Entries Tagged "surveillance"
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Applying CALEA to VoIP
“Security Implications of Applying the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act to Voice over IP,” paper by Steve Bellovin, Matt Blaze, Ernie Brickell, Clint Brooks, Vint Cerf, Whit Diffie, Susan Landau, Jon Peterson, and John Treichler.
Executive Summary
For many people, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) looks like a nimble way of using a computer to make phone calls. Download the software, pick an identifier and then wherever there is an Internet connection, you can make a phone call. From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that anything that can be done with a telephone, including the graceful accommodation of wiretapping, should be able to be done readily with VoIP as well.
The FCC has issued an order for all “interconnected” and all broadband access VoIP services to comply with Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)—without specific regulations on what compliance would mean. The FBI has suggested that CALEA should apply to all forms of VoIP, regardless of the technology involved in the VoIP implementation.
Intercept against a VoIP call made from a fixed location with a fixed IP address directly to a big internet provider’s access router is equivalent to wiretapping a normal phone call, and classical PSTN-style CALEA concepts can be applied directly. In fact, these intercept capabilities can be exactly the same in the VoIP case if the ISP properly secures its infrastructure and wiretap control process as the PSTN’s central offices are assumed to do.
However, the network architectures of the Internet and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) are substantially different, and these differences lead to security risks in applying the CALEA to VoIP. VoIP, like most Internet communications, are communications for a mobile environment. The feasibility of applying CALEA to more decentralized VoIP services is quite problematic. Neither the manageability of such a wiretapping regime nor whether it can be made secure against subversion seem clear. The real danger is that a CALEA-type regimen is likely to introduce serious vulnerabilities through its “architected security breach.”
Potential problems include the difficulty of determining where the traffic is coming from (the VoIP provider enables the connection but may not provide the services for the actual conversation), the difficulty of ensuring safe transport of the signals to the law-enforcement facility, the risk of introducing new vulnerabilities into Internet communications, and the difficulty of ensuring proper minimization. VOIP implementations vary substantially across the Internet making it impossible to implement CALEA uniformly. Mobility and the ease of creating new identities on the Internet exacerbate the problem.
Building a comprehensive VoIP intercept capability into the Internet appears to require the cooperation of a very large portion of the routing infrastructure, and the fact that packets are carrying voice is largely irrelevant. Indeed, most of the provisions of the wiretap law do not distinguish among different types of electronic communications. Currently the FBI is focused on applying CALEA’s design mandates to VoIP, but there is nothing in wiretapping law that would argue against the extension of intercept design mandates to all types of Internet communications. Indeed, the changes necessary to meet CALEA requirements for VoIP would likely have to be implemented in a way that covered all forms of Internet communication.
In order to extend authorized interception much beyond the easy scenario, it is necessary either to eliminate the flexibility that Internet communications allow, or else introduce serious security risks to domestic VoIP implementations. The former would have significant negative effects on U.S. ability to innovate, while the latter is simply dangerous. The current FBI and FCC direction on CALEA applied to VoIP carries great risks.
Greek Wiretapping Scandal
Back in February, I wrote about a major wiretapping scandal in Greece. The Wall Street Journal has a really interesting article (link only good for a week, unfortunately) about it:
Behind the bugging operation were two pieces of sophisticated software, according to Ericsson. One was Ericsson’s own, some basic elements of which came as a preinstalled feature of the network equipment. When enabled, the feature can be used for lawful interception by government authorities, which has become increasingly common since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. But to use the interception feature, operators like Vodafone would need to pay Ericsson millions of dollars to purchase the additional hardware, software and passwords that are required to activate it. Both companies say Vodafone hadn’t done that in Greece at the time.
The second element was the rogue software that the eavesdroppers implanted in parts of Vodafone’s network to achieve two things: activate the Ericsson-made interception feature and at the same time hide all traces that the feature was in use. Ericsson, which analyzed the software in conjunction with Greece’s independent telecom watchdog, says it didn’t design, develop or install the rogue software.
The software allowed the cellphone calls of the targeted individuals to be monitored via 14 prepaid cellphones, according to the government officials and telecom experts probing the matter. They say when calls to or from one of the more than 100 targeted phones were made, the rogue software enabled one of the interceptor phones to be connected also.
