Entries Tagged "terrorism"

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ISIS Encryption Opsec

Tidbits from the New York Times:

The final phase of Mr. Hame’s training took place at an Internet cafe in Raqqa, where an Islamic State computer specialist handed him a USB key. It contained CCleaner, a program used to erase a user’s online history on a given computer, as well as TrueCrypt, an encryption program that was widely available at the time and that experts say has not yet been cracked.

[…]

More than a year and a half earlier, the would-be Cannes bomber, Ibrahim Boudina, had tried to erase the previous three days of his search history, according to details in his court record, but the police were still able to recover it. They found that Mr. Boudina had been researching how to connect to the Internet via a secure tunnel and how to change his I.P. address.

Though he may have been aware of the risk of discovery, perhaps he was not worried enough.

Mr. Boudina had been sloppy enough to keep using his Facebook account, and his voluminous chat history allowed French officials to determine his allegiance to the Islamic State. Wiretaps of his friends and relatives, later detailed in French court records obtained by The Times and confirmed by security officials, further outlined his plot, which officials believe was going to target the annual carnival on the French Riviera.

Mr. Hame, in contrast, was given strict instructions on how to communicate. After he used TrueCrypt, he was to upload the encrypted message folder onto a Turkish commercial data storage site, from where it would be downloaded by his handler in Syria. He was told not to send it by email, most likely to avoid generating the metadata that records details like the point of origin and destination, even if the content of the missive is illegible. Mr. Hame described the website as “basically a dead inbox.”

The ISIS technician told Mr. Hame one more thing: As soon as he made it back to Europe, he needed to buy a second USB key, and transfer the encryption program to it. USB keys are encoded with serial numbers, so the process was not unlike a robber switching getaway cars.

“He told me to copy what was on the key and then throw it away,” Mr. Hame explained. “That’s what I did when I reached Prague.”

Mr. Abaaoud was also fixated on cellphone security. He jotted down the number of a Turkish phone that he said would be left in a building in Syria, but close enough to the border to catch the Turkish cell network, according to Mr. Hame’s account. Mr. Abaaoud apparently figured investigators would be more likely to track calls from Europe to Syrian phone numbers, and might overlook calls to a Turkish one.

Next to the number, Mr. Abaaoud scribbled “Dad.”

This seems like exactly the sort of opsec I would set up for an insurgent group.

EDITED TO ADD: Mistakes in the article. For example:

And now I’ve read one of the original French documents and confirmed my suspicion that the NYTimes article got details wrong.

The original French uses the word “boîte”, which matches the TrueCrypt term “container”. The original French didn’t use the words “fichier” (file), “dossier” (folder), or “répertoire” (directory). This makes so much more sense, and gives us more confidence we know what they were doing.

The original French uses the term “site de partage”, meaning a “sharing site”, which makes more sense than a “storage” site.

The document I saw says the slip of paper had login details for the file sharing site, not a TrueCrypt password. Thus, when the NYTimes article says “TrueCrypt login credentials”, we should correct it to “file sharing site login credentials”, not “TrueCrypt passphrase”.

MOST importantly, according the subject, the login details didn’t even work. It appears he never actually used this method—he was just taught how to use it. He no longer remembers the site’s name, other than it might have the word “share” in its name. We see this a lot: ISIS talks a lot about encryption, but the evidence of them actually using it is scant.

Posted on March 31, 2016 at 6:10 AMView Comments

Leaked ISIS Documents

Looks like tens of thousands of ISIS documents have been leaked. Where did they come from? We don’t know:

Documents listing the names of Islamic State fighters have been touted around the Middle East for months, dangled in front of media outlets for large sums of money.

[…]

Ramsay said he met the source of the documents in Turkey, an individual calling himself Abu Hamed who had been in the Free Syrian Army rebel group and switched to Isis before becoming disillusioned with it.

Sky said the documents were on a memory stick stolen from the head of Isis’s internal security police.

The Syrian opposition news website, Zaman al-Wasl, in a report billed as “exclusive” and published before Sky’s, said it had the personal data on 1,736 fighters and that its documents had come from Isis’s general administration of borders.

