Use of Tor and e-mail crypto could increase chances that NSA keeps your data
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
As sad as it is to say, lets be honest and admit that this is a fairly small number. How long do you think it will be till your less committed friends get tired of decrypting your emails and just ignore what you send? Make sure you only pick people that use actual email clients because gpg and Gmail is no fun.
As far as the "Thomas Crowne Affair attack" goes generating effective cover traffic is not easy and random traffic is definitely a bad idea. Basic traffic analysis would be able to separate your legit emails from your cover traffic.
Addendum: I noticed you just generated your new gpg key yesterday. Why not go big and use a 4096 bit key?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mailvelope/kajibbe...
(I suspect that'd last about 121 minutes before most of my friends spam filtered me forever)
That, sir, is genuis. Now that talibans have office in qatar, I hope they'll publish some kind of contact email, so we can rickroll both NSA and them through tormail. Sorry authoritarians, this is the internet.
Repurpose Sircam to do this, perhaps.
Procedures used by NSA to target non-US persons: Exhibit A: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/7166...
Procedures used by NSA to minimize data collection from US persons: Exhibit B: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/7166...
It is amazing how many requests the guardian wants to make to third party sites.
Maybe they're just trying to make sure every social site knows you're there so that NSA can figure it out later with PRISM? ;)
As a European, what I find more disturbing about all the news about PRISM and related programs, is how US centric the reports about it are and how little other western governments are objecting to all of this. We are always told how the USA is the EU's biggest ally, yet US politicians try to legitimize everything by saying it's only non-US citizens they spy on, and say it like then it's suddenly okay.
I get that some spying is a necessary evil and 100% freedom and privacy is not feasible, especially if there are nations that are less than friendly towards you. But that's a whole different thing than recording as much data as possible, especially from friendly nations.
I don't think many friendships would survive if it turned out your best friend has been hiring private investigators with the goal to records as much of your life as possible.
Not so much that it makes things "okay" but that it makes things "legal." The NSA isn't supposed to spy on U.S. citizens, that's outside its scope of operation.
Every one of the countries currently lodging complaints over the story of the UK's GCHQ hacking G20 delegates possesses a communications intelligence organisation whose mandate is to spy on foreign states and on foreign people. That includes my own country, which has complained loudly while conveniently forgetting about the National Communications Centre whose purpose is to do exactly that sort of thing. They've also forgotten about some surveillance equipment that was discovered outside the German embassy about a decade ago.
So it's the way things are and have always been. You spy on your allies (very discreetly!) because that's how you maintain confidence in them remaining your allies.
In my opinion this is vastly different from a government reading and storing pretty much all foreign communication they can get their hands on from an allied state citizens though, something I understand the USA/NSA seems to be doing.
So what the NSA is doing to foreign citizens is no different to what every other country with the means does. My country will happily (and legally) spy on American citizens indiscriminately if it feels the need to, as will all of Europe.
That covers Tor, but not the rest...
> As a European, what I find more disturbing about all the news about PRISM and related programs, is how US centric the reports
Agreed. I worry that the American government has done damage to the cause of globalisation that will take a very long time to heal. This is a problem for us all.
I don't know if you've been over to the U.S. but we have a stunningly large continent of people who feel that it is absolutely treasonous to give foreign aid at all to other nations (especially ones like Egypt and Pakistan) while there are still the poor within domestic boundaries.
The people worried about globalization are in large corporations. Even many of our liberals see "globalization" as a code term for "child labor" and "sweatshops".
Right. Globalization can be used as a powerful force to subvert or bypass democracy, and to create a worldwide "race to the bottom."
Oh, certainly not. I don't think they are or will be concerned...
Is it global surveillance? Military domination? Economic centralization?
Or is it something more benign?
We must create boogeymen from a vacuum so that we can burn taxpayer dollars to further enrich the right people. Unlike biochemicals, encryption, storage and analysis are benevolent forms of collateral damage as they lead to increases in computing power and mathematical insights.
