NSA Chief Stakes Out Pro-Encryption Position, in Contrast to FBI

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/21/nsa-chief-stakes-out-pro-encryption-position-in-contrast-to-fbi/

by sinak • 11 years ago

230 82 11 years ago

theintercept.com

blurbleblurble• 11 years ago

maybe that's cause the NSA has secret algorithms to factor large numbers with quantum computers 0_0

informatimago• 11 years ago

I would think so too.

But it should also be noted they have the mandate to protect thru encryption and system security the data and secrets of the US government.

On the other hand, the job of the FBI is to catch (some) criminals; they don't care much about anything else.

micah94• 11 years ago

I would hope so. It's kind of their job. They've also published guides for strong encryption and best practices for operating systems for years. You dismiss their wealth of knowledge at your peril.

The FBI just wants to throw you in jail. What do they publish? Lists of people they want to throw in jail. Anything that stands in their way of throwing you in jail is bad, including your encrypted phone.

spacecowboy_lon• 11 years ago

That is the problem with the FBI doing ordinary police work and secret squirrel stuff the two roles get in each others way.

mst• 11 years ago

Right. When I try and figure out how to compare the FBI to british law enforcement I end up with "MI5 smashed together with Special Branch plus SOCA plus a bunch of other specialist bits" ... and I'm pretty sure if we'd done that it'd've been an unmitigated disaster just the same.

It was notable that there was a very brief "scandal" that MI5 had found evidence of child molestation but ignored it because they'd only found it via their ability to ignore due process in the name of national security and therefore since the information wasn't a national security issue it was filed under "not usable".

Cooler heads pointed out repeatedly that that was how it had to work to preserve due process, and it didn't stay news for long; this was, to me, the correct outcome.

(of course GCHQ is a whole different kettle of fish)

nickik8• 11 years ago

We know that they publish stuff with backdoors included. We know that they payed RSA to build backdoors into their crypto.

Their is a very good reason that SHA3 is not designed by the NSA.

Yes you can learn from them, both from their published stuff and even more from how they attacked people.

exelius6• 11 years ago

The NSA chief should be pro-encryption: the presence of backdoors in encryption (as demanded by some US law enforcement officials) creates a national security threat. Period.

If law enforcement needs access to encrypted data, they already have a few different ways. They can subpoena the data and throw the person who controls the key in jail until they release it, or they can just brute-force the encryption in cases of extreme national interest (it's too expensive to do for run-of-the-mill crime, but they have the capability if they really need it).

IMO the entire goal of encryption tech should be to make the government incur significant costs for every invasion of privacy they feel they have to perform. That way, they have the power to invade our privacy (and I don't think we as a populace can really stop them from having that power) but it's so expensive / cumbersome to use they really only use it in extreme cases. I'm fine with privacy being broken by the government on a case-by-case basis; the danger is when the government does a dragnet on everyone.

rosalinekarr• 11 years ago

Even on a case by case basis, the power to break encryption raises some serious questions. What if the current President or some future President goes digging through the emails of their opposition in an election year? What if the NSA starts investigating the records of politicians with a anti-NSA stance? With access to passwords and accounts, you even have to ask what if an agency like the GCHQ planted evidence in someone's email or tweeted an embarrassing photo on their behalf? [They have the tools to do so](http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/ghcqs-chinese-menu-o...), and with power like that, they could basically destroy anyone who opposes them before they even start.

I don't think perfect encryption is an impossible dream. I think it will be very hard to achieve, and we have a long way to go to getting there, but it's important work, and right now companies, governments and people should be pouring everything they can into making it a reality. We need a lot more research into encryption, especially [information theoretic secure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_security) algorithms.

exelius6• 11 years ago

What if the current President or some future President goes digging through the emails of their opposition in an election year?

This has happened before with Watergate -- and the only reason Nixon got caught was because people talked. I would imagine something similar would happen. Politics can help create some balance here -- if they really were doing something that benefitted one side over another, someone from the other side would likely blow the whistle.

Regardless though, that information wouldn't just be sitting there unencrypted if there was no request look at it: there would be a paper trail that a certain individual was targeted and records pulled. That's not always the case if you just have a huge database of unencrypted communications.

What if the NSA starts investigating the records of politicians with a anti-NSA stance?

This is a danger I am actually concerned about, but I'm also pretty sure this has been going on for decades. If not with the NSA, then with the FBI (e.g. the Hoover era).

with power like that, they could basically destroy anyone who opposes them before they even start.

