Tag Archives: NSA

The Wires Cannot Be Trusted; Does DRM Have Something to Teach Us?

In the continuing revelations about the depth to which governments have gone to subjugate global communications in terms of privacy, anonymity, and security on the Internet, one thing is very clear: nothing can be trusted anymore.

Before you wipe this post off as smacking of ‘conspiracy theorist’, take the Snowden revelations disclosed since Christmas, particularly regarding the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations catalog that demonstrates the ways they can violate implicit trust in local hardware by infecting firmware at a level where even reboots and factory ‘resets’ cannot remove the implanted malware, or their “interdiction” of new computers that allow them to install spyware between the time it leaves the factory and arrives at your house.  At a broader level, because of the trend in global data movement towards centralizing data transit through a diminishing number of top tier carriers – a trend is eerily similar to wealth inequality in the digital era – governments and pseudo-governmental bodies have found it trivial to exact control with quantum insert attacks.  In these sophisticated attacks, malicious entities (which I define for these purposes as those who exploit trust to gain illicit access to a protected system) like the NSA or GCHQ can slipstream rogue servers that mimic trusted public systems such as LinkedIn to gain passwords and assume identities through ephemeral information gathering to attack other systems.

Considering these things, the troubling realization is this is not the failure of the NSA, the GCHQ, the US presidential administration, or the lack of public outrage to demand change.  The failure is in the infrastructure of the Internet itself.  If anything, these violations of trust simply showcase technical flaws we have chosen not to acknowledge to this point in the larger system’s architecture.  Endpoint encryption technologies like SSL became supplanted by forward versions of TLS because of underlying flaws not only in cipher strength, but in protocol assumptions that did not acknowledge all the ways in which the trust of a system or the interconnects between systems could be violated.  This is similarly true for BGP, which has seen a number of attacks that allow routers on the Internet to be reprogrammed to shunt traffic to malicious entities that can intercept it: a protocol that trusts anything is vulnerable because nothing can be trusted forever.

When I state nothing can be trusted, I mean absolutely nothing.  Your phone company definitely can’t be trusted – they’ve already been shown to have collapsed to government pressure to give up the keys to their part of the kingdom.  The very wires leading into your house can’t be trusted, they could already or someday will be tapped.  Your air-gapped laptop can’t be trusted, it’s being hacked with radio waves.

But, individual, private citizens are facing a challenge Hollywood has for years – how do we protect our content?  The entertainment industry has been chided for years on its sometimes Draconian attempts to limit use and restrict access to data by implementing encryption and hardware standards that run counter to the kind of free access analog storage mediums, like the VHS and cassette tapes of days of old, provided.  Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from their attempts to address the problem of “everything, everybody, and every device is malicious, but we want to talk to everything, everybody, on every device”.  One place to draw inspiration is HDCP, a protocol most people except hardcore AV enthusiasts are unaware of that establishes device authentication and encryption across each connection of an HD entertainment system.  Who would have thought when your six year old watches Monsters, Inc., those colorful characters are protected by such an advanced scheme on the cord that just runs from your Blu-ray player to your TV?

While you may not believe in DRM for your DVD’s from a philosophical or fair-use rights perspective, consider the striking difference with this approach:  in the OSI model, encryption occurs at Layer 6, on top of many other layers in the system.  This is an implicit trust of all layers below it, and this is the assumption violated in the headlines from the Guardian and NY Times that have captured our attention the most lately: on the Internet, he who controls the media layers also controls the host layers.  In the HDCP model, the encryption happens more akin to Layer 2, as the protocol expects someone’s going to splice a wire to try to bootleg HBO from their neighbor or illicitly pirate high-quality DVD’s.  Today if I gained access to a server closet in a corporate office, there is nothing technologically preventing me from splicing myself into a network connection and copying every packet on the connection.  The data that is encrypted on Layer 6 will be very difficult for me to make sense of, but there will be plenty of data that is not encrypted that I can use for nefarious purposes: ARP broadcasts, SIP metadata, DNS replies, and all that insecure HTTP or poorly-secured HTTPS traffic.  Even worse, it’s a jumping off point for setting up a MITM attack, such as an SSL Inspection Proxy.  Similarly, without media-layer security, savvy attackers with physical access to a server closet or the ability to coerce or hack into the next hop in the network path can go undetected if they redirect your traffic into rogue servers or into malicious networks, and because there is no chained endpoint authentication mechanism on the media-layer, there’s no way for you to know.

