
Inside the NSA's War on Internet Security - FabianBeiner
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-s-war-on-internet-security-a-1010361.html
======
dmix
This would be a good time to wait and let security professionals analyze the
documents and take what you read in this article lightly, as I've found a
number of sensationalist examples.

For example, they claim Canada is monitoring hockey sites:

> Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSEC) even monitors sites
> devoted to the country's national pastime: "We have noticed a large increase
> in chat activity on the hockeytalk sites. This is likely due to the
> beginning of playoff season," it says in one presentation.

But if you look at the actual slide
[https://i.imgur.com/2GO8H6L.png](https://i.imgur.com/2GO8H6L.png), it is
clearly a fake sample report of what a real one might look like. It even uses
the name 'Canukistan' as the country name.

There are 44 slide decks, one of the biggest leaks so far. It will take time
to make sense of the noise. And any misinformation from reporting by non-
technical journalists doesn't help the cause.

~~~
glitchdout
If I didn't know that the government is manipulating social media all the
time, I totally would not think you're a shill trying to discredit these news
reports by claiming that Jake Appelbaum is a non-technical journalist.

* Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media ([http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks))

* How Covert Agents Infiltrate The Internet To Manipulate, Deceive, And Destroy Reputations ([https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/))

~~~
xnull2guest
Reprising a relevant comment:

The United States and allies do use the internet to spread Western culture and
ideas, start revolutions, and kindle insurrection.

The United States CIA attempted (and nearly succeeded) in inciting a
revolution against Castro by pretending to be a series of grassroots movements
on a Twitter-like platform and by inciting anti-administration feelings within
the Cuban population. That was earlier this year.

"USAID effort to undermine Cuban government with fake ‘Twitter’ another anti-
Castro failure" [1]

The United States has an ongoing effort to use Internet media to
'deradicalize' the next generation of Middle Easterners and actively
manipulates public opinions in Jordan, Cairo, Syria and other Middle Eastern
states. Here are some quotes from one DoD MINERVA paper:

"...it is imperative that we develop empirically-based procedures for
countering messages that promote violent extremism and anti-Western
beliefs..."

"...Neural predictors of Twitter impact in Cairo (UCLA & Egypt). Our prior
work (Falk et al., 2012), indicates that neural responses of a small group can
predict which persuasive messages will be more successful in mass media
campaigns..."

"... Defense Group Inc. already tracks Twitter trends specific to Egypt and
will identify which of the selected Twitter topics went on to be highly
influential over the next month and which did not..." \- Matthew Lieberman,
UCLA, September 30, 2012, Department of Defense MINERVA Initiative [2]

Here's one US company that does it. MARAYA MEDIA - "Driving Intelligent
Dialog". [3]

The United States engages in targeted mass media and social manipulation to
stir dissent in target nations, and to quell dissent where destabilization
would hurt policy objectives. The DoD's MINERVA project specifically looks to
understand the cultural components of stability of various countries and
mechanisms to encourage or disrupt that stability. Among a great number of
social studies you will find DoD research on how to seed information inside of
specific Asian countries, including China, for the targeted introduction of
instability. I will leave speculations of possible connections to the Hong
Kong protests to the reader. [4] During the Iraq war US officials were known
to detain Iraqi journalists and bloggers and force them to write articles in
favor of the American efforts or to spread misinformation useful to ongoing
campaigns. The CIA purposefully slipped misinformation into American media
outlets to fool counterinsurgents who were reading American media (the
infamous "Fallujah PysOp").

This should not come as a surprise given the history of the US: The United
States and allies are known to target media in other countries to stir
dissent. Radio Free Europe, "Voice of Iraq" (cough American), the Lincoln
Group infiltrations and partnerships, etc.

But now with global interconnectedness it is easy to set up 'foreign media',
blogs and other politicizing content to influence other nations' populations.

In the past decade it has become a global issue.

This year Egypt sentenced Al Jazeera journalists that they believed were
partnered with geopolitical interests of other states. Putin's administration
is now requiring bloggers to register if they have a certain number of
readers, so that his administration can curtail international influence. China
blocks many American services including Facebook and Google. The usual story
in America is that they are censoring free speech. The truth is that they do
not want foreign influence to destabilize their population and that they do
not want their citizen's data in America's PRISM program (there's a reason
it's called the FISA "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" court).

