July 15, 2013

by Bruce Schneier

Chief Security Technology Officer, BT

schneier@schneier.com

http://www.schneier.com

A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise.

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In this issue:

There’s one piece of blowback that isn’t being discussed — aside from the fact that Snowden has killed the chances of any liberal arts major getting a DoD job for at least a decade — and that’s how the massive NSA surveillance of the Internet affects the US’s role in Internet governance.

Ron Deibert makes this point:

But there are unintended consequences of the NSA scandal that will undermine U.S. foreign policy interests — in particular, the “Internet Freedom” agenda espoused by the U.S. State Department and its allies.

The revelations that have emerged will undoubtedly trigger a reaction abroad as policymakers and ordinary users realize the huge disadvantages of their dependence on U.S.-controlled networks in social media, cloud computing, and telecommunications, and of the formidable resources that are deployed by U.S. national security agencies to mine and monitor those networks.

Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue.

We can’t fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don’t see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/12/opinion/…

The new Internet nationalism:

https://www.schneier.com/essay-416.html

http://www.cnas.org/theinternetyalta

Metadata

There’s been some interesting speculation that the NSA is storing everyone’s phone calls, and not just metadata. The first link, below, is definitely worth reading.

I expressed skepticism about this just a month ago. My assumption had always been that everyone’s compressed voice calls are just too much data to move around and store. Now, I don’t know.

There’s a bit of a conspiracy-theory air to all of this speculation, but underestimating what the NSA will do is a mistake. General Alexander has told members of Congress that they *can* record the contents of phone calls. And they have the technical capability.

I believe that, to the extent that the NSA is analyzing and storing conversations, they’re doing speech-to-text as close to the source as possible and working with that. Even if you have to store the audio for conversations in foreign languages, or for snippets of conversations the conversion software is unsure of, it’s a lot fewer bits to move around and deal with.

And, by the way, I hate the term “metadata.” What’s wrong with “traffic analysis,” which is what we’ve always called that sort of thing?

http://.rubbingalcoholic.com/post/52913031241/…

My previous skepticism:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/05/…

More:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/…

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/…

http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/…

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?…

Metadata:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/interactive/…

In an excellent essay about privacy and secrecy, law professor Daniel Solove makes an important point. There are two types of NSA secrecy being discussed. It’s easy to confuse them, but they’re very different.

Of course, if the government is trying to gather data about a particular suspect, keeping the specifics of surveillance efforts secret will decrease the likelihood of that suspect altering his or her behavior.

But secrecy at the level of an individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret. The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security. What kind of information is gathered? How is it used? How securely is it kept? What kind of oversight is there? Are these activities even legal? These questions can’t be answered, and the government can’t be held accountable, if surveillance programs are completely classified.

This distinction is also becoming important as Snowden keeps talking. There are a lot of articles about Edward Snowden cooperating with the Chinese government. I have no idea if this is true — Snowden denies it — or if it’s part of an American smear campaign designed to change the debate from the NSA surveillance programs to the whistleblower’s actions. (It worked against Assange.) In anticipation of the inevitable questions, I want to change a previous assessment statement: I consider Snowden a hero for whistleblowing on the existence and details of the NSA surveillance programs, but not for revealing specific operational secrets to the Chinese government. Charles Pierce wishes Snowden would stop talking. I agree; the more this story is about him the less it is about the NSA. Stop giving interviews and let the documents do the talking.

Back to Daniel Solove, this excellent 2011 essay on the value of privacy is making the rounds again. And it should.

Many commentators had been using the metaphor of George Orwell’s “1984” to describe the problems created by the collection and use of personal data. I contended that the Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control) might be apt to describe law enforcement’s monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases is not particularly sensitive, such as one’s race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status. Many people do not care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own or rent, or the kind of beverages they drink. People often do not take many steps to keep such information secret. Frequently, though not always, people’s activities would not be inhibited if others knew this information.

I suggested a different metaphor to capture the problems: Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” which depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used. The problems captured by the Kafka metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition or chilling. Instead, they are problems of information processing — the storage, use, or analysis of data — rather than information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

The whole essay is worth reading, as is — I hope — my essay on the value of privacy from 2006.

I have come to believe that the solution to all of this is regulation. And it’s not going to be the regulation of data collection; it’s going to be the regulation of data use.

Blog entry URL:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/…

Solove’s essay:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/…

Snowden and the Chinese:

http://online.wsj.com/article/…

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/world/asia/…

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/06/14/…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/…

Wikileaks smears:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1707146/…

http://www.fair.org//2011/03/02/…

My previous Snowden essays:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/…

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/…

Charles Pierce on Snowden:

http://www.esquire.com/s/politics/…

Solove’s 2011 essay:

https://chronicle.com/article/…

My essay:

https://www.schneier.com/essay-114.html

A good rebuttal to the “nothing to hide” argument:

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/06/…

Comment

I have signed a petition calling on the NSA to “suspend its domestic surveillance program pending public comment.” This is what’s going on:

In a request today to National Security Agency director Keith Alexander and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the group argues that the NSA’s recently revealed domestic surveillance program is “unlawful” because the agency neglected to request public comments first. A federal appeals court previously ruled that was necessary in a lawsuit involving airport body scanners.

