More Encryption Is Not the Solution
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Big companies' ability to break the encryption between them an you is irrelevant: if they're the legitimate receiver of the communication, they can offer the plain text directly to governments.
The ability for a third party to break the secrecy between two individuals has a pretty good solution though, and that solution is local encryption + open source. It makes it very difficult for states to compromise the scheme, and every time they use this ability, they're at risk of having their exploit discovered, and going blind again. They'd only use information gathered that way for legitimate national security reasons, and will never show it in a court for instance. A discovered 0-day exploit in OpenSSL or GPG isn't as easily replaced as one in Flash player.
The biggest potential impact of Snowden's revelations is that now, any security scheme relying on trusting a third party companies has to be considered unacceptably weak, at least if you mind governments--or companies sponsoring politicians--reading everything you exchange.
TL;DR: encryption isn't the absolute weapon against illegal spying by governments, but it helps making it extremely difficult, expensive and unscalable. Which is good enough a reason to promote it in addition to political action.
I agree we should continue this arms race but I'm a little less confident than I was before reading this article.
It's true they can't reveal exploits in court, but that matters less and less. If they decide they don't like you there are all sorts of other ways they can screw with you.
Suddenly, Dijkstra's insistence on developing the proof together with the program and providing it to any interested person doesn't seem to be the ridiculous idea that some people consider it to be, does it?
-- Don Knuth
Indeed, but my point is, in addition to be worth a lot, it's difficult to implement, and it's very fragile. Every time they use it, they gamble its secrecy, hence its effectiveness. So they won't use it for petty reasons, only for genuine national security matters.
The problem isn't that NSA works on ensuring national security: it's that the scope of what they consider national security, and thus justifies extra-legal measures in their eyes, grows unreasonably, becoming a threat to the robustness of democracy.
A spy agency's ideal environment is totalitarian, not democratic. For a starter, they're scared of free speech and accountability. There must be counter-powers, cancelling their natural tendency to push towards totalitarianism (this is in no way specific to the USA).
> If they decide they don't like you there are all sorts of other ways [than courts] they can screw with you.
Yes, but those ways don't scale. You can screw with a couple of people you dislike, but not with hundreds or thousands of people simultaneously.
Bureaucrats have expertize, inertia, the ability to sabotage many things, long term stable positions, and care about how things actually are, rather than how they look to the average voter. In many cases, including this one IMO, politicians have the appearance of control, but very little actual latitude in practice.
If you want a cruel but funny illustration of this, may I suggest that you read [http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Yes-Minister-ebook/dp/B00...] or watch [http://www.amazon.com/Open-Government/dp/B0015KOTY2] Yes Minister? It compellingly illustrate how an administration can manipulate a politician, what they call the "house training" of a minister.
That said, politically originated policy turned the FISA Court into a Star Chamber making Supreme Court type decisions, and broadened the scope of NSA's role from spying on the Russians to spying on humanity.
Politicians can curtail those activities as well, either by making explicit policy changes, or by defunding things strategically. It requires courage.
That is true, but it's true for every attacker, not just the government, which changes the situation quite a bit. There is a very strong incentive for security experts to look very carefully at every patch to, say, OpenSSL. Few things are better marketing for a security firm than revealing a critical hole in security infrastructure.
In fact, the high price of such an exploit on the black market works in our favour as well. Tons of black-hats are looking for holes, and when they find and sell one, the subsequent exploitation is bound to raise some red flags and eventually point white-hats in the right direction.
Basically, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time"
No crypto-system is truly secure unless BOTH sides can be trusted. If either one is even remotely possible to compromise, then that will happen. In the case where one of those parties is well-known and has something to lose, you can be certain that the powers-that-be will focus their attention on that party. (nb: Skype)
SO yeah, crypto en masse will make casual collection harder, but it's not even halfway towards what is needed. There has to be an awareness of the downside to reduced privacy that can be tangibly grasped by the populace otherwise we're all pissing in the wind. Any crypto-system that requires anything approaching trade-craft on the part of the user is probably going to fail miserably.
I was fresh out of the military when the USG was proposing the widespread deployment of the "Clipper" chip that included key-escrow as a fundamental feature for LEA access to keys. That failed, but I would not be surprised to hear that we got it anyway through quiet "arrangements" with major crypto-system equipment/software providers.
Have YOU inspected your CPU/Firmware/OS/Applications for backdoors? Even with the full source code?
It's a hard problem and requires a lot more than just neat technology to solve. In fact, it probably can't be solved with technology at all.
this is absolutely spot on, especially the firmware. nobody talks about it and the attack surface is huge.
just to be explicit, hardware backdoors exist as well :)
Encryption isn't going to help stop a guy with a stick from beating the information out of you. A functional state, however, can help prevent such things from happening.
