Federal Judge Orders Defendant to Decrypt Laptop
A U.S. federal judge has ordered a defendant to decrypt her laptop.
EDITED TO ADD (2/14): The ruling. And a good analysis.
Entries Tagged "encryption"
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"Going Dark" vs. a "Golden Age of Surveillance"
It’s a policy debate that’s been going on since the crypto wars of the early 1990s. The FBI, NSA, and other agencies continue to claim they’re losing their ability to engage in surveillance: that it’s “going dark.” Whether the cause of the problem is encrypted e-mail, digital telephony, or Skype, the bad guys use it to communicate, so we need to pass laws like CALEA to force these services to be made insecure, so that the government can eavesdrop.
The counter-argument is the “Golden Age of Surveillance”—that the massive increase of online data and Internet communications systems gives the government a far greater ability to eavesdrop on our lives. They can get your e-mail from Google, regardless of whether you use encryption. They can install an eavesdropping program on your computer, regardless of whether you use Skype. They can monitor your Facebook conversations, and learn thing that just weren’t online a decade ago. Today we all carry devices that tract our locations 24/7: our cell phones.
In this essay, CDT fellows (and law professors) challenge the “going dark” metaphor and make the case for “the golden age of surveillance.” Yes, wiretapping is harder; but so many other types of surveillance are easier.
A simple test can help the reader decide between the “going dark” and “golden age of surveillance” hypotheses. Suppose the agencies had a choice of a 1990-era package or a 2011-era package. The first package would include the wiretap authorities as they existed pre-encryption, but would lack the new techniques for location tracking, confederate identification, access to multiple databases, and data mining. The second package would match current capabilities: some encryption-related obstacles, but increased use of wiretaps, as well as the capabilities for location tracking, confederate tracking and data mining. The second package is clearly superior—the new surveillance tools assist a vast range of investigations, whereas wiretaps apply only to a small subset of key investigations. The new tools are used far more frequently and provide granular data to assist investigators.
A longer and more detailed version of the same argument can be found in “Encryption and Globalization,” forthcoming in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review.
In a related story, there’s a relatively new WikiLeaks data dump of documents related to government surveillance products.
Multiple Protocol Attacks
In 1997, I wrote about something called a chosen-protocol attack, where an attacker can use one protocol to break another. Here’s an example of the same thing in the real world: two different parking garages that mask different digits of credit cards on their receipts. Find two from the same car, and you can reconstruct the entire number.
I have to admit this puzzles me, because I thought there was a standard for masking credit card numbers. I only ever see all digits except the final four masked.
GCHQ Hacking Contest
GCHQ is holding a hacking contest to drum up new recruits.
EDITED TO ADD (12/6): The contest has been cracked, but only because the administrators didn’t hide the solution page from search-engine spiders.
Full-Disk Encryption Works
According to researchers, full-disk encryption is hampering police forensics.
The authors of the report suggest there are some things law enforcement can do, but they all must happen prior to a drive being buttoned up by encryption. Specifically, they say that law enforcement should stop turning computers off to bring them to another location for study, doing so only causes the need for a password to be entered to read the encrypted data. Also, in some cases, doing so causes the data to be automatically destroyed. Fortunately, there are some tools forensics experts can use to gather data if it sits untouched, such as copying everything in memory to a separate disk. The team also suggests that law enforcement look first to see if the drive has been encrypted before scanning it with their own software, as doing so will likely result in a lot of wasted time.
Paper, behind a paywall.
Paul Kocher
Really nice article on crypotographer Paul Kocher and his company, Cryptography Research, Inc.
Twofish Mentioned in Thriller Novel
I’ve been told that the Twofish encryption algorithm is mentioned in the book Abuse of Power, in the first paragraph of Chapter 3. Did the terrorists use it? Did our hero break it? I am unlikely to read it; can someone scan the page for me.
EDITED TO ADD (10/25): Google Books has it:
The line was picked up after three rings. The cell phones were encrypted using a Twofish algorithm and a 4096-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange.
No one would be listening in.
Official Malware from the German Police
The Chaos Computer Club has disassembled and analyzed the Trojan used by the German police for legal intercept. In its default mode, it takes regular screenshots of the active window and sends it to the police. It encrypts data in AES Electronic Codebook mode with—are you ready?—a fixed key across all versions. There’s no authentication built in, so it’s easy to spoof. It sends data to a command-and-control server in the U.S., which is almost certainly against German law. There’s code to allow the controller to install additional software onto the target machine, but that’s not authenticated either, so it would be easy to fool the Trojan into installing anything.
Detailed analysis in German. F-Secure has announced it will treat the Trojan as malware. I hope all the other anti-virus companies will do the same.
EDITED TO ADD (10/12): Another story. And some good information on the malware. Germany’s Justice Minister is calling for an investigation.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.