Entries Tagged "FBI"

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More about the NSA's Tailored Access Operations Unit

Der Spiegel has a good article on the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit: basically, its hackers.

“Getting the ungettable” is the NSA’s own description of its duties. “It is not about the quantity produced but the quality of intelligence that is important,” one former TAO chief wrote, describing her work in a document. The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit head stating that TAO has contributed “some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen.” The unit, it goes on, has “access to our very hardest targets.”

Defining the future of her unit at the time, she wrote that TAO “needs to continue to grow and must lay the foundation for integrated Computer Network Operations,” and that it must “support Computer Network Attacks as an integrated part of military operations.” To succeed in this, she wrote, TAO would have to acquire “pervasive, persistent access on the global network.” An internal description of TAO’s responsibilities makes clear that aggressive attacks are an explicit part of the unit’s tasks. In other words, the NSA’s hackers have been given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries—nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.

[…]

Certainly, few if any other divisions within the agency are growing as quickly as TAO. There are now TAO units in Wahiawa, Hawaii; Fort Gordon, Georgia; at the NSA’s outpost at Buckley Air Force Base, near Denver, Colorado; at its headquarters in Fort Meade; and, of course, in San Antonio.

The article also has more details on how QUANTUM—particularly, QUANTUMINSERT—works.

Until just a few years ago, NSA agents relied on the same methods employed by cyber criminals to conduct these implants on computers. They sent targeted attack emails disguised as spam containing links directing users to virus-infected websites. With sufficient knowledge of an Internet browser’s security holes—Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, for example, is especially popular with the NSA hackers—all that is needed to plant NSA malware on a person’s computer is for that individual to open a website that has been specially crafted to compromise the user’s computer. Spamming has one key drawback though: It doesn’t work very often.

Nevertheless, TAO has dramatically improved the tools at its disposal. It maintains a sophisticated toolbox known internally by the name “QUANTUMTHEORY.” “Certain QUANTUM missions have a success rate of as high as 80%, where spam is less than 1%,” one internal NSA presentation states.

A comprehensive internal presentation titled “QUANTUM CAPABILITIES,” which SPIEGEL has viewed, lists virtually every popular Internet service provider as a target, including Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and YouTube. “NSA QUANTUM has the greatest success against Yahoo, Facebook and static IP addresses,” it states. The presentation also notes that the NSA has been unable to employ this method to target users of Google services. Apparently, that can only be done by Britain’s GCHQ intelligence service, which has acquired QUANTUM tools from the NSA.

A favored tool of intelligence service hackers is “QUANTUMINSERT.”

[…]

Once TAO teams have gathered sufficient data on their targets’ habits, they can shift into attack mode, programming the QUANTUM systems to perform this work in a largely automated way. If a data packet featuring the email address or cookie of a target passes through a cable or router monitored by the NSA, the system sounds the alarm. It determines what website the target person is trying to access and then activates one of the intelligence service’s covert servers, known by the codename FOXACID.

This NSA server coerces the user into connecting to NSA covert systems rather than the intended sites. In the case of Belgacom engineers, instead of reaching the LinkedIn page they were actually trying to visit, they were also directed to FOXACID servers housed on NSA networks. Undetected by the user, the manipulated page transferred malware already custom tailored to match security holes on the target person’s computer.

The technique can literally be a race between servers, one that is described in internal intelligence agency jargon with phrases like: “Wait for client to initiate new connection,” “Shoot!” and “Hope to beat server-to-client response.” Like any competition, at times the covert network’s surveillance tools are “too slow to win the race.” Often enough, though, they are effective. Implants with QUANTUMINSERT, especially when used in conjunction with LinkedIn, now have a success rate of over 50 percent, according to one internal document.

Another article discusses the various tools TAO has at its disposal.

A document viewed by SPIEGEL resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry—including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell.

[…]

In the case of Juniper, the name of this particular digital lock pick is “FEEDTROUGH.” This malware burrows into Juniper firewalls and makes it possible to smuggle other NSA programs into mainframe computers. Thanks to FEEDTROUGH, these implants can, by design, even survive “across reboots and software upgrades.” In this way, US government spies can secure themselves a permanent presence in computer networks. The catalog states that FEEDTROUGH “has been deployed on many target platforms.”