The Snowden revelations showed us how intelligence agencies are involved in
PsyOps - the term for 'psychological operations' used by the CIA and others.
The GCHQ's BIRDSONG/BADGER/GATEWAY/SLIPSTREAM/ETC and partnership with the NSA
are used to influence online polls, discussion forums and to vote up and down
content that aligns with policy goals. [5][6][7] The giant meta-data graph
created by the NSA is also particularly valuable for 'influencer' and 'social
contagion' analysis (leaks showed they do use it to understand internal chain-
of-command and organization structure for target selection). It's why metadata
matters. A nice illustration of this is the article "Finding Paul Revere."

And so we have issues here with the use of targeted social influence in
America as well. First there are instances where other countries are trying to
incite disruption in the US - the US wants to study and curtail it. [8]

A number of journalists have called out that the state has been extremely
aggressive to dissenting opinions, even to go so far as labeling current
policy on the issue "War on Journalism". American officials have exported a
number of journalists with Middle Eastern descent and journalists like Ayman
Mohyeldin have been pulled from Gaza and other conflicts when reporting has
erred on the side of other state interests. The crackdown on journalism is
worth another post I don't have time to write.

Just look at how central a role controlling internet dialog is for running a
modern US presidency. A Google search for "Obama internet campaign" [9]
results in headlines "How Obama's Internet Campaign Changed Politics", "How
Obama won the internet", "Barack Obama and the Facebook Election", "Propelled
by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency" \- this isn't because of grassroots
discussion but because both Obama and McCain (and Romney before him) had cyber
centers in control of internet PR engaging tens of millions of dollars in
Twitter messages, etc.

You can nudge public opinion by bombarding them with an influx of the same
message, slightly disguised in one way and then another. The MINERVA program
has plenty of good reading with regard to this. Anyway, the USG does this
overseas and, to a limited degree (you decide how limited) presidential
campaigns and journalistic partnerships (anyone want me to write a blurb on
that...?) have them doing it inside the United States as well.

[1] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-
effort-t...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/usaid-effort-to-
undermine-cuban-government-with-fake-twitter-another-anti-castro-
failure/2014/04/03/c0142cc0-bb75-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html)

[2] [http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-
Lieberman.pdf](http://minerva.dtic.mil/doc/samplewp-Lieberman.pdf)

[3]
[http://www.marayamedia.com/company.php](http://www.marayamedia.com/company.php)

[4] [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-
manipula...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-
manipulation/)

[5] [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-
manipula...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-
manipulation/)

[6]
[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/22/hacking-
anonymous)

[7] [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-
The...](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The-HB-Gary-
Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All)

[8] [http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-
unw...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unworthy-of-
tax-dollars/2014/10/17/a3274faa-531b-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html)

[9]
[https://www.google.com/?q=obama+internet+campaign](https://www.google.com/?q=obama+internet+campaign)

Comment reprised from here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709976)

~~~
karmacondon
All of this makes seems and is well sourced. But there is a huge difference
between inciting revolutions that are beneficial to the US in foreign
countries, one of the stated purposes of the intelligence community, and
"shilling" comments on hackernews or reddit. Covert US involvement in swaying
public opinion against opposing ideologies is a proud tradition that goes back
to at least the 1930s and beyond. Using social media is just an extension of
that. Most of the sources you provided are about creating fake social media
sites to be used in foreign countries or broad discussions about psychological
influence techniques that mention social media. There are no detailed plans
that mention hackernews, reddit or any other online social news aggregator. It
would be incredibly costly for the NSA to have agents posting pro-government
comments on every thread that pops up on the hundreds of online tech
communities and I don't see how they would benefit from it in any way. The
idea is frankly laughable.

It's fun to think that we're so important that the US government cares enough
to intervene in our political discussions. But we are not, not a single one of
us. If pg himself called for open insurrection in his next essay, no one in
the NSA would lift an eyebrow or raise a finger. Until this or any community
becomes known as a hotbed for muslim extremism or communist agitation we're
simply not on the radar in any way. As far as hackernews and reddit are
concerned, "shill" is a synonym for "someone who disagrees with me" and always
will be.

~~~
xnull2guest
We do know that the United States Government and allies manipulate both
foreign and domestic press.

I agree with the sentiment that this does not imply reddit or hackernews are
subject to influence by the United States Government or allies.

