Tag: encryption

Stop reading, start patching

… in order to correct this problem, BOTH the client AND the router must be patched

This is an emergency post: normal* service will resume next week**.

So, over the past 48 hours or so, news of the KRACK vulnerability for Wifi has started spreading.  This vulnerability makes is pretty trivially easy to snoop on information sent between a device (mobile phone, laptop, etc.) and a wifi router, in some cases allowing changes to that information.  This is not a bug in code, but a mis-design in the crypto algorithm that’s used by the vast majority of Wifi connections: WPA2.

Some key facts:

  • WPA2 personal and WPA2 enterprise are vulnerable
  • the vulnerability is in the design of the code, not the implementation
    • however, Linux and Android 6.0+ implementations (which use wpa_supplicant 2.4 or higher, are even more easily attacked)
  • in order to correct this problem, BOTH the client AND the router must be patched.
    • this means that it’s not good enough just to update your laptop, but also the router in your house, business, etc.
  • Android phones typically take a long time to get patches (if at all)
    • unless you have evidence to the contrary, assume that your phone is vulnerable
  • many hotels, businesses, etc., rarely update or patch their routers
    • assume that any wifi connection that you use from now on is vulnerable unless you know that it’s been patched
  • you can continue to rely on VPNs
  • you can continue to rely on website encryption***
    • but remember that you may be betraying lots of metadata, including, of course, the address of the website that you’re visiting, to any snoopers
  • the security of IoT devices is going to continue to be a problem
    • unless their firmware can easily be patched, it’s difficult to believe that they will be safe

For my money, it’s worth investing in that VPN solution you were always promising yourself, and starting to accept the latency hit that it may cost you.

For more information in an easily readable form, I suggest heading over to The Register, which is pretty much always a good place to start.

For information in the initial publisher of this attack, visit https://www.krackattacks.com/. 

*well, as normal as it ever was

**hopefully

***as much as you ever could before…

That Backdoor Fallacy revisited – delving a bit deeper

…if it breaks just once that becomes always,..

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post called The Backdoor Fallacy: explaining it slowly for governments.  I wish that it hadn’t been so popular.  Not that I don’t like the page views – I do – but because it seems that it was very timely, and this issue isn’t going away.  The German government is making the same sort of noises that the British government* was making when I wrote that post**.  In other words, they’re talking about forcing backdoors in encryption.  There was also an amusing/worrying story from slashdot which alleges that “US intelligence agencies” attempted to bribe the developers of Telegram to weaken the encryption in their app.

Given some of the recent press on this, and some conversations I’ve had with colleagues, I thought it was worth delving a little deeper***.  There seem to be three sets of use cases that it’s worth addressing, and I’m going to call them TSPs, CSPs and Other.  I’d also like to make it clear here that I’m talking about “above the board” access to encrypted messages: access that has been condoned by the relevant local legal system.  Not, in other words, the case of the “spooks”.  What they get up to is for another blog post entirely****.  So, let’s look at our three cases.

TSPs – telecommunications service providers

In order to get permission to run a telecommunications service(wired or wireless) in most (all?) jurisdictions, you need to get approval from the local regulator: a licence.  This licence is likely to include lots of requirements: a typical one is that you, the telco (telecoms company) must provide access at all times to emergency numbers (999, 911, 112, etc.).  And another is likely to be that, when local law enforcement come knocking with a legal warrant, you must give them access to data and call information so that they can basically do wire-taps.  There are well-established ways to do this, and fairly standard legal frameworks within which it happens: basically, if a call or data stream is happening on a telco’s network, they must provide access to it to legal authorities.  I don’t see an enormous change to this provision in what we’re talking about.

