It's impossible to create a backdoor that only the "good guys" can use by Wendy M. Grossman / June 5, 2017 / Leave a comment

After WhatsApp was used by the Westminster attacker, Amber Rudd vowed to take on encryption. Photo: PA

From pig Latin to the complex mathematics of todays computer encryption, encoding communications is as old as humanity. Often, as with Alan Turings work in World War II, cracking the enemys codes has conferred crucial military advantage.

Because the internet was designed to share, rather than secure, information, encryption plays several important roles in todays digitised landscape. It ensures that sensitive data cant be read by unauthorised people: when a healthcare manager forgets the clinics laptop in a taxi, a criminal steals a companys usernames and passwords, or a consumer sends credit card details to an online retailer, encryption protects the data against interlopers.

Encryption also provides a way to check that digital filesfrom the software programs that run your cars braking system to medical images and electronic payments havent been tampered with.

Around 1990, three interrelated developments coalesced to disrupt the policies that govern encryption. The first was the culmination of two decades during which there had been growing adoption of computers and computer networks. Second, cryptographers began working outside the militaryin academia and commercial companies. Third, computing plummeted in costwhile escalating in power.

It is great to see that you are enjoying the Prospect website.

You have now reached your allowance of 3 free articles in the last 30 days. Dont worryto get another 7 articles absolutely free, just enter your email address in the box below.

You are in complete control of which 7 articles you choose to read. Register now to enjoy more of the finest writing on politics, economics, literature, the arts, philosophy and science.

When you register, well also send you our free e-bookThe past in perspectivewhich considers how reflecting on the past can give great insight into the present AND well send you our free weekly newsletter. (If you prefer not to receive the newsletter you can unsubscribe at any time).

Prospect takes your privacy seriously. We promise never to rent or sell your e-mail address to any third party. You can unsubscribe from the Prospect e-mail newsletter at any time.

Link:
The wrong approach to encryption could make us more vulnerable - Prospect

British Prime Minister Theresa May has used Saturday's terrorist attack to again push for a ban on encryption.

May said on Sunday that Britain must take a new approach to tackling terrorism, and that this included denying terrorists and their sympathisers access to digital tools that she claimed were being used for communication and planning attacks.

On Saturday night, seven people were killed and scores injured in an attack on London Bridge. The country goes to the polls on Thursday.

"We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed," May said, according to a CNN report."Yet that is precisely what the Internet and the big companies that provide Internet-based services provide.

This is not the first time that British politicians have pushed for a ban on encryption.

In March, following an attack, Home Secretary Amber Rudd demanded that all encrypted messaging apps allow intelligence agencies access to content when they demanded.

More recently, after the attack on a concert given by American singer Ariana Grande, Rudd was again in the forefront, blaming social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for not doing enough to prevent messages advocating terrorism on their sites.

Last year, Britain passed a sweeping surveillance law, dubbed the Snoopers Charter, that requires Internet, phone and communications applications firms to store records for a year and allow law enforcement to access the data on demand.

Well-known digital activist and author Cory Doctorow described May's call as "a golden oldie, a classic piece of foolish political grandstanding".

"May says there should be no 'means of communication' which 'we cannot read' and no doubt many in her party will agree with her, politically. But if they understood the technology, they would be shocked to their boots."

He said it was impossible to overstate how "bonkers" the idea of sabotaging cryptography was to people who understood information security.

"If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again or on the wire, when youre sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography.

"Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the 'good guys' are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption."

See original here:
British PM seeks ban on encryption after terror attack - iTWire

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said social media companies are too tolerant of extremist material, and called on those companies to help bust the encryption used in user communications.

"We need these global social media messaging companies to assist in providing access to encrypted communications, which are used by billions of people," Turnbull said on Monday.

"The security services need to get access to them."

The prime minister said the Five Eyes countries -- the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand -- are working with social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter to get extremist material taken down.

Saying nations and their agencies need to be smarter, more agile, and more collaborative than those "who are seeking to do us harm", Turnbull agreed with the thoughts espoused by British Prime Minister Teresa May over the weekend.

May called for the introduction of rules to "deprive the extremists of their safe spaces online", and also hit out at technology firms for not doing enough.

"We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet, that is precisely what the internet and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide," said May.

May's comments followed the UK suffering its third terrorist attack in four months.

