Entries Tagged "NSA"

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NSA Collected Americans' E-mails Even After it Stopped Collecting Americans' E-mails

In 2001, the Bush administration authorized—almost certainly illegally—the NSA to conduct bulk electronic surveillance on Americans: phone calls, e-mails, financial information, and so on. We learned a lot about the bulk phone metadata collection program from the documents provided by Edward Snowden, and it was the focus of debate surrounding the USA FREEDOM Act. E-mail metadata surveillance, however, wasn’t part of that law. We learned the name of the program—STELLAR WIND—when it was leaked in 2004. But supposedly the NSA stopped collecting that data in 2011, because it wasn’t cost-effective.

The internet metadata collection program authorized by the FISA court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted,” Shawn Turner, the Obama administration’s director of communications for National Intelligence, said in a statement to the Guardian.

When Turner said that in 2013, we knew from the Snowden documents that the NSA was still collecting some Americans’ Internet metadata from communications links between the US and abroad. Now we have more proof. It turns out that the NSA never stopped collecting e-mail metadata on Americans. They just cancelled one particular program and changed the legal authority under which they collected it.

The report explained that there were two other legal ways to get such data. One was the collection of bulk data that had been gathered in other countries, where the N.S.A.’s activities are largely not subject to regulation by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and oversight by the intelligence court.

[…]

The N.S.A. had long barred analysts from using Americans’ data that had been swept up abroad, but in November 2010 it changed that rule, documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden have shown. The inspector general report cited that change to the N.S.A.’s internal procedures.

The other replacement source for the data was collection under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which permits warrantless surveillance on domestic soil that targets specific noncitizens abroad, including their new or stored emails to or from Americans.

In Data and Goliath, I wrote:

Some members of Congress are trying to impose limits on the NSA, and some of their proposals have real teeth and might make a difference. Even so, I don’t have any hope of meaningful congressional reform right now, because all of the proposals focus on specific programs and authorities: the telephone metadata collection program under Section 215, bulk records collection under Section 702, and so on. It’s a piecemeal approach that can’t work. We are now beyond the stage where simple legal interventions can make a difference. There’s just too much secrecy, and too much shifting of programs amongst different legal justifications.

The NSA continually plays this shell game with Congressional overseers. Whenever an intelligence-community official testifies that something is not being done under this particular program, or this particular authority, you can be sure that it’s being done under some other program or some other authority. In particular, the NSA regularly uses rules that allow them to conduct bulk surveillance outside the US—rules that largely evade both Congressional and Judicial oversight—to conduct bulk surveillance on Americans. Effective oversight of the NSA is impossible in the face of this level of misdirection and deception.

Posted on November 24, 2015 at 1:37 PM • View Comments

Policy Repercussions of the Paris Terrorist Attacks

In 2013, in the early days of the Snowden leaks, Harvard Law School professor and former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith reflected on the increase in NSA surveillance post 9/11. He wrote:

Two important lessons of the last dozen years are (1) the government will increase its powers to meet the national security threat fully (because the People demand it), and (2) the enhanced powers will be accompanied by novel systems of review and transparency that seem to those in the Executive branch to be intrusive and antagonistic to the traditional national security mission, but that in the end are key legitimating factors for the expanded authorities.

Goldsmith is right, and I think about this quote as I read news articles about surveillance policies with headlines like “Political winds shifting on surveillance after Paris attacks?”

The politics of surveillance are the politics of fear. As long as the people are afraid of terrorism—regardless of how realistic their fears are—they will demand that the government keep them safe. And if the government can convince them that it needs this or that power in order to keep the people safe, the people will willingly grant them those powers. That’s Goldsmith’s first point.

Today, in the wake of the horrific and devastating Paris terror attacks, we’re at a pivotal moment. People are scared, and already Western governments are lining up to authorize more invasive surveillance powers. The US want to back-door encryption products in some vain hope that the bad guys are 1) naive enough to use those products for their own communications instead of more secure ones, and 2) too stupid to use the back doors against the rest of us. The UK is trying to rush the passage of legislation that legalizes a whole bunch of surveillance activities that GCHQ has already been doing to its own citizens. France just gave its police a bunch of new powers. It doesn’t matter that mass surveillance isn’t an effective anti-terrorist tool: a scared populace wants to be reassured.