The interceptor phones likely enabled conversations to be secretly recorded elsewhere, the government said during a February 2006 news conference. At least some of the prepaid cellphones were activated between June and August 2004. Such cellphones, particularly when paid for in cash, typically are harder to trace than those acquired with a monthly subscription plan.
Vodafone claims it didn’t know that even the basic elements of the legal interception software were included in the equipment it bought. Ericsson never informed the service provider’s top managers in Greece that the features were included nor was there a “special briefing” to the relevant technical division, according to a Vodafone statement in March.
But Ericsson’s top executive in Greece, Bill Zikou, claimed during parliamentary-committee testimony that his company had informed Vodafone about the feature via its sales force and instruction manuals.
Vodafone and Ericsson discovered something was amiss in late January 2005 when some Greek cellphone users started complaining about problems sending text messages. Vodafone asked Ericsson to look into the issue. Ericsson’s technicians spent several weeks trying to figure out the problem, with help from the equipment maker’s technical experts at its headquarters in Sweden. In early March of that year, Ericsson’s technicians told Vodafone’s technology director in Greece of their unusual discovery about the cause of the problems: software that appeared to be capable of illegally monitoring calls. It’s unclear exactly how the rogue software caused the text-messaging problem.
Ericsson confirmed the software was able to monitor calls, and Vodafone soon discovered that the targeted phones included those used by some of the country’s most important officials. On March 8, Mr. Koronias ordered that the illegal bugging program be shut down, in a move he has said was made to protect the privacy of its customers. He called the prime minister’s office the next evening.
The head of Greece’s intelligence service, Ioannis Korantis, said in testimony before the parliamentary committee last month that Vodafone’s disabling of the software before authorities could investigate hampered their efforts. “From the moment that the software was shut down, the string broke that could have lead us to who was behind this,” he said. Separately, he distanced his own agency from the bugging effort, saying it didn’t have the technical know-how to effectively monitor cellphone calls.
Unmanned Security Drones
This sounds like a science fiction premise: Unmanned drones that monitor the population for crimes.
NSA Combing Through MySpace
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.
Privacy as Contextual Integrity
Interesting law review article by Helen Nissenbaum:
Abstract: The practices of public surveillance, which include the monitoring of individuals in public through a variety of media (e.g., video, data, online), are among the least understood and controversial challenges to privacy in an age of information technologies. The fragmentary nature of privacy policy in the United States reflects not only the oppositional pulls of diverse vested interests, but also the ambivalence of unsettled intuitions on mundane phenomena such as shopper cards, closed-circuit television, and biometrics. This Article, which extends earlier work on the problem of privacy in public, explains why some of the prominent theoretical approaches to privacy, which were developed over time to meet traditional privacy challenges, yield unsatisfactory conclusions in the case of public surveillance. It posits a new construct, ‘contextual integrity’ as an alternative benchmark for privacy, to capture the nature of challenges posed by information technologies. Contextual integrity ties adequate protection for privacy to norms of specific contexts, demanding that information gathering and dissemination be appropriate to that context and obey the governing norms of distribution within it. Building on the idea of ‘spheres of justice’ developed by political philosopher Michael Walzer, this Article argues that public surveillance violates a right to privacy because it violates contextual integrity; as such, it constitutes injustice and even tyranny.
U.S. Government Wants your Internet Data
In case you thought you had any privacy on the Internet:
Gonzales and Mueller asked Google Inc., Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and other companies to preserve the data at a May 26 meeting, citing their value to investigations into child-pornography distribution and terrorism. Internet companies typically keep customer histories for only a few days or weeks.
The Justice Department said Thursday that it was not seeking to have e-mail content archived, just information about the websites people visit and those with whom they correspond.
Note that the Justice Department invoked two of the Four Horsemen of the Internet Apocalypse: child pornographers and terrorists. If they can figure out how to work kidnappers and drug dealers in, they can probably do anything they want.
Track Someone Using GPS
Just hide this gadget in someone’s car or briefcase—or maybe sew it into his coat—and then track his every move.
You have to recover the device to play it back, but presumably the next generation will be queryable remotely.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.