Last week, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Andrew Colvin said tackling the online world is a "'genuinely wicked problem" for police forces.

"Technology presents challenges to governments like almost never before," Colvin said. "It is a realm that we cannot simply legislate or regulate to control -- we must work with the industry who have their hands on the levers, and invariably, they are in the private sector."

Colvin called for the use of traditional and non-traditional policing capabilities to ensure criminals cannot hide behind encryption to avoid the law.

"Prolific growth in the use of encryption technology is an everyday reality for investigators, and we cannot afford for this to remain an obstacle."

Read more:
Australian PM calls on Facebook and Apple to help access encrypted chats - ZDNet

Rapid7 encouraged owners of its Nexpose appliancesthis week to apply an update to their systems to tweak how SSH is configured by default.

The company warned on Wednesday the devices were shipped with an SSH configuration that could have let some obsolete KEX, encryption and MAC algorithms be used for key exchange.

Nexpose devices are preconfigured servers, deployed in server racks, designed to help users gauge vulnerabilities, manage vulnerability data, and limit threat exposure. All physical Nexpose appliances are affected per a disclosure by Samuel Huckins, a program manager with the company, published on Wednesday.

Disclosure on CVE-2017-5243: Nexpose hardware appliance SSH enabled obsolete algorithms https://t.co/DHI7uLJ5yj (Thanks to @LiamMSomerville)

Rapid7 (@rapid7) May 31, 2017

Liam Somerville, a researcher based in Scotland, discovered the vulnerability (CVE-2017-5243) and reported it to the company three weeks ago.

Nothing needs to be downloaded to resolve the issue, but a file does need to edited, Rapid7 said. According to Huckins, to fix the vulnerability a user with root access has to edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config in the appliance to ensure only modern ciphers, key exchange, and MAC algorithms are accepted. This should lessen the likelihoodof any attacks involving authentication.

Prior to the fix, weak and out of date encryption algorithms such asAES192-CBC, Blowfish-CBC, and 3DES-CBC, and KEX algorithms such asdiffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1, could have been enabled.

This change should not impact connections from Nexpose instances to the physical appliance. The main impact is shoring up access by SSH clients such that they cannot connect to the appliance using obsolete algorithms, Huckins wrote.

According to Tod Beardsley, Research Director at Rapid7, the vulnerability could have let an attacker in a privileges position on the network force an algorithm downgrade between an SSH client and Nexpose during authentication.

The privileged position is crucial to making the attack a success, since its a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack first, the attacker needs to be able to insert himself between the client and server, which usually means the attacker is on the same network as either endpoint, or has compromised an ISP along the way (in which case you have bigger problems), Beardsley told Threatpost late Friday, Once there, the attacker can pose as both sides of the initial SSH handshake, and rewrite the handshake to request one of these older, obsolete algorithms. Once thats done, the attacker then records the session, and then can decrypt the session offline.

Beardsley says that removing server-side support for the algorithms makes the aforementioned kind of attack impractical and that overall, the actual risk of exploitation is fairly low.

These appliances dont tend to be exposed on public networks, so attackers need to be on the inside to begin with, Beardsley said, The whole point of SSH is to be resistant to this kind of session meddling, even in the face of an attacker whos in the right place and has the right expertise and resources to mount this sort attack. By strengthening whats available on the server, we can help keep that promise of confidentiality.

*This article was updated at 4:30 p.m. EST to include comments from Tod Beardsley of Rapid7.

See the original post:
SSH Configuration on Nexpose Servers Allowed Weak Encryption Algorithms - Threatpost

/ Cory Doctorow / 8 am Sun, Jun 4 2017

Aaron Swartz once said, "It's no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works."

report this ad

He was talking to law-makers, policy-makers and power-brokers, people who were, at best, half-smart about technology -- just smart enough to understand that in a connected world, every problem society has involves computers, and just stupid enough to demand that computers be altered to solve those problems.

Paging Theresa May.

Theresa May says that last night's London terror attacks mean that the internet cannot be allowed to provide a "safe space" for terrorists and therefore working cryptography must be banned in the UK.

This is a golden oldie, a classic piece of foolish political grandstanding. May's predecessor, David Cameron, repeatedly campaigned on this one, and every time he did, I wrote a long piece rebutting him. Rather than writing a new one for May, I thought I'd just dust off a pair of my Cameron-era pieces (1, 2), since every single word still applies.

