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British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

reuters.com

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Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#91

Post by CMCDragonkai »

treyd wrote: post #83
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Group E2E encryption is a difficult problem. Not if it was architected properly from the beginning.

Nah the best you could do for a long while was just to have n^2 bilateral encryption sessions that behave like a group channel. Only fairly recently was a workable construction for doing many-party encryption sessions actually developed, called TreeKEM, and is now standardized in the IETF MLS standard. This is literally bleeding edge cryptography. It's an extremely flexible design and has relatively few constraints i…

When talking about recent, you're talking about 6 years ago right?

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#92

Post by thaumasiotes »

treyd wrote: post #83
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Group E2E encryption is a difficult problem. Not if it was architected properly from the beginning.

Nah the best you could do for a long while was just to have n^2 bilateral encryption sessions that behave like a group channel. Only fairly recently was a workable construction for doing many-party encryption sessions actually developed, called TreeKEM, and is now standardized in the IETF MLS standard. This is literally bleeding edge cryptography. It's an extremely flexible design and has relatively few constraints i…

> Nah the best you could do for a long while was just to have n^2 bilateral encryption sessions that behave like a group channel.

What? We could do better than that before we had group chats. PGP will let you send encrypted email to multiple recipients, and multiple simultaneous bilateral encryption sessions are not involved.

The system is:

1. You encrypt the message using a symmetric encryption key.

2. You encrypt the key, which is short, once for every recipient.

3. You prepend the whole bundle of encrypted keys to the message.

4. You send that out. Everyone receives the same encrypted data. This is what would appear in a group channel.

5. When you receive a message, you try to decrypt it. If decrypting the header doesn't produce a key for you, then you're not one of the recipients.

Even if you want to analyze this as a set of bilateral sessions, the storage and computation requirements are linear, not quadratic: when I send a shared message to Alice and Bob, I need to know how I send messages to Alice, and I need to know how I send messages to Bob, but I don't care how Alice sends messages to Bob.

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#93

Post by missingrib »

wasdfff wrote: post #64
somenameforme wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the US a lot of the surveillance is probably illegal and cannot be used in court. They way they get around this is parallel construction. [1] Reuters had an awesome article about this a long time ago, which seems to have been removed from their site. [2] The NSA or whoever spies on somebody they're not supposed to be spying on. They see he's e.g. selling drugs, and further spying shows the time of a sell.…

How often does this even get used? How does the NSA even communicate to a police officer in the field? I think you give local cops a ton of credit. At the end of the day it looks like there are more hard drugs available on the street than ever before despite all the spooky tech and warrantless searching.

It was probably used in the Silk Road investigation.

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#94

Post by feoren »

KMag wrote: post #89
sremani wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A man's urge to be a Hero and save the day, and a bureaucrat's fear of losing reputation are a deadly cocktail.

That's a great statement. DDG seems to think you came up with it. Is that so? Thank goodness I'm not inebriated near an all-night tattoo parlor.

> Thank goodness I'm not inebriated near an all-night tattoo parlor.

Speaking of brand new sentences ...

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#95

Post by frickinLasers »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #51
mohon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

especially with the push of whatsapp business, orgs can freely store ur messages to them. also by relying on the whatsapp metadata (the one where you can export by urself), it should be already good enough for feds agent to locate u. for the E2E itself, as non crypto guy, seems the open whisper paper implemented on whatsapp alr good enough?

> the open whisper paper implemented on whatsapp alr good enough? i think wikileaks showed us that we cannot really trust anything when it comes to the sophistication of tech surveillance.

What did wikileaks show about the sophistication of tech surveillance?

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#96

Post by alwa »

krisoft wrote: post #29
redeeman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean... joking about bomb threats at an airport is not "not doing anything wrong". in a private message to friends? it most definitely is. also what does airports have to do with anything? are you implying its okay to do if the target is a rural farmhouse, but not an airport?

> what does airports have to do with anything? Happy to explain. Due to previous attacks people and law enforcement around air travel are more on edge about such threats. This is because for inherent technical reasons during a flight a relatively small explosive can have devastating consequences. This is due to the pressure difference between the cabin and the atmosphere at cruise altitude , and the inherent energies…

There’s also the small matter of that attack mode having actually been fashionable amongst murderously-suicidal ideologue types over the years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_airliner_bombing...

Security forces pay more attention to threat vectors that have a track record of actively being exploited.

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#97

Post by MagnumOpus »

wasdfff wrote: post #64
somenameforme wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the US a lot of the surveillance is probably illegal and cannot be used in court. They way they get around this is parallel construction. [1] Reuters had an awesome article about this a long time ago, which seems to have been removed from their site. [2] The NSA or whoever spies on somebody they're not supposed to be spying on. They see he's e.g. selling drugs, and further spying shows the time of a sell.…

How often does this even get used? How does the NSA even communicate to a police officer in the field? I think you give local cops a ton of credit. At the end of the day it looks like there are more hard drugs available on the street than ever before despite all the spooky tech and warrantless searching.

The NSA (probably) communicates it to the DEA’s Special Operations Division, which creates an entry in the DEA’s DICE database and tips off a DEA field office, which then asks local law enforcement to do a “random” stop and to use some Parallel Construction to keep it hush hush.

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#98

Post by realfeel78 »

OP title is not backed up by linked article whatsoever. The article says nothing at all to that effect.

The article says this, however, which I don't really understand:

> He suggested one of the chat's other members could have warned the police, but if that were the case, that other member would have to be charged, not Verma.

Can anyone help explain this?

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#99

Post by thekevan »

eterm wrote: post #78
thekevan wrote: post #76

I thought I read another article that said it was caught because he was connected to and using the airport's wifi.

That's not how wifi works. Being on wifi doesn't mean that wifi network has access to your encrypyed communication.

Right, is it possible he was on wifi and not using end to end?

Re: British intelligence able to read and flag private Snapchat messages

#100

Post by pr337h4m »

vhguru wrote: post #63
clawoo wrote: post #22

One needs to ask themselves, what is more likely? 1. The /feds/ broke Snapschat's end to end encryption and they're monitoring for all traffic with designated stopwords, or... 2. One of his friends reported him, one way or another, or.. 3. Snapchat's end to end encryption is... not. I can't find any definitive statement that the chat messages themselves are E2EE, only that photos and videos are encrypted and the key…

Group chats generally don’t have E2EE. Most apps provide that only for one-to-one conversations. Group E2E encryption is a difficult problem.

WhatsApp and Signal have had end-to-end encryption for group chats for a very long time.
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