On the other hand, Edward Snowden thinks he can secure information effectively from attempts to crack it. He probably had practical knowledge of the day-to-day capabilities of the NSA when he worked there. There is no reason that most everything that you and I store and transmit can't be equally well-protected.
They could also just plant bugs/cameras and watch you type in passwords, or rent the room beside you and set up Van Eck/TEMPEST equipment. They could mess with the power socket in the wall to do encryption analysis as well or replace your powerbar with an evil bar.
You would need guards to watch your room, a SICP tent and TEMPEST proof NATO standards laptop, OpenBSD to softraid encrypt the discs leaving no bootloader (or carry around the bootloader on a usb or CD), and you would have to custom manufacture the equipment yourself in Taiwan to ensure no backdoors and pick it up in person, or manually solder in hardware firewalls to block signals from leaking out of proprietary blobs.
Even poorly-executed encryption will stop _some_ forms of attack, some of the time.
But a failure to provide legal protections will render even strong crypto a weak shield.
Property laws and strong fences and effective policing make for good neighbors.
Depends on what you want to keep secret and mean by secure. Homomorphic encryption (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_computing) schemes work even when an end-point is untrusted. For example a game of mental poker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker) each party/end-point is untrusted by it may still be a "secure" system.
Or consider "secure" to mean that your identity remains private if you so wish. One could certainly create a crypto system that binds an actor to an act without any end-points learning the identity of the actor, but still allowing the actor to take credit if they so wish.
That's what they (NSA) actually are doing/trying to do right now, collecting everything about everyone and decrypting it later when/if needed.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-ns...
As far as we know, integer factorization is still hard, so RSA is still secure, given large enough keys. There's Shors Algorithm for quantum computers but these are still very much experimental things and subject to research. Besides, building, maintaining and running one is incredibly expensive. I might underestimate the NSA here though.
AES has been broken in theory but the results have no real repercussions. A "break" is anything faster than brute-force, no matter whether it actually makes the process computationally feasible or not. In the real world it doesn't currently matter whether we search through 2^256 keys or have a complexity of 2^254.4. Both are vastly out of the reach of current computers. AES has been rated as "suitable for top secret". There is reasons to believe that the NSA uses AES themselves. Knowing about a ciphertext-only attack would put their very own secrets at risk. If such an attack exists, it will only be a matter of time until somebody else finds it.
There are other weaknesses in both these systems though, most of which are due to implementation and physical realities. Side-channel attacks are known for both RSA and AES as well as for SSL.
So yes, they might very well collect everything right now but unless they are many decades ahead of the rest of the world in terms of cryptanalysis, they can't do anything with the data for now.
One thing a lot of these discussions miss is that the entire point of doing privacy and anonymity correctly is that you are never on a list of people that any particular nation state wants to deny privacy to. That your True Name (to borrow the idea from Vinge’s story of the same name) is never the target, is never even interesting.
I personally don't advocate a world where everything I do is encrypted and anonymized, I think that that is as unachievable and sacrificing as living an entirely private life. Use gmail, skype, facebook, twitter, send non-encrypted messages about christmas to your friends and family, etc.
But what we do need is an online equivalent of a private life as well. And people need to be educated in the tools and techniques that can make this possible when necessary. Use tor, hidden services, pgp, i2p etc Use completely different online identities, ways of speaking and never login to a HN account associated with your real identity from that private space. Create and participate in hidden online communities, but don’t center those communities around your real life family and friends (ie facebook-esque hidden service would be a very bad idea).
The idea is not to challenge, fight or oppose nation states with surveillance capabilities, that's a losing proposition; the idea is to create a space away from them.
Implementing what you suggest is just such a lot of work. Certainly too much for me, when I weight up the odds I'll fall foul of Big Brother ( as an Oz living in London. Burma, Saudi, etc have clear problems )
I believe that if one comes on the radar of Big Brother, it is for boring mundane reasons like they don't like your politics, they don't like someone you communicate with or you're a lawyer representing someone they don't like.
There are clearly edge cases with serious consequences, such as a police chief fancies your wife and uses privilege to mess with you. But these are rare thank G-d, and one probably has a heads up that this is occurring.
In this context of very low probability consequences, how can I justify all the effort ??
Where ``hard'' means, ``really, really hard''.
With encryption and privacy it will be the same. People will need to learn new skills.