Posted on March 11, 2016 at 6:17 AMView Comments

Lots More Writing about the FBI vs. Apple

I have written two posts on the case, and at the bottom of those essays are lots of links to other essays written by other people. Here are more links.

If you read just one thing on the technical aspects of this case, read Susan Landau’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. It’s very comprehensive, and very good.

Others are testifying, too.

Apple is fixing the vulnerability. The Justice Department wants Apple to unlock nine more phones.

Apple prevailed in a different iPhone unlocking case.

Why the First Amendment is a bad argument. And why the All Writs Act is the wrong tool.

Dueling poll results: Pew Research reports that 51% side with the FBI, while a Reuters poll reveals that “forty-six percent of respondents said they agreed with Apple’s position, 35 percent said they disagreed and 20 percent said they did not know,” and that “a majority of Americans do not want the government to have access to their phone and Internet communications, even if it is done in the name of stopping terror attacks.”

One of the worst possible outcomes from this story is that people stop installing security updates because they don’t trust them. After all, a security update mechanism is also a mechanism by which the government can install a backdoor. Here’s one essay that talks about that. Here’s another.

Cory Doctorow comments on the FBI’s math denialism. Yochai Benkler sees this as a symptom of a greater breakdown in government trust. More good commentary from Jeff Schiller, Julian Sanchez, and Jonathan Zdziarski. Marcy Wheeler’s comments. Two posts by Dan Wallach. Michael Chertoff and associates weigh in on the side of security over surveillance.

Here’s a Catholic op-ed on Apple’s side. Bill Gates sides with the FBI. And a great editorial cartoon.

Here’s high snark from Stewart Baker. Baker asks some very good (and very snarky) questions. But the questions are beside the point. This case isn’t about Apple or whether Apple is being hypocritical, any more than climate change is about Al Gore’s character. This case is about the externalities of what the government is asking for.

One last thing to read.

Okay, one more, on the more general back door issue.

EDITED TO ADD (3/2): Wall Street Journal editorial. And here’s video from the House Judiciary Committee hearing. Skip to around 34:50 to get to the actual beginning.

EDITED TO ADD (3/3): Interview with Rep. Darrell Issa. And at the RSA Conference this week, both Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Microsoft’s chief legal officer Brad Smith sided with Apple against the FBI.

EDITED TO ADD (3/4): Comments on the case from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

EDITED TO ADD (3/7): Op ed by Apple. And an interesting article on the divide in the Obama Administration.

EDITED TO ADD (3/10): Another good essay.

EDITED TO ADD (3/13): President Obama’s comments on encryption: he wants back doors. Cory Doctorow reports.

Posted on March 1, 2016 at 6:47 AMView Comments

Decrypting an iPhone for the FBI

Earlier this week, a federal magistrate ordered Apple to assist the FBI in hacking into the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. Apple will fight this order in court.

The policy implications are complicated. The FBI wants to set a precedent that tech companies will assist law enforcement in breaking their users’ security, and the technology community is afraid that the precedent will limit what sorts of security features it can offer customers. The FBI sees this as a privacy vs. security debate, while the tech community sees it as a security vs. surveillance debate.

The technology considerations are more straightforward, and shine a light on the policy questions.

The iPhone 5c in question is encrypted. This means that someone without the key cannot get at the data. This is a good security feature. Your phone is a very intimate device. It is likely that you use it for private text conversations, and that it’s connected to your bank accounts. Location data reveals where you’ve been, and correlating multiple phones reveals who you associate with. Encryption protects your phone if it’s stolen by criminals. Encryption protects the phones of dissidents around the world if they’re taken by local police. It protects all the data on your phone, and the apps that increasingly control the world around you.

This encryption depends on the user choosing a secure password, of course. If you had an older iPhone, you probably just used the default four-digit password. That’s only 10,000 possible passwords, making it pretty easy to guess. If the user enabled the more-secure alphanumeric password, that means a harder-to-guess password.

Apple added two more security features on the iPhone. First, a phone could be configured to erase the data after too many incorrect password guesses. And it enforced a delay between password guesses. This delay isn’t really noticeable by the user if you type the wrong password and then have to retype the correct password, but it’s a large barrier for anyone trying to guess password after password in a brute-force attempt to break into the phone.