I'm making a personal effort to use TorBrowser whenever I have some trivial need to use a government website. I suspect I'd stop short of applying for a visa via TOR, but I'll happily look up my local state or federal politicians and their websites, or renew my car registration, or any of the other day-to-day things - in much the same way as I always choose to use BitTorrent for fully legal purposes when available - sure, we all know that 99% of Torrent traffic is copyright infringement, but at least _some_ of it is me grabbing the latest Ubuntu/Raspbian/GameOfThones (no, wait, not that last one...)
Here's some info on how to help: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-...
And that's why I encourage everybody I can to run a tor node
A: No. If law enforcement becomes interested in traffic from your exit relay, it's possible that officers will seize your computer. For that reason, it's best not to run your exit relay in your home or using your home Internet connection.
Instead, consider running your exit relay in a commercial facility that is supportive of Tor. Have a separate IP address for your exit relay, and don't route your own traffic through it.
Of course, you should avoid keeping any sensitive or personal information on the computer hosting your exit relay, and you never should use that machine for any illegal purpose.
This will reduce the monthly usage to 12GB and keep you under the 15GB limit. I've been running this bridge for a few months now and have never gone over.
A: Tor (like all current practical low-latency anonymity designs) fails when the attacker can see both ends of the communications channel. For example, suppose the attacker controls or watches the Tor relay you choose to enter the network, and also controls or watches the website you visit. In this case, the research community knows no practical low-latency design that can reliably stop the attacker from correlating volume and timing information on the two sides.
So, what should we do? Suppose the attacker controls, or can observe, C relays. Suppose there are N relays total. If you select new entry and exit relays each time you use the network, the attacker will be able to correlate all traffic you send with probability (c/n)2. But profiling is, for most users, as bad as being traced all the time: they want to do something often without an attacker noticing, and the attacker noticing once is as bad as the attacker noticing more often. Thus, choosing many random entries and exits gives the user no chance of escaping profiling by this kind of attacker.
The solution is "entry guards": each Tor client selects a few relays at random to use as entry points, and uses only those relays for her first hop. If those relays are not controlled or observed, the attacker can't win, ever, and the user is secure. If those relays are observed or controlled by the attacker, the attacker sees a larger fraction of the user's traffic — but still the user is no more profiled than before. Thus, the user has some chance (on the order of (n-c)/n) of avoiding profiling, whereas she had none before.
You can read more at An Analysis of the Degradation of Anonymous Protocols, Defending Anonymous Communication Against Passive Logging Attacks, and especially Locating Hidden Servers.
More to the point - I want the expectation of privacy and the deployment of tools to maintain privacy in the face of technological and legal "advances" in surveillance to seem closer to "technologically informed libertarian" rather than "paranoid wingnut" or "jetliner-hijacking 3rd-world-sympathiser".
"A global passive adversary is the most commonly assumed threat when analyzing theoretical anonymity designs. But like all practical low-latency systems, Tor does not protect against such a strong adversary. Instead, we assume an adversary who can observe some fraction of network traffic; who can generate, modify, delete, or delay traffic; who can operate onion routers of his own; and who can compromise some fraction of the onion routers."[1]
If your attacker is not "a global passive adversary"(GPA) what dots are they going to connect if you renew your car registration? If your attacker is a GPA they are already connecting all the dots.
[1] https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-des...
I'm assuming "they" have access to government servers and networks, and that they'll easily be able to connect me - as a real and (at least mostly) law abiding citizen - to a clean-slate browser using SSL over TOR - logging in to a government web server with real world credentials and doing some mundane and law abiding everyday task.
Which may well be true.
(But I'm still hoping my new 2048bit GPG key and a significant portion of tor nodes are _not_ NSA bugged...)
However, that doesn't mean there isn't a good reason to use it anyway to make a statement and promote legitimate usage of Tor.
Then, even if things get patched, it's mere existence and prevelence among the layman gives you a tremendous amount of plausible deniability while also increasing the strength of the network.
However, it's quite morally wrong to do so. I guess it's just one of those late-night thoughts.
Good luck, have fun NSA. You liberty hating anti-American bastards.
A Chinese/Egyptian/Turkish dissident might consider it perfectly sensible to use TOR to access their gmail account - that's a perfectly valid way of hiding from your local (non-US) government and spy agencies.