You don't even need government power to do this; the major political parties are set up with this purpose in mind. And work in politics for even a little bit and you'll realize there's not a whole lot of separation between government work and party work. I don't know that this is really much different than the status quo over the last few decades.

rand3342• 11 years ago

They've kinda already done that. They were spying on the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee...

nickik8• 11 years ago

He should be, but that does not stop the NSA from trying to put backdoors into everything, standards, specifications, hardware and so on.

The NSA wants to be able to easly read all traffic from everybody so they can figure out who the 'bad' people are, inside and outside of the country.

The NSA is not actually primarly protecting the people, its protecting itself first, the government second and third, maybe the people a little bit.

exelius6• 11 years ago

The NSA wants to be able to easly read all traffic from everybody so they can figure out who the 'bad' people are, inside and outside of the country.

I actually don't think the NSA cares about reading traffic from everyone; they know who their targets are, and no amount of software can replace good old-fashioned investigation.

The NSA is not actually primarly protecting the people, its protecting itself first, the government second and third, maybe the people a little bit.

The NSA is a government agency tasked with the mission of intelligence gathering outside the US. Intelligence is far more valuable when you know something and others don't. Any widely-applicable exploit of a crypto algorithm would also make it easier for other countries to break encryption. The NSA has a huge advantage over those other countries' spy agencies in the form of resources; so to protect their exclusive ability to break encryption with brute force, they need to make sure the algorithms are sufficiently strong.

It's about maintaining an exclusive capability that other countries don't have. A spy could leak information about how to exploit a crypto backdoor to other countries and render your advantage useless. A spy can leak your strategy (spend an epic fuck-ton of money on datacenters for brute forcing encryption) all they want, but that won't help your enemies break arbitrary crypto.

rpgmaker2• 11 years ago

The NSA is not actually primarly protecting the people, its protecting itself first, the government second and third, maybe the people a little bit.

I wouldn't put the people that high up the list. Remember that their programs haven't been shown to save a single person. Even with the insane amount of pressure that they had because of the Snowden revelations they couldn't come up with some sort weasel logic that allowed them to claim that hundreds of lives had been saved. They don't care for that.

The terrorists have been using encryption forever and will keep doing so even if it's outlawed in major western countries. Just the other day it was reported that ISIS has its own encrypted chat app. Attempting to fuck up encryption for the masses won't help anyone.

nickpsecurity4• 11 years ago

The NSA chief shouldn't be pro-encryption if they're doing their legal job: collect anything needed to advance America's interests or advise on threats to national security; protect communication security of defense-related systems. Like Hayden said, you draw a box around him and he'll push straight to the edges of it to accomplish his mission. The problem is the NSA's mission is too broad, unrealistic, and essentially evil. It basically requires them to do what they're doing as there's no other option and the I.C. will get blamed by Americans and Congress if anything happens. Surveillance and security theater follow.

I wrote it up in detail here:

http://pastebin.com/J2kc9miz

This is coming from someone whose alternatively imitated them (IAD Type 1 specifically) or attempted to counter them (high assurance security) for around a decade. What goes in determines what comes out. The problem is not the NSA: it's what they're required to do and lack of strong accountability in how they do it. That they were non-threatening to Americans before 9/11 & mission expansion supports my claim.

willvarfar• 11 years ago

Nickp on schneiers blog comments?

DINKDINK• 11 years ago

IMO the entire goal of encryption tech should be to make the government incur significant costs for every invasion of privacy

The entire goal of encryption is to preserve the consent of whomever is using it. Two people wish to speak privately and don't consent to eavesdropping. Unfortunately, due to engineering realities, only the next best thing is for eavesdroppers to incur linearized costs to violate that consent. In effect this is theft of communication / information.

eevilspock2• 11 years ago

Not to mention that you cannot outlaw mathematics.

Because the only way to prevent people from sharing open source code for end-to-end encryption that takes back-doorable companies like Apple and Google out of the loop is by outlawing the math behind encryption.

recursive• 11 years ago

I think there's some precedent for this. I remember export controls on web browsers because their encryption was too strong or something.

derefr3• 11 years ago

They can subpoena the data and throw the person who controls the key in jail until they release it

I think, a lot of the time, they want to read data from a device owned by someone who's not jailable any more—i.e., dead people.