I do not agree that the idea is preposterous or laughable. This is because we
do know that the NSA infiltrates domestic technical groups as they did with
the IETF to affect standards discussions, that they infiltrate activist groups
inside the United States to disrupt them, that they are aware of social
contagion theory and its usefulness in affecting public opinion, that they
have done studies with at least the UCLA on viral messaging for Americans (to
compare to, with and against foreign countries), that political campaigns use
social targeting techniques without branding and will comment on news articles
(to be 'first to post') to color conversation on hot button issues during the
races, and that companies with political interests and who share a revolving
door with elected office also advertise political discourse online in this
way. Thinkst researchers studied how easy it is to manipulate online social
conversation, news media outlets and platforms. We know that the GCHQ have
JTRIG capabilities to perform internet manipulation and that there are
documents from Snowden that specifically mention their use in derailing
conversations on online forums. There have been reports of PR firms of private
companies astroturfing reddit and others. And we know that HBGary Federal and
other cyberoperations contractors for the US Government sell astroturfing
services.

What we don't know is that reddit or hackernews are targeted specifically or
for domestic purposes by the US Government. We have a few indications that
this is done for large media outlets (recently Judith Miller, Ken Dilanian,
CNN on Bahrain) in tandem with other leverage like access to officials,
exclusive press passes and permission to report at the edges of no-reporting
zones. Unfortunately there isn't enough evidence to be conclusive yet about
the reddit/HN case as there have not been leaks that speak directly about it,
so any debate in this area is bound to be speculation versus speculation.

------
diafygi
THESE DOCUMENTS CONTAIN EVIDENCE OF ATTACKS ON VPN, SSL, TLS, SSH, TOR. What
do we do now? No seriously, what do we do?

The full list of documents: [http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-
documents-atta...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-documents-
attacks-on-vpn-ssl-tls-ssh-tor-a-1010525.html)

The accompanying lecture:
[http://streaming.media.ccc.de/relive/6258/](http://streaming.media.ccc.de/relive/6258/)

Also, obligatory: [https://eff.org/donate](https://eff.org/donate)

~~~
freeduck
Earlier this year at goto copenhagen I heard a good talk by Tim bray:

[http://gotocon.com/cph-2014/presentation/Privacy%20and%20Sec...](http://gotocon.com/cph-2014/presentation/Privacy%20and%20Security,%20Policy%20and%20Technology)

Where he argues that even though we can not achieve complete security there is
great value in raising the bar. If we continuously make it increasingly harder
for NSA, MOSAD, GCHQ and the rest of them to spy on us, we can achieve good
enough privacy. Where most communication will be secure. But he also argues
that if one of these agencies really wants to target YOU specifically they
will get to the information. By breaking into your house and installing
cameras, if necessary.

~~~
username223
It's Michens' MOSSAD/not-MOSSAD question[1]. Any half-decent encryption will
protect you from bulk collection and monitoring, but if you're targeted, you
lose.

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/thisworld...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/people/mickens/thisworldofours.pdf)

~~~
peterkelly
That has to be the best paper I've ever read

~~~
STRML
I thought you were joking, but I had to click anyway. You're right, this paper
is fantastic. I thought Micken's stopped writing, I'm so glad he didn't.

------
revelation
I mostly read this thinking "good news". No, seriously, the documents suggest
that the NSA hasn't made fundamentally important advances in decryption or
uncovered significant weaknesses that academia doesn't know about. Now, that's
not too much of a reassurance, because what academia (and the NSA) know is
that HTTPS is in pretty terrible state, end-point security remains a
significant problem, IPSec is a terrible protocl and so on.

It does raise the question what all the mathematicians are doing at NSA, and
why they don't seem to have come up with any meaningful results. Suggests they
are a waste of money, but then that's all of the NSA.

I suggest all of you check the original material (powerpoints w/ screenshots).
A lot of people here suffer from the _action movie_ mentality where they think
the NSA is not like any other government agency, i.e. inefficient, behind the
times, filled with horrible middle managers, deadweight, .. you get the idea.
Things like the enterprise Java web interface, the CSV mass data export and
"genericIPSec_wrapper.pl" can quickly dispel that myth.

~~~
EthanHeilman
Or at the very least they have compartmentalized serious mathematical
cryptanalytic capabilities.

For instance:

* We know that the NSA has a novel md5 collision capability since they have used it in their malware. None of the Snowden docs, that I have seen, have talked about this.

* It is likely based on public research that the NSA can break 1024-bit RSA, but this has not showed up in the documents either.

My personal belief is that we are missing compartments dealing with
cryptanalysis because Snowden did not have access to them. His work and access
were focused on Computer Network Operations and not cryptanalysis.