And politicians want to reassure. It’s smart politics to exaggerate the threat. It’s smart politics to do something, even if that something isn’t effective at mitigating the threat. The surveillance apparatus has the ear of the politicians, and the primary tool in its box is more surveillance. There’s minimal political will to push back on those ideas, especially when people are scared.

Writing about our country’s reaction to the Paris attacks, Tom Engelhardt wrote:

…the officials of that security state have bet the farm on the preeminence of the terrorist ‘threat,’ which has, not so surprisingly, left them eerily reliant on the Islamic State and other such organizations for the perpetuation of their way of life, their career opportunities, their growing powers, and their relative freedom to infringe on basic rights, as well as for that comfortably all-embracing blanket of secrecy that envelops their activities.

Goldsmith’s second point is more subtle: when these power increases are made in public, they’re legitimized through bureaucracy. Together, the scared populace and their scared elected officials serve to make the expanded national security and law enforcement powers normal.

Terrorism is singularly designed to push our fear buttons in ways completely out of proportion to the actual threat. And as long as people are scared of terrorism, they’ll give their governments all sorts of new powers of surveillance, arrest, detention, and so on, regardless of whether those powers actually combat the threat. This means that those who want those powers need a steady stream of terrorist attacks to enact their agenda. It’s not that these people are actively rooting for the terrorists, but they know a good opportunity when they see it.

We know that the PATRIOT Act was largely written before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and that the political climate was right for its introduction and passage. More recently:

Although “the legislative environment is very hostile today,” the intelligence community’s top lawyer, Robert S. Litt, said to colleagues in an August e-mail, which was obtained by The Post, “it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.”

The Paris attacks could very well be that event.

I am very worried that the Obama administration has already secretly told the NSA to increase its surveillance inside the US. And I am worried that there will be new legislation legitimizing that surveillance and granting other invasive powers to law enforcement. As Goldsmith says, these powers will be accompanied by novel systems of review and transparency. But I have no faith that those systems will be effective in limiting abuse any more than they have been over the last couple of decades.

EDITED TO ADD (12/14): Trevor Timm is all over this issue. Dan Gillmor wrote something good, too.

Posted on November 24, 2015 at 6:32 AM • View Comments

Breaking Diffie-Hellman with Massive Precomputation (Again)

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.

Posted on October 16, 2015 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

SYNful Knock Attack Against Cisco Routers

FireEye is reporting the discovery of persistent malware that compromises Cisco routers:

While this attack could be possible on any router technology, in this case, the targeted victims were Cisco routers. The Mandiant team found 14 instances of this router implant, dubbed SYNful Knock, across four countries: Ukraine, Philippines, Mexico, and India.

[…]

The implant uses techniques that make it very difficult to detect. A clandestine modification of the router’s firmware image can be utilized to maintain perpetual presence to an environment. However, it mainly surpasses detection because very few, if any, are monitoring these devices for compromise.

I don’t know if the attack is related to this attack against Cisco routers discovered in August.

As I wrote then, this is very much the sort of attack you’d expect from a government eavesdropping agency. We know, for example, that the NSA likes to attack routers. If I had to guess, I would guess that this is an NSA exploit. (Note the lack of Five Eyes countries in the target list.)

Posted on September 21, 2015 at 11:45 AM • View Comments

Hacking Team, Computer Vulnerabilities, and the NSA

When the National Security Administration (NSA)—or any government agency—discovers a vulnerability in a popular computer system, should it disclose it or not? The debate exists because vulnerabilities have both offensive and defensive uses. Offensively, vulnerabilities can be exploited to penetrate others’ computers and networks, either for espionage or destructive purposes. Defensively, publicly revealing security flaws can be used to make our own systems less vulnerable to those same attacks. The two options are mutually exclusive: either we can help to secure both our own networks and the systems we might want to attack, or we can keep both networks vulnerable. Many, myself included, have long argued that defense is more important than offense, and that we should patch almost every vulnerability we find. Even the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies recommended in 2013 that “U.S. policy should generally move to ensure that Zero Days are quickly blocked, so that the underlying vulnerabilities are patched on U.S. Government and other networks.”