These concerns aren’t just theoretical either, and they’re not to protect teenagers’ rights to anonymously author provocative and mildly threatening anarchist manifestos.  They’re to protect your identity, your money, your family, and your security.  Only more will be accessible and controllable on the Internet going forward, and without appropriate protections in place, it won’t just be governments soon who can utilize the assumptions of trust in the Internet’s architecture and implementation for ill, but idealist hacker cabals, organized crime rings, and eventually, anyone with the right script kiddie program to exploit the vulnerabilities once better known and unaddressed.

Why aren’t we protecting financial information or credit card numbers with media-layer security so they’are at least as safe as Mickey Mouse on your HDTV?


Tags: , , ,

When All You See Are Clouds… A Storm Is Brewing

The recent disclosures that the United States Government has violated the 4th amendment of the U. S. Constitution and potentially other international law by building a clandestine program that provides G-Men at the NSA direct taps into every aspect of our digital life – our e-mail, our photos, our phone calls, our entire relationships with other people and even with our spouses, is quite concerning from a technology policy perspective.  The fact that the US Government (USG) can by legal authority usurp any part of our recorded life – which is about every moment of our day – highlights several important points to consider:

  1. Putting the issue of whether the USG/NSA should have broad access into our lives aside, we must accept that the loopholes that allow them to demand this access expose weaknesses in our technology.
  2. The fact the USG can perform this type of surveillance indicates other foreign governments and non-government organizations likely can and may already be doing so as well.
  3. Given that governments are often less technologically savvy though much more resource-rich than malevolent actors, if data is not secure from government access, is it most definitely not secure from more cunning hackers, identity thieves, and other criminal enterprises.

If we can accept the points above, then we must accept that the disclosure of PRISM and connotation through carefully but awkwardly worded public statements about the program present both a problem and an opportunity for technologists to solve regarding data security in today’s age.  This is not a debate of whether we have anything to hide, but rather a discussion of how can we secure data, because if we cannot secure it from a coercive power (sovereign or criminal), we have no real data security at all.

But before proposing some solutions, we must consider:

How Could PRISM Have Happened in the First Place?

I posit an answer devoid of politics or blame, but on an evaluation of the present state of Internet connectivity and e-commerce.  Arguably, the Internet has matured into a stable, reliable set of services.  The more exciting phase of its development saw a flourishing of ideas much like a digital Cambrian explosion.  In its awkward adolescence, connecting to the Internet was akin to performing a complicated rain dance that involved WinSock, dial-up modems, and PPP, sprinkled with roadblocks like busy signals, routine server downtime, and blue screens of death.  The rate of change in equipment, protocols, and software was meteoric, and while the World Wide Web existed (what most laypeople consider wholly as “the Internet” today), it was only a small fraction of the myriad of services and channels for information to flow.  Connecting to and using the Internet required highly specialized knowledge, which both increased the level of expertise of those developing for and consuming the Internet, while limiting its adoption and appeal – a fact some consider the net’s Golden Age.

But as with all complex technologies, eventually they mature.  The rate of innovation slows down as standardization becomes the driving technological force, pushed by market forces.  As less popular protocols and methods of exchanging information give way to young but profitable enterprises that push preferred technologies, the Internet became a much more homogeneous experience both in how we connect to and interact with it.  This shapes not only the fate of now-obsolete tech, such as UUCP, FINGER, ARCHIE, GOPHER, and a slew of other relics of our digital past, but also influenced the very design of what remains — a great example being identification and encryption.

For the Internet to become a commercializable venue, securing access to money, from online banking to investment portfolio management, to payments, was an essential hurdle to overcome.  The solution for the general problem of identity and encryption, centralized SSL certificate authorities providing assurances of trust in a top-down manner, solves the problem specifically for central server webmasters, but not for end-users wishing to enjoy the same access to identity management and encryption technology.  So while the beneficiaries like Amazon, eBay, PayPal, and company now had a solution that provided assurance to their users that you could trust their websites belonged to them and that data you exchanged with them was secure, end-users were still left with no ability to control secure communications or identify themselves with each other.