On oft-hear piece of advice is to never use an identity you ever use elsewhere over TOR - for me, as a "non US person", even if I can trust TOR and TLS/SSL to ensure the privacy of my data in transit, it doesn't matter if the far end of my connection through TOR ends up at my gmail/apple/facebook/linkedin/twitter/dropbox/yahoo/amazon/any-other-US-affiliated-corporation. Being "non US" and located outside the US means the bar for any "legal requests" those companies receive is _very_ low.
(Hmmm, I wonder if proxying all my web traffic through a vpn with a definitely-in-the-US endpoint might be a worthwhile bit of civil protest? I wonder if tcp connections originating from my Digital Ocean vps in New York and heading to US datacenters have slightly better legal protection or "presumtion of domestic provenance" than tcp connections originating here in Australia? Maybe I should be doing this anyway for all the analytics/ad-tracking web-bugs...)
The NSA is very good at exploiting very small mistakes. In the Venona project, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona, they NSA realized that the soviets were re-using one time pads. By knowing A xor C and B xor C, they were able to get A xor B - and from that, they were able to decode the messages.
I could imagine things like looking at the tor traffic, and trying to match up things like writing patterns. And of course, there's the very good chance some people aren't using tor right.
I don't think that what the NSA is doing is legal - but think there's a good chance it's somewhat effective.
That all said - and I realize that this might be controversial - I fully agree with wiretaps as long as there is a warrant (and I mean a real warrant from a real court on a case-by-case basis).
With its sweeping data collection the NSA is doing itself a disservice as it will eventually lead to wider use of strong encryption, which will make wiretaps with warrants much more expensive (or even impossible) to serve.
I think new laws for stricter limitations on exporting cryptography software or even restricting cryptography itself are likely in the near future. This will lead to interesting trials where folks might be forced to reveal their encryption keys; and the inability to prove whether there actually is encrypted data (good encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data, and some folks wipe old harddrives with random data before they are discarded, how would one prove that this is really random data?)
The fact of the matter is, people who use Tor are the ones trying to hide from the government, and it only makes sense for the NSA to run Tor exit nodes and analyze all traffic passing through them.
You probably have more privacy by not using Tor at all.
But in a world where individuals have access to extremely powerfull tech, something has to be done.
I think the solution for privacy might look like something different. Maybe the government could read everything, but there would be some good transparency tools, ensuring proper usage.
And I agree -- high latency systems are far more secure. Something with 5-10 day latency should be secure under a lot of assumptions. Sadly the old mixmaster code is lame, and mixminion never really took over.
I do not mean this to be snarky -- if you have a legitimate source other than hearsay, I'd love to see it.
Is it really that hard to believe? Considering that the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) gets mostly DoD contracts and research grants and a lot of those contracts are for classified projects.
Now, as for DoD funding institutional research, absolutely (they funded me last year for something completely benign and outside the scope for "info wars"). They fund research at a lot more places than GT. So, yes, plausible. But, unlikely IMO that NSA has an active presence on your campus doing intelligence work.
BTW, I challenge your claim that GT gets "mostly DoD". I'm sure your school is primarily funded by NSF (the preferred government tit to suck on). DoD is actually a pain in the ass to deal with because they don't go away after the money changes hands. Same is true for SBIR/STTR.
Finally, DoD classifies everything. Don't let that label fool you into thinking the work is sensitive (or even interesting). Within academia, this is less so because the objective of funding institutional research to produce publications. Contract R&D is not something that is popular with faculty (or the school, since depending on the IP ownership, it can put their tax exempt status at risk.)
That said, keep snooping and let us know what you find in that room labeled "no personnel permitted without super-duper top secret clearance".
No it is not hard to believe that NSA doles out a lot of research money to schools across the country. Information Assurance is one of NSA's core missions.
128.61.0.0/19
128.61.32.0/19
128.61.64.0/18
128.61.128.0/17
130.207.0.0/16
143.215.0.0/16
204.152.10.0/23
[1] http://bgp.he.net/AS2637#_prefixes
[2] http://www.nsa.gov/ia/academic_outreach/nat_cae/institutions...