Unfortunately, what we need to do is as cumbersome as a surgeon prepping for operation - it takes too much care to make sure you don't mix things up. You never login into your Gmail on Tor, don't refer to your reddit user name on Gmail, etc.
Unless you already did, in which case you're toast. They already have years of data on your views and interests.
Could we make a browser extension that would compare all you do and force privacy for you? For example, if you mistakenly mention your anonymous identity in your official mail, to catch it before sending. It should have a list of forbidden things - keywords, user names, etc - and send watch people not to mix the pots. Take care to separate cookies between anonymous mode and public mode. I am sure such an extension would go 99% of the way to making your private online life private again.
I envision a whole suite of apps - browser, mail, messaging, file sharing - written with this goal in mind - to separately manage identities - private and public - based on the content of communication. Like spam filters, but applied to all our data leaks.
I can imagine a day when face to face communication gets really popular, even critical for some people.
This coupled with your idea of 3d printing for casing is interesting.
As always, there's a tradeoff between cost and security. How many hardware hackers are good enough (or motivated enough) to design their own brand new ISA and CPU design, then bootstrap a compiler and OS for their homemade CPU? Maybe 0.001% of the population, if that.
1. These communication tools are operated by a company under American jurisdiction, that can therefore be strong-armed into cooperation
2. These communication tools store your data unencrypted
3. The world outside that company has no way of figuring out what is happening inside (i.e. no transparency)
I am therefore of the opinion that the only viable technical solution to Prism has to be
a. Completely decentralized
b. Fully (end-to-end) encrypted
c. Open source
If our communication tools were decentralized, encrypted and open source, then the NSA would have had a much harder job listening in. What needs to happen is that we need to build those systems, and basically divorce Facebook the company from Facebook the tool.
We need to change the playing field, and remove the capability to listen in on our communications. The internet is an amazing tool, but it's still in its infancy. It could very well be that, decades from now, we will look back at this period and wonder how it was even possible that the NSA was listening in on every single person in the world. We're not there yet, but it's not impossible.
One of the author's points was that you can't even trust your hardware. To prevent this fundamental weakness, we would need a whole new infrastructure of open-source hardware designs along with manufacturers who could somehow be trusted not to insert backdoors.
Also, you can't live in modern society without doing communicating with entities who you don't necessarily trust with your privacy (i.e. businesses). If the other party is agnostic or malicious regarding your privacy then you need the state's help if you want protection.
And the fundamental problem is, out of those 500 or 600 "contacts" I've got on Twitter/Facebook, I've got maybe 2 dozen PGP keys matching them. By far the greatest portion of any email I send is going to have to arrive in friends/colleages/clients mailboxes as cleartext, and I strongly suspect there are people who's PGP keys I do have, who'll decrypt mail I send them and store the cleartext somewhere vulnerable to NSA snooping anyway. Same with just about every other "technical solution", until everybody has properly managed and secured keypairs - most communication is going to have weakest-link vulnerabilities that are trivially defeat-able to a "globally present network embedded adversary". Having said that, it's still worth doing, from the point of view of increasing the level of difficulty for a ubiquiously surveilling adversary. (with the probably downside of drawing attention to myself by asserting my ethical "right to privacy", which is no doubt interpreted as "doing something suspicious" by the opponent)
Just think about it: the current communication tools store all the world's communication in plain text databases on American soil. No wonder the NSA engineered access to it - it is a prize too good to be true. I think we can and should at least try to change that.
Regarding the availability and use of PGP key pairs and related technology: you're right. Almost no one uses them, save for security enthusiasts. They're difficult to use, overly technical, make you feel like a paranoid conspiracy theorist and are frankly a pain. Those are all issues that could be overcome, though. There are no real, actual, structural reasons why good security has to be difficult to use.
But what I'm really wondering about is the best way forward. Like I said, I would strongly prefer a political solution, but I'm skeptical if that will ever pan out. I've been mulling this for a while, and if we would really want decentralized, encrypted, open source means of communications, shouldn't we take a structural approach to this?
It's an interesting question – who's going to fund writing the software that effectively needs to replace Facebook while making it impossible to monetise in the ways Facebook can?
(Random half-baked ideas: what about something built on top of BitTorrentSync? A distributed encrypted file storage repo with sufficient storage/bandwidth on every users machine to store many encrypted blobs, some of which are encrypted using your public key. A client-side app that gives you a personal view of that data showing only the stuff meant for you. Work backwards from there to a Facebook or Twitter like service, with a whole bunch of strong crypto using PGP keypairs and self-signed TLS certs authenticated with your social graph's web of trust. It's almost certainly more difficult than that though - I feel like like this guy: http://xkcd.com/793/ – and we're now back at the "everyone just needs a PGP keypair" showstopper…)
It makes eavesdropping without a warrant harder. However, in some countries the refusal to turn over a private key to the police is already a crime [1]. I don't find it hard to imagine that governments would seek to require that private keys are handed to the government or that they would reintroduce a Clipper-like chip. Especially if it becomes harder to wiretap via Facebook et al.
