'Five Eyes' nations discuss backdoor access to WhatsApp

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/30/five-eyes-backdoor-access-whatsapp-encryption

by humantiy • 7 years ago

188 125 7 years ago

xster2• 7 years ago

Tony Ma's daughter better not go to any of the Five Eyes countries at this point.

skrowl• 7 years ago

If this works, it won't actually stop strong e2e encryption, it'll just make people download their strong e2e encryption communication apps from non-mass-surveillance states.

This isn't p*rnhub. You can't backdoor everything.

amfsn3• 7 years ago

People generally don't care about LE reading what they say, so no. People used whatsapp before e2e and will keep using it after e2e.

merpnderp• 7 years ago

Maybe your "people" are cool with LE reading their salty messages to significant others, or hot take political commentary, but all the "people" I know expect privacy as good responsible citizens should.

andyjh• 7 years ago

One might reasonably assume the "bad guys" they're trying to catch would go elsewhere though, if they have any sense. So then you're just left with innocent people to spy on.

driverdan• 7 years ago

This isn't p*rnhub.

Why would you censor pornhub?

jdauriemma• 7 years ago

For those of you searching for good E2E-encrypted messaging apps, Wire is really good. It has true cross-platform support without being tied to a phone number.

bobbyd3• 7 years ago

I know a lot of folks who are technical (and non-technical) and it was a big enough struggle to get them using Signal. I definitely see the advantages of Wire and not being tied to a phone number but I just don't know anyone using it. It's odd because some of those folks are using Keybase chat though... they just bulk at installing yet another messaging app (regardless of features).

hestipod2• 7 years ago

I tried to get people to use Wire but it was buggy enough, and still is with most ignored, the majority of converts have abandoned it. I have continual problems. If it would have been reliable it could have been a killer app as it was basically Skype but encrypted and ostensibly available on all platforms. Having a stand alone (no linked phone) browser (angostic) based option is a great feature. But, it really feels they left the free/Personal version in the dust for their Pro/Enterprise option and from reading Github complaints and seeing a former employee discuss it in another forum I'd assume that to be accurate. Signal isn't much better from reading around and also still requires a phone linked and is only Chrome if you want to use it on the desktop (unless I am behind the times). Seems the space for an all in one encrypted communication/sharing tool available and accessible to all people and platforms has sort of died. I will never trust FB so even if people way smarter than me say Whatsapp is safe it still feels so dirty...and again the phone required bit.

redthrow• 7 years ago

Wire's "not tied to a phone number" part is good but constant delayed messages and lack of (useful) time stamps for each message (a la Signal) make the app pretty much unusable for me (and probably many others).

humantiy4• 7 years ago

The controversial so-called “ghost protocol” has been fiercely opposed by companies, civil society organizations and some security experts – but intelligence and law enforcement agencies continue to lobby for it.

Even if it it was possible I think the bigger question is do we want to live in a society where any and all conversations can be ease-dropped on? I get the point that they want it for investigations, but its been proven over and over that if there is a way it will be abused.

Would intelligence and LE also be ok with that same rules applying to them?

Nasrudith• 7 years ago

The answer is no of course - they have the thought terminating cliche of "national security" to protect against accountability.

Really the fact intelligence and law enforcement agencies are lobbying is actually utterly fucked up. Their purpose is to serve us not the other way around.

If people with actual sense were in charge the fuckers pushing for it would be fired and out the door so fast it breaks the sound barrier - actively undermining that which the nation benefits from the most economically and making them weaker to attackers - all while not making adversaries weaker? That is inexcusable incompetence.

isostatic3• 7 years ago

Their purpose is to serve us not the other way around.

However "we" want them to be able to "stop the bad guys" and "monitor bad communication". "We" also have nothing to hide.

This yougov poll shows more Americans support backdoors in encryption than oppose it

https://today.yougov.com/topics/technology/articles-reports/...

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inline...

dan-robertson2• 7 years ago

I think it’s normally wrong to pose these issues as intelligence services trying to come up with new ways to oppress the population. It requires some kind of conspiracy either of the whole organisation or a conspiracy of the highest levels to trick the rest of the organisation into oppressing the population.