CSPs – cloud service providers

Things get a little more tricky where cloud service providers are concerned.  Now, I’m being rather broad with my definition, and I’m going to lump your Amazons, Googles, Rackspaces and such in with folks like Facebook, Microsoft and other providers who could be said to be providing “OTT” (Over-The-Top – in that they provide services over the top of infrastructure that they don’t own) services.  Here things are a little greyer*****.  As many of these companies (some of who are telcos, how also have a business operating cloud services, just to muddy the waters further) are running messaging, email services and the like, governments are very keen to apply similar rules to them as those regulating the telcos. The CSPs aren’t keen, and the legal issues around jurisdiction, geography and what the services are complicate matter.  And companies have a duty to their shareholders, many of whom are of the opinion that keeping data private from government view is to be encouraged.  I’m not sure how this is going to pan out, to be honest, but I watch it with interest.  It’s a legal battle that these folks need to fight, and I think it’s generally more about cryptographic key management – who controls the keys to decrypt customer information – than about backdoors in protocols or applications.

Other

And so we come to other.  This bucket includes everything else.  And sadly, our friends the governments want their hands on all of that everything else.    Here’s a little list of some of that everything else.  Just a subset.  See if you can see anything on the list that you don’t think there should be unfettered access to (and remember my previous post about how once access is granted, it’s basically game over, as I don’t believe that backdoors end up staying secret only to “approved” parties…):

  • the messages you send via apps on your phone, or tablet, or laptop or PC;
  • what you buy on Amazon;
  • your banking records – whether on your phone or at the bank;
  • your emails via your company VPN;
  • the stored texts on your phone when you enquired about the woman’s shelter
  • your emails to your doctor;
  • your health records – whether stored at your insurers, your hospital or your doctor’s surgery;
  • your browser records about emergency contraception services;
  • access to your video doorbell;
  • access to your home wifi network;
  • your neighbour’s child’s chat message to the ChildLine (a charity for abused children in the UK – similar exist elsewhere)
  • the woman’s shelter’s records;
  • the rape crisis charity’s records;
  • your mortgage details.

This is a short list.  I’ve chosen emotive issues, of course I have, but they’re all legal.  They don’t even include issues like extra-marital affairs or access to legal pornography or organising dissent against oppressive regimes, all of which might well edge into any list that many people might copmile.  But remember – if a backdoor is put into encryption, or applications, then these sorts of information will start leaking.  And they will leak to people you don’t want to have them.

Our lives revolve around the Internet and the services that run on top of it.  We have expectations of privacy.  Governments have an expectation that they can breach that privacy when occasion demands.  And I don’t dispute that such an expectation is valid.  The problem that this is not the way to do it, because of that phrase “when occasion demands”.  If the occasion breaks just once, then that becomes always, and not just to “friendly” governments.  To unfriendly governments, to criminals, to abusive partners and abusive adults and bad, bad people.  This is not a fight for us to lose.

*I’m giving the UK the benefit of the doubt here: as I write, it’s unclear whether we really have a government, and if we do, for how long it’ll last, but let’s just with it for now.

**to be fair, we did have a government then.

***and not just because I like the word “delving”.  Del-ving.  Lovely.

****one which I probably won’t be writing if I know what’s good for me.

*****I’m a Brit, so I use British spelling: get over it.

The Backdoor Fallacy: explaining it slowly for governments

… I literally don’t know a single person with modicum of technical understanding who thinks this is a good idea …

I should probably avoid this one, because a) everyone will be writing about it; and b) it makes me really, really cross; but I just can’t*.  I’m also going to restate the standard disclaimer that the opinions expressed here are mine, and may not represent those of my employer, Red Hat, Inc. (although I hope that they do).

Amber Rudd, UK Home Secretary, has embraced what I’m going to call the Backdoor Fallacy.  This is basically a security-by-obscurity belief that it’s necessary for encryption providers to provide the police and security services with a “hidden” method by which they can read all encrypted communications**.  The Home Secretary’s espousal of this popular position is a predictable reaction to the terrorist attack in London last week, but it won’t help.  I literally don’t know a single person with modicum of technical understanding who thinks this is a good idea.  Or remotely practicable.  Obviously, therefore, I’m not the only person who’s going to writing about this, but I thought it would be an interesting exercise to collect some of the reasons that this is monumentally bad idea in one short article, so let’s examine this fallacy from a few angles.

