NSA's TAO -- Leaked catalog of tools and techniques

NSA's TAO -- Dark Reading

The Internet has been buzzing with reports of the recently leaked NSA exploits, backdoors, and hacking / surveillance tools. The linked article is good example.

None of this should be news to anyone paying attention. Many similar hacking tools are available from vendors at conferences like BlackHat and DefCon.

We all know that zero-day exploits exist, and things like Stuxnet clearly show that governments collect them.

Intentionally introducing compromised crypto into the commercial stream has a long history, perhaps best demonstrated by the continued sales of Enigma machines to national governments long after it had been cracked by the US and others.

This reminds me of a quote I posted back in March. Brian Snow, former NSA Information Assurance Director said “Your cyber systems continue to function and serve you not due to the expertise of your security staff but solely due to the sufferance of your opponents.”

One can focus on making this difficult, but none of us should be under the illusion that we can make it impossible. If you have something that absolutely must be protected, and upon which your life or liberty depends, then you need to be taking drastic steps, including total air gaps.

For the rest of your activities, you can use email encryption, disk encryption, VPNs, and other tools to make it as difficult as possible for any adversary to easily vacuum up your information.

If you are of special interest, you may be individually targeted, in which case you should expect your opponent to succeed. Otherwise, someone hacking your computer, or planting a radio enabled USB dongle on your computer is the least of your worries. Your cell phone and social media activities are already hemorrhaging information.

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook and Google+.

Law Enforcement Back Doors

Bruce Schneier has a great post on issues with CALEA-II.

He talks about two main issues, with historical context.

First, about the vulnerabilities that automated eavesdropping backdoors always create in communications, and how that disadvantages US companies.

Second, about the fact that law enforcement claims of communications "Going Dark" are absurd given the treasure trove of new surveillance information available through social media, and cloud services (like gmail).

I know I have talked about this issue a lot over the years, but I am shocked that I can't find any posts like it on this blog.

Bruce does it really well in any case.

FBI: Anonymity implies terrorist

The FBI in conjunction with the Bureau of Justice Assistance and Joint Regional Intelligence Center have produced a number of fliers to help the public identify possible terrorists. While some of the points have merit, it is very likely that this will generate an extremely high proportion of false alerts based on perfectly reasonable and legal behaviors.

A big red flag for me were the fliers for cyber cafes and electronics stores. These suggest that the use of privacy protecting services, like Anonymizer, should be deemed suspicious. They also call out Encryption, VoIP, and communicating through video games.

In almost all of the fliers they suggest that wanting to pay cash (legal tender for all debts public and private) is suspicious.

Thanks to Public Intelligence for pulling together PDFs of the documents.

Internet Cafe flier.

Electronics Store flier.

Schneier on Security: Domain-in-the-Middle Attacks

Schneier on Security: Domain-in-the-Middle Attacks

Bruce Schneier on the real world effectiveness of a very simple domain name based man in the middle attack.

Here is a Wired article on the same issue showing how it was used to steal 20 GB of email from a Fortune 500 company.

Matt Blaze: Wiretapping and Cryptography Today

Matt Blaze analyzes why the widespread use of cryptography has had almsost no impact on our practical ability to do wiretaps and gather information under legitimate court orders. Not too technical and absolutely worth a read.

Matt Blaze: Wiretapping and Cryptography Today:

A Very Nice Analysis of the Lockheed Martin Network Breach

Here is a really nice analysis of the recent security breach at Lockheed Martin. The short version is that is looks like their SecureID tokens got duplicated. This is almost certainly related to the security breach at EMC / RSA. Digital Dao: An Open Source Analysis Of The Lockheed Martin Network Breach

Excellent EFF post on failures of Cryptography regulation

The EFF has an excellent article on eight reasons why government regulation of cryptography is a bad idea. The short answer is: the bad guys can easily get it and use it anyway, and it will make security for the rest of us much worse (not including the big brother surveillance  and constitutional issues).

Breach in the trust of the global public key infrastructure

In a recent post on Privacy Digest, and an article in the NYTimes, there is a discussion of some major and well known vulnerabilities in the global public key infrastructure (PKI) and some examples of exploitations of that vulnerability.

The issue is with the proliferation of certificate authorities on the Internet, and the low level of oversight on their policies.

Using the web as an example, here is how it works. Embedded in every browser is a list of "certificate authorities". These are companies that are deemed trustworthy to issue and sign website certificates. Website certificates are what allows websites to be authenticated by your browser and enables SSL based secure connections (e.g. to your bank).

These certificate authorities may also be able to delegate their certificate signing authorities to other secondary certificate authority organizations. The list of primary certificate authorities in your browser is long (I count 43 in my copy of Firefox), and who knows how many secondary certificate authorities may be out there. These certificate authorities exist all over the world, and any of them can issue a certificate that your browser will accept as valid.

A malevolent certificate authority could issue certificates to allow them to impersonate any secure website.

