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When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

nytimes.com

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Re: When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

#71

Post by gumby »

komali2 wrote: post #49
snowwrestler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has no interest in funding terrorist attacks against the U.S. or anyone else. They want to be a Great Power, not a rogue state. Aside from nukes, which would draw an obvious and unstoppable reprisal from the U.S., China does not have the military capability to meaningfully threaten the U.S. They don't have the aircraft, ships, subs, landing craft, etc. And again, I don't know why they would want that. They do h…

Interesting. I feel I could say the same of the USA vs China - any outright attack against China would draw a massive response, and I hardly believe the USA is capable of occupying China in any meaningful way.

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "massive response" as China's nuclear capability is more for regional prurposes (i.e. India) though I do believe they have some ICBMs capable of reaching anywhere in north america. But their military resources are much smaller (e.g. they only have a couple of aircraft carriers and no supercarriers) and the PLA isn't really set up for projection of force at a distance.

I do agree to the extent that though the US would win any initial skirmish the long term viability of such an effort close to or on the Chinese mainland is probably not great.

Then again I can't come up with any reason the US would want to fight a war with China either (or vice versa), but who knows these days.

Re: When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

#73

Post by champagnepapi »

hohohogrengiant wrote: post #57
nostromo wrote: post #40

I wonder why Apple doesn't encrypt calls between iPhones. And subsequently work on an open encryption standard with Google et al. It's strange that Facetime and Messages and Whatsapp and others are end-to-end encrypted, but voice is not.

Facetime Audio is encrypted, just use that.

Or Signal calling

Re: When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

#74

Post by thinkling »

jacobsheehy wrote: post #64
thinkling wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would think that the President's team would travel with a known-good pico-cell device and let his phone only connect to that. Or force wi-fi calling and only let the phone connect to the wi-fi network they bring along everywhere.

There is a huge amount of unwarranted assumptions and misplaced trust in the President* to follow the advice of his team in this thread. He has made it very clear that he thinks he is the smartest person in the world and doesn't need to listen to experts. I don't think anyone can follow him with a known-good device and let him connect to that. The article describes his short-temper and complete unwillingness to sacri…

Nothing in the schemes I suggest takes the President any time. You outfit his environment with picocells & secure wi-fi networks, set up his phone to prefer to connect to those, and you're done at least for preventing Stingray attacks.

I think a more compelling answer would be "You'd think that the government's IT people would have found a way for Hillary Clinton to have an easy-to-use yet secure email server and yet they stonewalled her to the point that she had her own server set up at home."

Re: When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

#75

Post by gumby »

_iyig wrote: post #65
gumby wrote: post #9

Similarly to how agreed-upon overflights increase security (as your opponent knows you're not preparing an attack and/or are keeping to treaty obligations) one could consider this a good thing. Of course China is not currently a military threat to the US, at least at the level deserving attention of a US president (e.g. random encounters in the Spratleys are jostling, not escalation). I certainly don't think this is…

>Of course China is not currently a military threat to the US ... I would disagree. China routinely threatens U.S. naval vessels which transit disputed regions of the South China Sea, and maintains a large battery of missiles pointed at Taiwan, an American diplomatic ally. They have also developed hypersonic anti-carrier missiles, and are rapidly expanding their blue-water navy.

I referred the jostling in the Spratleys in my comment and on their ability to project force in another comment down thread.

They are rapidly expanding a blue water navy from a tiny starting point (e.g. recently bringing online a Ukranian aircraft carrier (not a super carrier) doubled their carrier force) and have a few remote naval bases, but their strength, to the degree it exists, is locally strong and externally mainly soft power.

There is no question the US would abandon Taiwan the same as Macarthur pulled back to the southern half of Australia in WWII. Pragmatics argues this -- as pragmatics argue against China actually attacking Taiwan militarily any time in the next 30 years. E.g. bombing Hon Hai would degrade Chinese manufacturing unacceptably.

