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Interesting video of Brian Snow speaking from last November. (Brian used to be the Technical Director of NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate.) About a year and a half ago, I complained that his words were being used to sow cyber-fear. This talk—about 30 minutes—is a better reflection of what he really thinks.
In an excellent article in Wired, James Bamford talks about the NSA’s codebreaking capability.
According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
Bamford has been writing about the NSA for decades, and people tell him all sorts of confidential things. Reading the above, the obvious question to ask is: can the NSA break AES?
My guess is that they can’t. That is, they don’t have a cryptanalytic attack against the AES algorithm that allows them to recover a key from known or chosen ciphertext with a reasonable time and memory complexity. I believe that what the “top official” was referring to is attacks that focus on the implementation and bypass the encryption algorithm: side-channel attacks, attacks against the key generation systems (either exploiting bad random number generators or sloppy password creation habits), attacks that target the endpoints of the communication system and not the wire, attacks that exploit key leakage, attacks against buggy implementations of the algorithm, and so on. These attacks are likely to be much more effective against computer encryption.
EDITED TO ADD (3/22): Another option is that the NSA has built dedicated hardware capable of factoring 1024-bit numbers. There’s quite a lot of RSA-1024 out there, so that would be a fruitful project. So, maybe.
EDITED TO ADD (4/13): The NSA denies everything.
The NSA has released its specification for a secure Android.
One of the interesting things it’s requiring is that all data be tunneled through a secure VPN:
Inter-relationship to Other Elements of the Secure VoIP System
The phone must be a commercial device that supports the ability to pass data over a commercial cellular network. Standard voice phone calls, with the exception of emergency 911 calls, shall not be allowed. The phone must function on US CDMA & GSM networks and OCONUS on GSM networks with the same functionality.
All data communications to/from the mobile device must go through the VPN tunnel to the VPN gateway in the infrastructure; no other communications in or out of the mobile device are permitted.
Applications on the phone additionally encrypt their communications to servers in infrastructure, or to other phones; all those communications must be tunneled through the VPN.
The more I look at mobile security, the more I think a secure tunnel is essential.
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.
The papers are old, but they have just been released under FOIA.
Invasive U.S. surveillance programs, either illegal like the NSA’s wiretapping of AT&T phone lines or legal as authorized by the PATRIOT Act, are causing foreign companies to think twice about putting their data in U.S. cloud systems.
I think these are legitimate concerns. I don’t trust the U.S. government, law or no law, not to spy on my data if it thought it was a good idea. The more interesting question is: which government should I trust instead?
The second document in this file is the recently unclassified “Guide to Historical Cryptologic Acronyms and Abbreviations, 1940-1980,” from the NSA
Note that there are still some redactions.
Article on the NSA’s Menwith Hill listening station in the UK.
National Security Agency (NSA) SIGINT Reporter’s Style and Usage Manual, 2010.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.