The articles talk specifically about a secondary certificate authority called Etisalat, located in the UAE. They created a certificate which allowed them to sign code which would be accepted as valid and authorized by BlackBerry cell phones. They then created and distributed software to about 100,000 users which enabled government surveillance of the devices. RIM, the maker of BlackBerry, was able to detect and patch this introduced back door.

Etisalat could create certificates to allow the UAE to intercept and read all secure web traffic traveling over networks within that country.

It is likely that there are many other certificate authorities that are similarly willing to compromise the security of the PKI for various ends. To date, no action has been taken against Etisalat. The EFF is calling for Verizon to revoke Etisalat's ability to issue certificates (Verizon is the primary authority that delegated to Etisalat as the secondary).

IntelFusion - Use a proxy server. Feed an Intel service.

Read this post from IntelFusion. It makes a very strong case for why I worry about any privacy system run by operators you can't really trust, investigate, and verify. In this case it is an investigation of Glype servers. They can be configured to do significant logging, and the author has been able to remotely retrieve the logs from many of the Glype servers. The results show many users from within sensitive US Government organizations and would provide the ability for an attacker to gather all kinds of useful intelligence to find soft targets to exploit. On the personal privacy side, it is an easy way for attackers to intercept usernames, passwords, travel plans, personal information and more for use in, identity theft, burglary, and hacking among other things.

Video: Hacker war drives San Francisco cloning RFID passports - Engadget

Video: Hacker war drives San Francisco cloning RFID passports - Engadget The law of unintended consequences strikes again. In an attempt to improve national security, the U.S. Government has been pushing hard for the widespread adoption of RFID tags in passports around the world. They are already in U.S. passports. The problem is that they are easily scanned from a distance (as shown in the video), and can be cloned. If the RFID chip in the passport is trusted by the authorities, then the security situation is actually worse, not better. Getting real passport information from someone used to be hard. It generally involved actually stealing the passport. With the scanner, one could produce large numbers of clones while simply standing around the airport with the antenna in ones roller luggage (staying out side of security).

The long range readable RFID tags also make possible all kinds of other tracking and identification. The video talks about correlating personal information from RFID enabled credit cards with the passport number to produce even better fakes.

Distribution of such devices around a city would provide much better and more accurate and automated tracking of a population than cameras with their resolution, and facial recognition issues.

Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks - NYTimes.com

Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks - NYTimes.com I held off a while before blogging about this to see a bit of the analysis come in after the initial flush of opinion. It seems clear that a cyber attack of some kind did take place against Georgia. It also seems clear that it was Russian in origin. It further seems clear that it was timed to coincide with the Russian land assault. It is an interesting characteristic of cyber warfare that it is almost impossible to determine if this was actually government controlled, directed, sponsored, or simply a independent sympathetic effort. It is hard to rule out a scenario like support from patriotic cyber criminal organizations. There is at least some evidence that such a scenario played at least some part in the attack. Because Georgia is such a minimally wired country, the actual impact of the attacks was negligible. I would assume there are few significant connections between Georgia and the rest of the Internet. If so, they should have been able to unplug from the rest of the net while deciding how to react. A country like the US or a nation in Europe or much of Asia would be much harder pressed  to disconnect because of the tremendous diversity of international interconnections. Such countries are also much more vulnerable because they rely on the Internet for many critical functions. Additionally, enormous economic damage would result from such an attack.

Bruce Schneier's Security Matters: The Myth of the 'Transparent Society'

Bruce Schneier's Security Matters: The Myth of the 'Transparent Society'This is a nice little article arguing against the idea of Brin's Transparent Society as a solution to the privacy problem. I suspect David Brin would object to the characterization of his work as presenting it as a panacea, but many do so argue.Bruce argues that the relative power disparity makes for un-equal results in the two direction of observation. From my perspective, the idea of enabling the public to watch the government surveillance apparatus is completely unrealistic. It would enable our enemies (and as a nation the US does have real enemies) to reverse engineer and avoid our surveillance. The best one can realistically hope for is very rigorous oversight (which has also seemed unrealistic of late).At the same time the spread of cameras, facial recognition, RFID, etc., is rapidly increasing the level of surveillance of the general population. The only place where observation and recording by the people seems to be really effective is in issues of corruption or abuse of power. Rodney King being an obvious (and ambiguous) example. 

Security and Privacy Aren't Opposites

What Our Top Spy Doesn't Get: Security and Privacy Aren't OppositesWow, I don't know how I missed this one back last month! I wish I had written this essay. The key point is that privacy is not the antithesis of security. Most of the privacy invading "security" solutions we see are what I call "placebo security" and Bruce calls "security theatre" . Things like the "don't fly list" which appears to catch orders of magnitude more innocents than terrorists, and the national ID card when all the terrorists had legally issued valid ID already.In fact, many measures seriously damage security, like putting personal information in the clear on drivers licenses, including Social Security Numbers in many cases! It is an axiom of security that valuable information will leak and people with access will abuse that access. The more control a government demands, the more  oversight is required. That was my real problem with warrantless wiretapping. Not the wiretapping, but the warrantless. Surveillance of anyone at any time for any reason is the hallmark of a police state. The key is independent oversight. The debate on how that should be done must be open an honest.The security vs. privacy debate seems to me to be built on dishonest assumptions. It tends to be rhetoric and political point scoring on both sides with little discussion of whether the proposed solutions or changes actually improve security, what the real trade off is, and whether that trade is worth while.We are currently being asked to sacrifice enormous amounts of privacy and freedom to confront a threat that is miniscule compared to smoking or drunk driving, threats about which few would make such arguments. 

