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Susan Landau has a new paper on the NSA’s increasing role in commercial cybersecurity. She argues that the NSA is the wrong organization to do this, and we need a more public and open government agency involved in commercial cybersecurity.
EDITED TO ADD (11/13): David Elliott Bell has a related paper. Also read this review of both papers.
FBI Director James Comey again called for an end to secure encryption by putting in a backdoor. Here’s his speech:
There is a misconception that building a lawful intercept solution into a system requires a so-called “back door,” one that foreign adversaries and hackers may try to exploit.
But that isn’t true. We aren’t seeking a back-door approach. We want to use the front door, with clarity and transparency, and with clear guidance provided by law. We are completely comfortable with court orders and legal process—front doors that provide the evidence and information we need to investigate crime and prevent terrorist attacks.
Cyber adversaries will exploit any vulnerability they find. But it makes more sense to address any security risks by developing intercept solutions during the design phase, rather than resorting to a patchwork solution when law enforcement comes knocking after the fact. And with sophisticated encryption, there might be no solution, leaving the government at a dead end—all in the name of privacy and network security.
I’m not sure why he believes he can have a technological means of access that somehow only works for people of the correct morality with the proper legal documents, but he seems to believe that’s possible. As Jeffrey Vagle and Matt Blaze point out, there’s no technical difference between Comey’s “front door” and a “back door.”
As in all of these sorts of speeches, Comey gave examples of crimes that could have been solved had only the police been able to decrypt the defendant’s phone. Unfortunately, none of the three stories is true. The Intercept tracked down each story, and none of them is actually a case where encryption foiled an investigation, arrest, or conviction:
In the most dramatic case that Comey invoked—the death of a 2-year-old Los Angeles girl—not only was cellphone data a non-issue, but records show the girl’s death could actually have been avoided had government agencies involved in overseeing her and her parents acted on the extensive record they already had before them.
In another case, of a Louisiana sex offender who enticed and then killed a 12-year-old boy, the big break had nothing to do with a phone: The murderer left behind his keys and a trail of muddy footprints, and was stopped nearby after his car ran out of gas.
And in the case of a Sacramento hit-and-run that killed a man and his girlfriend’s four dogs, the driver was arrested in a traffic stop because his car was smashed up, and immediately confessed to involvement in the incident.
[…]
His poor examples, however, were reminiscent of one cited by Ronald T. Hosko, a former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, in a widely cited—and thoroughly debunked—Washington Post opinion piece last month.
In that case, the Post was eventually forced to have Hosko rewrite the piece, with the following caveat appended:
Editors note: This story incorrectly stated that Apple and Google’s new encryption rules would have hindered law enforcement’s ability to rescue the kidnap victim in Wake Forest, N.C. This is not the case. The piece has been corrected.
Hadn’t Comey found anything better since then? In a question-and-answer session after his speech, Comey both denied trying to use scare stories to make his point—and admitted that he had launched a nationwide search for better ones, to no avail.
This is important. All the FBI talk about “going dark” and losing the ability to solve crimes is absolute bullshit. There is absolutely no evidence, either statistically or even anecdotally, that criminals are going free because of encryption.
So why are we even discussing the possibility to forcing companies to provide insecure encryption to their users and customers?
The EFF points out that companies are protected by law from being required to provide insecure security to make the FBI happy.
Sadly, I don’t think this is going to go away anytime soon.
My first post on these new Crypto Wars is here.
Interesting essay about James Bamford and his efforts to publish The Puzzle Palace over the NSA’s objections. Required reading for those who think the NSA’s excesses are somehow new.
The latest Intercept article on the Snowden documents talks about the NSA’s undercover operatives working in foreign companies. There are no specifics, although the countries China, Germany, and South Korea are mentioned. It’s also hard to tell if the NSA has undercover operatives working in companies in those countries, or has undercover contractors visiting those companies. The document is dated 2004, although there’s no reason to believe that the NSA has changed its behavior since then.
The most controversial revelation in Sentry Eagle might be a fleeting reference to the NSA infiltrating clandestine agents into “commercial entities.” The briefing document states that among Sentry Eagle’s most closely guarded components are “facts related to NSA personnel (under cover), operational meetings, specific operations, specific technology, specific locations and covert communications related to SIGINT enabling with specific commercial entities (A/B/C)””
It is not clear whether these “commercial entities” are American or foreign or both. Generally the placeholder “(A/B/C)” is used in the briefing document to refer to American companies, though on one occasion it refers to both American and foreign companies. Foreign companies are referred to with the placeholder “(M/N/O).” The NSA refused to provide any clarification to The Intercept.
