, or only in the presence of a particular court order.

Either everyone gets security or no one does. Either everyone gets access or no one does. The current case is about a single iPhone 5c, but the precedent it sets will apply to all smartphones, computers, cars and everything the Internet of Things promises. The danger is that the court’s demands will pave the way to the FBI forcing Apple and others to reduce the security levels of their smart phones and computers, as well as the security of cars, medical devices, homes, and everything else that will soon be computerized. The FBI may be targeting the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, but its actions imperil us all.

This essay previously appeared in the Washington Post

The original essay contained a major error.

I wrote: “This is why Apple fixed this security flaw in 2014. Apple’s iOS 8.0 and its phones with an A7 or later processor protect the phone’s software as well as the data. If you have a newer iPhone, you are not vulnerable to this attack. You are more secure – from the government of whatever country you’re living in, from cybercriminals and from hackers.” Also: “We are all more secure now that Apple has closed that vulnerability.”

That was based on a misunderstanding of the security changes Apple made in what is known as the “Secure Enclave.” It turns out that all iPhones have this security vulnerability: all can have their software updated without knowing the password. The updated code has to be signed with Apple’s key, of course, which adds a major difficulty to the attack.

Dan Guido writes:

If the device lacks a Secure Enclave, then a single firmware update to iOS will be sufficient to disable passcode delays and auto erase. If the device does contain a Secure Enclave, then two firmware updates, one to iOS and one to the Secure Enclave, are required to disable these security features. The end result in either case is the same. After modification, the device is able to guess passcodes at the fastest speed the hardware supports.

The recovered iPhone is a model 5C. The iPhone 5C lacks TouchID and, therefore, lacks a Secure Enclave. The Secure Enclave is not a concern. Nearly all of the passcode protections are implemented in software by the iOS operating system and are replaceable by a single firmware update.

EDITED TO ADD (2/22): Lots more on my previous blog post on the topic.

How to set a longer iPhone password and thwart this kind of attack. Comey on the issue. And a secret memo describes the FBI’s broader strategy to weaken security.

Orin Kerr’s thoughts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

EDITED TO ADD (2/22): Tom Cook’s letter to his employees, and an FAQ. How CALEA relates to all this. Here’s what’s not available in the iCloud backup. The FBI told the county to change the password on the phone—that’s why they can’t get in. What the FBI needs is technical expertise, not back doors. And it’s not just this iPhone; the FBI wants Apple to break into lots of them. What China asks of tech companies—not that this is a country we should particularly want to model. Former NSA Director Michael Hayden on the case. There is a quite a bit of detail about the Apple efforts to assist the FBI in the legal motion the Department of Justice filed. Two good essays. Jennifer Granick’s comments.

In my essay, I talk about other countries developing this capability with Apple’s knowledge or consent. Making it work requires stealing a copy of Apple’s code-signing key, something that has been done by the authors of Stuxnet (probably the US) and Flame (probably Russia) in the past.

Posted on February 22, 2016 at 6:58 AM • View Comments

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.