An example of the power of social engineering

Here is another article I picked up on the Qui Custodes blog of David Kaufman: Washington City Paper: Cover Story: Desk Job.This article describes a woman, without any special training, who was able to gain access to "secure" government buildings and steal money right from the desks and purses of the employees. Obviously this could have been documents and information if she had been involved with foreign intelligence. Her methods were simple. She was spotted frequently, but very few people were willing to confront her about her actions, choosing to avoid conflict. The moral here is: security is about everyone following up on everything that seems out of place or unusual. Better metal detectors, or bigger guns at the front door won't do it. Security comes from the alert minds of everyone on the inside of the building being willing to ask direct questions.

Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Eavesdropper's Paradise

Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Eavesdropper's Paradise In a follow up to this post I wrote a few weeks ago, we now understand how the 1000 government email accounts were compromised. It turns out that he did it using TOR.

I have said for a long time that I am amazed that any one operates TOR servers other than government people and criminal/terrorist people. As the operator of a TOR server, you have access to the clear text of the data flowing through your server when you are the exit node (about 1/3 of the traffic typically). While the TOR documentation is clear about this vulnerability, it really understates it, and does not address what you should do about communicating with public services that do not provide an option to do end to end encryption of the information.

As a user of TOR, you are trusting the operators of the servers not to monitor your information. Dan Egerstad's attack was simply to violate that trust. He actively monitored all of the traffic through his 5 TOR servers. He ran multiple servers to increase the amount of data he could collect. He identified the government accounts by searching the captured data for simple strings that would indicate the message was an email being sent or received in the clear, then further searching for key words that would indicate is was government or military related.

Many other TOR servers could currently be searching for financial, medical, trade secret, or other information.

With any privacy service, you need to trust the operators of that service. The theory was that you would not need to trust the operators of the TOR network. The reality is that, in real world use, you do have to trust them, but you typically know very little about them. There is almost no hurdle to establishing a new TOR server. Just about anyone with access to a server can set it up as a TOR server. You must assume that many of those people will not have your best interests at heart.

My personal approach is to work with people with a long track-record of trustworthy behavior. Anonymizer has been providing services for almost 12 years. I personally have been operating privacy services since 1992. In that time I have protected millions of people and billions of web pages and emails. Our track record for integrity is long and unblemished. I think that is the kind of basis one should use for deciding who to trust.

Hacks hit embassy, government e-mail accounts worldwide

Hacks hit embassy, government e-mail accounts worldwide

Usernames and passwords for more than 100 e-mail accounts at embassies and governments worldwide have been posted online. Using the information, anyone can access the accounts that have been compromised.

I am not sure how much needs to be said about this. In general email security is very lax. People often forget just how much information lives in their email accounts. Especially when using Exchange or IMAP type email, all of your old email archives will be compromised if your account is breached. When you consider all of the file attachments most of us get every day, there is probably little sensitive information any of us handle that is not contained in those email archives.

Germany wants to spy on suspects via Web

Germany wants to spy on suspects via Web Germany is proposing to use trojan horse software to enable surveillance of target computers. I have to wonder how effective this will actually be. They are talking about distributing it in an apparently official email from a government email address.

1. Now that the bad guys know this, it seems likely that they will take more care with the attachments from the government.
2. Anti-virus / anti-malware programs should be able to identify and block this software
3. If the anti-virus software makers are convinced to leave a hole for this software, it will be a huge back door for other hackers to use to deploy their trojan horse software.

In general this seems like a high risk operation for the Germans. I suspect that it will be used rarely and very selectively.

Cyberterrorism Trends

Cyberterrorism: By Whatever Name, It's On The Increase -- Security -- InformationWeek Yet more evidence of the use of the Internet as a part of modern asymmetric warfare. From recruiting and fundraising, to direct attacks on IT infrastructure, the Internet is now a key tool for both sides of the conflicts.

CIO - China Makes Viruses for Cyberwar First-Strike

CIO - China Makes Viruses for Cyberwar First-Strike We really have moved on from the idea of the hacker portrayed in the movie "war games". A young boy working out of his bedroom. These days it is a very professional operation, run by organized criminals, or governments in this case.

Because of the anti-censorship work we do Anonymizer has already been on the receiving end of numerous attacks out of China that appear to be government sponsored and initiated.

The Internet is now absolutely part of every nation's critical infrastructure. Cyber war provides a relatively bloodless form of attack that can do massive economic damage and potentially leave little evidence of who launched the attack. It is also a powerful leveler. Using standard hacking methods like bot nets even a tiny country or terrorist organization could inflict damage completely out of proportion to its resources.