A final contributing factor I want to point out is that other protocols drifted into oblivion, more functionality was demanded over a more uniform channel — the de facto winner becoming HTTP and the web.  Originally a stateless protocol designed for minimal browsing features, the web became a solution for virtually everything, from e-mail (“webmail”), to searching, to file storage (who has even fired up an FTP client in the last year?).  This was a big win for service providers, as they, like Yahoo! and later Google, could build entire product suites on just one delivery platform, HTTP, but it was also a big win for consumers, who could throw away all their odd little programs that performed specific tasks, and could just use their web browser for everything — now even Grandma can get involved.  A more rich offering of single-shot tech companies were bought up or died out in favor of the oligarchs we know today – Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the like.

Subtly, this also represented a huge shift on where data is stored.  Remember Eudora or your Outlook inbox file tied to your computer (in the days of POP3 before IMAP was around)?  As our web browser became our interface to the online world, and as we demanded anywhere-accessibility to those services and they data they create or consume, those bits moved off our hard drives and into the nebulous service provider cloud, where data security cannot be guarenteed.

This is meaningful to consider in the context of today’s problem because:

  1. Governments and corporate enterprises were historically unable to sufficiently regulate, censor, or monitor the internet because they lacked the tools and knowledge to do so.  Thus, the Internet had security through obscurity.
  2. Due to the solutions to general problems around identity and encryption relying on central authorities,  malefactors (unscrupulous governments and hackers alike) have fewer targets to influence or assert control over to tap into the nature of trust, identity, and communications.
  3. With the collapse of service providers into a handful of powerful actors on a scale of inequity on par with a collapse of wealth distribution in America, there exist now fewer providers to surveille to gather data, and those providers host more data on each person or business that can be interrelated in a more meaningful way.
  4. As information infrastructure technology has matured to provide virtual servers and IaaS offerings on a massive scale, fewer users and companies deploy controlled devices and servers, opting instead to lease services from cloud providers or use devices, like smartphones, that wholly depend upon them.
  5. Because data has migrated off our local storage devices to the cloud, end-users have lost control over their data’s security.  Users have to choose between an outmoded device-specific way to access their data, or give up the control to cloud service providers.

There Is A Better Way

Over the next few blog posts, I am going to delve into a number of proposals and thoughts around giving control and security assurances of data back to end-users.  These will address points #2 and #4 above as solutions that layer over existing web technologies, not proposals to upend our fundamental usage of the Internet by introducing opaque configuration barriers or whole-new paradigms.  End-users should have choice whether their service providers have access to their data in a way that does not require Freenet’s darknets or Tor’s game-of-telephone style of anonymous but slow onion-routing answer to web browsing.  Rather, users should be able to positively identify themselves to the world and be able to access and receive data and access it in a cloud-based application without ever having to give up their data security, not have to trust of the service provider, be independent to access the data on any devices (access the same service securely anywhere), and not have to establish shared secrets (swap passwords or certificates).

As a good example, if you want to send a secure e-mail message today, you have three categorical options to do so:

  1. Implicitly trust a regular service provider:  Ensure both the sender and the receiver use the same server.  By sending a message, it is only at risk while the sender connects to the provider to store it and while the receiver connects the provider to retrieve it.  Both parties trust the service provider will not access or share the information.  Of course, many actors, like Gmail, still do.
  2. Use a secure webmail provider:  These providers, like, encrypt the sender’s connection to the service to protect the message as it is sent, and send notifications to receivers to come to a secure HTTPS site to view the message.  While better than the first option, the message is still stored in a way that can be demanded by subpoena or snooped inside the company while it sits on their servers.
  3. Use S/MIME certificates and an offline mail client:  While the most secure option for end-to-end message encryption, this cumbersome method is machine-dependent and requires senders and receivers to first share a certificate with each other – something the average user is flatly incapable of understanding or configuring.

Stay tuned to my next post, where I propose a method by which anyone could send me a message securely, without knowing anything else about me other than my e-mail address, in a way I could read online or my mobile device, in a way that no one can subpoena or snoop on in between.



Tags: ,