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What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

nytimes.com

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Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#161

Post by shshhdhs »

praptak wrote: post #128
shshhdhs wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't use the phone for exchanging plaintext keys. You're forgetting about ECHELON, wiretaps, and the dragnets where LEA are ignoring (or purposefully misinterpreting) the law. It's really cheap to store ALL phone calls these days, and just "playback" when you get the legal search warrant.

It's only about avoiding automatic dragnet, so making a person listen to the conversation and figure out the key counts as success.

Automatic voice transcriptions has been a technology for greater than two decades.

Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#162

Post by Spooky23 »

smaddox wrote: post #139
mikepurvis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox de-duplicates your files with other users who have the same ones, and are capable of serving them all to you through a web site. There's no encryption there at all, except TLS in transit.

Found that hard to believe, so I googled it. Not positive this is a trustworthy source, but it sounds like Dropbox does use encryption for files at rest and in motion: https://www.virtru.com/blog/dropbox-encryption/

They do, but Dropbox controls the key and their services can decrypt customer data, so the value of the encryption is limited at best.

Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#163

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

maxerickson wrote: post #92
colordrops wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that most people are completely in the dark when it comes to security, including myself, but there are some principles that should be unwavering that regularly get ignored again with every new iteration of "secure" software: * If there is a weak layer in the stack, from the physical layer to to UI, then the system is not secure. Even if your messaging app is secure, your messages are not secure if your OS is…

Source code isn't required to study what software may do. If you were really worried about what a particular binary would do, trusting that the binary matched the source and studying runtime behavior would both be a waste of time compared to fully analyzing the binary in question. If you treat the software as a black box and only study run time behavior, you have no idea if you have tripped a countermeasure that sile…

>If you treat the software as a black box and only study run time behavior, you have no idea if you have tripped a countermeasure that silences the malicious behavior; if you study the control flow directly, you can look for such countermeasures.

It would be great to find such a countermeasure, and be able to trigger it reliably, or assert the behavior on a permanent basis. Considering that particular weakness of such countermeasures though, wouldn't the safest [for the attacker] default countermeasure likely be to simply crash the device?

Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#164

Post by 1001101 »

The only encryption I truly trust is one-time pad. Discrete log may be NP-intermediate (if P!=NP, which is open), and we know from the Snowden disclosures that NSA was working with U Maryland on a quantum computer which will be a reality at some point (Shor's algorithm). With 'collect it all,' today's ciphertext is tomorrow's plaintext. Always be skeptical.

Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#165

Post by jksmith »

MarkMc wrote: post #37
colordrops wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that most people are completely in the dark when it comes to security, including myself, but there are some principles that should be unwavering that regularly get ignored again with every new iteration of "secure" software: * If there is a weak layer in the stack, from the physical layer to to UI, then the system is not secure. Even if your messaging app is secure, your messages are not secure if your OS is…

I think you are being too strict in your definition of 'secure'. 99.99% of devices run Android, iOS or Windows which are closed source and therefore not 'secure'. To me, security is not a binary property but rather a sliding scale. WhatsApp say they use end-to-end encryption and they have a strong financial incentive to be telling the truth. No hacker has demonstrated that WhatsApp are lying and the Wikileaks dump su…

Right. Security threats are never eliminated, only mitigated, relative to the cost of mitigation.

Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#166

Post by TillE »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #141
patrickaljord wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking pgp like encryption would require a huge mathematical breakthrough in how prime numbers work and their discovery. It would also require unknown math geniuses to work for said secret department which is unlikely, most of the best mathematical geniuses are already known and tend to work at universities/public research/private research and publish their work there. Not saying this is impossible but it's really…

The NSA is the single largest employer of mathematicians in the US. The Snowden leaks did not include any of the data from the departments actually involved in attacking cryptography. All we really know is that they don't have any breaks for their low-level mass surveillance tools. Likewise with the CIA. From the 1% of the documents leaked so far, there's no evidence that they have the ability to crack modern encrypt…

It's fairly difficult to do anything useful with ultra-secret magic decryption tools. You can passively observe, but taking any action, even subtle indirect action, means you're eventually going to alert a target to your capabilities.

Anyway, these are extraordinarily difficult problems which may not have good solutions outside of quantum computing. You can throw all the smart people and computing power in the world at a problem and still come up with almost nothing.

Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#167

Post by maxerickson »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #163
maxerickson wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source code isn't required to study what software may do. If you were really worried about what a particular binary would do, trusting that the binary matched the source and studying runtime behavior would both be a waste of time compared to fully analyzing the binary in question. If you treat the software as a black box and only study run time behavior, you have no idea if you have tripped a countermeasure that sile…

>If you treat the software as a black box and only study run time behavior, you have no idea if you have tripped a countermeasure that silences the malicious behavior; if you study the control flow directly, you can look for such countermeasures. It would be great to find such a countermeasure, and be able to trigger it reliably, or assert the behavior on a permanent basis. Considering that particular weakness of suc…

Could be.

A user that knows about malicious code (which you would have to in order to trigger it to go silent) in a binary just shouldn't use the binary at all though.

The broader point is more important: compiled software isn't a black box, treating it like a black box is not the only or best way to analyze it.

Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#168

Post by notfed »

1001101 wrote: post #164

The only encryption I truly trust is one-time pad. Discrete log may be NP-intermediate (if P!=NP, which is open), and we know from the Snowden disclosures that NSA was working with U Maryland on a quantum computer which will be a reality at some point (Shor's algorithm). With 'collect it all,' today's ciphertext is tomorrow's plaintext. Always be skeptical.

If you trust a one-time pad---which no one actually uses---you can trust stream ciphers, which are actually practical.

Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#169

Post by SCHiM »

andai wrote: post #70

Does anyone here have an air-gapped computer setup? I'm thinking of doing something with raspberry pi. I'm stuck at the part where it communicates (for my purposes, small amounts of ascii) with a non airgapped computer without using USB or networking. I'm thinking about giving both machines a little speaker and microphone and using high frequency pulses to transfer the text. Why, you may be wondering? 1. Airgapped sy…

You can use something called a data diode. These are used in high security networks to provide secure one way communication (insecure->secure). The idea is that if there _is_ communication it's not possible to exclude compromise completely. However if you do get compromised no information can escape a network with one way traffic, so an attacker might only destroy your information.

Funnily enough, someone else thought to use a raspberry pi for this purpose too: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58957&p=5...

Re: What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works

#170

Post by leetbulb »

andai wrote: post #67

I don't see any mention of quantum computers in here so I thought I'd mention: the NSA themselves are concerned that quantum computing will be a great threat to encryption in the near future. Keep in mind that the NSA and god knows who else are storing encrypted communications to break them later. Quantum computing will defeat RSA, DH, ECC, asymmetric crypto, but it will only weaken symmetric crypto (eg. AES) by a fa…

Considering DH is often used along with AES, I'd assume many encrypted communication streams implementing these that have been captured will likely be broken when this becomes a reality. Anyone care to shed some light on this? As far as ECDH goes... (afaik) most ECC implementations are vulnerable to quantum computing attacks...are there any decent post-quantum key exchange algorithms / protocols?

EDIT: nevermind, i've now read through the thread more and have found answers. :)

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