“In simple terms, a line has been crossed,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told CNET. “The agency’s function has been transformed, and we think the public should have an opportunity to say something about that.”

It’s an ambitious — and untested — legal argument. No court appears to have ever ruled that the Administrative Procedure Act, which can require agencies to solicit public comment, has applied to the supersecret intelligence community. The APA explicitly excludes from judicial review, for instance, “military authority exercised in the field in time of war.”

EPIC is relying on a July 2011 decision (PDF) it obtained from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dealing with installing controversial full-body scanners at airports. The Transportation Security Agency, the court said, was required to obtain comment on a rule that “substantively affects the public.”

This isn’t an empty exercise. While it’s unlikely that a judge will order the NSA to suspend the program pending public approval, the process will put pressure on Washington to subject the NSA to more oversight, and pressure the NSA into more transparency. We’ve used these tactics before. Two decades ago, EPIC launched a similar petition against the Clipper Chip, a process that eventually led to the Clinton administration and the FBI abandoning the effort. And EPIC’s more recent action against TSA full-body scanners is one of the reasons we have privacy safeguards on the millimeter wave scanners they are still using.

The more people who sign this petition, this, the clearer the message it sends to Washington: a message that people care about the privacy of their telephone records, Internet transactions, and online communications. Secret judges should not be allowed to use secret interpretations of secret laws to authorize the NSA to engage in domestic surveillance. Sooner or later, a court is going to recognize that. Until then, the more noise the better.

Add your voice here. It just might work.

Petition:

http://epic.org/2013/06/…

http://epic.org/NSApetition/

News article:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589640-38/…

This article, on the cozy relationship between the commercial personal-data industry and the intelligence industry, has new information on the security of Skype.

Skype, the Internet-based calling service, began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to people briefed on the program who asked not to be named to avoid trouble with the intelligence agencies.

Project Chess, which has never been previously disclosed, was small, limited to fewer than a dozen people inside Skype, and was developed as the company had sometimes contentious talks with the government over legal issues, said one of the people briefed on the project. The project began about five years ago, before most of the company was sold by its parent, eBay, to outside investors in 2009. Microsoft acquired Skype in an $8.5 billion deal that was completed in October 2011.

A Skype executive denied last year in a blog post that recent changes in the way Skype operated were made at the behest of Microsoft to make snooping easier for law enforcement. It appears, however, that Skype figured out how to cooperate with the intelligence community before Microsoft took over the company, according to documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the N.S.A. One of the documents about the Prism program made public by Mr. Snowden says Skype joined Prism on Feb. 6, 2011.

Reread that Skype denial from last July, knowing that at the time the company knew that they were giving the NSA access to customer communications. Notice how it is precisely worded to be technically accurate, yet leave the reader with the wrong conclusion. This is where we are with all the tech companies right now; we can’t trust their denials, just as we can’t trust the NSA — or the FBI — when it denies programs, capabilities, or practices.

Back in January, we wondered whom Skype lets spy on their users. Now we know.

The article quoted:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/…

Skype’s denial:

http://s.skype.com/2012/07/26/…

We can’t trust the NSA:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/…

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/…

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/nsa-numbers/

http://fabiusmaximus.com/2013/06/11/…

My post from last January:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/…

This quote is from the Spring 1997 issue of “CRYPTOLOG,” the internal NSA newsletter. The writer is William J. Black, Jr., the Director’s Special Assistant for Information Warfare.

Specifically, the focus is on the potential abuse of the Government’s applications of this new information technology that will result in an invasion of personal privacy. For us, this is difficult to understand. We *are* “the government,” and we have no interest in invading the personal privacy of U.S. citizens.

This is from a Seymour Hersh “New Yorker” interview with NSA Director General Michael Hayden in 1999:

When I asked Hayden about the agency’s capability for unwarranted spying on private citizens — in the unlikely event, of course, that the agency could somehow get the funding, the computer scientists, and the knowledge to begin making sense out of the Internet — his response was heated. “I’m a kid from Pittsburgh with two sons and a daughter who are closet libertarians,” he said. “I am not interested in doing anything that threatens the American people, and threatens the future of this agency. I can’t emphasize enough to you how careful we are. We have to be so careful — to make sure that America is never distrustful of the power and security we can provide.”

It’s easy to assume that both Black and Hayden were lying, but I believe them. I believe that, 15 years ago, the NSA was entirely focused on intercepting communications outside the US.

