71–80 of 107 posts
His comments are actually the most insightful points I've seen about the discussion regarding PRISM: I have my own suspicions -- which I won't go into here -- about what PRISM was actually about. I'll just say that there are ways to intercept people's Google, Facebook, etc., traffic in bulk without sticking any moles into the org -- or directly tapping their lines. You may find some interesting hints in the leaked PR…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beam splitters (prisms?) inside the backbone providers. All traffic goes to its destination unharmed, but the NSA gets all the packets. SSL is harder, but all you need is the private keys. Those are hard to get but not impossible for someone with the resources of the government. This is the only scalable way to do what they are supposed to be doing and not involve lots of outsiders. Note that the people who have real…
This is exactly the conclusion I came to. My guess is they have the SSL/TLS keys. That being said, tptacek thinks we are wrong, and he is a subject matter expert, so I am not sure.
This denial is a lot stronger than Page's, which was full of weasel words. Unless Zunger is just lying, which somehow seems unlikely (forgive my naiveté), it'll be interesting to know how PRISM actually works. But I will say that his faith in his company sounds misplaced, since Google's more official denials are so weak. edit: clarity
He hints at a couple of reasons for his confidence in his post. One of his assumptions was that people would notice surreptitiously installed hardware or software doing the monitoring. I don't think this is unreasonable. Hoovering up all the private data in Google is bound to be a big job, regardless of whether you are sieving it on site or transferring it off site. Even if it would only take a few people to install…
One possibility: Google obviously has some capacity to honor search warrants and NSLs. And presumably that involves some technical artifacts somewhere: admin-level API access to data and some sort of external endpoint through which the government can actually make those requests. So that's all stuff we can confidently say is already there humming along happily, whether used for nefarious purposes or not.
OK, so given that those exist, how much volume do they support? How hard would it be to modify them to bypass the scrutiny process? Or give the NSA access to those endpoints instead of just domestic law enforcement? In other words, these are just changes to the process, totally invisible to anyone without explicit access to it. It might not involve any weird hardware at all, and could operate with very few people in the know.
Another possibility: Google handed over its TLS keys and just let the taps happen upstream.
That's why the confidence of a senior person that there isn't fishy hardware running around makes the question of how PRISM works more interesting. But it certainly doesn't make the project impossible.
Edit: removing distracting aside
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman creates a new key per connection in a public-safe manner. You cannot eavesdrop on such a connection, even if you have the signing key. The question then becomes, are the SSL sessions actually using that mode.
> Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman creates a new key per connection in a public-safe manner. How does that make a difference when you have the Diffie-Hellman key? We are saying they have the Diffie-Hellman keys, not the signing keys, nor the block cipher key that is exchanged. They have the only key that matters.
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actually everyone seems to have switched to the "fast" SSL ciphers instead - only dropbox defaults to DHE: > openssl s_client -connect google.com:443 RC4-SHA > openssl s_client -connect dropbox.com:443 DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA Again, this is usually done for speed, but all of the companies on the list are using "fast" SSL/TLS ciphers rather than more secure ones.
I not really an expert in this at all, but we were not discussing ciphers, but key exchange methods. I open google.com in Chrome, click on lockpad icon, go to the second tab, and it says: Key exchange method: ECDHE_ECDSA Some googling turns up that: "ECDHE-ECDSA provide perfect forward secrecy" http://nmav.gnutls.org/2011/12/price-to-pay-for-perfect-forw...
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We are not disagreeing with anything he says. We are saying the NSA has the private key. Ian Gallager: > so if you have the private key, you can decrypt that key, and then use it to decrypt the bulk-encrypted data. Like he says, if you have the key, wireshark can decrypt the data trivially. If you have the CA master keys, then the only thing you can do is perform a MITM attack, but not silently decrypt the raw data.…
Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman creates a new key per connection in a public-safe manner. You cannot eavesdrop on such a connection, even if you have the signing key. The question then becomes, are the SSL sessions actually using that mode.
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/protecti...
His comments are actually the most insightful points I've seen about the discussion regarding PRISM: I have my own suspicions -- which I won't go into here -- about what PRISM was actually about. I'll just say that there are ways to intercept people's Google, Facebook, etc., traffic in bulk without sticking any moles into the org -- or directly tapping their lines. You may find some interesting hints in the leaked PR…
Here's a much simpler explanation: The Feds submit a FISA order for specific data collection. The companies' lawyers approve it. Then the NSA has a convenient user interface for accessing that data (perhaps real-time?) somehow from the companies' servers (possibly through an intermediary). How else is this data being sent to Ft. Mead? Thumb drives via FedEx? The dates on the slides might be when a company has erected…
More likely this is software written to take in structured data obtained by subpoena -- as it's generated by targeted users. This "ultimate user data liberation" API may have even been the system at Google that was attacked by the Chinese: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/chines...
His comments are actually the most insightful points I've seen about the discussion regarding PRISM: I have my own suspicions -- which I won't go into here -- about what PRISM was actually about. I'll just say that there are ways to intercept people's Google, Facebook, etc., traffic in bulk without sticking any moles into the org -- or directly tapping their lines. You may find some interesting hints in the leaked PR…
Beam splitters (prisms?) inside the backbone providers. All traffic goes to its destination unharmed, but the NSA gets all the packets. SSL is harder, but all you need is the private keys. Those are hard to get but not impossible for someone with the resources of the government. This is the only scalable way to do what they are supposed to be doing and not involve lots of outsiders. Note that the people who have real…
Beam splitters are not enough, they would need something to interpret this traffic.
Something is missing here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beam splitters (prisms?) inside the backbone providers. All traffic goes to its destination unharmed, but the NSA gets all the packets. SSL is harder, but all you need is the private keys. Those are hard to get but not impossible for someone with the resources of the government. This is the only scalable way to do what they are supposed to be doing and not involve lots of outsiders. Note that the people who have real…
It has been well known that they already do the beam splitting portion, so it's really just up to the keys.