[…]

Another program attacks the firmware in hard drives manufactured by Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung, all of which, with the exception of the latter, are American companies. Here, too, it appears the US intelligence agency is compromising the technology and products of American companies.

[…]

There is no information in the documents seen by SPIEGEL to suggest that the companies whose products are mentioned in the catalog provided any support to the NSA or even had any knowledge of the intelligence solutions.

The German version of the article had a couple of pages from the 50-page catalog of tools; they’re now on Cryptome. Leaksource has the whole TOP SECRET catalog; there’s a lot of really specific information here about individual NSA TAO ANT devices. (We don’t know what “ANT” stands for. Der Spiegel speculates that it “stands for Advanced or Access Network Technology.”) For example:

(TS//SI//REL) SOUFFLETROUGH is a BIOS persistence implant for Juniper SSG 500 and SSG 300 series firewalls. It persists DNT’s BANANAGLEE software implant. SOUFFLETROUGH also has an advanced persistent back-door capability.

And NIGHTSTAND:

(TS//SI//REL) An active 802.11 wireless exploitation and injection tool for payload/exploit delivery into otherwise denied target space. NIGHTSTAND is typically used in operations where wired access to the target is not possible.

NIGHTSTAND can work from as far away as eight miles, and “the attack is undetectable by the user.”

One more:

(TS//SI//REL) DROPOUTJEEP is a software implant for Apple iPhone that utilizes modular mission applications to provide specific SIGNIT functionality. This functionality includes the ability to remotely push/pull files from the device, SMS retrieval, contact list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell tower location, etc. Command, control, and data exfiltration can occur over SMS messaging or a GPRS data connection. All communications with the implant will be covert and encrypted.

(TS//SI//REL) The initial release of DROPOUTJEEP will focus on installing the implant via close access methods. A remote installation capabilitiy will be pursued for a future release.

There’s lots more in the source document. And note that this catalog is from 2008; presumably, TAO’s capabilities have improved significantly in the past five years.

And—back to the first article—TAO can install many of the hardware implants when a target orders new equipment through the mail:

If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called “load stations,” agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.

These minor disruptions in the parcel shipping business rank among the “most productive operations” conducted by the NSA hackers, one top secret document relates in enthusiastic terms. This method, the presentation continues, allows TAO to obtain access to networks “around the world.”

They can install the software implants using techniques like QUANTUM and FOXACID.

Related is this list of NSA attack tools. And here is another article on TAO from October.

Remember, this is not just about the NSA. The NSA shares these tools with the FBI’s black bag teams for domestic surveillance, and presumably with the CIA and DEA as well. Other countries are going to have similar bags of tricks, depending on their sophistication and budgets. And today’s secret NSA programs are tomorrow’s PhD theses, and the next day’s criminal hacking tools. Even if you trust the NSA to only spy on “enemies,” consider this an advance warning of what we have to secure ourselves against in the future.

I’m really happy to see Jacob Appelbaum’s byline on the Der Spiegel stories; it’s good to have someone of his technical ability reading and understanding the documents.

Slashdot thread. Hacker News thread. MetaFilter thread. Ars Technica article. Wired article. Article on Appelbaum’s talk at 30c3.

EDITED TO ADD: Here’s Appelbaum’s talk. And three BoingBoing posts.

Posted on December 31, 2013 at 7:31 AM • View Comments

Tor User Identified by FBI

Eldo Kim sent an e-mail bomb threat to Harvard so he could skip a final exam. (It’s just a coincidence that I was on the Harvard campus that day.) Even though he used an anonymous account and Tor, the FBI identified him. Reading the criminal complaint, it seems that the FBI got itself a list of Harvard users that accessed the Tor network, and went through them one by one to find the one who sent the threat.

This is one of the problems of using a rare security tool. The very thing that gives you plausible deniability also makes you the most likely suspect. The FBI didn’t have to break Tor; they just used conventional police mechanisms to get Kim to confess.

Tor didn’t break; Kim did.

Posted on December 18, 2013 at 9:59 AM • View Comments

A Template for Reporting Government Surveillance News Stories

This is from 2006—I blogged it here—but it’s even more true today.

Under a top secret program initiated by the Bush Administration after the Sept. 11 attacks, the [name of agency (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.)] have been gathering a vast database of [type of records] involving United States citizens.