What changed? What caused the NSA to abandon its non-US charter and start spying on Americans? From what I’ve read, and from a bunch of informal conversations with NSA employees, it was the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That’s when everything changed, the gloves came off, and all the rules were thrown out the window. That the NSA’s interests coincided with the business model of the Internet is just a — lucky, in their view — coincidence.

Black quote:

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologs/…

Hayden quote:

http://cryptome.org/nsa-hersh.htm

A few weeks ago, the “Guardian” published two new Snowden documents. These outline how the NSA’s data-collection procedures allow it to collect lots of data on Americans, and how the FISA court fails to provide oversight over these procedures.

The documents are complicated, but I strongly recommend that people read both the “Guardian” analysis and the EFF analysis — and possibly the “USA Today” story.

Frustratingly, this has not become a major news story. It isn’t being widely reported in the media, and most people don’t know about it. At this point, the only aspect of the Snowden story that is in the news is the personal story. The press seems to have had its fill of the far more important policy issues.

I don’t know what there is that can be done about this, but it’s how we all lose.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/…

Analysis:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/…

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/…

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/…

More Snowden documents analyzed by the “Guardian” — two articles — discuss how the NSA collected e-mails and data on Internet activity of both Americans and foreigners. The program might have ended in 2011, or it might have continued under a different name. This is the program that resulted in that bizarre tale of Bush officials confronting then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in his hospital room; the “New York Times” story discusses that. What’s interesting is that the NSA collected this data under one legal pretense. When that justification evaporated, they searched around until they found another pretense.

This story is being picked up a bit more than the previous story, but it’s obvious that the press is fatiguing of this whole thing. Without the Ashcroft human interest bit, it would be just another story of the NSA eavesdropping on Americans — and that’s lasts week’s news.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/27/…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/27/…

More stories:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/us/…

http://reason.com/24-7/2013/06/28/…

“Final Report on Project C-43.” This finally explains what James Ellis was talking about in “The Possibility of Non-Secret Encryption” when he dropped a tantalizing hint about wartime work at Bell Labs.

http://techpinions.com/…

Related:

https://www.schneier.com/essay-377.html

Details of NSA data requests from US corporations.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/…

John Mueller and Mark Stewart ask the important questions about the NSA surveillance programs: why were they secret, what have they accomplished, and what do they cost?

https://chronicle.com/s/conversation/2013/06/13/…

This essay attempts to figure out if they accomplished anything.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/17/opinion/…

This essay attempts to figure out if they can be effective at all.

http://live.wsj.com/article_email/…

Companies allow US intelligence to exploit vulnerabilities before they patch them. No word on whether these companies would delay a patch if asked nicely — or if there’s any way the government can require them to. Anyone feel safer because of this?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/…

A fine piece: “A Love Letter to the NSA Agent who is Monitoring my Online Activity.”

http://www.happyplace.com/24470/…

A similar sentiment is expressed in this video.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/ba0cc80eec/…

Lessons from Japan’s response to terrorism by Aum Shinrikyo.

http://lhote.blogspot.com/2013/06/…

The future of satellite surveillance is pretty scary — and cool.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/06/…

Remember, it’s not any one thing that’s worrisome; it’s everything together.

Interesting story of a spear phishing attack against the “Financial Times.”

http://labs.ft.com/2013/05/a-sobering-day/

Ron Beckstrom gives a talk (video and transcript) about “Mutually Assured Destruction,” “Mutually Assured Disruption,” and “Mutually Assured Dependence.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwxC1HslvQg

http://www.beckstrom.com/PDFspeech.pdf

Great story on the cracking of the Kryptos Sculpture at the CIA headquarters.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/…

Interesting article on the history of, and the relationship between, secrecy and privacy: “As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets. In other words, the case for privacy always comes too late. The horse is out of the barn. The post office has opened your mail. Your photograph is on Facebook. Google already knows that, notwithstanding your demographic, you hate kale.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/06/24/…

Lessons from biological security.

http://s.hbr.org/cs/2013/06/…

I recommend his book, “Learning from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease.”

This is an interesting article about a new breed of malware that also hijacks the victim’s phone text messaging system, to intercept one-time passwords sent via that channel.

http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/178_111/…

Adding a remote kill switch to cell phones would deter theft.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/13/technology/mobile/…

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/…

Here we can see how the rise of the surveillance state permeates everything about computer security. On the face of it, this is a good idea. Assuming it works — that 1) it’s not possible for thieves to resurrect phones in order to resell them, and 2) that it’s not possible to turn this system into a denial-of-service attack tool — it would deter crime. The general category of security is “benefit denial,” like ink tags attached to garments in retail stores and car radios that no longer function if removed. But given what we now know, do we trust that the government wouldn’t abuse this system and kill phones for other reasons? Do we trust that media companies won’t kill phones it decided were sharing copyrighted materials? Do we trust that phone companies won’t kill phones from delinquent customers? What might have been a straightforward security system becomes a dangerous tool of control, when you don’t trust those in power.