Reading data off the phones of murder victims—the activity you'd expect "digital forensics" to properly refer to—would be pretty useful, if it were possible. I imagine a lot of police work has gotten harder in the move from "little black books" and feature-phone contact lists to everything about a person's contacts/calendar/call history/etc. being on an FDE-ed smartphone. Manufacturer key escrow services seem almost sensible in this light.

The other use is in reading data off devices of someone who's already dead because law enforcement just killed them. I can see both good and bad outcomes of that: if it were quick to do, it would help to map e.g. a hired hitman to their client, or a gang-member to the gang-leader. But it would also encourage/enable "shoot first, ask questions [to devices] later" tactics, which is just plain horrible.

cgearhart• 11 years ago

Manufacturer key escrow services seem almost sensible in this light.

I understand your position, but I could not disagree more strongly with your conclusion. Many of the techniques law enforcement is complaining about losing didn't exist before cell phones (and smart phones in particular). The challenges they face in a world with FDE-by-default are not new, their biggest frustration is in losing capabilities that they feel have been valuable.

The problem with something like key escrow is that while there might be value in occasionally providing access to law enforcement, there is absolute certainty of damage in cases where the keys are lost, stolen, or compromised -- all of which happen with alarming regularity already. You can't un-ring the bell of a data loss due to compromised encryption - so the only real question is how many abuses we should be expected to endure in order to realize marginal benefits in some circumstances.

It is understandably inconvenient & frustrating for law enforcement to lose access to the contents of smartphones, but that alone is not sufficient justification for universally compromising one of the layers responsible for protecting our data.

batbomb2• 11 years ago

You can subpoena google for the calendar and email, Apple for iMessage routing, and the phone company for phone calls and texts. You can even get emergency warrants for that kind of thing. Then you subpoena all those contacts.

This idea that the immediate access to all of an individual's information is necessary for law enforcement to do their work is a farce, especially considering the propagation of private and public security cameras. The same logic is used to justify torture, expand SWAT and procure urban assault vehicles. These things are almost always unnecessary, impractical, or unreliable.

Yes, people can be extremely careful to avoid police. That's not the average case, and we shouldn't optimize our law enforcement for it.

rand3342• 11 years ago

Right, but if I die, I don't want people accessing my phone after death. They can still get call and text metadata from the phone companies for 90+ days. In fact, I think even the text contents of SMS messages are available for 90 days. The stuff I send over encrypted services, I don't want read.

js8• 11 years ago

Encrypted data without a key are something that is irreversible, but you wish it wasn't, really. I think you have to accept it as a fact of life.

Your wish to "reading data off the phones of murder victims" is akin to "it'd be cool they wouldn't be dead, they could tell us who the murderer was".

meowface• 11 years ago

Correct. They support it purely for pragmatic reasons. If there was any feasible way they could implement a perfectly secure backdoor, and that it could apply to most encryption that most people use, they'd do it in a heartbeat. But they know it's not possible and never will be.

The real question is what "clever" new methods they'll invent to deal with a post-end-to-end-encryption world.

DennisP• 11 years ago

With AES-256, if you had a billion GPUs, it would take much longer than the age of the universe to brute-force the key.

https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1x50xl/time...

barkingcat• 11 years ago

They are pro encryption because they can already crack the algorithms (or already have funding to bruteforce them). Of course they'd be Pro-encryption. It's their job. They are also a state-actor.

deelowe4• 11 years ago

They are pro encryption because they can already crack the algorithms

Got proof of that?

exelius6• 11 years ago

Nobody has any proof, but it's strongly suspected. The NSA wrote or had a hand in writing every widely-supported encryption algorithm, and they have a military-scale budget (seriously; the NSA's non-clandestine budget is larger than the entire military budget of every country except the US and China) to spend on hardware to brute-force encryption. Cyberwarfare is a top strategic priority of the US Military, and cyberwarfare is made much easier when you can break encryption.

They have the motive, the resources, and the knowledge to break encryption routinely. It's also standard tradecraft for a spy agency to hide any proof that they have a capability to create uncertainty among their enemies whether or not they do. So no, nobody has proof that the NSA can break encryption, but we do have proof that they have everything they would need to develop that capability.

caskance5• 11 years ago

Any proof would obviously be classified. But there is a lot of circumstantial evidence.

1. He made the statement in the OP. That implies that normal people using modern encryption does not impose a significant barrier to the NSA doing their jobs. Contrast with the 90s when the NSA pushed for the clipper chip, presumably because they couldn't eavesdrop effectively otherwise.