Theresa May says there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read" -- and no doubt many in her party will agree with her, politically. But if they understood the technology, they would be shocked to their boots.

Its impossible to overstate how bonkers the idea of sabotaging cryptography is to people who understand information security. If you want to secure your sensitive data either at rest on your hard drive, in the cloud, on that phone you left on the train last week and never saw again or on the wire, when youre sending it to your doctor or your bank or to your work colleagues, you have to use good cryptography. Use deliberately compromised cryptography, that has a back door that only the good guys are supposed to have the keys to, and you have effectively no security. You might as well skywrite it as encrypt it with pre-broken, sabotaged encryption.

There are two reasons why this is so. First, there is the question of whether encryption can be made secure while still maintaining a master key for the authorities use. As lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer explained, adding the complexity of master keys to our technology will introduce unquantifiable security risks. Its hard enough getting the security systems that protect our homes, finances, health and privacy to be airtight making them airtight except when the authorities dont want them to be is impossible.

What Theresa May thinks she's saying is, "We will command all the software creators we can reach to introduce back-doors into their tools for us." There are enormous problems with this: there's no back door that only lets good guys go through it. If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. They -- and not just the security services -- will be able to use it to intercept all of our communications. That includes things like the pictures of your kids in your bath that you send to your parents to the trade secrets you send to your co-workers.

But this is just for starters. Theresa May doesn't understand technology very well, so she doesn't actually know what she's asking for.

For Theresa May's proposal to work, she will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of her jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

May is not alone here. The regime she proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Theresa May has already shown that she believes she can order the nation's ISPs to block access to certain websites (again, for the record, this hasn't worked very well). The next step is to order Chinese-style filtering using deep packet inspection, to try and distinguish traffic and block forbidden programs. This is a formidable technical challenge. Intrinsic to core Internet protocols like IPv4/6, TCP and UDP is the potential to "tunnel" one protocol inside another. This makes the project of figuring out whether a given packet is on the white-list or the black-list transcendentally hard, especially if you want to minimise the number of "good" sessions you accidentally blackhole.

More ambitious is a mandate over which code operating systems in the UK are allowed to execute. This is very hard. We do have, in Apple's Ios platform and various games consoles, a regime where a single company uses countermeasures to ensure that only software it has blessed can run on the devices it sells to us. These companies could, indeed, be compelled (by an act of Parliament) to block secure software. Even there, you'd have to contend with the fact that other EU states and countries like the USA are unlikely to follow suit, and that means that anyone who bought her Iphone in Paris or New York could come to the UK with all their secure software intact and send messages "we cannot read."

But there is the problem of more open platforms, like GNU/Linux variants, BSD and other unixes, Mac OS X, and all the non-mobile versions of Windows. All of these operating systems are already designed to allow users to execute any code they want to run. The commercial operators -- Apple and Microsoft -- might conceivably be compelled by Parliament to change their operating systems to block secure software in the future, but that doesn't do anything to stop people from using all the PCs now in existence to run code that the PM wants to ban.

More difficult is the world of free/open operating systems like GNU/Linux and BSD. These operating systems are the gold standard for servers, and widely used on desktop computers (especially by the engineers and administrators who run the nation's IT). There is no legal or technical mechanism by which code that is designed to be modified by its users can co-exist with a rule that says that code must treat its users as adversaries and seek to prevent them from running prohibited code.

This, then, is what Theresa May is proposing:

* All Britons' communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

* Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

* All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

* Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

* Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease -- security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one's findings, such as industry R&D and the security services

* All packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

* Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

* Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

* Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

* Free/open source operating systems -- that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors -- must be banned outright

Theresa May will say that she doesn't want to do any of this. She'll say that she can implement weaker versions of it -- say, only blocking some "notorious" sites that carry secure software. But anything less than the programme above will have no material effect on the ability of criminals to carry on perfectly secret conversations that "we cannot read". If any commodity PC or jailbroken phone can run any of the world's most popular communications applications, then "bad guys" will just use them. Jailbreaking an OS isn't hard. Downloading an app isn't hard. Stopping people from running code they want to run is -- and what's more, it puts the whole nation -- individuals and industry -- in terrible jeopardy.