I agree that a political solution is strongly preferable, but I'm not sure if that's ever going to happen.
I am not sure. I think that under sufficient political pressure, it could happen in Europe. Perhaps with the wrong motivation (weakening the position of US companies), but some influential politicians (e.g. Neelie Kroes) have been very critical of Prism. Of course, we don't know that much of the breadth of data collection of EU security agencies...
[1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/10/uk_police_can_...
[2] http://www.zdnet.com/prism-fallout-could-cost-us-cloud-indus...
But the real reason technologists focus on the tech is because it is their area of expertise.
I for one don't feel like making it easy for the NSA, a foreign agency in my case, to spy on me. I owe it to my privacy to at least try and protect it.
The political change that is necessary is out of my reach in the case of PRISM, as I am not from the US. I can only hope that the American public will realize how bad this really is and act accordingly. After all, this is still a democracy and it will be until all privacy has been taken away completely.
Just use bloody SIP or any other cryptographically-sound protocol; maintain trust with people and their personal endpoints, rather than companies which are obviously under enormous state pressure(the threat of violence and imprisonment, and the rape included with that, for life) to give up the goodies.
We have other issues, including the pervasive use of proprietary software trading convenience over the pragmatic requirement of not having industrial or governmental espionage committed against you.
Intel is under grave pressure to inject these bugs into their CPUs, and even a well-audited system such as OpenBSD is not modular enough to prevent remote exploitation through network stacks(see the last two remote vulnerabilities), but laziness leaves them on monolithic kernels.
Even if the systems worked correctly, proprietary firmware in PCIe devices like network cards and graphics cards allows them to directly access memory on the bus, generally with very little protection, and often enough with none at all.
You guys are buying all of this crap, supporting the people who subjugate and bend.
You paid them knowingly to do all of this crap(in addition to raping, killing, and enslaving hundreds of millions or billions in other countries), and you continue to today.
If you want this stuff to stop happening, you need to simply stop knowingly supporting these things, and playing dumb when you learn the specifics.
Also, while politics sometimes trumps cryptography, the opposite happens just as often. All the police force is useless if they don't know where to point their guns (see Silk Road)
Maybe they will still be able to spy on a select few individuals (just like they can order a locksmith to open a safe, or just blowtorch through). But then again, there are much cheaper and old school ways to spy on a select few individuals
At the moment I set up TOR and use Starpage.COM instead of Google. Auto-delete cookies after closing the tabs and actively remove ads and tracking JS from web pages with the help of a few browser extensions. It's not perfect, but it's above average for the moment.
You know how we could become anonymous? Just pipe the traffic of 1000 people through the same box, mix their searches and pages loaded in the same stream. Then send them on the clear net - they can't trace back who requested what. Hiding in the crowd, in plain sight.
I read it wondering 'If at first they come for cp, what about mv? rm?'
And how would author convince Russia or China not to spy? Or some people who are not government at all? (terrorists, scam...). Also NSA lied several times and said it would lie again.
Lets just treat it as any other security issue. Banning XSS in parliament is ridiculous.
Unfortunately, the current environment lets even the intelligence chief get away with blatantly lying to Congress about who's he spying on and why. I agree that a policy solution is definitely preferable in the long run, but for now we should protect ourselves however we can, until we get to turn the "surveillance state" into a "privacy state".
That also proves that the end users can't assume that they can get any idea when some company starts to be the part of such a program, even if now everybody likes to feel smart and more secure in his abilities to spot the difference: "look it was the architecture change."
The US DoD/DISA publishes some of their documentation for how to operate iOS devices that access unclassified DoD networks (google for "ios stig"). It's inflexible -- no app store (except for internal, whitelisted app store), no music/etc, no iMessage, etc. They have a need to operate that way because even simple things like the physical location of personnel are potentially meaningful to adversaries. They also have the budget to do so.
I think that you need to scale up your security measures to meet your needs. If I were a political candidate running for a significant office, I'd demand a level of operational discipline to ensure that communication with key people was secure. Ditto if I were personally involved in some sort of extended litigation for attorney-client email.
Beyond that, what's the point? I could send pictures of my one-year old's birthday party to my mom with GPG. But why? And how would I expect my mom to handle that picture afterwards? Secrets (encrypted or not) are as strong as their weakest link -- I think that we all learned that lesson in high school.
