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Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

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Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#181
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you wait for his response: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

At first, the site attracted about sixteen hundred daily visitors, and Graham moderated and maintained it himself. Today, around five million people read Hacker News each month, and it’s grown more difficult to moderate. The technical discussions remain varied and can be insightful. But social, cultural, and political conversations, which, despite the guidelines, have proliferated, tend to devolve. A recent comment t…

That sounds like the Hacker News that I know. It's worth trawling through the comments because you get gems among the dross, but it should be a trawl.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#182
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus, that's a textbook example of a bad encryption mode.

Makes you wonder how someone could approve that pull request...

It's possible it comes from a corporate culture that is focused on ease-of-use over security. This is not the first time that they've done some questionable things to reduce friction. See for example https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20688113/zoom-apple-mac-pa..., where they installed a secret webserver to save Mac users a single click.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#183
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The students are all forced to agree to these abusive third party TOS simply to receive the education to which they are entitled/for which they have already paid. That’s a bait and switch on the part of the university. “You’ve already paid, but now you have to give up your civil rights against this third party you’ve never heard of to get the service.” There should be liability for the schools for doing this. A class…

There's a pandemic, schools and professors try what they can to keep the courses running and not ruin their students' year, and your reaction is "sue them"?

They’re pulling a bait and switch.

There are video technologies they can license so that they can keep things running without forcing students into having to enter into abusive third party agreements. They can hire people to set up simple first-party HLS streaming systems—it can be done in a day. There are tons of non-abusive alternatives. Zoom makes malware. Can you imagine being given the option by a university to whom you have already paid tens of thousands of dollars: “install this malware or you don’t get to come to class”?

You could say the same about Amazon and their backlash against workers. “There’s a pandemic, and this company is doing what it can to keep the supplies moving, and your reaction is “sue them”?”

Yes, that is the appropriate reaction if they break the law.

A pandemic does not justify abusive, coercive behavior. If anything, it makes it more abusive.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#184
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi dang, Thanks in advance for all your moderation efforts that make HN the site we all love to use on a regular basis. I'm curious if you've ever considered writing a blog post about some of the things you've learned from your years of moderation? You spend so much time on HN, you must have seen lots of patterns and have lots of insights on...well, everything that gets posted on HN to everybody that posts on HN. I'd…

While you wait for his response: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

Fascinating, thanks for sharing. Makes me reflect on the (relatively few) comments I've made here, and if I'm making a positive impact on the community.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Untrue. Many performance trade-offs have to be made and the entropy has to vary drastically with time. See for example B-Frames vs I-frames in compressed video. Couple that with the very low entropy video conference data and bam.

Two words: sensor noise. Even uncompressed video will be hard to see that "penguin image effect" in, because the pixels that make up each block will be constantly changing in a random way, and unlike that synthetically generated image, it's highly unlikely for a block to be the exact same as any other one in any given frame.

You greatly overestimate both the image quality of crappy videoconferencing streamed video, the amount of pixel-wise sensor noise after noise reduction (pretty low actually), while underestimating the ingenuity of crypt-analysts and the power of having a lot of data. Like seriously, the only way the shitty 1mm or less sensors on webcams are able to deliver HD video is through an abject amount of noise reudction, sharpening and filtering. All of which greatly reduce entropy.

Hint: You don't need to know the plaintext exactly. you just need to be able to build a reasonably precise probability distribution.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition, we identify potential areas of concern in Zoom’s infrastructure, including observing the transmission of meeting encryption keys through China.

Thanks! Indeed that was in their opener, but their clarifying statement is broader. FTA "We suspect that keys may be distributed through these servers. A company primarily catering to North American clients that sometimes distributes encryption keys through servers in China is potentially concerning, given that Zoom may be legally obligated to disclose these keys to authorities in China." "We suspect" is not the same…

They observed keys being transmitted to Chinese servers, which makes them to suspect that Zoom is distributing keys via these servers. They have worded this very carefully to avoid claiming something that they cannot confirm (distribution to multiple users).

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#187

Using AES in ECB mode is clearly a bad choice, but honestly it's not that horrible for high entropy data like compressed audio/video. I'm sure someone could prove me wrong one day, but it seems hard to extract any useful patterns out of compressed audio/video. It does check the box of "uses encryption" for regulatory reasons (while missing the intent). It's pretty egregious considering how easy this is to get right.…

Is it just me to whom it seems obvious why they've gone with ECB?

Zoom's design has a single key for everybody and for everything [ in the context of a particular video conference call ] . It's simpler and, to a layman, it sounds secure. [ We arguably contribute to this if we say e.g. "the key" implying it's just one thing when we mean something like a master secret in TLS used to derive lots of actual keys ].

Once you've committed to a single key ECB behaves exactly how you'd want.

You've got some audio, or video, ready to send? Just encrypt it with the key. Receive some encrypted data? Just decrypt it.

What happens if you have some network trouble briefly? Nothing, everybody decrypts whatever does arrive and maybe a few frames are missing.

All of the other modes don't work at all if you try to use them this way. They all expect you to have thought about the problem and track a bunch more state and then maintain that state despite an unreliable network and other issues.

Unless there is somebody in the room who says we can't do ECB because it's fundamentally not a secure choice, ECB is what you're going to get from this design decision.

And I've been in rooms like that as the only voice, or at least as the only person who spoke up. I've been in rooms where I was part of a chorus too, but as organisations get bigger and "security is everyone's problem" becomes a phrase people learn but don't act on, it gets lonelier.

Also, I actually can't even work out what a "correct" key rotation strategy could be for ECB with a variable number of parties all encrypting stuff at once. As a result it seems unlikely that Zoom did figure out such a strategy and then correctly implemented it. Instead it seems safe to assume there is no key rotation, everything sent by every participant for the life of the stream is encrypted with the same key, even though that's a terrible idea.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#188
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just downloaded their binary build and it worked without sudo (you need to run "ZoomLauncher" file). That being said, I did not get the impression of an easy to use app that "just works" (at least with my tiling window manager), things were confusing, clunky and rather idiosyncratic (e.g. sharing a screen was weird, and the whiteboard did not work).

Did you use it to talk to someone? I ran it too, but wanted to make sure it really works without being installed.

Yeah, I used it for calls, did not install anything.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#189
Given Zoom is blocked in China, what reason is there for the main key server to be there?

Even ignoring the appearances, for latency and the fault tolerance reasons, China is the last place you'd want to put it a critical server for an app used in the West.

Re: Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

#190
post #63
post #2

This is honestly the best “Zoom is bad” summery I’ve seen so far. While I certainly believe some of the Zoom hate is blown out of proportion, this article does a good job explaining to someone who isn't a security expert what the issues are. I've been getting questions about the company from family and friends, and will be forwarding this to them. Well done.

This is a great article, but as an educational provider it fails to answer one question: Why should I care? The only concerning thing for me is, why would they lie about using AES-256 when none of my users (and I assume most of their users) would care in any way about AES-256 vs. AES-128 in ECB mode. Why would they lie? Even after this, having my users conducting university lessons over something that might be decryp…

Lets say these lessons are a politics seminar discussing whatever PRC finds objectionable, then family of the student back in the old country get their social credit score deducted.

Or even better use those recording in the future as compromat as needed.

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