After NSA's XKeyscore, Wikipedia Switches to HTTPS
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Switches to https automatically when visiting Wikipedia, even if you're not logged in.
$ echo | openssl s_client -debug -connect en.wikipedia.org:443 | grep "Cipher is" -A 4
depth=1 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert High Assurance CA-3
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
verify return:0
DONE
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is RC4-SHA
Server public key is 2048 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_forward_secrecyhttp://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/future-https-wikimedia-...
Enabling perfect forward secrecy is only useful if we also
eliminate the threat of traffic analysis of HTTPS, which
can be used to detect a user’s browsing activity, even
when using HTTPS.I think we should assume the NSA is cutting Fiber. My fear is they would sniff that for keys.
If even one person fails to secure keys, we all lose. Hence why I think rotating keys are important.
ssl_ciphers EECDH+AES:EDH+AES:-SHA1:EECDH+RC4:EDH+RC4:RC4-SHA:EECDH+AES256:EDH+AES256:AES256-SHA:!aNULL:!eNULL:!EXP:!LOW:!MD5
Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17308690/how-do-i-enable-...Because Wikipedia's content is public, the NSA can crawl the site repeatedly with all common user agents, generating the number of HTTPS bytes needed to download any given Wikipedia page. Then, simply by looking at the patterns of bits sent over the wire, they can trivially reconstruct the likely pages a user was viewing.
Wikipedia has not discussed any plans to mitigate traffic analysis; until they do so this whole exercise is futile, and I doubt Wikipedia will be able to obfuscate their site sufficiently to evade sophisticated traffic analysis.
However this does mean that systems like PRISM and phone metadata will simply become more important as 'upstream wiretaps' go away, and the NSA will surely have other tricks up their sleeves as well.
Of course, anything we can do to make their surveillance efforts require manual intervention (e.g. having to attack an ownCloud installation from within a rented system in the same datacenter) makes those efforts less of a threat to each of us than a completely automated tracking of anyone they wish.
The hacker mantra is indeed "There is a key to every lock" but what happens when 1) you unlock a door, 2) they know you unlocked that door, and 3) it's illegal to unlock that door?
Answer: Then they put you in prison.
A hacker charged with changing YOUR Internet Browser, potentially making the entire country less secure in the face of terrorists, has been found guilty of crimes against the state.
Actually, that's pretty much the #1 prerequisite for the job of a being a politician...
In your imagined dystopia what you're talking about doing (using a browser with safe CAs) would be illegal no matter where the browser really comes from.
Governments knew how to tap analog phone lines well, and when cell phones became popular they had to adapt methods.
Governments knew how to capture or analyze mail traffic, and when the Internet became popular they had to adapt methods.
1) Find the first edit made by a user
2) Search for IP sockets with a spike in outbound traffic to Wikipedia at around the same time (editing a large section submits a large POST).
3) Follow the users' further edits, and do the same as above to keep narrowing the candidate IPs down.
I work in a nuclear physics lab; if the NSA is watching, I'm sure that some of my searches have triggered flags. Doesn't help that the physics community is small, and everyone is only a few degrees of separation apart.
So, unless they already had decided to keep an eye on you, your traffic would probably have gone unnoticed. Switching to a VPN now or something would keep you relatively anonymous.
the XKeyScore slides are 5 years old. who knows what they can do now.
But if you become person of interest, there is strong possibility that they can do man-in-the-middle attack very easily (with certificates that don't give any alarms). They probably have stuff in major network hubs that can divert traffic trough their servers.
Remember how easily Nokia, Opera and Amazon are able to do MITM attack against phone users by running it trough SSL proxy (I think Nokia has stopped doing this). https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/man-in-the-mi...
I strongly suspect that NSA don't have to do that kind of stuff that can be easily noticed. They just ask nicely from Symantec/Verisign to give them valid certificate. Or they already have common root certificates.
I agree with your main point.
Maybe offer a search on the site that returns links that are generated just for you, so instead of going to the above url, you'd access something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/onetime/45sdf3sd8re2dfa7w7eras... (and throw away the key after the access).
1. DNS query in plaintext for en.wikipedia.org.
2. Open a connection to the resultant IP (the fact that you connect to this IP is trace-able).
3. Do an SSL handshake.
4. HTTP protocol stuff, including transmission of PATH_INFO, happens on the encrypted channel.
5. Server responds on encrypted channel.
But considering what Wikipedia is, users wanting increased privacy could just download a copy of the encyclopedia and do their searches offline. Wikimedia makes data dumps of their user-generated content (UGC) available to the public. (Don't you wish all mega-websites relying on UGC did that?)
There was a time before the internet when we used volumes of paper bound encyclopedias. These were not written by laypeople and they were not free. Few people owned their own set of volumes of Brittanica's encyclopedia. They used someone else's copy, e.g., a library's.
But imagine if Brittanica offered _free_ copies of their encyclopedia that could somehow fit in your pocket (as is possible now through digitization and Wikipedia).
Would you continue to use a copy belonging to someone else everytime you had to look something up? Why wouldn't you obtain a copy for yourself?
What if... Wikipedia's data dumps were small enough. Wikipedia content was, overall, static enough. Storage was cheap enough. Download speeds were fast enough. And you could get your very own copy of the encyclopedia.
Compared to the speed, reliability and privacy of offline reading, grabbing specific articles piecemeal via HTTPS simply cannot compare.
See OpenMoko's WikiReader as an example implementation. It's on Github.
Images are much more resource intensive, but if text only is sufficient then the average user can download the compressed Wikipedia dumps in less than 2 days.
Please use torrents to reduce the load on Wikimedia's servers and to increase download speed: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#enwiki
I keep a backup on an external hard-drive, in case of apocalypse or censorship (same thing). Nobody can take away my list of Scrubs episodes.
