What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by MarkMc » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 5:24 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #68

MarkMc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> WhatsApp say they use end-to-end encryption and they have a strong financial incentive to be telling the truth. I'm not giving much to the various "whatsapp backdoor" allegations but I'm curious to why they'd have financial incentive to provide privacy. Most of their userbase likely still doesn't care about security and they do belong to Facebook - so if anything, they'd have a financial incentive not to use effect…

I guess I would point to the Yahoo security breach as an example of how poor security can have an adverse financial effect on a company valuation and its CEO's remuneration. The Sony hack also comes to mind as something which damaged it's reputation and had an indirect affect on their financial position.

If hackers could get access to WhatsApp and dump all messages to Wikileaks it would make the company look very bad and a significant number of users would switch to something else. If security is not that important to users, why pretend to add end-to-end encryption at all?

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

#172

Post by mmcwilliams » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #88

mmcwilliams wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that what imaginenore is suggesting is that if you are communicating between your public network-connected machine and your air gapped machine, there is no longer an air gap (barring some very specific use cases). The technique you're describing is actually an attack used to defeat security of machines not on untrusted networks[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_malware EDIT: This is specifically t…

Ahh.. remember BadBIOS? :) It did need USB flash drives to spread though. (See BadUSB.. and weep!)

I do remember BadBIOS, though looking it up not it seems it might have been a hoax(?) or at least vaporware. Personally when I think of expertly hopping air gaps, stuxnet always comes to mind.

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

#173

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 5:44 PM UTC

Kadin wrote: post #143

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…

That doesn't make sense. Once you connect it to the rest of the network, it's no longer "air gapped". The phrase "air gapped" doesn't signify something special about air , it refers specifically towards breaking the connection (which is typically electrical) between that system and the rest of the network. Perhaps it is not the best term, and "completely isolated" would be better. If you set up an IR LAN, or use soun…

> I have periodically seen ideas for logging systems that use a 100BT (not Gigabit) Ethernet connection with the Tx pair cut

That would only work with unidirectional protocols. Scratch TCP/IP and probably even UDP since it would need to figure out the MAC address of the other side.

If you're going to do this you essentially have a one-way high speed serial link without the ability to error-correct.

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

#174

Post by yellowMoneky » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 5:47 PM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #149

falcolas wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for a target of interest, given quantum computing, it would not really provide any real protections. I could see how recalculating the key would be well worth it, if you really want the data.

Agreed, it won't help much in that case.

This case is a targeted breach of confidentiality not unlike a phone wire tap, still not allowing bulk surveillance. Not bad altogether.

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

#175

Post by hackcasual » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 5:49 PM UTC

Filligree wrote: post #158

y7 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Note that some "post-quantum" key exchange schemes already exist (based on lattice cryptography, for which there are no known poly-time quantum attacks), e.g. https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1092 . But I haven't heard of it being used anywhere.

The sad truth is, until we've spent a lot more time analysing and attacking those algorithms, they aren't as secure as what we've got.

Google's canary test also does regular ECDH requiring it to be broken as well

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

#176

Post by Neliquat » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 6:07 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #173

Kadin wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense. Once you connect it to the rest of the network, it's no longer "air gapped". The phrase "air gapped" doesn't signify something special about air , it refers specifically towards breaking the connection (which is typically electrical) between that system and the rest of the network. Perhaps it is not the best term, and "completely isolated" would be better. If you set up an IR LAN, or use soun…

> I have periodically seen ideas for logging systems that use a 100BT (not Gigabit) Ethernet connection with the Tx pair cut That would only work with unidirectional protocols. Scratch TCP/IP and probably even UDP since it would need to figure out the MAC address of the other side. If you're going to do this you essentially have a one-way high speed serial link without the ability to error-correct.

Checksums and redundant data would mostly solve that. Look what we do for deep space transmissions for example, where latency makes it basically one-way. I just feel like there are too many variables still uncontrolled to make it worthwhile.

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

#177

Post by cwyers » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 6:15 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #10

dromenkoning wrote: post #6

The article mentions WhatsApp multiple times as a service that successfully made the transition to end-to-end encryption, but it always seemed to me that this claim is rather meaningless when we don't have the possibility of auditing their source code.

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…

Security is not a binary. "Secure" is not something that can be evaluated without context, ie, a threat model. Security is something that comes with tradeoffs. If you require a 100% certainty that no adversary, no matter how well resourced, can obtain electronic communications from you when conducting active surveillance, your only defense is to stop using computers. Most of us don't live with that sort of a constraint, and thus can evaluate things that increase our relative security given a threat model of mostly passive surveillance by state actors and active malicious attacks from private parties that mostly just want our credit card numbers.

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

#178

Post by astrange » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 6:33 PM UTC

benevol wrote: post #57

dromenkoning wrote: post #6

The article mentions WhatsApp multiple times as a service that successfully made the transition to end-to-end encryption, but it always seemed to me that this claim is rather meaningless when we don't have the possibility of auditing their source code.

> this claim is rather meaningless when we don't have the possibility of auditing their source code Open source is required not just for apps, but also for: - operating systems - drivers - firmware Then we can start to talk about privacy.

Have you tried learning assembly? It's not hard or anything.

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

#179

Post by klodolph » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 6:35 PM UTC

srssays wrote: post #131

chimeracoder wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if your RNG is compromised, there's no point talking about encryption in the first place.

That's not really the case. OTP requires a large amount of perfectly unbiased randomness, implicitly from a hardware randomness source (otherwise what you have is more accurately a stream cipher). Contrast with deriving a key using cryptographic primitives, which can accept low-quality randomness (as long as there is sufficient entropy), that can be easily and transparently collected.

Yes, in theory OTP requires perfectly uniform uncorrelated random input. However, in practice, you can use a randomness extractor… at which point, yes, we can't prove that someone with unbounded computational power wouldn't be able to crack it. But all known computational power is bounded.

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

#180

Post by cJ0th » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 6:36 PM UTC

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…

> Quantum computing will defeat RSA, DH, ECC, asymmetric crypto, but it will only weaken symmetric crypto (eg. AES) by a factor of two.

That's quite a bummer. I finally managed to convince someone to use gpg and now I learn that this just makes sure your emails will be read/analyzed by anyone who has an interest in it in the future.