Both the NSA and the White House have talked about a secret “vulnerability equities process” they go through when they find a security flaw. Both groups maintain the process is heavily weighted in favor or disclosing vulnerabilities to the vendors and having them patched.

An undated document—declassified last week with heavy redactions after a year-long Freedom of Information Act lawsuit—shines some light on the process but still leaves many questions unanswered. An important question is: which vulnerabilities go through the equities process, and which don’t?

A real-world example of the ambiguity surrounding the equities process emerged from the recent hacking of the cyber weapons arms manufacturer Hacking Team. The corporation sells Internet attack and espionage software to countries around the world, including many reprehensible governments to allow them to eavesdrop on their citizens, sometimes as a prelude to arrest and torture. The computer tools were used against U.S. journalists.

In July, unidentified hackers penetrated Hacking Team’s corporate network and stole almost everything of value, including corporate documents, e-mails, and source code. The hackers proceeded to post it all online.

The NSA was most likely able to penetrate Hacking Team’s network and steal the same data. The agency probably did it years ago. They would have learned the same things about Hacking Team’s network software that we did in July: how it worked, what vulnerabilities they were using, and which countries were using their cyber weapons. Armed with that knowledge, the NSA could have quietly neutralized many of the company’s products. The United States could have alerted software vendors about the zero-day exploits and had them patched. It could have told the antivirus companies how to detect and remove Hacking Team’s malware. It could have done a lot. Assuming that the NSA did infiltrate Hacking Team’s network, the fact that the United States chose not to reveal the vulnerabilities it uncovered is both revealing and interesting, and the decision provides a window into the vulnerability equities process.

The first question to ask is why? There are three possible reasons. One, the software was also being used by the United States, and the government did not want to lose its benefits. Two, NSA was able to eavesdrop on other entities using Hacking Team’s software, and they wanted to continue benefitting from the intelligence. And three, the agency did not want to expose their own hacking capabilities by demonstrating that they had compromised Hacking Team’s network. In reality, the decision may have been due to a combination of the three possibilities.

How was this decision made? More explicitly, did any vulnerabilities that Hacking Team exploited, and the NSA was aware of, go through the vulnerability equities process? It is unclear. The NSA plays fast and loose when deciding which security flaws go through the procedure. The process document states that it applies to vulnerabilities that are “newly discovered and not publicly known.” Does that refer only to vulnerabilities discovered by the NSA, or does the process also apply to zero-day vulnerabilities that the NSA discovers others are using? If vulnerabilities used in others’ cyber weapons are excluded, it is very difficult to talk about the process as it is currently formulated.

The U.S. government should close the vulnerabilities that foreign governments are using to attack people and networks. If taking action is as easy as plugging security vulnerabilities in products and making everyone in the world more secure, that should be standard procedure. The fact that the NSA—we assume—chose not to suggests that the United States has its priorities wrong.

Undoubtedly, there would be blowback from closing vulnerabilities utilized in others’ cyber weapons. Several companies sell information about vulnerabilities to different countries, and if they found that those security gaps were regularly closed soon after they started trying to sell them, they would quickly suspect espionage and take more defensive precautions. The new wariness of sellers and decrease in available security flaws would also raise the price of vulnerabilities worldwide. The United States is one of the biggest buyers, meaning that we benefit from greater availability and lower prices.

If we assume the NSA has penetrated these companies’ networks, we should also assume that the intelligence agencies of countries like Russia and China have done the same. Are those countries using Hacking Team’s vulnerabilities in their cyber weapons? We are all embroiled in a cyber arms race—finding, buying, stockpiling, using, and exposing vulnerabilities—and our actions will affect the actions of all the other players.