  • It always fails – because a backdoor isn’t just a backdoor for authorised users: it’s a backdoor for anyone who can find it.  And keeping these sort of things hidden is difficult, because:
    • academic researchers look for them
    • criminals look for them
    • “unfriendly state actors” (governments we don’t like at the moment) look for them
    • previously friendly state actors (governments we used to like, but we don’t like so much anymore) look for them
    • police and security services mess up and leak them by accident
    • insiders within police and security services decide to leak them
    • source code gets leaked, giving clues to how they’re implemented -for those apps which aren’t Open Source in the first place
    • the people writing them don’t always get it right, and you end up with more holes than you expected***
    • techniques that seem safe now often seem laughably insecure in a few years’ time.

There is just no safe way to protect these backdoors.

  • You can’t identify all the providers – today it’s Whatsapp.  And Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, and Tumblr, and …  But if I’d asked you for a list a year, or five years ago, what would that list have looked like?  And can you tell me what should be on the list for next week, or next year?  No, you can’t.  And I suspect you (as a learned reader of this blog) are a lot more clued up than the UK Home Office.
  • You can’t convince all the providers – and that’s assuming that all of the providers are interested or can be convinced to care adequately to sign up anyway.
  • You can’t hit all channels – even if you could identify all the providers, what about online gaming?  And email.  And ssh.  I mean, really.
  • The obviousness issue – presumably, in order to make this work, governments need to publish a list of approved applications.  I suspect, just suspect that the sort of bad people who want to get around this will choose to use different apps, or different channels to the approved ones … but so will people who aren’t “bad people”, but just have legitimate reasons for encrypting their communications.
  • The business problem – there are legitimate uses for encryption.  Many, many of them.  And they far outnumber the illegitimate uses.  So, if you’re a government, you have two options:
    1. you can convince all legitimate business, including banks, foreign corporations and human rights organisations and everyone who communicates with them to use your compromised, “backdoor-enhanced”***** encryption scheme.  Good luck with this: it’s not going to work.
    2. you can institute a simple, fast, unabuseable red-tape free process by which you hand out exemptions to “legitimate” businesses who you can trust to use non-compromised, backdoor-unenhanced encryption schemes.******

I’m guessing that we don’t expect either of these to fly.

  • The “nothing to hide” sub-fallacy – “But if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear” argument.  Well, I may have nothing to hide from the current government.  But what about future governments?  Have the past 100 years of world history taught us nothing?  Hitler, Franco, Stalin, Perón, … the list goes on and on.  From “previously friendly state actors”?  And from the criminals who are the main reason most of us use encryption in the first place?  Puh-lease.
  • The who-do-you-trust question – this leads on from the “police and security services mess up” sub-bullet above.  The fewer people to whom you give the backdoor details, the more hard work and expense there is in using that backdoor for your purposes.  So there’s an obvious move to reduce costs by spreading knowledge of the backdoor.  And governments tend towards any policy which reduces costs, so…  And, of course, the more spread the knowledge, the more likely it is it leak.
  • Once it’s gone, it’s gone – and once it’s leaked, it’s leaked, whether by accident or intention (Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, …).  You can’t put this genie back in the bottle.  The cost and complication of re-keying a communications channel for which the key has leaked is phenomenal.  I’m assuming that this is just a re-keying exercise, but if it’s a recoding exercise, it’s even harder.  And how do you enforce that only the new version is used, anyway?
  • The jurisdiction issue – do all governments agree on the same key?  No?  Well, then I have to have different versions of all apps I might use, and choose the correct one for each country I travel in?  And ensure that neither I nor any businesses ever communicate across jurisdictional boundaries.  Or we could have multiple backdoors, each for a different jurisdiction?  Let’s introduce the phrase “combinatorial explosion” here, shall we?

Let’s work as an industry to disabuse governments of the idea that this is ever a good idea. And we also need to work them to come up with other techniques to help them catch criminals and stop terrorist attacks: let’s do that, too.

*believe me: I tried.  Not that hard, but I tried.

**they probably want all “at-rest” keys as well as all transport keys.  This is even more stupid.

***don’t get me wrong: this is going to happen anyway, but why add to the problem?

****inverted commas for irony, which I hope is obvious by this state in the proceedings

*****”I can’t even”, to borrow from popular parlance.  This is the UK government, after all.