But that iPhone has a security flaw. While the data is encrypted, the software controlling the phone is not. This means that someone can create a hacked version of the software and install it on the phone without the consent of the phone’s owner and without knowing the encryption key. This is what the FBI ­ and now the court ­ is demanding Apple do: It wants Apple to rewrite the phone’s software to make it possible to guess possible passwords quickly and automatically.

The FBI’s demands are specific to one phone, which might make its request seem reasonable if you don’t consider the technological implications: Authorities have the phone in their lawful possession, and they only need help seeing what’s on it in case it can tell them something about how the San Bernardino shooters operated. But the hacked software the court and the FBI wants Apple to provide would be general. It would work on any phone of the same model. It has to.

Make no mistake; this is what a backdoor looks like. This is an existing vulnerability in iPhone security that could be exploited by anyone.

There’s nothing preventing the FBI from writing that hacked software itself, aside from budget and manpower issues. There’s every reason to believe, in fact, that such hacked software has been written by intelligence organizations around the world. Have the Chinese, for instance, written a hacked Apple operating system that records conversations and automatically forwards them to police? They would need to have stolen Apple’s code-signing key so that the phone would recognize the hacked as valid, but governments have done that in the past with other keys and other companies. We simply have no idea who already has this capability.

And while this sort of attack might be limited to state actors today, remember that attacks always get easier. Technology broadly spreads capabilities, and what was hard yesterday becomes easy tomorrow. Today’s top-secret NSA programs become tomorrow’s PhD theses and the next day’s hacker tools. Soon this flaw will be exploitable by cybercriminals to steal your financial data. Everyone with an iPhone is at risk, regardless of what the FBI demands Apple do

What the FBI wants to do would make us less secure, even though it’s in the name of keeping us safe from harm. Powerful governments, democratic and totalitarian alike, want access to user data for both law enforcement and social control. We cannot build a backdoor that only works for a particular type of government, or only in the presence of a particular court order.

Either everyone gets security or no one does. Either everyone gets access or no one does. The current case is about a single iPhone 5c, but the precedent it sets will apply to all smartphones, computers, cars and everything the Internet of Things promises. The danger is that the court’s demands will pave the way to the FBI forcing Apple and others to reduce the security levels of their smart phones and computers, as well as the security of cars, medical devices, homes, and everything else that will soon be computerized. The FBI may be targeting the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, but its actions imperil us all.

This essay previously appeared in the Washington Post

The original essay contained a major error.

I wrote: “This is why Apple fixed this security flaw in 2014. Apple’s iOS 8.0 and its phones with an A7 or later processor protect the phone’s software as well as the data. If you have a newer iPhone, you are not vulnerable to this attack. You are more secure – from the government of whatever country you’re living in, from cybercriminals and from hackers.” Also: “We are all more secure now that Apple has closed that vulnerability.”

That was based on a misunderstanding of the security changes Apple made in what is known as the “Secure Enclave.” It turns out that all iPhones have this security vulnerability: all can have their software updated without knowing the password. The updated code has to be signed with Apple’s key, of course, which adds a major difficulty to the attack.

Dan Guido writes:

If the device lacks a Secure Enclave, then a single firmware update to iOS will be sufficient to disable passcode delays and auto erase. If the device does contain a Secure Enclave, then two firmware updates, one to iOS and one to the Secure Enclave, are required to disable these security features. The end result in either case is the same. After modification, the device is able to guess passcodes at the fastest speed the hardware supports.

The recovered iPhone is a model 5C. The iPhone 5C lacks TouchID and, therefore, lacks a Secure Enclave. The Secure Enclave is not a concern. Nearly all of the passcode protections are implemented in software by the iOS operating system and are replaceable by a single firmware update.

EDITED TO ADD (2/22): Lots more on my previous blog post on the topic.

How to set a longer iPhone password and thwart this kind of attack. Comey on the issue. And a secret memo describes the FBI’s broader strategy to weaken security.