The NSA has published some new symmetric algorithms: SIMON and SPECK

http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/404.pdf

It’s always fascinating to study NSA-designed ciphers. I was particularly interested in the algorithms’ similarity to Threefish, and how they improved on what we did. I was most impressed with their key schedule. I am *always* impressed with how the NSA does key schedules. And I enjoyed the discussion of requirements. Missing, of course, is any cryptanalytic analysis.

This is a really good paper describing the unique threat model of children in the home, and the sorts of security philosophies that are effective in dealing with them. Stuart Schechter, “The User IS the Enemy, and (S)he Keeps Reaching for that Bright Shiny Power Button!” Definitely worth reading.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=194484

The US Department of Defense is blocking sites that are reporting about the Snowden documents. I presume they’re not censoring sites that are smearing him personally. Note that the DoD is only blocking those sites on its own network, not on the Internet at large. The blocking is being done by automatic filters, presumably the same ones used to block porn or other sites it deems inappropriate.

http://www.usnews.com/news/s/…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/28/…

Interesting law journal article: “Privacy Protests: Surveillance Evasion and Fourth Amendment Suspicion,” by Elizabeth E. Joh.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?…

Read this while thinking about the lack of any legal notion of civil disobedience in cyberspace.

Here’s a transcript of a panel discussion about NSA surveillance. There’s a lot worth reading here, but I want to link to Bob Litt’s opening remarks. He’s the General Counsel for ODNI, and he has a lot to say about the programs revealed so far in the Snowden documents.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/…

As always, the fundamental issue is trust. If you believe Litt, this is all very comforting. If you don’t, it’s more lies and misdirection. Taken at face value, it explains why so many tech executives were able to say they had never heard of PRISM: it’s the internal NSA name for the database, and not the name of the program. I also note that Litt uses the word “collect” to mean what it actually means, and not the way his boss, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Jr., used it to deliberately lie to Congress.

How Apple continues to make security invisible.

http://www.macworld.com/article/2041724/…

iOS security white paper:

http://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2012/readings/…

Evgeny Morozov makes a point about surveillance and big data: it just looks for useful correlations without worrying about causes, and leads people to implement “fixes” based simply on those correlations — rather than understanding and correcting the underlying causes.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/…

A philosophical perspective on the value of privacy.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/…

This study concludes that there is a benefit to forcing companies to undergo privacy audits: “The results show that there are empirical regularities consistent with the privacy disclosures in the audited financial statements having some effect. Companies disclosing privacy risks are less likely to incur a breach of privacy related to unintentional disclosure of privacy information; while companies suffering a breach of privacy related to credit cards are more likely to disclose privacy risks afterwards. Disclosure after a breach is negatively related to privacy breaches related to hacking, and disclosure before a breach is positively related to breaches concerning insider trading.”

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?…

This is a really interesting article on secret languages. It starts by talking about a “cant” dictionary of 16th-century thieves’ argot, and ends up talking about secret languages in general.

http://thejunket.org/2012/04/issue-three/…

Nice history of Project SHAMROCK, the NSA’s illegal domestic surveillance program from the 1970s. It targeted telegrams.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/…

We don’t know what they mean, but there are a bunch of NSA code names on LinkedIn profiles: ANCHORY, AMHS, NUCLEON, TRAFFICTHIEF, ARCMAP, SIGNAV, COASTLINE, DISHFIRE, FASTSCOPE, OCTAVE/CONTRAOCTAVE, PINWALE, UTT, WEBCANDID, MICHIGAN, PLUS, ASSOCIATION, MAINWAY, FASCIA, OCTSKYWARD, INTELINK, METRICS, BANYAN, MARINA

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130617/…

This is a *really* interesting article on something I’ve never thought about before: how free games trick players into paying for stuff.

http://www.gamasutra.com/s/RaminShokrizade/…

Today, the United States is conducting offensive cyberwar actions around the world.

More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pretargeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.

This is much worse than what we’re accusing China of doing to us. We’re pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren’t making the Internet any safer. We’re reacting from fear, and causing other countries to counter-react from fear. We’re ignoring resilience in favor of offense.

Welcome to the cyberwar arms race, an arms race that will define the Internet in the 21st century.

Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued last October and released by Edward Snowden, outlines US cyberwar policy. Most of it isn’t very interesting, but there are two paragraphs about “Offensive Cyber Effect Operations,” or OCEO, that are intriguing:

OECO can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging. The development and sustainment of OCEO capabilities, however, may require considerable time and effort if access and tools for a specific target do not already exist.

The United States Government shall identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power, establish and maintain OCEO capabilities integrated as appropriate with other US offensive capabilities, and execute those capabilities in a manner consistent with the provisions of this directive.

These two paragraphs, and another paragraph about OCEO, are the only parts of the document classified “top secret.” And that’s because what they’re saying is very dangerous.