This statement is beyond absurdity. Controlling a few exit nodes doesn't compromise Tor, it's designed to resist that. Tracing someone is possible, but it is extremely difficult and/or unreliable unless you've managed to compromise nearly all nodes on a chain.
This whole NSA scandal may really push forward the use of encryption of securer communication methods.
Until the tools take 5 min to setup. And encryption/decryption is as easy as clicking a checkbox in your mail client, PGP will never take off. Things like the public key directory have to handled transparently to the user.
It's too bad Mozilla dropped support for Thunderbird. Tight integration with GnuPG could have made mainstream PGP a reality.
If you start using PGP for all your email, then you by inference "have something to hide". Brilliant logic.
What a mess.
Probably not. Quoting from http://blog.agilebits.com/2013/03/09/guess-why-were-moving-t...:
A quantum of bits [Update: March 20, 2013]
I reached out to the cryptographic community for any insight into Molly’s question about why the NSA insists that TOP SECRET material be encrypted using 256-bit keys. The answer came from Steven Bellovin of Columbia University:
@jpgoldberg @marshray Just heard that during the AES competition, NSA said in the open meetings it was for defense against quantum computing
Quantum computers, if they are every made practical, will be able to do amazing things. They will certainly change how we design cryptographic systems. It’s not that quantum computers will be faster or more powerful. Indeed, in some very important respects they will be less powerful than current computers. But there are some things that they will be able to do in less “time”. I put “time” in scare quotes because it has a different meaning in this context from the ordinary use of the word. Oh, what a big difference it is. In this context it means the number of distinct steps an algorithm must take in performing some computation.
Searching through 2128 keys (on a classical, non-quantum, computer) takes a number of steps that is proportional to 2128. But for a quantum computer it takes a number of steps proportional to the square root of that number, 264. If a quantum computer is ever built capable of performing that task, we don’t know how the actual speed of each individual step will compare to those of current computers, but the NSA is taking no chances. Something with the effective strength of a 64-bit key isn’t strong enough. A 256-bit key against a quantum brute force attack would have the effective strength of a 128 bit key against a classical brute force attack.
I very much doubt that we will see a quantum computer actually capable of handing such things within the next thirty years. But if the past is any guide, my predictions about the future should be taken with a large grain of salt.
We're so early in development that we don't know how quickly we'll be able to scale them, but if we solve a few physical problems, we're looking the ability to scale up resources for linear costs for exponential rewards. With on-demand cloud pricing models for computing becoming the norm, normal people could do some pretty amazing things. It's hard to predict how quickly this will come, but it will definitely come eventually.
Not really; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography A decent chunk of today's crypto is either immune or only weakened a little bit (for example, Bitcoin is mostly immune although the SHA hashes are a little weakened and so hypothetically miners might some day move to quantum computers using Shor's algorithm to mine for matches).
Please read:
Wikipedia:One Time Pad
or
"My crypto assumes RH(Riemann hypothesis)" if it can be broken, RH is proved. Thank you `quantum quack quack quamputer!
Or if you actually believe this
Wikipedia: The Time Machine(film)
Grrrrrrrrrrr...
If we can get entangled particles between parties ahead of time to exchange keys, we can do all sorts of fun things.
All good news!
1: The Guardian is still time-releasing, I thought they caved under a IGIC -sorry, what ever its called over there - gag order.
2: Now we know what to do to backup into the NSA cloud! Another USA world benefit: a highly secure service for all the world to avail themselves for free.
3: web app $opportunity$! tor p2p delivery and crypto of your files into free NSA Cloud, for only $0.99!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/defence-d-bbc-me....
And if you're willing to pay a few bucks for private cams, there's no way anyone else can have a copy of your screencap, so no amount of clever transcoding will get them a reference copy.
>"reasonably believed to contain evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed."
Is this sort of intelligence gathering of domestic signals handed over to other relevant authorities? I'm sure the DEA would love to have the NSA's assistance in tracking down drug dealers. I'm just not convinced it has much of anything to do with national security.
Also, does use of HTTPS constitute "communications that are enciphered?"