For fsck's SAKKE: GCHQ-built phone voice encryption has massive backdoor – researcher The UK government's official voice encryption protocol, around which it is hoping to build an ecosystem of products, has a massive backdoor that would enable the security services to intercept and listen to all past and present calls, a researcher has discovered. Dr Steven Murdoch of University College London has posted an …
What is puzzling is how many Western "intelligence" agencies want to drown in useless data. It seems like they all want slurp all communications without considering that 99.99..9% is absolutely not germain to terrorist or criminal activity even most of the communications by terrorists and criminals is going to be of the more mundane ordering a pizza for delivery type.
Not yet. Squeeze a little harder with the austerity packages. Wait until people are watching their children freeze or starve to death so that bank bond holders can be bailed out again and that 99% figure starts decreasing. The actions the government are taking now are for events a decade away.
>they all want slurp all communications without considering that 99.99..9% is absolutely not germain to terrorist or criminal activity
You think that's what it's for?
It is really for stopping things like the MP's expenses scandal, where those involved aren't really prepared to move to Russia to avoid being made to disappear.
Terrorist attacks generally increase government support. What's not to like about that?
The God-damn Germans got nothin' to do with it!
Where's Sheriff Buford T. Justice when you need him? Ah, here he is:
According to this he was arrested after ordinary people, the kind you piss off with mass surveillance, reported "armed people" in a nearby property; the rest seems to have been "proper police work" i.e. stake out the house and wait:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaqu%C3%ADn_Guzm%C3%A1n#Third_capture:_2016
Governments always seem to come up with spurious cases to justify mass data slurping, but the actual facts tend to dispute the bullshit.
"It seems like they all want slurp all communications without considering that 99.99..9% is absolutely not germain to terrorist or criminal activity "
Oh dear. : (
This has nothing to do with the story they tell their political "masters" to get funding.
Data fetishists collect data because they believe more is always better.
It's not a policy, it's a disease.
Not at all, slurp all, catch some oversight politician having an affair that would be embarrassing and your budget is guaranteed forever.
The NSA learned it from the CIA, who learned it from J Edgar Hoover's FBI, who set up the largest house of prostitution in D.C. Complete with tape recorders and cameras hidden behind the walls.
.... absolutely not germain to terrorist or criminal activity ....
Oh. Lets ask the question: What are the threats and opportunities faced by the "intelligence" services?
Opportunities: Terrorism, organised crime, paedophiles .... politicians doing something they shouldn't
Threats: Politicians with real clout finding out that the "intelligence" services isn't actually very intelligent or competent and consistently have missed pretty much *every* major world-changing event(!) resulting in budget cuts and dismissals.
Solution: Spy on the politicians and the Civil Service, get some Dirt on Them before they do US.
Bonus: While "intelligence" are all busy doing that, the "Opportunities" will grow all on their own.
"They" actually wanted to engineer a pre-emptive attack on (at least) the Civil Service and Parliament, by pushing a back-doored "secure" communication protocol onto them disguised as "The most secure kit our boffins could come up with, Sir". Nice one.
"such a significant backdoor, it is perhaps less surprising when you consider who developed the spec: the information security arm of the UK listening post GCHQ"
Once again, I am compelled to point out that tasking sigint agencies with the additional responsibility of being their national cybersecurity champions contains a built-in paradox. The GCHQ (and the NSA) came into existence to penetrate communications, not secure them. The GCHQ's (and the NSA's) masters value intercepted data a lot more than protected data. The GCHQ's (and the NSA's) customers will be far more likely to ask "What have you intercepted today?" versus "How well did you protect XYZ's financial/healthcare/communications data today?" The GCHQ's (and the NSA's) overseas sigint partners would raise Hell with the agency's leadership if somebody at the GCHQ (or the NSA) actually did something that secured significant portions of national or international data traffic. People at the GCHQ (and the NSA) get recognition and promotions for providing new ways to compromise IT and telecoms security--not for finding new ways to secure it from compromise, especially when said compromise is often authored within house or by these overseas partners.
The GCHQ's (and the NSA's) culture has fully absorbed these facts, and the chances of this agency actually generating REAL IT security are next to nil, as long as the real mission of the agency remains focused on "What did you get for me today?" versus "How did you protect our country's data and telecoms infrastructure today?"
GET THESE AGENCIES OUT OF THE CYBERSECURITY BUSINESS!!!!