2. The NSA uses its own secret suite A algorithms for things they really care about keeping secret, not the suite B algorithms like AES that they recommend for the rest of us through NIST.

jostmey• 11 years ago

A play for political power. The NSA probably doesn't care if data is encrypted---they most likely already have a back-door to take data before its encrypted or after its decrypted. So if encryption is used, the FBI will be dependent on the NSA.

nickik8• 11 years ago

I disagree. While they try to build backdoors its not that simple. Even if you have backdoor to every laptop in the world, its not an easy thing to smuggle out lots of data without people noticing.

We know from Snowden that they do not have backdoors into everything.

Its about economics, if they can listen in on the exchange its essentially free. If they have to backdoor every end user device, its gone cost a literal shit ton of money.

throwawayaway• 11 years ago

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8623643&cid=5131565...

It's really pretty damn easy.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8623643&cid=5131356...

Win 7, 8 and 10 are done. OSX has spotlight upload to microsoft in plain sight. What else does OSX have under the hood? Phones are pretty much a foregone conclusion in my estimation, with the exception of cyanogen mod or something.

nickpsecurity4• 11 years ago

I agree he's screwing around. They do care, though, because encryption makes their job more difficult. They want to be able to go through every potential source of usable intel as quickly as possible. Can't do that if they're having to sneak around with backdoors on a per device basis. They'd rather use the backdoors for attacks on high-priority targets who are dodging other stuff.

Snowden leaks confirmed that hypothesis. Probably still true for economic reasons as other commenter noted.

nickpsecurity4• 11 years ago

NSA chief can easily be pro encryption in public while breaking, subverting, and bypassing it in private as they always have. So, it's a smart position from a political standpoint. Action movie equivalent of being perceived as James Bond while pulling off super-villainy at the same time. Win win!

nickik8• 11 years ago

He is most definitely not pro encryption. He is just against legal access by other agencies. He wants the NSA to have a backdoor into every possible crypto system and make them the organization every else has to come to for their data.

JustSomeNobody• 11 years ago

I am glad to hear someone making sense. All this handwavy let's just outlaw encryption babble is getting old. There are serious consequences to outlawing encryption.

Oh, and if terrorists are hell bent on attacking, they will do so with or without encryption. And no amount of data collection is going to stop them if they plan well enough.

kriro• 11 years ago

Guess we know which agency has the working quantum computers ;P

ytdht2• 11 years ago

that should be considered a backdoor, unless they make their findings about quantum computing public (the same goes for undisclosed "0-day" bugs that they discover).

caskance5• 11 years ago

In the house analogy, it's less of a backdoor and more like just walking through the wall.

mariodiana• 11 years ago

There are two main points in this debate. Number one, we cannot abide having encryption weakened with back doors. Modern society relies on strong encryption. Number two, no amount of "magical technology" is ever going to replace human intelligence. The front lines in the war on terror is made up of human infiltrators and turncoats, not ones and zeroes.

laotzu• 11 years ago

If the number one security vulnerability is the human element, then shifting a system's security from autonomous unbiased code to the human element is necessarily decreasing security.

Advocates for such are either deliberately malicious or grossly negligent.

jlarocco• 11 years ago

I'm not sure this means much.

Several popular encryption schemes have been developed by or heavily influenced by the NSA (including algorithms mandated by FIPS and other government organizations), and there has been a lot of speculation that they added backdoors to AES and other algorithms.

So in reality they've had the ability to add backdoors all along, and it's in their best interest to keep it a secret whether they've added one, so it makes complete sense that their chief would say this.

njharman• 11 years ago

Probably because NSa can break most encryption.

Golddisk• 11 years ago

Not particularly surprising, the government has ways to get around the encryption anyways, it just takes longer than if they had the backdoors to go through.

o0o0_ooo• 11 years ago

Wasn't this the whole situation with Dual_EC_DRBG? As far as I understand (which may not be that far when it comes to cryptography, admittedly), the NSA has already been caught intentionally weakening cryptographic standards via its influence over the NIST and by paying RSA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

RSA makes Dual_EC_DRBG the default CSPRNG in BSAFE. In 2013, Reuters reports this is a result of a secret $10 million deal with NSA.

According to the New York Times story, the NSA spends $250 million per year to insert backdoors in software and hardware as part of the Bullrun program.

multinglets• 11 years ago

wait so which department is the FBI under and which department is the NSA under again?

... ah nevermind, I'm sure that doesn't mean anything.

NSA Chief Stakes Out Pro-Encryption Position, in Contrast to FBI

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