Cyberattacks have the potential to be both immediate and devastating. They can disrupt communications systems, disable national infrastructure, or, as in the case of Stuxnet, destroy nuclear reactors; but only if they’ve been created and targeted beforehand. Before launching cyberattacks against another country, we have to go through several steps.

We have to study the details of the computer systems they’re running and determine the vulnerabilities of those systems. If we can’t find exploitable vulnerabilities, we need to create them: leaving “back doors,” in hacker speak. Then we have to build new cyberweapons designed specifically to attack those systems.

Sometimes we have to embed the hostile code in those networks — these are called “logic bombs” — to be unleashed in the future. And we have to keep penetrating those foreign networks, because computer systems always change and we need to ensure that the cyberweapons are still effective.

Like our nuclear arsenal during the Cold War, our cyberweapons arsenal must be pretargeted and ready to launch.

That’s what Obama directed the US Cyber Command to do. We can see glimpses of how effective we are in Snowden’s allegations that the NSA is currently penetrating foreign networks around the world: “We hack network backbones — like huge Internet routers, basically — that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one.”

The NSA and the US Cyber Command are basically the same thing. They’re both at Fort Meade in Maryland, and they’re both led by Gen. Keith Alexander. The same people who hack network backbones are also building weapons to destroy those backbones. At a March Senate briefing, Alexander boasted of creating more than a dozen offensive cyber units.

Longtime NSA watcher James Bamford reached the same conclusion in his recent profile of Alexander and the US Cyber Command (written before the Snowden revelations). He discussed some of the many cyberweapons the US purchases:

According to Defense News’ C4ISR Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek, Endgame also offers its intelligence clients — agencies like Cyber Command, the NSA, the CIA, and British intelligence — a unique map showing them exactly where their targets are located. Dubbed Bonesaw, the map displays the geolocation and digital address of basically every device connected to the Internet around the world, providing what’s called network situational awareness. The client locates a region on the password-protected web-based map, then picks a country and city — say, Beijing, China. Next the client types in the name of the target organization, such as the Ministry of Public Security’s No. 3 Research Institute, which is responsible for computer security — or simply enters its address, 6 Zhengyi Road. The map will then display what software is running on the computers inside the facility, what types of malware some may contain, and a menu of custom-designed exploits that can be used to secretly gain entry. It can also pinpoint those devices infected with malware, such as the Conficker worm, as well as networks turned into botnets and zombies — the equivalent of a back door left open…

The buying and using of such a subscription by nation-states could be seen as an act of war. ‘If you are engaged in reconnaissance on an adversary’s systems, you are laying the electronic battlefield and preparing to use it’ wrote Mike Jacobs, a former NSA director for information assurance, in a McAfee report on cyberwarfare. ‘In my opinion, these activities constitute acts of war, or at least a prelude to future acts of war.’ The question is, who else is on the secretive company’s client list? Because there is as of yet no oversight or regulation of the cyberweapons trade, companies in the cyber-industrial complex are free to sell to whomever they wish. “It should be illegal,” said the former senior intelligence official involved in cyberwarfare. “I knew about Endgame when I was in intelligence. The intelligence community didn’t like it, but they’re the largest consumer of that business.”

That’s the key question: How much of what the United States is currently doing is an act of war by international definitions? Already we’re accusing China of penetrating our systems in order to map “military capabilities that could be exploited during a crisis.” What PPD-20 and Snowden describe is much worse, and certainly China, and other countries, are doing the same.

All of this mapping of vulnerabilities and keeping them secret for offensive use makes the Internet less secure, and these pretargeted, ready-to-unleash cyberweapons are destabilizing forces on international relationships. Rooting around other countries’ networks, analyzing vulnerabilities, creating back doors, and leaving logic bombs could easily be construed as acts of war. And all it takes is one overachieving national leader for this all to tumble into actual war.

It’s time to stop the madness. Yes, our military needs to invest in cyberwar capabilities, but we also need international rules of cyberwar, more transparency from our own government on what we are and are not doing, international cooperation between governments, and viable cyberweapons treaties. Yes, these are difficult. Yes, it’s a long, slow process. Yes, there won’t be international consensus, certainly not in the beginning. But even with all of those problems, it’s a better path to go down than the one we’re on now.

We can start by taking most of the money we’re investing in offensive cyberwar capabilities and spend them on national cyberspace resilience. MAD, mutually assured destruction, made sense because there were two superpowers opposing each other. On the Internet there are all sorts of different powers, from nation-states to much less organized groups. An arsenal of cyberweapons begs to be used, and, as we learned from Stuxnet, there’s always collateral damage to innocents when they are. We’re much safer with a strong defense than with a counterbalancing offense.