Orin Kerr’s thoughts: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

EDITED TO ADD (2/22): Tom Cook’s letter to his employees, and an FAQ. How CALEA relates to all this. Here’s what’s not available in the iCloud backup. The FBI told the county to change the password on the phone—that’s why they can’t get in. What the FBI needs is technical expertise, not back doors. And it’s not just this iPhone; the FBI wants Apple to break into lots of them. What China asks of tech companies—not that this is a country we should particularly want to model. Former NSA Director Michael Hayden on the case. There is a quite a bit of detail about the Apple efforts to assist the FBI in the legal motion the Department of Justice filed. Two good essays. Jennifer Granick’s comments.

In my essay, I talk about other countries developing this capability with Apple’s knowledge or consent. Making it work requires stealing a copy of Apple’s code-signing key, something that has been done by the authors of Stuxnet (probably the US) and Flame (probably Russia) in the past.

Posted on February 22, 2016 at 6:58 AMView Comments

Fear and Anxiety

More psychological research on our reaction to terrorism and mass violence:

The researchers collected posts on Twitter made in response to the 2012 shooting attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. They looked at tweets about the school shooting over a five-and-a-half-month period to see whether people used different language in connection with the event depending on how geographically close they were to Newtown, or how much time had elapsed since the tragedy. The analysis showed that the further away people were from the tragedy in either space or time, the less they used words related to sadness (loss, grieve, mourn), suggesting that feelings of sorrow waned with growing psychological distance. But words related to anxiety (crazy, fearful, scared) showed the opposite pattern, increasing in frequency as people gained distance in either time or space from the tragic events. For example, within the first week of the shootings, words expressing sadness accounted for 1.69 percent of all words used in tweets about the event; about five months later, these had dwindled to 0.62 percent. In contrast, anxiety-related words went up from 0.27 percent to 0.62 percent over the same time.

Why does psychological distance mute sadness but incubate anxiety? The authors point out that as people feel more remote from an event, they shift from thinking of it in very concrete terms to more abstract ones, a pattern that has been shown in a number of previous studies. Concrete thoughts highlight the individual lives affected and the horrific details of the tragedy. (Images have >particular power to make us feel the loss of individuals in a mass tragedy.) But when people think about the event abstractly, they’re more apt to focus on its underlying causes, which is anxiety inducing if the cause is seen as arising from an unresolved issue.

This is related.

Posted on February 16, 2016 at 6:27 AMView Comments

Security vs. Surveillance

Both the “going dark” metaphor of FBI Director James Comey and the contrasting “golden age of surveillance” metaphor of privacy law professor Peter Swire focus on the value of data to law enforcement. As framed in the media, encryption debates are about whether law enforcement should have surreptitious access to data, or whether companies should be allowed to provide strong encryption to their customers.

It’s a myopic framing that focuses only on one threat—criminals, including domestic terrorists—and the demands of law enforcement and national intelligence. This obscures the most important aspects of the encryption issue: the security it provides against a much wider variety of threats.

Encryption secures our data and communications against eavesdroppers like criminals, foreign governments, and terrorists. We use it every day to hide our cell phone conversations from eavesdroppers, and to hide our Internet purchasing from credit card thieves. Dissidents in China and many other countries use it to avoid arrest. It’s a vital tool for journalists to communicate with their sources, for NGOs to protect their work in repressive countries, and for attorneys to communicate with their clients.

Many technological security failures of today can be traced to failures of encryption. In 2014 and 2015, unnamed hackers—probably the Chinese government—stole 21.5 million personal files of U.S. government employees and others. They wouldn’t have obtained this data if it had been encrypted. Many large-scale criminal data thefts were made either easier or more damaging because data wasn’t encrypted: Target, TJ Maxx, Heartland Payment Systems, and so on. Many countries are eavesdropping on the unencrypted communications of their own citizens, looking for dissidents and other voices they want to silence.

Adding backdoors will only exacerbate the risks. As technologists, we can’t build an access system that only works for people of a certain citizenship, or with a particular morality, or only in the presence of a specified legal document. If the FBI can eavesdrop on your text messages or get at your computer’s hard drive, so can other governments. So can criminals. So can terrorists. This is not theoretical; again and again, backdoor accesses built for one purpose have been surreptitiously used for another. Vodafone built backdoor access into Greece’s cell phone network for the Greek government; it was used against the Greek government in 2004-2005. Google kept a database of backdoor accesses provided to the U.S. government under CALEA; the Chinese breached that database in 2009.

