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'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

reuters.com

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Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#201

Post by cfv »

brisance wrote: post #193
cfv wrote: post #187

I can't help but giggle at the thought of Emirati hackers. For whatever reason my mind can't wrap around the fact that an extremely religious people can also be at the high end of tech (at the very least high enough to figure out 0days and such). Does anyone have any info on since when this has actually been like this? I'd like to look up how their CS education works and that kind of stuff.

The Society of Jesuits aka Jesuits have also conducted technical research in parallel with religious pursuits. Don't see any problem.

It's not a... problem, I'm just having a tough time understanding how that works. And would love any pointers towards more or less when they started getting good at it.

Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#202

Post by bradleyjg »

tlrobinson wrote: post #186

> and former American intelligence operatives working as contractors for the UAE’s intelligence services At what point does this become considered treason?

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#203

Post by Zecar »

FakeComments wrote: post #171
Zecar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my exact point is that we can create a cost to cracking each phone — in hashing power and time spent This is not at all how encryption or security works

It’s exactly how it works: You create a hash chain, then use the final result as an encryption key of your secret (in this case, the key for the data), then store only the start of the chain and encrypted secret. The only way to retrieve the secret is to recompute all the hashes, from the start, to recreate the key and decrypt the data. So it’s secure unless you believe there’s a weakness in the underlying encryption…

Yeah uhh hey I appreciate your enthusiasm but this literally is not how modern public key encryption works, or will ever be changed to work. All ciphers in general use don't have any sort of a realistic time-bound to being cracked or computed

Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#204

Post by FakeComments »

baybal2 wrote: post #196
FakeComments wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your analysis — the way most people receive encryption, including criminals and terrorists, is through a provider. Regulating their behavior does change the general trend in security. Further, forcing them to implement their own encryption increases the likelihood they make a mistake while also refocusing the NSA et al to those algorithms instead. What we’ve seen is governments subverting encryption a…

> I’m not trying to accomplish some absolute ideological position You did. Any attempt at right of privacy must be mercilessly crushed with maximum force

That’s clearly not how the US (or anywhere) operates: the constitution itself negotiates terms between privacy and security — privacy is not and never has been an absolute right.

Further, I’m actually trying to increase privacy, by negotiating a compromise that’s workable for society as a way to remove the excuses bad actors are using, and shift the legal framework around the topic. That’s not an absolute ideological position, by any definition.

By contrast, you do adopt such an absolutist position — which isn’t grounded in law, and fails to provide for other societal needs. Such stances lead to failure, because of their absolutism. Your stance is why Australia passed an internet wiretapping law, not mine — because you refused to acknowledge a societal need until they employed force.

If your approach worked, we wouldn’t have the state of things we do now.

Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#205

Post by darkpuma »

FakeComments wrote: post #179
darkpuma wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing deliberate backdoors to the legal system does not preclude the discovery of other exploits, and the sale of those exploits to whoever has money.

It does not, but it changes the set of people looking to buy them and the way in which they’re used, both of which impact the general market for vulnerability sales — and additionally, re-aligns some present attackers to defenders. Security researchers, strangely enough, seem to care who they sell to. If the NSA stopped buying and only the UAE was interested, I expect we’d see some firms move to other business models…

> "It does not, but it changes the set of people looking to buy them and the way in which they’re used, both of which impact the general market for vulnerability sales"

There is no shortage of oppressive regimes with incredible amounts of money at their disposal. People who are in it for the money don't honestly give a shit who pays them. You cannot eliminate the market for this stuff. The only option is to create better software.

Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#206

Post by graeme »

air7 wrote: post #133

I think that the idea of out-of-the-box privacy/security against even a semi-competent adversary on any computer (especially a mobile device) is completely fictitious, and these hack stories play an important role in helping people realize that. Consider the thousands of people around the world that are involved in making phones in design, hardware, software, manufacturing, signal providers, platform providers, app w…

That a good, cautious stance. That said, thus may not be a good example of it.

We don't know the imessage bug, but a big one was patched in ios 9.3.3, released July 18, 2016. Meanwhile, the article says this exploit got a lot of people in 2016/2017.