The only problem is that images need massive space. I hope some technological advances will enable us to include all of them in wiki dumps soon.
Do you have any data for that? I highly doubt it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Anonymous_edits
Time to get the TLS hangups sorted and upgrade to 1.2 ?!
sigh
I just went to wikipedia and the implementation is not live yet.
This is why people should donate as much as possible before the "drive banners" come up. It doesn't have to be a whole lot; if most of the people who use it give even a small sum, considering the volume of visitors, they could still keep up with operations costs pretty well.
"We're still waiting on some core changes in MediaWiki to switch logged-in users
to HTTPS. I'd prefer to have that happen first."
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=758857That's the question we should all be asking.
Mallory has always been out there. NSA is certainly a member of Mallory, but is not the only member.
So while it's nice that NSA is bringing attention to the idea of securing your communications, it shouldn't have had to come to this. It's been recommend practice for years now to use TLS for everything unless there were good reasons not to, to the point that it's baked-in to SPDY.
Maybe not against the NSA, but against your everyday problems people are going to be better prepared.
(This whether or not your goal with TLS for it is securing that site or increasing the overall volume of encrypted data)
[0] http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=ifissues&Template=/C...
How would the FBI monitor me using a card catalog and getting a book off the shelf? With a camera? If it was a camera, it's still not what we expect from the physical world, because we don't physically expect that we are being watched unless there are actually eyes staring at us.
If there was an FBI agent watching me look up things from a card catalog, and another one watching me read the books, this would match my physical understanding of a lack of privacy.
In a public library, it is not a reasonable person's expectation that the books that person is selecting are not going to be seen by others in the library. A reasonable person would not expect privacy in a public library, because it is, by definition, public.
Facebook isn't public, though. Expectations of privacy change here, and that's where we get into murky waters - we have no meatspace equivalent to Facebook or Google, so we don't really know what to expect.
A library is public not because there is a lack of privacy, but because it owned by the state. Do you not have privacy in a public restroom? The same arguments here about the physical expectations of privacy apply to private libraries in private universities.
Yes, when I go to the library, I notice from time to time the covers of books or magazines that other people are reading. However, in retrospect I cannot remember a single instance of who read what book, not their names if I know them nor their faces. I'm a pretty observant person with a good memory, so I have the same reciprocal expectations of others. If I were to walk up to somebody and straight up ask them what book they were reading, or to start reading over their shoulder, that would be considered an invasion of privacy.
Of course I don't have any way to prove this, but I would be astonished if a stranger in the city that's only ever seen me in the library could tell you what I've taken off the shelf.
Facebook is kind of like posting things on bulletin boards. Email is like sending postcards. Google is the aforementioned card catalog.
The standard of expectation of privacy is set by society[0], not you specifically. Even if you don't write down the books other people are carrying around, it's not illegal or even morally wrong to do so, nor would it be an invasion of privacy to ask a person what book he/she was reading. Not sure about literally reading over their shoulder, but that's not what we're talking about.
There is zero legal precedence for this idea of "anonymous in a crowd" that I do see every now and then when talking about privacy. I am legally allowed to take as many pictures of public places and people in public places as I want, so while a person might not be able to directly recall your face, I could easily and legally take your photograph in a public space and thus track your movements this way.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy#Overview
Congress should draft up some kind of "rules of engagement" for the Internet, explicitly setting expectations. We know we're going to get searched at the airport, but we have no clue what the US government is going to do to us when we're online. That would be friggin' helpful to know.
It's not like Wikipedia is shifting to HTTPS because people reading about the "American Revoltionary War" are going to get flagged for rendition. That HTTP session didn't need to be private.
Wikipedia is shifting because they don't want NSA snooping with any of their users' traffic. But if they didn't want NSA snooping then certainly they didn't want ISPs, hackers on the same cable modem loop, etc. snooping, so they could/should have done this switch awhile ago.
Even should we change the law to match our expectations regarding Internet privacy, https is still a better idea as the NSA is really the least of worries for the vast majority of us who have bigger threats with organized crime from Eastern Europe, spammers forming botnets, etc.
Banks are connections between customers that have deficits and customers that have surpluses, ie: credit and lending. There are also investment structures that people use, ie: stocks and bonds.
In addition to consumer banking and investment banking, there is also insurance functions.
There are companies that meet individual needs (ie: companies that do only insurance) but many consumers still prefer to utilize "one-stop shop" banking institutions that accommodate a variety of needs.
There are also plenty of other attack vectors for the NSA even with HTTPS; obtaining the private keys of the common certification authorities is perhaps the most straightforward.
[1] http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/evoswitch-hosts-the-...
EDIT: My info is out of date. Their Florida datacenter has become the backup, with the primary being Equinix in Ashburn, Virginia:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/01/14/its-o...
Wikimedia employee here. FYI, we're headquartered in SF, but we have no datacenter here. All traffic goes through our datacenters in FL, VA, and Amsterdam.
[1] http://www.bit-byters.net/2009/11/netherlands-still-1-in-pho...
Also, the citation you give is about phone tapping, not the kind of NSA-style online surveillance we're talking about trying to protect against with HTTPS support.
IMO, in general you shouldn't consider your activity over HTTP private regardless of whether you trust a particular government or not. Even some random individual running Firesheep in your local cafe is a threat in such a case.
About the larger point: even with the fully craptastic information we've learned about NSA snooping, there are huge advantages for Wikipedia users to have our organization and Wikipedia data hosted in the United States. As one big one: I'm not sure Wikipedia could survive if it wasn't for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.[1]
1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/cda-230-success-cases-...