While that's an excellent idea, the way things are now the implementation would put 2 agencies in direct opposition to each other and neither would do anything of note except squabble, blame each other for failures, and waste massive amounts of tax dollars. Come to think of it, we (the US) does have a cybersecurity military command that's pretty useless due to manpower.
While I'm against blanket snooping, trolling, etc. I could see that this could be used WITH a subpoena much like a wire-tap back in the analog phone days. It would make massive slurps unnecessary and only allow the court (court, not a politician) to approve it. If the agencies had to pinpoint who they were listening to and justify it, then it might be a better use of their assets. As it is now, meh.... waste of time and money.. too much data, too little payback.
If the pinpoint snooping (subpoenaed wire taps) were permitted, then maybe a cybersecurity agency would work if the agency could afford to hire decent people.
"You think the Russians care about a US or UK subpoena? Keep thinking only your countries Intel agencies will have access to any back door."
Indeed.
It's not the details of the backdoor that matter.
It is the fact that a government mandated exists at all.
And once enough back ground knowledge exist finding it won't be that hard.
@Mark 85
You just illustrated my point. Who runs (and funds) the inadequately resourced U.S. Cyber Command? The NSA--that's who. So you already have two agencies that are at odds, except that one of the agencies is directed by it's opposition and is therefore the red-headed stepchild that never gets anything done.
In reality, the NSA's principal cybersecurity mission is to make sure that nothing prevents the NSA or it's overseas partners from penetrating worldwide data infrastructure on a practically at-will basis. In short, the mission is continued cyber-insecurity.
"The NSA--that's who. So you already have two agencies that are at odds, except that one of the agencies is directed by it's opposition and is therefore the red-headed stepchild that never gets anything done."
Odd, when I drove past cybercommand every day back and forth from work, they seemed to be doing quite well for themselves. Regular deliveries, plenty of people coming and going and all quite happy when at the local fast food joint.
Apparently, you've no military experience, so let me suggest that a division does not starve its brigades of funding, otherwise, it fails its missions every time.
The NSA is part of the US DoD and its mission is primarily military.
Antagonistic processes are the way of life, checks and balances are built on them. Offices are full of them.
The big issue that really annoys me, is that GCHQ staff are vetted by the NSA, so over time, they have been shaped. So a protocol with a hidden key escrow, is more likely to be hidden from Parliament than the NSA.
So its concerning that they'd push that as 'Government grade'.
I also think a lot of extra features on encryption are the problem to adoption. Encryption should be encryption, nothing else. Currently lots of the certs I'm getting are fake, a consequence of using a "C" word in a country under a "C" leader. I would have to accept the fake cert to allow send, because some idiot likes identification and encryption.
"So its concerning that they'd push that as 'Government grade'."
Not at all. It fits the government's requirements exactly. That is, a bloody great hole in the system so that they can trawl through whatever they like, whenever they like.
So it's fit for purpose. The only snag it is not your purpose they have designed this for, it's theirs.
CESG is *supposed* to be a separate wing of GCHQ, which advises the rest of the government (and industry) on computer security. They're linked because being close to the people who break security for a living should give one insights into what the opposition are capable of.
Perhaps it's about time CESG were spun out a bit further away from GCHQ, especially as they are presumably encouraging government departments to use MIKEY-SAKKE, which is counter-productive to say the least.
It doesn't make much difference for the rest of us as most people won't use any encryption, and if you are, why the hell would you use and encryption scheme promoted by a government?
Actually, the NSA has always been tasked with electronic spying *and* securing US DoD traffic from snooping. It's why they hire the most mathematicians in the world, to crack codes and create difficult to impossible to crack code.
Every bit of crypto kit I had, back when I was in the business of shooting and blowing people up, had NSA crypto keys. We knew that the NSA kept a copy and could listen in if something was amiss and we really didn't care.
We *would* care if the NSA was snooping on Congress, as then, they'd be seen to be attempting to undermine their oversight.
Our keys for network services, such as SSL and our CAC cards came from DISA, rather than the NSA and DISA retained a copy. That came in handy when one's encryption key was expired and replaced, as one could retrieve that key and decrypt old messages.
Now, I can't speak on how the GCHQ does things on Landing Strip One, province of Oceania.
"...The fact GCHQ even tried to fob this off illustrates how dumb GCHQ is and how bereft of ideas they are..."
Does it really though?
Make a lot of noise at the front door whilst someone quietly slips through the back door when no one is paying attention springs to mind.