In reality these are massive organisations of people who want to do good and protect people from actual dangers and repeats of actual harmful incidents. So I think framing the motives as malevolent isn’t helpful because the motives aren’t malevolent.

I think it’s much more reasonable to ask why these things arise. Eg maybe the government says “how will you stop something like x happening again” and they say “well it would have been really hard to detect but we were slightly suspicious of them. If only we could get a warrant to find out what they were talking about...”. And this probably seems reasonable to the minister who still thinks these intelligence agencies are steaming open letters or tapping into phone lines.

It doesn’t even need to be the case that people know these laws would work/be useful, all they need is to feel that they would. And this can quite easily happen without any malicious intentions.

Other things one could imagine happening are finding warrants annoying because they feel like a formality and feeling that the pause in the process potentially causes harm. Or seeing the whole “I ask my ally to spy on my citizens” process as a silly way to get round an annoying loophole. I can imagine something like this happening in a multinational company and if you see intelligence allies as actually working together in a team it doesn’t seem so crazy to see it as a silly legal formality to allow the actual teamwork. So (to say the same thing again) I don’t think these things arise from bad intentions.

A final thing is that many people in these intelligence organisations seem to care about how this surveillance is done in an ethical way (although some people don’t). Eg note here that they want to get this ability with a warrant (perhaps they really want it warrantless and plan to get it or perhaps they feel like they were burned by the various revelations and don’t think they could get it anyway).

Compare this to the way much of the modern mass surveillance we are exposed to every day is planned where there is virtually no ethical oversight at all.

ummonk2• 7 years ago

Well there is a middle ground - one where any conversation could be examined after the fact but only with an auditable warrant-based investigation.

consp• 7 years ago

Which still requires a backdoor or control agency which is insecure and can be exploited by anyone by grace of existing and given some time/effort.

humantiy4• 7 years ago

There isn't though unfortunately. If you allow it audit trail or not it can and will be abused. FISA court being an example of that exact type of warrant abuse. Even without a warrant someone would have to hold the master key or keys that any nation state would go to great lengths if they weren't in possession of them and if that did hold it; they will abuse it.

They seem to unlock most of this info though by attacking the endpoint itself anyway.

gnode2• 7 years ago

Would intelligence and LE also be ok with that same rules applying to them?

Intelligence agents willingly sacrifice much of their personal privacy as a condition of their security clearance, so by selection bias would be more willing to subject others to loss of privacy.

JoeSmithson3• 7 years ago

Also, there is no exception in the law for LEOs or intelligence officers, the same rules literally do apply to them.

humantiy4• 7 years ago

I wasn't referring to personal so much. More so the conversations they have that they are trying to keep a secret.

vineyardmike• 7 years ago

So I broadly agree with your point (that 'backdoors are bad'), but I'm both curious, and want to play devil's advocate.

its been proven over and over that if there is a way it will be abused.

Is there actually any good, cite-able instance of government backdoors being abused? I believe it is possible, but i don't know of any instance of it happening.

bitxbitxbitcoin4• 7 years ago

Food for thought: Some of the zero days we have heard about could intentionally have been left in there at the behest of the government for their use.

Barrin924• 7 years ago

Even if it it was possible I think the bigger question is do we want to live in a society where any and all conversations can be ease-dropped on? I get the point that they want it for investigations, but its been proven over and over that if there is a way it will be abused.

I'm going to defend what is probably the minority opinion on this site and say yes, I'd rather live in a society where communication is open to surveillance.

The reason being that the situation appears to me very binary (and I think most people would agree on this), either there's strong encryption in which case almost all communication is not subject to surveillance, or the state has the capacity to eaves-drop.

The first scenario scares me because it essentially eliminates the ability to engage in surveillance when it is needed. Be it financial fraud on a wide scale, terrorism, crime, radicalisation or whatever else, and society has a vested interested in having the capacity to prevent this.