The US government was already tracking every citizen's postal mail, and storing a copy of the contents for potential later use, for many years before networked computers, "email" and the "world wide web".
Further, anyone working at a government security contractor could at their own discretion inspect any such postal mail.
I would hope you're now thinking "Wait a second. That would be quite difficult to do." Truthfully, I have no idea whether postal mail was tracked and stored; I am only trying to make a point.
My point is that one reason we're seeing a mass scale dragnet now is because _it is so easy to accomplish_.
phk seems to ignore this inconvenient fact.
I see no reason for him to try to persuade citizens to choose politics _over_ use of technology as a means to preserve their right to privacy. Why does his frame of reference need to be binary: that it's either one or the other? Is there a rationale for this?
Maybe citizens should pursue _both_?
If citizens routinely through their choice of technology make surveillance of their communications _ridiculously easy_, then how will they be perceived when they come forth and demand greater privacy? Who would take them seriously?
If citizens are to persuade their representatives that the privacy of their communications is important to protect, then I would argue they must practice what they advocate. They should not be communicating by megaphone. Or plain text.
All the points he makes are possible scenarios. After Snowden, almost nothing that can be done seems unlikely to have been done. Heck, even the movie "The Net" looks like prophecy come true now.
It's weird to think that encryption is not as secure as we all believed but it still makes it more difficult for the Big Brother to watch over all of use.
In the end, encryption is only completely useless if each and every provider reports to the government. It's a shame and disgrace for the western world that we even assume that this could become a reality.
Doesn't steganography mitigate this issue if used properly?
Or if it couldn't be trusted by a part of the population (e.g blacks) you got civil rights activism.
Only a very lazy and apolitical society would say that technology is the only recourse.
To get a revolution the government would have to start to starve people. I don't think there was any period in history of organized nation-states when people trusted those in power.
> Only a very lazy and apolitical society would say that technology is the only recourse.
Technology is a force multiplier. Moreover, technology shapes the environment we live in. We can all see that groups of people behave like water. They do what they have always done (i.e. move down the potential gradient). You can try and do politics all you want, but this tend to be as pointless as arguing with water to start flowing upstream. What you can do is to change the potential gradient, and let the people achieve your goals by doing what they were always doing.
That's why I think technological solutions are important, and probably we should focus mainly on them.
That's like the naive marxist notion that it's all about the economy. People have revolted without being starved and people have starved without revolting. Culture, patriotism, hummiliation, religion, and tons of other factors come into play.
>Technology is a force multiplier.
Yes, and if the government is allowed to have 10 times the force of regular citizens, then the government ends with 10multipler power using technology, where the people with just 1multiplier. That's why technology is not a solution.
>Moreover, technology shapes the environment we live in. We can all see that groups of people behave like water. They do what they have always done
The last 3000 years of history show great shifts of power, strikes, revolts, changes in government and culture etc. And the 2400 of them (e.g 1600 AD and before) are not even related with any great changes in technology.
Of course if people are convinced that they "behave like water", they will behave like water.
But that's not what history shows they did (and do).
The author says the solution can only be on the politics side, but frankly I see a dilemma and don't see how to solve it.
The author makes an interresting parallel with the privacy loss we have at work and we accept. But I know I accept it because there are rules and higher authority that can punish abuse. The problem is that this doesn't exist with states spying.
If there was an authority who could punish states who abuse the information gathered for surveillance, then I beleive we could reconcile the need of surveilance for collective security interest and trust in privacy.
We may need some more decades to reach such evolution stage.
The combinations[1] mean that many people are not protected, and do not know that they are not protected.
I think that I tend to avoid paranoia. But (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6132613) and the Debian rng bug (https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/05/random_number...) are scary.
[1] Good products used carefully; good products used carelessly; bad products used carefully; bad products used carelessly.
But it doesn't have to be unbreakable, either. It only has to be more of a hassle than getting a warrant.
Tax rules for a company of the size of Microsoft are not simple. It's not impossible to hide stuff.
Not to mention that the last 40 years not much progress has been made in this direction (if any).
Also: the other proposition also helps putting a better government in place. The "technological" solution, even if it worked, it would only solve the very specific problem of privacy. Not the much more important problem of a government that betrayed the trust of the people.
We've built a system that makes sure liars and demagogues get into office. Until people are on board with putting an end to such a system of elections, the only way to change the political landscape will be to circumvent it.
However, given the situation, it is the only one available to us.
The answer involves more encryption. We need it, anyway, to secure us against crooks.
But we also need to control governments. We need to do both.