~~~
yuhong
_It is likely based on public research that the NSA can break 1024-bit RSA,
but this has not showed up in the documents either._

It would be expensive though. This is one reason why I consider 1024-bit end
entity certificates much less of a threat than 1024-bit CA roots.

~~~
skuhn
I don't totally agree. I think that factoring in the risk of exposure leaves a
CA root with a worse price / performance ratio versus an individual cert.

While you could use a faux CA root to sign faux certs for any site you want
(ideally ones who are customers of that CA), in practice your use is severely
limited. If faux certs are spotted and no one knows where they came from,
suspicions are going to be raised. Not only is your faux CA root compromised,
but now you may have tipped your hand regarding your capabilities.

To limit that possibility, your attacks would have to be extremely targeted.
The more often a fake cert is used and the more people exposed to it, the
higher the likelihood that someone will notice what is going on.

It also doesn't help you decrypt the real traffic to the site, or historical
traffic, which busting the site's actual SSL key can yield. This presumes that
you have a way of intercepting said traffic, but I think it's pretty clear
that that is not out of the question (public wifi / ISP cooperation / fiber
optic taps / malware). It's more work to bust individual certs, but you're
leaving a smaller trail and you aren't sending out examples of your RSA
cracking capabilities to your opponents over the public Internet.

Lowering the risk of exposure will let an attacker use the same methods over a
much longer period of time, which I think is the goal here.

As to how to combat this: there is a lot of low hanging fruit. Besides the
obvious, I would love to see much shorter expiration times for certs become
the norm (as in weeks, if not days). For this to realistically happen in a
widespread fashion, at minimum CAs need to embrace the concept from a pricing
perspective.

~~~
yuhong
Yea, if one was signed for www.google.com it would be a serious problem. If it
is targeting specific obscure domain names where the customer is willing to
accept the risk, that is a different matter.

------
driverdan
Has anyone found which docs say how they attack SSH? The intro slides don't go
into any detail. It could just be known SSH-1 vulnerabilities.

My overall impression is that this doesn't reveal any new attacks. They are
most likely using known vulnerabilities. For example, they decrypt PSK IPSec
by exploiting routers and getting the keys, not breaking the encryption.

~~~
ProfOak_
In the talk they say that the papers only suggest that it can be broken into.

------
avz
One topic I find missing from the privacy and security debate following
Snowden's revelations is an explicit consideration of the adequate threat
model.

If the public thinks that the most prominent attackers on their privacy,
security or identify are the best founded intelligence agencies on the planet,
then the likely outcome will be grumpy resignation and consequent failure to
protect against more mundane (and more likely) threats. Security and
encryption are considered difficult and tricky. Even for software engineers.
Raising the bar by highlighting the scale of resources of the most competent
attackers is counterproductive.

I think a practical threat model for an average internet user should highlight
cyber-criminals, accidental misconfiguration, and careless handling of private
information. Not NSA or GCHQ.

Edit: The discussion of mischief by NSA and GCHQ belongs to the debate on
public oversight of government agencies. The article above is about using
encryption on the internet.

------
acd
Most proprietary and mainstream software and protocols are insecure. If you
care about your security use open source and open standards so that security
professionals can test and verify its security.

Skype insecure Cloud email popular ones used by end users insecure Whatsapp
insecure Facebook messenger insecure Email insecure Dropbox insecure

So in conclusion they are tapping into mainstream communication channels, its
their job.

People have become a bit lazy with cloud solutions and proprietary software
because of their fast setup and convenience. People pay with their privacy for
the convenience/laziness.

~~~
edraferi
WhatsApp's recent integration of TextSecure [1] makes it one of the most
secure communication options available to lay users. The vast majority of
people simply can't manage without hosted tools. This lack of sophistication
shouldn't damn them.