I don't think the two most cmmon criticisms hold up. The first one is that surveillance affects many people adversely. I don't think that's true. Nobody has an interest in eaves-dropping on average citizens, it's simply a waste of resources. The second one is the slippery slope line of argument you brought up. I don't think there is a lot of evidence that, in states of law, surveillance has been abused or employed illegaly.

bitxbitxbitcoin4• 7 years ago

Here is some evidence that in states of law like the US, surveillance has been abused. [1]

[1] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/09/police-ro...

astrea2• 7 years ago

I don't think the two most cmmon criticisms hold up. The first one is that surveillance affects many people adversely. I don't think that's true. Nobody has an interest in eaves-dropping on average citizens, it's simply a waste of resources. The second one is the slippery slope line of argument you brought up. I don't think there is a lot of evidence that, in states of law, surveillance has been abused or employed illegaly.

What about in the current case of the Nicaraguan government? https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/nicar...

deogeo3• 7 years ago

Dealing with the challenge faced by increasingly effective encryption

They weren't able to spy in bulk when communication was primarily offline, and they won't when it's primarily encrypted.

Don't let them frame the brief, anomalous period when they could listen in on everyone, as 'normal'.

tuxxy• 7 years ago

This. That entire period should be examined as a lapse in judgement, not a time when things were better.

Because of our state-of-the-art security, we're now able to do more things online in less secure environments. A secure, distributed internet is normal. One that is insecure by design is not.

m-p-3• 7 years ago

Even HTTPS was costly in terms of resources back then, thankfully hardware acceleration and better algorithms came and there are no valid reasons anymore not to encrypt communications now.

xster2• 7 years ago

They brought it up themselves too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xozVBAWo8XI (not dubbed unfortunately) where their users would accuse them of being antiquated for not doing any server sync'ed messages but it's all by intent.

OrgNet2• 7 years ago

proper security has always been "state-of-the-art"

sanbor• 7 years ago

Smart speakers and IoT might make the future a lot worse in terms of privacy.

torified2• 7 years ago

Also those Ring doorbell cameras that are being watched by over 200 police departments.

JoeSmithson3• 7 years ago

What does this have to do with "in bulk"? Seems like you're the one misrepresenting the situation.

deogeo3• 7 years ago

In bulk, as opposed to targeted spying - you can send an agent to hide behind the bushes, or plant a microphone, or infiltrate a group. Which was possible for a long time before computers or electronics (minus the microphone example), but it's not possible to do it at scale - you can spy on a few hundred people this way, but not on a few million.

skybrian• 7 years ago

I think the idea is that encryption doesn't prevent all eavesdropping (since the client could be hacked) but it makes it difficult to do at scale.

foxylad• 7 years ago

Really good point. I'm amazed we don't hear this argument more, and also the related one that we always used to have an anonymous payment system (cash) so why is a digital equivalent unthinkable?

thaumasiotes2• 7 years ago

Historically, intelligence services did routinely open and read physical letters sent through the mail, on bulk scales.

closeparen• 7 years ago

The historical norm also included pretty overbearing social surveillance of movements and contacts. I think you'd have an easier time getting a conspiracy past the NSA than getting it past the town elders.

nimbius• 7 years ago

from what ive learned about encryption and cryptography in general, it seems like you dont get to put this cat back in the bag once it gets out.

You can hold all the meetings you want. pound fists to table, elegantly restate your problem, but the mathematic fundamentals of it are your immovable object. your only option is to block it throughout your nation. this just makes room for a new, or an updated version of the fly you swat last week that gets around your flyswatter.

Sure, you can try to poison the code base, or inject some kind of malware, but this trick only works once. its not a silver bullet.

MarcScott• 7 years ago

I wrote a blog post about this awhile back, when the UK government was talking about adding backdoors to encrypted messaging platforms, framed as an open letter to our PM. It's a basic introduction to cryptography (I'm no expert though).

http://coding2learn.org/blog/2017/06/11/dear-theresa/

Given that the maths is "out of the bag", any motivated criminal organisation or group that is intent on not being caught can quite easily encrypt their own communications. The only people who won't are the innocent public, who can be spied on with impunity.

coldtea4• 7 years ago

Given that the maths is "out of the bag", any motivated criminal organisation or group that is intent on not being caught can quite easily encrypt their own communications. The only people who won't are the innocent public, who can be spied on with impunity.