This essay originally appeared on CNN.com. It had the title “Has U.S. Started an Internet War?” — which I had nothing to do with. Almost always, editors choose titles for my essay without asking my opinion — or telling me beforehand.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/18/opinion/…

Cyberwar arms race:

https://www.schneier.com/essay-421.html

https://www.schneier.com/essay-411.html

Presidential Policy Directive 20:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/…

EPIC’s suit from last October:

http://epic.org/privacy/cybersecurity/…

Policy outline:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/…

Snowden’s allegations:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/…

Alexander’s statement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GUraTzzPo

James Bamford’s writing:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/…

US accuses China:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/world/asia/…

Here’s an essay on the NSA’s — or Cyber Command’s — TAO: the Office of Tailored Access Operations. This is the group in charge of hacking China.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/10/…

None of this is new. Read this Seymour Hersh article on this subject from 2010.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/01/…

On his blog, Scott Adams suggests that it might be possible to identify sociopaths based on their interactions on social media.

My hypothesis is that science will someday be able to identify sociopaths and terrorists by their patterns of Facebook and Internet use. I’ll bet normal people interact with Facebook in ways that sociopaths and terrorists couldn’t duplicate.

Anyone can post fake photos and acquire lots of friends who are actually acquaintances. But I’ll bet there are so many patterns and tendencies of “normal” use on Facebook that a terrorist wouldn’t be able to successfully fake it.

Okay, but so what? Imagine you had such an amazingly accurate test…then what? Do we investigate those who test positive, even though there’s no suspicion that they’ve actually done anything? Do we follow them around? Subject them to additional screening at airports? Throw them in jail because we *know* the streets will be safer because of it? Do we want to live in a “Minority Report” world?

The problem isn’t just that such a system is wrong, it’s that the mathematics of testing makes this sort of thing pretty ineffective in practice. It’s called the “base rate fallacy.” Suppose you have a test that’s 90% accurate in identifying both sociopaths and non-sociopaths. If you assume that 4% of people are sociopaths, then the chance of someone who tests positive actually being a sociopath is 26%. (For every thousand people tested, 90% of the 40 sociopaths will test positive, but so will 10% of the 960 non-sociopaths.) You have postulate a test with an amazing 99% accuracy — only a 1% false positive rate — even to have an 80% chance of someone testing positive actually being a sociopath.

This fallacy isn’t new. It’s the same thinking that caused us to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II, stop people in their cars because they’re black, and frisk them at airports because they’re Muslim. It’s the same thinking behind massive NSA surveillance programs like PRISM. It’s one of the things that scares me about police DNA databases.

Many authors have written stories about thoughtcrime. Who has written about genecrime?

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_internet_fingerprint

The 4% number:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0767915828/counterpane

BTW, if you want to meet an actual sociopath, I recommend this book and blog.

http://www.amazon.com/…

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/…

http://www.sociopathworld.com/

I’m now on the board of directors of the EFF.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/…

Last month, I gave a talk at Google. It’s another talk about power and security, my continually evolving topic-of-the-moment that could very well become my next book. This installment is different than the previous talks and interviews, but not different enough that you should feel the need to watch it if you’ve seen the others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?…

There are things I got wrong. There are contradictions. There are questions I couldn’t answer. But that’s my process, and I’m okay with doing it semi-publicly. As always, I appreciate comments, criticisms, reading suggestions, and so on.

http://boingboing.net/2013/06/29/…

http://renaissancechambara.jp/2013/06/30/…

A long interview with me on EconTalk; this one is mostly about security and power.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/…

I was on the Lou Dobbs Show in mid-June.

http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/2484933934001

I have been awarded a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, for the 2013-2014 academic year. I’m excited about this; Berkman and Harvard is where a lot of the cool kids hang out, and I’m looking forward to working with them this coming year.

In particular, I have three goals for the year:

* I want to have my own project. I’ll be continuing to work on my research — and possible book — on security and power and technology. There are a bunch of people I would like to work with at Harvard: Yochai Benkler, Larry Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain, Joseph Nye, Jr., Steven Pinker, Michael Sandel. And others at MIT: Ethan Zuckerman, David Clark. I know I’ve forgotten names.

* I want to make a difference on a few other Berkman projects. I don’t know what yet, but I know there will be options.

* I want to work with some students on their projects. There are *always* interesting student projects, and I would like to be an informal advisor on a few of them. So if any of you are Harvard or MIT students and have a project you think I would be interested in, please email me.

I’m not moving to Boston for the year, but I’ll be there a lot.

https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/newsroom/…

In the wake of the Snowden NSA documents, reporters have been asking me whether encryption can solve the problem. Leaving aside the fact that much of what the NSA is collecting can’t be encrypted by the user — telephone metadata, e-mail headers, phone calling records, e-mail you’re reading from a phone or tablet or cloud provider, anything you post on Facebook — it’s hard to give good advice.

In theory, an e-mail program will protect you, but the reality is much more complicated.

* The program has to be vulnerability-free. If there is some back door in the program that bypasses, or weakens, the encryption, it’s not secure. It’s very difficult, almost impossible, to verify that a program is vulnerability-free.

* The user has to choose a secure password. Luckily, there’s advice on how to do this.