“This program is a vital tool in the fight against terrorism,” [Bush Administration official] said. “Without it, we would be dangerously unsafe, and the terrorists would have probably killed you and every other American citizen.” The Bush Administration stated that the revelation of this program has severely compromised national security.

We’ve changed administrations—we’ve changed political parties—but nothing has changed.

Posted on November 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM • View Comments

Defending Against Crypto Backdoors

We already know the NSA wants to eavesdrop on the Internet. It has secret agreements with telcos to get direct access to bulk Internet traffic. It has massive systems like TUMULT, TURMOIL, and TURBULENCE to sift through it all. And it can identify ciphertext—encrypted information—and figure out which programs could have created it.

But what the NSA wants is to be able to read that encrypted information in as close to real-time as possible. It wants backdoors, just like the cybercriminals and less benevolent governments do.

And we have to figure out how to make it harder for them, or anyone else, to insert those backdoors.

How the NSA Gets Its Backdoors

The FBI tried to get backdoor access embedded in an AT&T secure telephone system in the mid-1990s. The Clipper Chip included something called a LEAF: a Law Enforcement Access Field. It was the key used to encrypt the phone conversation, itself encrypted in a special key known to the FBI, and it was transmitted along with the phone conversation. An FBI eavesdropper could intercept the LEAF and decrypt it, then use the data to eavesdrop on the phone call.

But the Clipper Chip faced severe backlash, and became defunct a few years after being announced.

Having lost that public battle, the NSA decided to get its backdoors through subterfuge: by asking nicely, pressuring, threatening, bribing, or mandating through secret order. The general name for this program is BULLRUN.

Defending against these attacks is difficult. We know from subliminal channel and kleptography research that it’s pretty much impossible to guarantee that a complex piece of software isn’t leaking secret information. We know from Ken Thompson’s famous talk on “trusting trust” (first delivered in the ACM Turing Award Lectures) that you can never be totally sure if there’s a security flaw in your software.

Since BULLRUN became public last month, the security community has been examining security flaws discovered over the past several years, looking for signs of deliberate tampering. The Debian random number flaw was probably not deliberate, but the 2003 Linux security vulnerability probably was. The DUAL_EC_DRBG random number generator may or may not have been a backdoor. The SSL 2.0 flaw was probably an honest mistake. The GSM A5/1 encryption algorithm was almost certainly deliberately weakened. All the common RSA moduli out there in the wild: we don’t know. Microsoft’s _NSAKEY looks like a smoking gun, but honestly, we don’t know.

How the NSA Designs Backdoors

While a separate program that sends our data to some IP address somewhere is certainly how any hacker—from the lowliest script kiddie up to the NSA—spies on our computers, it’s too labor-intensive to work in the general case.

For government eavesdroppers like the NSA, subtlety is critical. In particular, three characteristics are important:

  • Low discoverability. The less the backdoor affects the normal operations of the program, the better. Ideally, it shouldn’t affect functionality at all. The smaller the backdoor is, the better. Ideally, it should just look like normal functional code. As a blatant example, an email encryption backdoor that appends a plaintext copy to the encrypted copy is much less desirable than a backdoor that reuses most of the key bits in a public IV (initialization vector).
  • High deniability. If discovered, the backdoor should look like a mistake. It could be a single opcode change. Or maybe a “mistyped” constant. Or “accidentally” reusing a single-use key multiple times. This is the main reason I am skeptical about _NSAKEY as a deliberate backdoor, and why so many people don’t believe the DUAL_EC_DRBG backdoor is real: they’re both too obvious.
  • Minimal conspiracy. The more people who know about the backdoor, the more likely the secret is to get out. So any good backdoor should be known to very few people. That’s why the recently described potential vulnerability in Intel’s random number generator worries me so much; one person could make this change during mask generation, and no one else would know.

These characteristics imply several things:

  • A closed-source system is safer to subvert, because an open-source system comes with a greater risk of that subversion being discovered. On the other hand, a big open-source system with a lot of developers and sloppy version control is easier to subvert.
  • If a software system only has to interoperate with itself, then it is easier to subvert. For example, a closed VPN encryption system only has to interoperate with other instances of that same proprietary system. This is easier to subvert than an industry-wide VPN standard that has to interoperate with equipment from other vendors.
  • A commercial software system is easier to subvert, because the profit motive provides a strong incentive for the company to go along with the NSA’s requests.
  • Protocols developed by large open standards bodies are harder to influence, because a lot of eyes are paying attention. Systems designed by closed standards bodies are easier to influence, especially if the people involved in the standards don’t really understand security.
  • Systems that send seemingly random information in the clear are easier to subvert. One of the most effective ways of subverting a system is by leaking key information—recall the LEAF—and modifying random nonces or header information is the easiest way to do that.