In this case, hold up a broken protocol for the world to ridicule and laugh into your brandy whilst the world keeps using the others that they don't realise are broken.
Or they could just be dumb :)
... they require your VoIP provider to support this for you. They need to add additional code to allow you to use it. Plus they only work via current VoIP so whatever the next generation of networks will be, it won't work.
It would be a lot smarter to use inband signalling of encryption. Essentially when you make a call, your user agents would use steganography to negotiate the cryptographic key, then they would alert you that the key has been established and encrypt your voice data. Since virtually all VoIP connections are bit transparent... even when going out to ISDN and increasingly GSM, this is very feasible. The additional benefit is that this would work regardless of what network you are connected to and it would work without your VoIP provider even knowing.
There is no reason why intermediate points should even know about end to end security.
"What's to stop a man in the middle from identifying and/or mangling the stego?"
That's a general problem of cryptography. Some people claim it can be solved by public key infrastructures... which has been proven to be wrong. Some people claim this can be solved by a web of trust... which has its own problems...
So what can you do against "man in the middle"? Well maybe you can exchange some credentials previously by displaying a QR code on the screen, and scanning it with another phone. Or you could display some numeric/letter code during the phone call and ask the people to read it out loud. Faking that would mean faking the voice which adds another difficult step in the process.
In any case, the idea behind this is that even bad crypto is better than no crypto, since it increases the effort from just sniffing to actually doing a man in the middle attack.
That still leaves the matter of the First Contact problem, where the parties have never met before. Plus, a resourceful adversary like a state can probably punch through an encrypted conversation almost as easily as an unencrypted one, making bad crypto worse than no crypto because it leads to a false sense of security.
" ... no reason why intermediate points should even know ... "
In the US, federal law requires that telephone communications be tappable by law enforcement agencies under warrant. I suspect there is a similar law in the UK and most other countries and that partly explains the characteristics of MIKEY-SAKKE. That means, of course, that telephone communications also are tappable without a warrant; to do so merely violates the law.
That was the reason for the Clipper chip and its key escrow arrangement. We pushed back against that twenty or so years ago, and it died from that as well as implementation flaws, leading to 20+ years in which the privacy and security of telephone calls was lower, and unlawful wiretapping, including by law enforcement authorities, was much easier.
I occasionally have wondered what happened to PGPhone.
> The UK government's official voice encryption protocol, around which it is hoping to build an ecosystem of products
Assuming 'product' refers to 'something we all want to use' like toothpaste or car: at the current state of affairs, who in their right mind would ever even consider using 'ecosystem of products' brought to you by one of the most draconian governments in the EU?
It's an encryption system for intra-Government use. Of course they're going to ensure that they can listen in. Why would anyone assume otherwise?
From the RFC: "The Initiator and the Responder trust a third party, the KMS, which provisions them with key material by a secure mechanism."
Now who do you think that will be?
> There is increasing demand for voicecall encryption. Unlike instant messaging, which effectively allowed companies to start from scratch and so has resulted in a number of highly secure products, phonecalls run over older infrastructure and almost always pass through telecom companies, usually in an unencrypted form (although the information may be encrypted while in transit).
As I'm sure you're all aware, Signal from OpenWhisper Systems [1] is the best answer ATM, folks.
Uses ZRTP which the table shows as ticking all the boxes. Integrates with existing phone/text functionality on your phone, but switches to secure version automatically if the other user is also using Signal.
IME, it just works.
[1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcrime.securesms&hl=en_GB
- https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/signal-private-messenger/id874139669?mt=8
Because it surely can't be this PoS.
I note that the Joint Speech Research Unit (part of the GPO IIRC but bound to have links to GCHQ) was doing voice over 2400bps in the 1950s
I would not underestimate their technical skills.
However what they are applied to is down to their PHB's.
It's the difference between British soldiers and the MoD.
One group is highly professional and focused, and the other group tells them what to do.
OK, this means that mobile phone makers will end up making 2 models, a UK model with the gaping back door in security and one for rest of the world with proper security.
So the UK mobile phone market will die on it's feet as people who actually care about security, businesses and so on, import phones from abroad.
Isn't it more of a frontdoor as it's clearly stated in the part of the publicly available spec?
It's mandated for VOIP carrying classified calls but apart from that no one else has to use this unless they want the decrypt-users-calls "feature".
Not saying it hasn't got issues/I'd want it, but just saying.
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