That program is SENTRY OSPREY, which is a program under SENTRY EAGLE.
The document makes no other reference to NSA agents working under cover. It is not clear whether they might be working as full-time employees at the “commercial entities,” or whether they are visiting commercial facilities under false pretenses.
Least fun job right now: being the NSA person who fielded the telephone call from the Intercept to clarify that (A/B/C)/(M/N/O) thing. “Hi. We’re going public with SENTRY EAGLE next week. There’s one thing in the document we don’t understand, and we wonder if you could help us….” Actually, that’s wrong. The person who fielded the phone call had no idea what SENTRY EAGLE was. The least fun job belongs to the person up the command chain who did.
Wired article. Slashdot and Hacker News threads.
Good essay by Molly Sauter: basically, there is no legal avenue for activism and protest on the Internet.
Also note Sauter’s new book, The Coming Swarm.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has released a report titled “Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications: Readiness of V2V Technology for Application.” It’s very long, and mostly not interesting to me, but there are security concerns sprinkled throughout: both authentication to ensure that all the communications are accurate and can’t be spoofed, and privacy to ensure that the communications can’t be used to track cars. It’s nice to see this sort of thing thought about in the beginning, when the system is first being designed, and not tacked on at the end.
In 2008, Yahoo fought the NSA to avoid becoming part of the PRISM program. It eventually lost the court battle, and at one point was threatened with a $250,000 a day fine if it continued to resist. I am continually amazed at the extent of the government coercion.
Since the beginning, data privacy regulation has focused on collection, storage, and use. You can see it in the OECD Privacy Framework from 1980 (see also this proposed update).
Recently, there has been concerted effort to focus all potential regulation on data use, completely ignoring data collection. Microsoft’s Craig Mundie argues this. So does the PCAST report. And the World Economic Forum. This is lobbying effort by US business. My guess is that the companies are much more worried about collection restrictions than use restrictions. They believe that they can slowly change use restrictions once they have the data, but that it’s harder to change collection restrictions and get the data in the first place.
We need to regulate collection as well as use. In a new essay, Chris Hoofnagle explains why.
The White House is refusing to release details about the security of healthcare.gov because it might help hackers. What this really means is that the security details would embarrass the White House.
The US Air Force is focusing on cyber deception next year:
Background: Deception is a deliberate act to conceal activity on our networks, create uncertainty and confusion against the adversary’s efforts to establish situational awareness and to influence and misdirect adversary perceptions and decision processes. Military deception is defined as “those actions executed to deliberately mislead adversary decision makers as to friendly military capabilities, intentions, and operations, thereby causing the adversary to take specific actions (or inactions) that will contribute to the accomplishment of the friendly mission.” Military forces have historically used techniques such as camouflage, feints, chaff, jammers, fake equipment, false messages or traffic to alter an enemy’s perception of reality. Modern day military planners need a capability that goes beyond the current state-of-the-art in cyber deception to provide a system or systems that can be employed by a commander when needed to enable deception to be inserted into defensive cyber operations.
Relevance and realism are the grand technical challenges to cyber deception. The application of the proposed technology must be relevant to operational and support systems within the DoD. The DoD operates within a highly standardized environment. Any technology that significantly disrupts or increases the cost to the standard of practice will not be adopted. If the technology is adopted, the defense system must appear legitimate to the adversary trying to exploit it.
Objective: To provide cyber-deception capabilities that could be employed by commanders to provide false information, confuse, delay, or otherwise impede cyber attackers to the benefit of friendly forces. Deception mechanisms must be incorporated in such a way that they are transparent to authorized users, and must introduce minimal functional and performance impacts, in order to disrupt our adversaries and not ourselves. As such, proposed techniques must consider how challenges relating to transparency and impact will be addressed. The security of such mechanisms is also paramount, so that their power is not co-opted by attackers against us for their own purposes. These techniques are intended to be employed for defensive purposes only on networks and systems controlled by the DoD.
Advanced techniques are needed with a focus on introducing varying deception dynamics in network protocols and services which can severely impede, confound, and degrade an attacker’s methods of exploitation and attack, thereby increasing the costs and limiting the benefits gained from the attack. The emphasis is on techniques that delay the attacker in the reconnaissance through weaponization stages of an attack and also aid defenses by forcing an attacker to move and act in a more observable manner. Techniques across the host and network layers or a hybrid thereof are of interest in order to provide AF cyber operations with effective, flexible, and rapid deployment options.
More discussion here.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.