Design Strategies for Defending against Backdoors

With these principles in mind, we can list design strategies. None of them is foolproof, but they are all useful. I’m sure there’s more; this list isn’t meant to be exhaustive, nor the final word on the topic. It’s simply a starting place for discussion. But it won’t work unless customers start demanding software with this sort of transparency.

  • Vendors should make their encryption code public, including the protocol specifications. This will allow others to examine the code for vulnerabilities. It’s true we won’t know for sure if the code we’re seeing is the code that’s actually used in the application, but surreptitious substitution is hard to do, forces the company to outright lie, and increases the number of people required for the conspiracy to work.
  • The community should create independent compatible versions of encryption systems, to verify they are operating properly. I envision companies paying for these independent versions, and universities accepting this sort of work as good practice for their students. And yes, I know this can be very hard in practice.
  • There should be no master secrets. These are just too vulnerable.
  • All random number generators should conform to published and accepted standards. Breaking the random number generator is the easiest difficult-to-detect method of subverting an encryption system. A corollary: we need better published and accepted RNG standards.
  • Encryption protocols should be designed so as not to leak any random information. Nonces should be considered part of the key or public predictable counters if possible. Again, the goal is to make it harder to subtly leak key bits in this information.

This is a hard problem. We don’t have any technical controls that protect users from the authors of their software.

And the current state of software makes the problem even harder: Modern apps chatter endlessly on the Internet, providing noise and cover for covert communications. Feature bloat provides a greater “attack surface” for anyone wanting to install a backdoor.

In general, what we need is assurance: methodologies for ensuring that a piece of software does what it’s supposed to do and nothing more. Unfortunately, we’re terrible at this. Even worse, there’s not a lot of practical research in this area—and it’s hurting us badly right now.

Yes, we need legal prohibitions against the NSA trying to subvert authors and deliberately weaken cryptography. But this isn’t just about the NSA, and legal controls won’t protect against those who don’t follow the law and ignore international agreements. We need to make their job harder by increasing their risk of discovery. Against a risk-averse adversary, it might be good enough.

This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.

EDITED TO ADD: I am looking for other examples of known or plausible instances of intentional vulnerabilities for a paper I am writing on this topic. If you can think of an example, please post a description and reference in the comments below. Please explain why you think the vulnerability could be intentional. Thank you.

Posted on October 22, 2013 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

Silk Road Author Arrested Due to Bad Operational Security

Details of how the FBI found the administrator of Silk Road, a popular black market e-commerce site.

Despite the elaborate technical underpinnings, however, the complaint portrays Ulbricht as a drug lord who made rookie mistakes. In an October 11, 2011 posting to a Bitcoin Talk forum, for instance, a user called “altoid” advertised he was looking for an “IT pro in the Bitcoin community” to work in a venture-backed startup. The post directed applicants to send responses to “rossulbricht at gmail dot com.” It came about nine months after two previous posts—also made by a user, “altoid,” to shroomery.org and Bitcoin Talk—were among the first to advertise a hidden Tor service that operated as a kind of “anonymous amazon.com.” Both of the earlier posts referenced silkroad420.wordpress.com.

If altoid’s solicitation for a Bitcoin-conversant IT Pro wasn’t enough to make Ulbricht a person of interest in the FBI’s ongoing probe, other digital bread crumbs were sure to arouse agents’ suspicions. The Google+ profile tied to the rossulbricht@gmail.com address included a list of favorite videos originating from mises.org, a website of the “Mises Institute.” The site billed itself as the “world center of the Austrian School of economics” and contained a user profile for one Ross Ulbricht. Several Dread Pirate Roberts postings on Silk Road cited the “Austrian Economic theory” and the works of Mises Institute economists Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard in providing the guiding principles for the illicit drug market.