We’re not being asked to choose between security and privacy. We’re being asked to choose between less security and more security.

This trade-off isn’t new. In the mid-1990s, cryptographers argued that escrowing encryption keys with central authorities would weaken security. In 2013, cybersecurity researcher Susan Landau published her excellent book Surveillance or Security?, which deftly parsed the details of this trade-off and concluded that security is far more important.

Ubiquitous encryption protects us much more from bulk surveillance than from targeted surveillance. For a variety of technical reasons, computer security is extraordinarily weak. If a sufficiently skilled, funded, and motivated attacker wants in to your computer, they’re in. If they’re not, it’s because you’re not high enough on their priority list to bother with. Widespread encryption forces the listener—whether a foreign government, criminal, or terrorist—to target. And this hurts repressive governments much more than it hurts terrorists and criminals.

Of course, criminals and terrorists have used, are using, and will use encryption to hide their planning from the authorities, just as they will use many aspects of society’s capabilities and infrastructure: cars, restaurants, telecommunications. In general, we recognize that such things can be used by both honest and dishonest people. Society thrives nonetheless because the honest so outnumber the dishonest. Compare this with the tactic of secretly poisoning all the food at a restaurant. Yes, we might get lucky and poison a terrorist before he strikes, but we’ll harm all the innocent customers in the process. Weakening encryption for everyone is harmful in exactly the same way.

This essay previously appeared as part of the paper “Don’t Panic: Making Progress on the ‘Going Dark’ Debate.” It was reprinted on Lawfare. A modified version was reprinted by the MIT Technology Review.

Posted on February 3, 2016 at 6:09 AMView Comments

Straight Talk about Terrorism

Nice essay that lists ten “truths” about terrorism:

  1. We can’t keep the bad guys out.
  2. Besides, the threat is already inside.
  3. More surveillance won’t get rid of terrorism, either.
  4. Defeating the Islamic State won’t make terrorism go away.
  5. Terrorism still remains a relatively minor threat, statistically speaking.
  6. But don’t relax too much, because things will probably get worse before they get better.
  7. Meanwhile, poorly planned Western actions can make things still worse.
  8. Terrorism is a problem to be managed.
  9. To do this, however, we need to move beyond the political posturing that characterizes most public debates about counterterrorism and instead speak honestly about the costs and benefits of different approaches.
  10. We need to stop rewarding terrorism.

Nothing here will be news to regular readers of this blog.

Posted on January 7, 2016 at 7:00 AMView 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 AMView Comments

Paris Terrorists Used Double ROT-13 Encryption

That is, no encryption at all. The Intercept has the story:

Yet news emerging from Paris—as well as evidence from a Belgian ISIS raid in January—suggests that the ISIS terror networks involved were communicating in the clear, and that the data on their smartphones was not encrypted.

European media outlets are reporting that the location of a raid conducted on a suspected safe house Wednesday morning was extracted from a cellphone, apparently belonging to one of the attackers, found in the trash outside the Bataclan concert hall massacre. Le Monde reported that investigators were able to access the data on the phone, including a detailed map of the concert hall and an SMS messaging saying “we’re off; we’re starting.” Police were also able to trace the phone’s movements.

The obvious conclusion:

The reports note that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the “mastermind” of both the Paris attacks and a thwarted Belgium attack ten months ago, failed to use encryption whatsoever (read: existing capabilities stopped the Belgium attacks and could have stopped the Paris attacks, but didn’t). That’s of course not to say batshit religious cults like ISIS don’t use encryption, and won’t do so going forward. Everybody uses encryption. But the point remains that to use a tragedy to vilify encryption, push for surveillance expansion, and pass backdoor laws that will make everybody less safe—is nearly as gruesome as the attacks themselves.

And what is it about this “mastermind” label? Why do we have to make them smarter than they are?

EDITED TO ADD: More information.

EDITED TO ADD: My previous blog post on this.

Posted on November 18, 2015 at 3:35 PMView Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.