So, presumably simply updating software would have protected a lot of the victims in this case.

The higher up in adversary skill level you go, the less this works. But up to a reasonably high level simply having up to date software thwarts most adversaries, no? And conversely, if you have very out of date software, even incompetent adversaries can break in.

Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#207

Post by TimTheTinker »

bb88 wrote: post #191
TimTheTinker wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't think of a great solution to this problem. There's really only one "final solution" to the problem in the purely technical realm. That would be to make provable security (in the theorem-proving sense) a non-negotiable requirement to all digital logic (both hardware and software) running on networked devices. I don't know if there's even a workable definition that would rigorously describe the goal of such a…

So, "provably secure" is a catch-22. If something can be created to be provably secure, then it can be an argument for government legislating a back door. "You said it's provably secure. Now you can give us provably secure access too without hurting your customer's privacy or security, because they're protected by the 4th amendment." I don't think this can be solved by technology, I think this comes down to politics…

The goal of probably secure computing would be merely to (hopefully) extend the mathematical certainties of cryptography to computers and software. The politics of cryptography wouldn’t change, they would only be broadened. Intentional back doors would still be possible, and the ramifications of building them would be just as dire.

So the best provable security could do would be to eliminate security holes like buffer overflow/etc. Trust issues (and even side-channel attacks) would still be present as always.

Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#208

Post by FakeComments »

Zecar wrote: post #203
FakeComments wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s exactly how it works: You create a hash chain, then use the final result as an encryption key of your secret (in this case, the key for the data), then store only the start of the chain and encrypted secret. The only way to retrieve the secret is to recompute all the hashes, from the start, to recreate the key and decrypt the data. So it’s secure unless you believe there’s a weakness in the underlying encryption…

Yeah uhh hey I appreciate your enthusiasm but this literally is not how modern public key encryption works, or will ever be changed to work. All ciphers in general use don't have any sort of a realistic time-bound to being cracked or computed

Yeah.

I appreciate you trying to correct me, but I never was saying that this was an instance of “public key encryption”, whichever version you mean.

This is a scheme by which you can intentionally create a key that can be re-generated in a fixed amount of time, and use it as part of normal symmetric encryption to protect a secret. One usage of that is creating intentionally crackable schemes, such as protecting other signing keys in a way you can later crack if you need to. This allows a device, such as a phone, to emit a masked secret that we have cryptographic guarantees it still takes time to recover.

Hashchains for time locking is a studied mechanism, and though it predates crypto currencies, it’s deployed as a mechanism in several kinds of applications there. A second usage is in storing paper copies of master signing keys in a safe, since the key cannot be exposed in the event of a robbery before a certain period of time — giving you time to rekey your system. (Generally, people use multipart keys instead, because they’re less cumbersome to recover; however, if you only have one secure location — multipart keys don’t help. Hash chains still do.)

So it’s literally how (part of) modern cryptography works.

Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#209

Post by BLKNSLVR »

pizza wrote: post #12

If the US government gives itself the right to install backdoors / exploit vulnerable software (as opposed to notifying companies about vulnerabilities) then I feel pretty uncomfortable about ex-government hackers just becoming freelance mercenaries using knowledge they may have gleaned from those ops once they move onto their next gig. I can't think of a great solution to this problem.

The US is Dr. Frankenstein, except they didn't learn their lesson from the first monster they unwittingly released into the world and continue to pump them out.

Re: 'Karma': A hack used by the UAE to break into iPhones of foes

#210

Post by m-ee »

brisance wrote: post #192
mont wrote: post #4

I realize it's a really sexy headline, but I'd like for there to be more than 0 proof that this is a real thing. Especially if they claim a vulnerability that's exploitable by only sending a text.

The description of the hack fits StageFright perfectly[1], which was exactly what it did. The sources may have just changed the affected platform to iOS to gain some traction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagefright_(bug)

A stagefright style iOS bug was reported around the time this took place

https://9to5mac.com/2016/07/22/stagefright-mac-iphone-ipad/

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