The clues didn’t stop there. In early March 2012 someone created an account on StackOverflow with the username Ross Ulbricht and the rossulbricht@gmail.com address, the criminal complaint alleged. On March 16 at 8:39 in the morning, the account was used to post a message titled “How can I connect to a Tor hidden service using curl in php?” Less than one minute later, the account was updated to change the user name from Ross Ulbricht to “frosty.” Several weeks later, the account was again updated, this time to replace the Ulbricht gmail address with frosty@frosty.com. In July 2013, a forensic analysis of the hard drives used to run one of the Silk Road servers revealed a PHP script based on curl that contained code that was identical to that included in the Stack Overflow discussion, the complaint alleged.

We already know that it is next to impossible to maintain privacy and anonymity against a well-funded government adversary.

EDITED TO ADD (10/8): Another article.

Posted on October 7, 2013 at 1:35 PM • View Comments

More on the NSA Commandeering the Internet

If there’s any confirmation that the U.S. government has commandeered the Internet for worldwide surveillance, it is what happened with Lavabit earlier this month.

Lavabit is—well, was—an e-mail service that offered more privacy than the typical large-Internet-corporation services that most of us use. It was a small company, owned and operated by Ladar Levison, and it was popular among the tech-savvy. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden among its half-million users.

Last month, Levison reportedly received an order—probably a National Security Letter—to allow the NSA to eavesdrop on everyone’s e-mail accounts on Lavabit. Rather than “become complicit in crimes against the American people,” he turned the service off. Note that we don’t know for sure that he received a NSL—that’s the order authorized by the Patriot Act that doesn’t require a judge’s signature and prohibits the recipient from talking about it—or what it covered, but Levison has said that he had complied with requests for individual e-mail access in the past, but this was very different.

So far, we just have an extreme moral act in the face of government pressure. It’s what happened next that is the most chilling. The government threatened him with arrest, arguing that shutting down this e-mail service was a violation of the order.

There it is. If you run a business, and the FBI or NSA want to turn it into a mass surveillance tool, they believe they can do so, solely on their own initiative. They can force you to modify your system. They can do it all in secret and then force your business to keep that secret. Once they do that, you no longer control that part of your business. You can’t shut it down. You can’t terminate part of your service. In a very real sense, it is not your business anymore. It is an arm of the vast U.S. surveillance apparatus, and if your interest conflicts with theirs then they win. Your business has been commandeered.

For most Internet companies, this isn’t a problem. They are already engaging in massive surveillance of their customers and users—collecting and using this data is the primary business model of the Internet—so it’s easy to comply with government demands and give the NSA complete access to everything. This is what we learned from Edward Snowden. Through programs like PRISM, BLARNEY and OAKSTAR, the NSA obtained bulk access to services like Gmail and Facebook, and to Internet backbone connections throughout the US and the rest of the world. But if it were a problem for those companies, presumably the government would not allow them to shut down.

To be fair, we don’t know if the government can actually convict someone of closing a business. It might just be part of their coercion tactics. Intimidation, and retaliation, is part of how the NSA does business.

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio has a story of what happens to a large company that refuses to cooperate. In February 2001—before the 9/11 terrorist attacks—the NSA approached the four major US telecoms and asked for their cooperation in a secret data collection program, the one we now know to be the bulk metadata collection program exposed by Edward Snowden. Qwest was the only telecom to refuse, leaving the NSA with a hole in its spying efforts. The NSA retaliated by canceling a series of big government contracts with Qwest. The company has since been purchased by CenturyLink, which we presume is more cooperative with NSA demands.

That was before the Patriot Act and National Security Letters. Now, presumably, Nacchio would just comply. Protection rackets are easier when you have the law backing you up.

As the Snowden whistleblowing documents continue to be made public, we’re getting further glimpses into the surveillance state that has been secretly growing around us. The collusion of corporate and government surveillance interests is a big part of this, but so is the government’s resorting to intimidation. Every Lavabit-like service that shuts down—and there have been several—gives us consumers less choice, and pushes us into the large services that cooperate with the NSA. It’s past time we demanded that Congress repeal National Security Letters, give us privacy rights in this new information age, and force meaningful oversight on this rogue agency.

This essay previously appeared in USA Today.

EDITED TO ADD: This essay has been translated into Danish.

Posted on August 30, 2013 at 6:12 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.