It seems foolish that we would not take every opportunity to neutralize the cyberweapons of those countries that would attack the United States or use them against their own people for totalitarian gain. Is it truly possible that when the NSA intercepts and reverse-engineers a cyberweapon used by one of our enemies—whether a Hacking Team customer or a country like China—we don’t close the vulnerabilities that that weapon uses? Does the NSA use knowledge of the weapon to defend the U.S. government networks whose security it maintains, at the expense of everyone else in the country and the world? That seems incredibly dangerous.

In my book Data and Goliath, I suggested breaking apart the NSA’s offensive and defensive components, in part to resolve the agency’s internal conflict between attack and defense. One part would be focused on foreign espionage, and another on cyberdefense. This Hacking Team discussion demonstrates that even separating the agency would not be enough. The espionage-focused organization that penetrates and analyzes the products of cyberweapons arms manufacturers would regularly learn about vulnerabilities used to attack systems and networks worldwide. Thus, that section of the agency would still have to transfer that knowledge to the defense-focused organization. That is not going to happen as long as the United States prioritizes surveillance over security and attack over defense. The norms governing actions in cyberspace need to be changed, a task far more difficult than any reform of the NSA.

This essay previously appeared in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.

EDITED TO ADD: Hacker News thread.

Posted on September 15, 2015 at 6:38 AM • View Comments

Glenn Greenwald Debates Keith Alexander

Interesting debate, surprisingly civil.

Alexander seemed to have been okay with Snowden revealing surveillance based on Section 215:

“If he had taken the one court document and said, ‘This is what I’m going to do’… I think this would be a whole different discussion,” Alexander said. “I do think he had the opportunity [to be] what many could consider an American hero.”

And he also spoke in favor of allowing adversarial proceedings in the FISA Court.

On the other hand, I am getting tired of this back-door/front-door nonsense. Alexander said that he’s not in favor of back doors in security systems, but wants some kind of “front door.” FBI Director Comey plays this wordgame too:

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.

They both see a difference here. A back door is a secret method of access, one that anyone can discover and use. A front door is a public method of access, one that—somehow—no one else can discover and use. But in reality, there’s no difference. Technologically, they’re the same: a method of third-party data access that works despite the intentions of the data owner.

In the beginning of the debate, I got the feeling that Alexander is trying to subtly shill his company. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I sometimes do the same thing. But realizing it helped me understand some of Alexander’s comments better.) Later, the discussion turned into a recycling of common talking points from both sides.

Posted on September 7, 2015 at 9:14 AM • View Comments

German BfV – NSA Cooperation

The German newspaper Zeit is reporting the BfV, Germany’s national intelligence agency, (probably) illegally traded data about Germans to the NSA in exchange for access to XKeyscore. From Ars Technica:

Unlike Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the domestic-oriented BfV does not employ bulk surveillance of the kind also deployed on a vast scale by the NSA and GCHQ. Instead, it is only allowed to monitor individual suspects in Germany and, even to do that, must obtain the approval of a special parliamentary commission. Because of this targeted approach, BfV surveillance is mainly intended to gather the content of specific conversations, whether in the form of e-mails, telephone exchanges, or even faxes, if anyone still uses them. Inevitably, though, metadata is also gathered, but as Die Zeit explains, “whether the collection of this [meta]data is consistent with the restrictions outlined in Germany’s surveillance laws is a question that divides legal experts.”

The BfV had no problems convincing itself that it was consistent with Germany’s laws to collect metadata, but rarely bothered since­—remarkably­—all analysis was done by hand before 2013, even though metadata by its very nature lends itself to large-scale automated processing. This explains the eagerness of the BfV to obtain the NSA’s XKeyscore software after German agents had seen its powerful metadata analysis capabilities in demonstrations.

It may also explain the massive expansion of the BfV that the leaked document published by Netzpolitik had revealed earlier this year. As Die Zeit notes, the classified budget plans “included the information that the BfV intended to create 75 new positions for the ‘mass data analysis of Internet content.’ Seventy-five new positions is a significant amount for any government agency.”

Note that the documents this story is based on seem to have not been provided by Snowden.