* The password has to be managed securely. The user can’t store it in a file somewhere. If he’s worried about security for after the FBI has arrested him and searched his house, he shouldn’t write it on a piece of paper, either.

* Actually, he should understand the threat model he’s operating under. Is it the NSA trying to eavesdrop on *everything*, or an FBI investigation that specifically targets him — or a targeted attack, like dropping a Trojan on his computer, that bypasses e-mail encryption entirely?

This is simply too much for the poor reporter, who wants an easy-to-transcribe answer.

We’ve known how to send cryptographically secure e-mail since the early 1990s. Twenty years later, we’re still working on the security engineering of e-mail programs. And if the NSA is eavesdropping on encrypted e-mail, and if the FBI is decrypting messages from suspects’ hard drives, they’re both breaking the engineering, not the underlying cryptographic algorithms.

On the other hand, the two adversaries can be very different. The NSA has to process a ginormous amount of traffic. It’s the “drinking from a fire hose” problem; they cannot afford to devote a lot of time to decrypting everything, because they simply don’t have the computing resources. There’s just too much data to collect. In these situations, even a modest level of encryption is enough — until you are specifically targeted. This is why the NSA saves all encrypted data it encounters; it might want to devote cryptanalysis resources to it at some later time.

Password advice:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/…

The NSA saves encrypted traffic:

https://threatpost.com/…

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/…

Responding to a tweet by Thomas Ptacek saying, “If you’re not learning crypto by coding attacks, you might not actually be learning crypto,” Colin Percival published a well-thought-out rebuttal, saying in part:

If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time when people avoided using CTR mode to convert block ciphers into stream ciphers, due to concern that a weak block cipher could break if fed input blocks which shared many (zero) bytes in common. This was a time when people cared about the “error propagation” properties of block ciphers — that is, how much of the output would be mangled if a small number of bits in the ciphertext are flipped. This was a time when people routinely advised compressing data before encrypting it, because that “compacted” the entropy in the message, and thus made it “more difficult for an attacker to identify when he found the right key”. It should come as no surprise that SSL, designed during this era, has had a long list of design flaws.

Cryptography in the 2010s is different. Now we start with basic components which are believed to be highly secure — e.g., block ciphers which are believed to be indistinguishable from random permutations — and which have been mathematically proven to be secure against certain types of attacks — e.g., AES is known to be immune to differential cryptanalysis. From those components, we then build higher-order systems using mechanisms which have been proven to not introduce vulnerabilities. For example, if you generate an ordered sequence of packets by encrypting data using an indistinguishable-from-random-permutation block cipher (e.g., AES) in CTR mode using a packet sequence number as the CTR nonce, and then append a weakly-unforgeable MAC (e.g., HMAC-SHA256) of the encrypted data and the packet sequence number, the packets both preserve privacy and do not permit any undetected tampering (including replays and reordering of packets). Life will become even better once Keccak (aka. SHA-3) becomes more widely reviewed and trusted, as its “sponge” construction can be used to construct — with provable security — a very wide range of important cryptographic components.

He recommends a more modern approach to cryptography: “studying the theory and designing systems which you can *prove* are secure.”

I think *both* of statements are true — and not contradictory at all. The apparent disagreement stems from differing definitions of cryptography.

Many years ago, on the Cryptographer’s Panel at an RSA conference, then-chief scientist for RSA Bert Kaliski talked about the rise of something he called the “crypto engineer.” His point was that the practice of cryptography was changing. There was the traditional mathematical cryptography — designing and analyzing algorithms and protocols, and building up cryptographic theory — but there was also a more practice-oriented cryptography: taking existing cryptographic building blocks and creating secure systems out of them. It’s this latter group he called crypto engineers. It’s the group of people I wrote “Applied Cryptography,” and, most recently, co-wrote “Cryptography Engineering,” for. Colin knows this, directing his advice to “developers” — Kaliski’s crypto engineers.

Traditional cryptography is a science — applied mathematics — and applied cryptography is engineering. I prefer the term “security engineering,” because it necessarily encompasses a lot more than cryptography — see Ross Andersen’s great book of that name. And mistakes in engineering are where a lot of real-world cryptographic systems break.

Provable security has its limitations. Cryptographer Lars Knudsen once said: “If it’s provably secure, it probably isn’t.” Yes, we have provably secure cryptography, but those proofs take very specific forms against very specific attacks. They reduce the number of security assumptions we have to make about a system, but we still have to make a lot of security assumptions.

And cryptography has its limitations in general, despite the apparent strengths. Cryptography’s great strength is that it gives the defender a natural advantage: adding a single bit to a cryptographic key increases the work to encrypt by only a small amount, but doubles the work required to break the encryption. This is how we design algorithms that — in theory — can’t be broken until the universe collapses back on itself.