[1]
[https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/](https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/)

------
dicroce
Domestic spying + Immunity from insider trading laws... It's a good time to be
in the government.

~~~
bostik
To give some credence to your comment about insider trading immunity, I
performed a quick search. (My guess is that you got downvoted for not
providing any evidence to support your, arguably acerbic and snarky, comment.)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2011/06/01/insider-
tra...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kylesmith/2011/06/01/insider-trading-
rules-that-dont-apply-to-congress/)

The money quote: _" There is no limit to how much money you can earn on
insider trading in the House or Senate. Lawmakers and their staffers are
specifically exempted."_

While I would consider it unlikely that NSA feeds senators with free stock
market tips, the members of the oversight committee are sure to have an
extensive advance view to foreign (and domestic) market-changing intelligence.
There has been systematic resistance to reforms - the members probably
consider making a quick and safe half-million on the stock market a necessary
perk of the job.

------
0x006A
There was also just a talk about this at 31C3. Recording is still running, you
have to seek back to the beginning:
[http://streaming.media.ccc.de/relive/6258/](http://streaming.media.ccc.de/relive/6258/)

------
ck2
As a google security engineer once said, "f-ck these guys"

 _According to an NSA document, the agency intended to crack 10 million
intercepted https connections a day by late 2012._

 _By the end of 2012, the system was supposed to be able to "detect the
presence of at least 100 password based encryption applications" in each
instance some 20,000 times a month._

------
eyeareque
It makes you wonder if the NSA/five eyes is actively working to keep
topics/threads such as this one down played in the media, or even on HN.

I did my part and upvoted the story to get it more exposure here:)

------
nullc
The fact that they broke some but not all the OTR messages in the log suggests
to me that their attack is not a MITM, but instead a compromise of the 1024
bit DH or CTR mode AES.

~~~
tptacek
Do you really think NSA has compromised AES-CTR? That would have to be a
pretty fundamental attack, wouldn't it?

~~~
nullc
I am not trying to draw any conclusions. Just exploring what the data seems to
support.

Another alternative (mentioned on otr-dev) is an implementation which uses a
low quality rng feeding the ECDH might result in some messages being
recoverable and others not.

An attack on CTR would indeed be pretty fundamental. Though some of the other
documents appeared to support some level of cryptanalysis capability against
some implementations of at least some symmetric ciphers.

~~~
tptacek
Can you think through a scenario in which CTR _could be_ broken? CTR, in
particular. What's a hypothetical here?

~~~
nullc
Sure.

Improve the existing key-recovery attacks ([http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/cryptanalysis/a...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/projects/cryptanalysis/aesbc.pdf)) on AES from 2^126 to 2^80 (through
unknown methods, potentially exploiting the trivial relation of CTR
plaintexts), which is a scale at which a state level party could perform
computation, especially on specialized hardware. Observe a CTR block on known
plaintext and recover the key.

Practical key recovery attacks have existed against many block ciphers. AES is
pedantically weaker than it should be (since an attack exists at 2^126).

Do I think this is likely? I don't have enough information to answer, and in
the absence of information I'd default to "probably not". It wouldn't be
inconceivable, however.

------
scrapcode
Even though we know that the NSA does collect data on Americans, let's assume
that they didn't. By using a network such as a VPN or a Tor Node that is
located outside of the United States, would they "legally" be able to use the
data collected on you received from those networks as if you weren't an US
Citizen?

~~~
CamperBob2
No, but that's where the Five Eyes concept comes into play, previously known
as ECHELON. The idea is that agencies such as CIA and NSA can work around the
limitations imposed by their own charters by cooperating with foreign agencies
who have no such prohibitions. Then, the doctrine of parallel construction
takes care of any remaining legal hangups.

------
misiti3780
does anyone know why spiegel leaked these docs - and not greenwald via the
intercept?

~~~
noinsight
They were released by Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras who did a 3C31 talk
about this too.

------
marcosdumay
Ok, now that I've finally read the slides. They take usernames and passwords
out of SSH.

People, if the private botnets didn't made you disable password authentication
already, do it for the NSA.

------
nsansansa
The comments that try to reassure the reader seem to have become more
frequent. Scary.

------
pointernil
In the age of information this is how an overpowered super power gets
"nerfed":

By "targeting" its information gathering capabilities by providing information
about its activities.

Information is power.

~~~
pointernil
Anyone care to explain why the downvotes? I still think all this revelations
will lead to a more balanced state of affairs.