It's always the innocent public who is the target of such moves. The goal is state omniscience, not crime fighting.

Competent criminal organisations wouldn't care about laws banning encryption, and would know to use the proper tools.

The random non-competent criminals caught this way, would be used to justify the measure...

coldtea4• 7 years ago

Or you can always make it illegal, and no commercial chat program will ship with it.

Then you confiscate devices and jail people when you believe (or have "reasonable suspicion") that they use one.

Problem solved for the 99% of the population!

gnode2• 7 years ago

A government can punish people for using cryptography, punish failure to disclose keys, or treat use of cryptography as circumstantial evidence.

yters• 7 years ago

As we worry about 'Five Eyes' spying on us, we happily give Google and Facebook all our communications for free...

beezle• 7 years ago

that is by choice. I have no choice about goverment spying on me.

est312• 7 years ago

In contemporary society you are usually quite the outcast when you say you don't do social media. You have the choice between being an outcast and being spied upon. Similarly for government spying in messenger apps: if you are an outcast who doesn't buy a smartphone or computer you are not affected.

cirrus-clouds• 7 years ago

Some info about disgraced former International Development Secretary Priti Patel, who is the UK's new Home Secretary (a position that looks after home affairs such as crime, security, terrorism, immigration, citizenship).

- She resigned from her previous position as International Development Secretary in 2017 when it was discovered she held secret unauthorised meetings with Israeli officials and lied about it. The meetings were not sanctioned by the Foreign Office and were a breach of ministerial code.

- A supporter of Brexit, she suggested last year that the UK leverage the prospect of food shortages in Ireland in order to gain a better Brexit deal. Although, she quickly back-pedalled on her comments, she was rightly criticised for her remarks.

The depressing reality is that the current Conservative Party in the UK is stuffed to the rafters with nasty politicians just like her.

Priti Patel's voting record in parliament: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24778/priti_patel/witham/v...

"Generally voted for requiring the mass retention of information about communications"

"Voted for mass surveillance of people’s communications and activities"

NeedMoreTea4• 7 years ago

Not to forget that immediately on being appointed Home Secretary she was accused of breaking the ministerial code yet again, in May! It's currently the only significant point under the Home Secretary section of her Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priti_Patel#Home_Secretary:_Ju...

Most of the reasonable and moderate members of the Tory party are on the back benches, leaving or about ready to retire. The old, reasonable, one nation Tory party is dead as a dodo.

repolfx2• 7 years ago

The alternative view is that this is the first reasonable and moderate cabinet since the referendum.

Consider that it's the first one which appears to be serious about actually doing what the government repeatedly said it would do, both before and after the vote. A government doing what it promised it would do is reasonable. It is led by a man who wants very much to reach an acceptable deal with the EU, but will leave without one if the EU makes it necessary. That's a reasonable and moderate position of the sort that millions of business leaders take every single day.

The previous cabinet had a position like this: we're saying we'll leave no matter what, but we're lying because we definitely won't ever leave without a "deal" of some sort, which basically means the party we're negotiating with can propose whatever terms they like and we'll always accept them regardless of how terrible. Thus an "agreement" which is universally regarded as awful is presented as the only possible path forward, other than ignoring the biggest vote in British history. That's not at all a reasonable way to go about negotiations or politics. Nor is it even slightly moderate - "we must accept terrible terms or else we'll be destroyed" is an unusually extreme belief, of the sort usually held by countries which just lost a war.

Patel may have broken some ministerial code, and that's bad. But the former Prime Minister and her cabinet said 108 times the country would leave the EU on the deadline with or without a deal and they were lying every single time. The cabinets before that told voters they were committed to bringing down immigration, but after leaving government Osborne admitted the cabinet never believed in their stated goal, didn't want to do it and therefore just ignored it. That sort of blatant, knowing manipulation is far, far worse and completely destructive to trust in politics. Meeting Israelis without filing the right paperwork is trivial compared to it.

