81–90 of 107 posts
For clarity, he's currently chief architect for Social/Google+ not Google as a whole, but he's still a very senior, longtime engineer.
it'd be nice if someone would correct the title of this.
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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…
This is my thoughts exactly. I cannot imagine any hugely sophisticated data collection infrastructure costing a mere $20m a year. 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-secur…
Seriously though, it seems like the general consensus is that no one on either side is actually lying, but the companies involved are using weasely language that can be interpreted to exclude any kind of indirect access, SSL keys, etc? I'm surprised at the tone of the statements the companies are giving, because were it to come out that the companies are giving indirect access, their adamance would just make them look terrible...It's as if the companies in their statements, at least FB and Google, sound shocked, hurt, etc. to find out people would assume that of them.
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> 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.
How are they getting the DH keys without cooperation from at least one of the SSL endpoints involved? They're newly generated at every SSL handshake, you can't just get a mole to hand you the keys once and be done with it. If you had the certificate private key, you could do a MITM, but this requires a LOT more resources and would be much more easily detectable.
But I am still lost on how it would be detectable? From Google's end, some client just disconnected. From the client's end, the internet just got a tiny bit more latency.
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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…
Right, that mostly paraphrases his arguments. But it doesn't convincingly eliminate a few possibilities for how this works. 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 s…
The TLS keys are an interesting angle. Are TLS keys typically one (small set) per site, or would each server typically generate its own unique keys? Even with the latter the surface area might be small enough within Google that no one would accidentally stumble upon it.
What I don't get is: from US government, we got confirmations - half-ass confirmations, but still confirmations - that PRISM is real, we maybe have some information wrong and we should stop asking and talking about it, but it's real. While the companies and its architects all oppose the claims in a way that's very convincing. I don't know what to believe anymore.
Don't believe. Ever. Agnosticism is a philosophy that extends well beyond religion. Instead, focus on what you want to be true and figure out how to make that true. You probably don't want PRISM to exist, or more generally, you probably don't want an extensive surveillance program of PRISM's caliber or greater to exist. In America, or anywhere? Be specific. Figure out exactly why each component is problematic. Unders…
Totally agree.
> But it's better than belief.
As someone dealing with what might be called a mild epistemological crisis, I can sympathize with the advice to apply agnosticism liberally, but I'm not sure belief can be avoided. If you want to take action for or against something, you have to ask: what if your information about that thing is malformed or incomplete, due to human error (either your own or somewhere in your chosen network of cognitive authority) or even malice? The answer is that you'll never know for sure. You could always be the victim of your own or someone else's bias.
So I'm just saying, action requires a leap of faith, sometimes just a microscopic leap, but a leap nonetheless. Belief is, alas, inescapable.
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
How are they getting the DH keys without cooperation from at least one of the SSL endpoints involved? They're newly generated at every SSL handshake, you can't just get a mole to hand you the keys once and be done with it. If you had the certificate private key, you could do a MITM, but this requires a LOT more resources and would be much more easily detectable.
One possibility is to actually compute discrete logarithms.
Does anyone know what elliptic curve parameters Gmail uses for key exchange? If the parameters are large, it is not feasible to break discrete logs using known methods, but while I'm usually wary of claims that the NSA is miles ahead of the academic research community, I could perhaps believe they have faster algorithms for e.g. some NIST curves.
With all of the conspiracy theories floating around, what about something fun, like the government proved P=NP and is just able to secretly crack the encryption keys, passwords, etc., like that silly movie "The Traveling Salesman Problem" where they turn algorithms into an action packed movie. Seriously though, it seems like the general consensus is that no one on either side is actually lying, but the companies invo…
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…