Despite this, cryptographic systems are broken all the time: well before the heat death of the universe. They’re broken because of software mistakes in coding the algorithms. They’re broken because the computer’s memory management system left a stray copy of the key lying around, and the operating system automatically copied it to disk. They’re broken because of buffer overflows and other security flaws. They’re broken by side-channel attacks. They’re broken because of bad user interfaces, or insecure user practices.

Lots of people have said: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. But in practice, they are not.” It’s true about cryptography. If you want to be a cryptographer, study mathematics. Study the mathematics of cryptography, and especially cryptanalysis. There’s a lot of art to the science, and you won’t be able to design good algorithms and protocols until you gain experience in breaking existing ones. If you want to be a security engineer, study implementations and coding. Take the tools cryptographers create, and learn how to use them well.

The world needs security engineers even more than it needs cryptographers. We’re great at mathematically secure cryptography, and terrible at using those tools to engineer secure systems.

Ptacek’s tweet:

https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/346328557989007360

Percival’s rebuttal:

http://www.daemonology.net//…

Ross Anderson’s book:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

After writing this, I found a conversation between the two where they both basically agreed with me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5896167

See also Stefan Lucks’ response to this essay on my blog.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/…

On April 1, I announced the Sixth Mostly-Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest:

For this year’s contest, I want a cyberwar movie-plot threat. (For those who don’t know, a movie-plot threat is a scare story that would make a great movie plot, but is much too specific to build security policy around.) Not the Chinese attacking our power grid or shutting off 911 emergency services — people are already scaring our legislators with that sort of stuff. I want something good, something no one has thought of before.

On May 15, I announced the five semi-finalists. Voting continued through the end of the month, and the winner is Russell Thomas:

It’s November 2015 and the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNCCC) is underway in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Over the past year, ocean level rise has done permanent damage to critical infrastructure in Maldives, killing off tourism and sending the economy into freefall. The Small Island Developing States are demanding immediate relief from the Green Climate Fund, but action has been blocked. Conspiracy theories flourish. For months, the rhetoric between developed and developing countries has escalated to veiled and not-so-veiled threats. One person in elites of the Small Island Developing States sees an opportunity to force action.

He’s Sayyid Abdullah bin Yahya, an Indonesian engineer and construction magnate with interests in Bahrain, Bangladesh, and Maldives, all directly threatened by recent sea level rise. Bin Yahya’s firm installed industrial control systems on several flood control projects, including in the Maldives, but these projects are all stalled and unfinished for lack of financing. He also has a deep, abiding enmity against Holland and the Dutch people, rooted in the 1947 Rawagede massacre that killed his grandfather and father. Like many Muslims, he declared that he was personally insulted by Queen Beatrix’s gift to the people of Indonesia on the 50th anniversary of the massacre — a Friesian cow. “Very rude. That’s part of the Dutch soul, this rudeness”, he said at the time. Also like many Muslims, he became enraged and radicalized in 2005 when the Dutch newspaper Jyllands-Posten published cartoons of the Prophet.

Of all the EU nations, Holland is most vulnerable to rising sea levels. It has spent billions on extensive barriers and flood controls, including the massive Oosterscheldekering storm surge barrier, designed and built in the 80s to protect against a 10,000-year storm surge. While it was only used 24 times between 1986 and 2010, in the last two years the gates have been closed 46 times.

As the UNCCC conference began in November 2015, the Oosterscheldekering was closed yet again to hold off the surge of an early winter storm. Even against low expectations, the first day’s meetings went very poorly. A radicalized and enraged delegation from the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) presented an ultimatum, leading to denunciations and walkouts. “What can they do — start a war?” asked the Dutch Minister of Infrastructure and the Environment in an unguarded moment. There was talk of canceling the rest of the conference.

Overnight, there are a series of news stories in China, South America, and United States reporting malfunctions of dams that resulted in flash floods and death of tens or hundreds people in several cases. Web sites associated with the damns were all defaced with the text of the SIDS ultimatum. In the morning, all over Holland there were reports of malfunctions of control equipment associated with flood monitoring and control systems. The winter storm was peaking that day with an expected surge of 7 meters (22 feet), larger than the Great Flood of 1953. With the Oosterscheldekering working normally, this is no worry. But at 10:43am, the storm gates unexpectedly open.

Microsoft Word claims it’s 501 words, but I’m letting that go.

This is the first professional — a researcher — who has won the contest. Be sure to check out his blogs, and his paper at WEIS this year.

Congratulations, Russell Thomas. Your box of fabulous prizes is on its way to you.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/…

Since 1998, CRYPTO-GRAM has been a free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or change your address on the Web at <http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html>. Back issues are also available at that URL.

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CRYPTO-GRAM is written by Bruce Schneier. Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by The Economist. He is the author of 12 books — including “Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Survive” — as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter “Crypto-Gram” and his blog “Schneier on Security” are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, has served on several government committees, and is regularly quoted in the press. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Security Futurologist for BT — formerly British Telecom. See <http://www.schneier.com>.

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Copyright (c) 2013 by Bruce Schneier.