CommanderData• 7 years ago

Terrible, cons have always been the nasty party and will continue this legacy.

Her unapproved meetings with foreign states should be enough to warrant her resignation but how she continue baffles me.

philpem• 7 years ago

Good social connections.

arethuza• 7 years ago

I recommend watching this clip from Question Time on the subject of capital punishment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU

I'm still shocked that we have someone as Home Secretary who thought capital punishment was a good idea.

DanBC• 7 years ago

"ultimate burden of proof"??

Are we going to now have three verdicts?

Not guilty

Guilty

No, we really mean it this time, actually properly guilty.

sam0x17• 7 years ago

This will just drive people to more and more distributed platforms until there is nothing they can do.

14• 7 years ago

“Creation, distribution, discussion, or any thought about encryption is illegal and will be punishable by up to life in prison under new anti-terrorism laws.” They will certainly try I am sure but at the end of the day encryption is just math and that is impossible to ban.

motohagiography• 7 years ago

At some point, people are going to see the problem as not of a lack of privacy technologies, but of a small group who surveils them and exploits their personal information to keep them disadvantaged, and they will decide that this is the problem they need to solve.

It is also likely that the technology they use to solve that problem will be much less sophisticated.

Ballots, surely.

taneq3• 7 years ago

Ballots, surely.

Well, one of the four boxes, anyway.

thelittleone• 7 years ago

Or could it be they already have a back door and stories like this serve them by making people believe they don’t.

dane-pgp2• 7 years ago

By this logic, the fact that there were no stories about the government not being able to spy on messenger apps before, means that those apps were perfectly secure until they added E2E crypto. That doesn't sound right to me.

fencepost• 7 years ago

Does nobody realize how inconvenient it is that the relationship between the radius and circumference of a circle cannot be calculated readily by hand? Our manufacturing processes will be greatly improved by silencing those so-called 'mathematicians' and standardizing on a value of 3 for pi not that never ending mess.

peterkelly2• 7 years ago

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

carapace• 7 years ago

CyberSaber..?

By choosing a simple but strong cipher that is already widely published and agreeing on how to use it, anyone with elementary programming skills can write their own encryption program without relying on any products that can be banned.

http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/

And Pontifex, aka the Solitaire Encryption Algorithm (SPOILER ALERT):

In Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, the character Enoch Root describes a cryptosystem code-named "Pontifex" to another character named Randy Waterhouse, and later reveals that the steps of the algorithm are intended to be carried out using a deck of playing cards.

https://www.schneier.com/academic/solitaire/

Laws cannot stop encryption, they can stop law-abiding people from using it maybe but not criminals.

schoen2• 7 years ago

The ciphersaber idea is great, but the cipher that was chosen for the project has been subject to significant attacks (further developments of the ones mentioned on that page) and has been deprecated in TLS. (The attack setting for attacking RC4 in HTTPS is probably a lot easier than attacking short person-to-person communications, but it's still not a good sign.)

Also, when you implement the ciphersaber, you're still only about 1/4 of the way to the functionality of early-1990s PGP, notably lacking any public key functionality.

For file encryption, a user need only memorize one key or passphrase. For messaging, users need to exchange pairs of keys through some secure means, most likely in person. Maintaining a list of correspondent's keys or passphrases in a master file, preferably itself encrypted with a memorized master key, is less convenient than public key encryption. But it may be all that is left in a few years if PGP key servers are banned.
It may even be possible to teach a manual version of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, perhaps using large number calculators (easily built in Java 1.1). The Diffie-Hellman procedure need be carried out just once per pair of correspondents, since CipherSaber eliminates the need to exchange keys for every message.

Apart from the implausibility of some of this, you have a very severe issue about key synchronization if you literally only want to do a key exchange once. For example, an attacker who can intercept one party's message and then trick another party into encrypting a known plaintext with the same key material (because that party doesn't know that the keystream has advanced yet?) can then decrypt the intercepted message.