Posted on August 28, 2015 at 9:23 AM • View Comments

NSA Plans for a Post-Quantum World

Quantum computing is a novel way to build computers—one that takes advantage of the quantum properties of particles to perform operations on data in a very different way than traditional computers. In some cases, the algorithm speedups are extraordinary.

Specifically, a quantum computer using something called Shor’s algorithm can efficiently factor numbers, breaking RSA. A variant can break Diffie-Hellman and other discrete log-based cryptosystems, including those that use elliptic curves. This could potentially render all modern public-key algorithms insecure. Before you panic, note that the largest number to date that has been factored by a quantum computer is 143. So while a practical quantum computer is still science fiction, it’s not stupid science fiction.

(Note that this is completely different from quantum cryptography, which is a way of passing bits between two parties that relies on physical quantum properties for security. The only thing quantum computation and quantum cryptography have to do with each other is their first words. It is also completely different from the NSA’s QUANTUM program, which is its code name for a packet-injection system that works directly in the Internet backbone.)

Practical quantum computation doesn’t mean the end of cryptography. There are lesser-known public-key algorithms such as McEliece and lattice-based algorithms that, while less efficient than the ones we use, are currently secure against a quantum computer. And quantum computation only speeds up a brute-force keysearch by a factor of a square root, so any symmetric algorithm can be made secure against a quantum computer by doubling the key length.

We know from the Snowden documents that the NSA is conducting research on both quantum computation and quantum cryptography. It’s not a lot of money, and few believe that the NSA has made any real advances in theoretical or applied physics in this area. My guess has been that we’ll see a practical quantum computer within 30 to 40 years, but not much sooner than that.

This all means that now is the time to think about what living in a post-quantum world would be like. NIST is doing its part, having hosted a conference on the topic earlier this year. And the NSA announced that it is moving towards quantum-resistant algorithms.

Earlier this week, the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate updated its list of Suite B cryptographic algorithms. It explicitly talked about the threat of quantum computers:

IAD will initiate a transition to quantum resistant algorithms in the not too distant future. Based on experience in deploying Suite B, we have determined to start planning and communicating early about the upcoming transition to quantum resistant algorithms. Our ultimate goal is to provide cost effective security against a potential quantum computer. We are working with partners across the USG, vendors, and standards bodies to ensure there is a clear plan for getting a new suite of algorithms that are developed in an open and transparent manner that will form the foundation of our next Suite of cryptographic algorithms.

Until this new suite is developed and products are available implementing the quantum resistant suite, we will rely on current algorithms. For those partners and vendors that have not yet made the transition to Suite B elliptic curve algorithms, we recommend not making a significant expenditure to do so at this point but instead to prepare for the upcoming quantum resistant algorithm transition.

Suite B is a family of cryptographic algorithms approved by the NSA. It’s all part of the NSA’s Cryptographic Modernization Program. Traditionally, NSA algorithms were classified and could only be used in specially built hardware modules. Suite B algorithms are public, and can be used in anything. This is not to say that Suite B algorithms are second class, or breakable by the NSA. They’re being used to protect US secrets: “Suite A will be used in applications where Suite B may not be appropriate. Both Suite A and Suite B can be used to protect foreign releasable information, US-Only information, and Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI).”

The NSA is worried enough about advances in the technology to start transitioning away from algorithms that are vulnerable to a quantum computer. Does this mean that the agency is close to a working prototype in their own classified labs? Unlikely. Does this mean that they envision practical quantum computers sooner than my 30-to-40-year estimate? Certainly.

Unlike most personal and corporate applications, the NSA routinely deals with information it wants kept secret for decades. Even so, we should all follow the NSA’s lead and transition our own systems to quantum-resistant algorithms over the next decade or so—possibly even sooner.

The essay previously appeared on Lawfare.

EDITED TO ADD: The computation that factored 143 also accidentally “factored much larger numbers such as 3599, 11663, and 56153, without the awareness of the authors of that work,” which shows how weird this all is.

EDITED TO ADD: Seems that I need to be clearer: I do not stand by my 30-40-year prediction. The NSA is acting like practical quantum computers will exist long before then, and I am deferring to their expertise.

Posted on August 21, 2015 at 12:36 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.