Re: When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

#76

Post by bb88 »

fspeech wrote: post #69
thinkling wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the article seems to mainly point the finger at malware Actually the article says: > "But the calls made from the phones are intercepted as they travel through the cell towers, cables and switches that make up national and international cellphone networks. Calls made from any cellphone — iPhone, Android, an old-school Samsung flip phone — are vulnerable."

That is a good point. The paper didn't make it as black and white as I read. However in my mind intercepting calls without police power (thus carrier cooperation) is much harder to achieve.

The intelligence services are really clever in getting the information they need. Often, just like with other forms of security holes, they just need to be clever exactly once, and that might lead to months or years of intelligence.

I also think of intelligence agencies are a little like magicians in how readily they will exploit someone's trust in reality.

Re: When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

#77

Post by thinkling »

graeme wrote: post #45

This article mentions that restoring an iphone from backup also risks transferring any malware. What would be the way to restore an iphone: would restore data from icloud also risk malware infection if the phone had it? (E.g. syncing calendars, imessages, health data, etc, all of which can use icloud sync) Referring to regular iphones here, not the president's custom phone

For backed up data to carry a piece of malware, they'd have to exploit a zero-day bug in iOS or in the associated app. That's possible in theory, but those have been rare, and once iOS or the app gets fixed, the exploit in the data is neutralized.

Looking at a list of known iOS malware [1] I don't offhand see any tools that manage to install themselves through exploits in non-jailbroken iOS or exploits normal App Store apps.

The closest thing I saw was an injection of malware into a pirated version of the Xcode developer tools, causing all apps compiled with that version to be infected. Those apps were then spread through a third-party app store--so again only loaded onto jailbroken iPhones.

Perhaps the scariest thing is something like Wirelurker[2] that spreads over USB connections and can spread from iPhones to Macs and back to other iPhones. People don't plug into other Macs very much, but if this were modified to affect CarPlay, it could spread from iPhone to rental car to iPhone, to iPhone, to iPhone...

[1] https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki/Malware_for_iOS

[2] http://time.com/3560875/iphone-malware-wirelurker/

Re: When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

#78

Post by fspeech »

thinkling wrote: post #61
brohoolio wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other articles talking about how many stingray devices there are in Washington DC owned by foreign governments.

One would think that the President's team would travel with a known-good pico-cell device and let his phone only connect to that. Or force wi-fi calling and only let the phone connect to the wi-fi network they bring along everywhere.

This doesn't prevent the other end from being surveilled, if indeed the signal is being intercepted. Similarly, keeping his phone malware free doesn't solve the problem of his friends' phones getting compromised. So without both ends on a secure line there is no real good way to secure things. Those listening in, as suggested by the paper, do not necessarily need to intercept every call. Sure they would love to listen in on every call, but it is not necessary if they just want to get a better model of how he thinks.

Re: When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

#79

Post by thinkling »

uxhack wrote: post #17
21 wrote: post #16

Why don't they have a mobile cell access point (like a Stingray) that they carry around with the president, for his off the shelf iPhone to connect to? And this access point would connect securely to a NSA proxy or whatever. Or is the problem further down the line, do the Chinese intercept the international carrier links between USA and Germany let's say?

Or why not use a VOIP like protocol with end to end encryption like WhatsApp or telegram ?

Because that requires buy-in by the person you want to call. And Mr. Trump wants to call whomever he wants, whenever he wants; he's not going to wait for his staff to arrange for the other person to install WhatsApp.

Re: When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn

#80

Post by fspeech »

bb88 wrote: post #76
fspeech wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good point. The paper didn't make it as black and white as I read. However in my mind intercepting calls without police power (thus carrier cooperation) is much harder to achieve.

The intelligence services are really clever in getting the information they need. Often, just like with other forms of security holes, they just need to be clever exactly once, and that might lead to months or years of intelligence. I also think of intelligence agencies are a little like magicians in how readily they will exploit someone's trust in reality.

Right. Considering that calls can be intercepted at either end, just securing his end does not preclude the call from getting compromised on the other end. Maybe that is why the security people are not pushing back that hard, since it is fairly hopeless to limit him to only speaking over secured lines. Sure it is easy for him to access a secured line, but not the friends he wants to talk to.
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