Even having the two users accidentally use the same part of the keystream to send separate unknown messages m₁ and m₂ will allow an adversary to compute m₁⊕m₂, which is very bad in many cases. One thing I remember from Dan Boneh's cryptography class is that if either message contains an ASCII space character (' ') at some position, then m₁⊕m₂ will contain the other message's plaintext with uppercase and lowercase inverted (for example,' '^'q' is 'Q').

The ciphersaber idea is conceptually really great, and I love the idea of helping teach people to create their own communications and communications security infrastructure. But I think that, apart from just how archaic the cryptographic technology it teaches is, the project really underestimates how far away this cipher implementation is from a complete system.

schoen2• 7 years ago

I should probably also acknowledge that Arnold Reinhold apparently started writing this page in 1997, and so the techniques presented there weren't nearly as far from the state-of-the-art then!

4ntonius8lock2• 7 years ago

This just in:

Dealing with the challenges faced by having a mere 97% conviction rate, federal prosecutors and law enforcement conspire with foreign powers to remove pesky civil liberties.

peterkelly2• 7 years ago

Ever since Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013, I've had zero sympathy for or trust in any intelligence service, even in purportedly democratic countries.

Last year, my own country (Australia) passed a law which allows the government to force companies or even individuals to add backdoors to their products, and makes it a criminal offence to refuse or publicly disclose their requests. I would go to jail before I complied.

For those of you in other five eyes countries, you'll have similar laws soon too. Our intelligence agencies have clearly set themselves up against fundamental principles of human rights, and their efforts to undermine these must be fought.

nitemice2• 7 years ago

One of the scariest parts of this to me is that the vast majority of Aussie developers don't seem to even be aware that such a law was proposed, let along already passed.

throwaway9d02912• 7 years ago

allows the government to force companies or even individuals to add backdoors to their products

I think the tech media and community overstates the impact of this law. The law [0] makes it clear that the backdoor cannot introduce any systematic weakness of vulnerability, which explicitly includes "a new decryption capability in relation to a form of electronic protection".

What it allows is stuff that targets a specific person _and_ is incapable of affecting anybody else. The second part overrides the first part, so if it's not possible to target a specific person without weakening protection for everybody else, you're not required to do anything.

For example asking you to put code into your app that creates a copy of private keys and sends them to ASIO if the user's ID matches a hard-coded value would be legally okay per my reading of the law.

However adding ASIO's key to every single message would not be okay.

I'm not saying I'm in favour of the law (I'm not) but its actual effect isn't at all what people assume (I hear a lot of comments about "Australia banned encryption" and other such nonsense).

[0] http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214...

rowanG0772• 7 years ago

What stops the government from just saying I want to target every single specific person that uses your app?

midge48• 7 years ago

This all shows what idiots government parliamentarians are in Australia. If the issue is encryption, then there are very simple ways of using unbreakable encryption systems without relying on asymmetric keys (ie one time pad or Vernam cypher). Granted it will not suit all use cases, since a means of identifying what is the key to use needs be agreed outside of the network processes. That is face to face or via messengers, for instance. But since any file can be used as key (ie music, text, video, object program, etc.) and having a key larger that the text encrypted eliminates repetition patterns, this is a totally unbreakable system. Even quantum computing would totally fail in decrypting a message! It is super simple to implement with a modicum of programming knowledge, it does not require any maths skills! An example of it can be found here: https://gitlab.com/MidGe48/cryptopad I can expand on the means of communicating and sharing keys which are simple and untraceable without requiring ongoing communication after an initial, simple, exchange.

tru3_power• 7 years ago

In addition to all the ethical and privacy concerns brought up here, another thing that always crosses my mind is do we even trust these entities to properly store this information? What happens if all data that is being collected from these backdoors is compromised? Think about every private conversation you’ve ever had potentially leaking to the entire world.

lunias• 7 years ago

"We need to ensure that our law enforcement and security and intelligence agencies are able to gain lawful and exceptional access to the information they need"

This entitlement is obscene.

If backdoor access is granted then a new set of heads will emerge from the hydra.

'Five Eyes' nations discuss backdoor access to WhatsApp

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