Thats a technical argument, and its a good one, but you dont have to be a cryptographer to understand the second problem with back doors: the security services are really bad at overseeing their own behaviour.

Once these same people have a back door that gives them access to everything that encryption protects, from the digital locks on your home or office to the information needed to clean out your bank account or read all your email, there will be lots more people wholl want to subvert the vast cohort that is authorised to use the back door, and the incentives for betraying our trust will be much more lavish than anything a tabloid reporter could afford.

If you want a preview of what a back door looks like, just look at the US Transportation Security Administrations master keys for the locks on our luggage. Since 2003, the TSA has required all locked baggage travelling within, or transiting through, the USA to be equipped with Travelsentry locks, which have been designed to allow anyone with a widely held master key to open them.

What happened after Travelsentry went into effect? Stuff started going missing from bags. Lots and lots of stuff. A CNN investigation into thefts from bags checked in US airports found thousands of incidents of theft committed by TSA workers and baggage handlers. And though aggressive investigation work has cut back on theft at some airports, insider thieves are still operating with impunity throughout the country, even managing to smuggle stolen goods off the airfield in airports where all employees are searched on their way in and out of their work areas.

The US system is rigged to create a halo of buck-passing unaccountability. When my family picked up our bags from our Easter holiday in the US, we discovered that the TSA had smashed the locks off my nearly new, unlocked, Travelsentry-approved bag, taping it shut after confirming it had nothing dangerous in it, and leaving it completely destroyed in the words of the official BA damage report. British Airways has sensibly declared the damage to be not their problem, as they had nothing to do with destroying the bag. The TSA directed me to a form that generated an illiterate reply from a government subcontractor, sent from a do-not-reply email address, advising that TSA is not liable for any damage to locks or bags that are required to be opened by force for security purposes (the same note had an appendix warning me that I should treat this communication as confidential). Ive yet to have any other communications from the TSA.

Making it possible for the state to open your locks in secret means that anyone who works for the state, or anyone who can bribe or coerce anyone who works for the state, can have the run of your life. Cryptographic locks dont just protect our mundane communications: cryptography is the reason why thieves cant impersonate your fob to your cars keyless ignition system; its the reason you can bank online; and its the basis for all trust and security in the 21st century.

In her Dimbleby lecture, Martha Lane Fox recalled Aaron Swartzs words: Its not OK not to understand the internet anymore. That goes double for cryptography: any politician caught spouting off about back doors is unfit for office anywhere but Hogwarts, which is also the only educational institution whose computer science department believes in golden keys that only let the right sort of people break your encryption.

(Image: Facepalm, Brandon Grasley, CC-BY))

report this ad

report this ad

Greg Gianforte is a short-tempered, hyper-conservative Montana political hopeful who is standing for the GOP in a special election for a Congressional seat; he is also invested in Russian firms that are under US sanction.

Before the FCC stopped taking comments on its plans to destroy Net Neutrality (but after so many people rallied to tell it not to that its site crashed and the agency manufactured a fake denial of service attack to avoid admitting how much America hated its plans), the FCCs comment form was flooded with 128,000 []

On Wednesday 25-year-old Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland who is being sued for $100M over his catastrophic schadenfreudefest gathered his long-unpaid employees on a conference call this week to tell them that After conferring with our counsel and all financial people, unfortunately we are not able to proceed with payroll. Were not firing []

Few things are as relaxing than an afternoon laying around in the sun. But no matter how careful you are, wet towels always seem to track some sand back home with you. The Quicksand Mat eliminates this beach-going annoyance by letting sand easily pass through.Whether you use it as a blanket or a buffer to []

Drones are the perfect way to cheaply shoot aerial video, but it can be difficult to accurately point its camera when your view is limited to a tiny smartphone screen. This quadcopter offers a first-person view of the action in immersive 3D, so you can frame your shots as if you were flying.The Micro Drone []

Python is an excellent general-purpose programming language that many professionalsconsider a good first language for aspiring programmers to learn. It isalso one of the tools of choice in the worlds of Big Data and machine learning. To help you get familiar with Pythons extensive capabilities and human-readable syntax, this bundle includes 7 unique courses covering []

See original here:
Theresa May wants to ban crypto: here's what that would cost, and here's why it won't work anyway - Boing Boing