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Algebraic Eraser is a public-key key-agreement protocol that’s patented and being pushed by a company for the Internet of Things, primarily because it is efficient on small low-power devices. There’s a new cryptanalytic attack.
This is yet another demonstration of why you should not choose proprietary encryption over public algorithms and protocols. The good stuff is not patented.
News article.
That is, no encryption at all. The Intercept has the story:
Yet news emerging from Paris—as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January—suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted.
European media outlets are reporting that the location of a raid conducted on a suspected safe house Wednesday morning was extracted from a cellphone, apparently belonging to one of the attackers, found in the trash outside the Bataclan concert hall massacre. Le Monde reported that investigators were able to access the data on the phone, including a detailed map of the concert hall and an SMS messaging saying “we’re off; we’re starting.” Police were also able to trace the phone’s movements.
The obvious conclusion:
The reports note that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the “mastermind” of both the Paris attacks and a thwarted Belgium attack ten months ago, failed to use encryption whatsoever (read: existing capabilities stopped the Belgium attacks and could have stopped the Paris attacks, but didn’t). That’s of course not to say batshit religious cults like ISIS don’t use encryption, and won’t do so going forward. Everybody uses encryption. But the point remains that to use a tragedy to vilify encryption, push for surveillance expansion, and pass backdoor laws that will make everybody less safe—is nearly as gruesome as the attacks themselves.
And what is it about this “mastermind” label? Why do we have to make them smarter than they are?
EDITED TO ADD: More information.
EDITED TO ADD: My previous blog post on this.
“Why Johnny Still, Still Can’t Encrypt: Evaluating the Usability of a Modern PGP Client,” by Scott Ruoti, Jeff Andersen, Daniel Zappala, and Kent Seamons.
Abstract: This paper presents the results of a laboratory study involving Mailvelope, a modern PGP client that integrates tightly with existing webmail providers. In our study, we brought in pairs of participants and had them attempt to use Mailvelope to communicate with each other. Our results shown that more than a decade and a half after Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt, modern PGP tools are still unusable for the masses. We finish with a discussion of pain points encountered using Mailvelope, and discuss what might be done to address them in future PGP systems.
I have recently come to the conclusion that e-mail is fundamentally unsecurable. The things we want out of e-mail, and an e-mail system, are not readily compatible with encryption. I advise people who want communications security to not use e-mail, but instead use an encrypted message client like OTR or Signal.
Some of the tricks that ransomware is using to get victims to pay up.
In August, I wrote about the NSA’s plans to move to quantum-resistant algorithms for its own cryptographic needs.
Cryptographers Neal Koblitz and Alfred Menezes just published a long paper speculating as to the government’s real motives for doing this. They range from some new cryptanalysis of ECC to a political need after the DUAL_EC_PRNG disaster—to the stated reason of quantum computing fears.
Read the whole paper. (Feel free to skip over the math if it gets too hard, but keep going until the end.)
EDITED TO ADD (11/15): A commentary and critique of the paper by Matthew Green.
The Internet is abuzz with this blog post and paper, speculating that the NSA is breaking the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol in the wild through massive precomputation.
I wrote about this at length in May when this paper was first made public. (The reason it’s news again is that the paper was just presented at the ACM Computer and Communications Security conference.)
What’s newly being talked about his how this works inside the NSA surveillance architecture. Nicholas Weaver explains:
To decrypt IPsec, a large number of wiretaps monitor for IKE (Internet Key Exchange) handshakes, the protocol that sets up a new IPsec encrypted connection. The handshakes are forwarded to a decryption oracle, a black box system that performs the magic. While this happens, the wiretaps also record all traffic in the associated IPsec connections.
After a period of time, this oracle either returns the private keys or says “i give up”. If the oracle provides the keys, the wiretap decrypts all the stored traffic and continues to decrypt the connection going forward.
[…]
This would also better match the security implications: just the fact that the NSA can decrypt a particular flow is a critical secret. Forwarding a small number of potentially-crackable flows to a central point better matches what is needed to maintain such secrecy.
Thus by performing the decryption in bulk at the wiretaps, complete with hardware acceleration to keep up with the number of encrypted streams, this architecture directly implies that the NSA can break a massive amount of IPsec traffic, a degree of success which implies a cryptanalysis breakthrough.
That last paragraph is Weaver explaining how this attack matches the NSA rhetoric about capabilities in some of their secret documents.
Now that this is out, I’m sure there are a lot of really upset people inside the NSA.
EDITED TO ADD (11/15): How to protect yourself.
The Obama Administration is not pursuing a law that would force computer and communications manufacturers to add backdoors to their products for law enforcement. Sensibly, they concluded that criminals, terrorists, and foreign spies would use that backdoor as well.
Score one for the pro-security side in the Second Crypto War.
It’s certainly not over. The FBI hasn’t given up on an encryption backdoor (or other backdoor access to plaintext) since the early 1990s, and it’s not going to give up now. I expect there will be more pressure on companies, both overt and covert, more insinuations that strong security is somehow responsible for crime and terrorism, and more behind-closed-doors negotiations.
The chip is built on glass:
Shattering the glass is straightforward. When the proper circuit is toggled, a small resistor within the substrate heats up until the glass shatters. According to Corning, it will continue shattering even after the initial break, rendering the entire chip unusable. The demo chip resistor was triggered by a photo diode that switched the circuit when a laser shone upon it. The glass plate quickly shattered into fragments once the laser touches it.
In 1999, Lance Hoffman, David Balenson, and others published a survey of non-US cryptographic products. The point of the survey was to illustrate that there was a robust international market in these products, and that US-only export restrictions on strong encryption did nothing to prevent its adoption and everything to disadvantage US corporations. This was an important contribution during the First Crypto War, and Hoffman testified before a Senate committee on his findings.
I want to redo that survey for 2015.
Here, at the beginning of the Second Crypto War, we again need to understand which encryption products are outside the reach of US regulation (or UK regulation). Are there so many foreign crypto products that any regulation by only one country will be easily circumvented? Or has the industry consolidated around only a few products made by only a few countries, so that effective regulation of strong encryption is possible? What are the possibilities for encrypted communication and data storage? I honestly don’t know the answer—and I think it’s important to find out.
To that end, I am asking for help. Please respond in the comments with the names—and URLs—of non-US encryption software and hardware products. I am only interested in those useful for protecting communications and data storage. I don’t care about encrypting financial transactions, or anything of that sort.
Thank you for your help. And please forward this blog post to anyone else who might help.
EDITED TO ADD: Thinking about it more, I want to compile a list of domestic (U.S.) encryption products as well. Since right now the FBI seems intent on just pressuring the big companies like Apple and Microsoft, and not regulating cryptography in general, knowing what else is out there in the U.S. will be useful.
An unofficial blog post from FTC chief technologist Ashkan Soltani on the virtues of strong end-user device controls.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.