A Saudi Arabia Telecom's Surveillance Pitch

http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/

by bbatsell • 13 years ago

459 111 13 years ago

tptacek18• 13 years ago

This stuff happens more than anyone in infosec wants to admit; it's (ironically) what got me into professional software security to begin with, after being upset by what a commercial network monitoring tool would have allowed us to do to our customers at an ISP I helped run.

It's especially funny to see a government sponsored telecom reaching out to Moxie Marlinspike. Also: this isn't like that time a random Microsoft recruiter accidentally hit ESR and he wrote the "Your Worst Nightmare" post about it. Like Moxie says, money buys technology, and they will eventually find someone to rig up a workable solution for what they're trying to do.

Moxie: one thing that would be hugely helpful is a quick list of the things you did that make you confident in Twitter's TLS code (which: thanks for doing).

moxie7• 13 years ago

In this case I was mostly referring to the inclusion of certificate pinning (ex: https://github.com/moxie0/AndroidPinning) in the mobile apps, which would theoretically prevent them from using a UAE or Saudi controlled CA to do the interception. In addition to iOS and Android, we also refused to compromise with low-end platforms like MediaTek, and made sure those clients were also all-TLS and that they employed certificate pinning. We also did common sense stuff like including assertions in all the platforms that would prevent accidental HTTP leakage.

More generally, a lot of common sense effort was put into the general TLS posture of the website. From certificate pinning baked into the browsers, to HSTS headers, to making sure the links in search results are https.

There was a bunch of generally nice TLS stuff in the pipe as well, but I'm not sure if it shipped yet.

ComputerGuru2• 13 years ago

If you really want the world to be a more secure place, can I please ask that you relicense the AndroidPinning code as BSD or something less viral than GPLv3?

I don't see Instagram, Facebook, etc. using that code to secure their apps, they won't license their Android clients as GPLv3 just to use the Android pinning library. While it is easy enough to re-create your code (though I have not looked at it), given that we're talking encryption libs, it's always nicest to have secure, vetted libs that just work.

(As a matter of fact, I'm sure you had to relicense it for Twitter to use it in their app.)

minimax2• 13 years ago

Like Moxie says, money buys technology, and they will eventually find someone to rig up a workable solution for what they're trying to do.

Governments are in a unique position here. They can always just move up the stack. Can't break the crypto? That's fine. They can just require the mobile phone companies to sell phones with spyware already included.

tptacek18• 13 years ago

That problem is, I think, a showstopper for "anti-circumvention" tools like whatever- the- next- generation- of - Tor will be. Dictatorships have little to lose by backdooring or rootkitting devices; they'll laugh off any outrage stirred up by the discovery of these methods.

But the economics flip around in Europe, Japan, the US, &c: governments there do have something to lose by surreptitiously backdooring huge numbers of devices, and the odds are good that any efforts to do so will be detected (the state of the art for reverse engineering now includes decapsulation and imaging of electronics packages).

spindritf3• 13 years ago

> money buys technology

I don't think it matters. He quickly noticed that the problem is cultural, that

>> I’d much rather think about the question of exploit sales in terms of who we welcome to our conferences, who we choose to associate with, and who we choose to exclude, than in terms of legal regulations. I think the contextual shift we’ve seen over the past few years requires that we think critically about what’s still cool and what’s not.

But the problem with/in Saudi Arabia is also cultural, or social, not technological. It doesn't really matter that they can buy exploits or intercept communications. What matters is that those in power can stay in power while doing all that.

Mao and Stalin built some of the most repressive regimes the world has seen with 1930s technology, and even then they were behind the times. Do you think those would have been rocked by secure Twitter? On the other hand, Greeks ran fairly decent democracies when the closest thing to mass communications was shouting in a place with good acoustics.

I'm not saying the west should just provide scum of the world with access to modern technology. Let's not kid ourselves though. Whether we do or not, it won't change much.

tptacek18• 13 years ago

It is possible to believe both things at the same time: that dictatorships will inevitably acquire exploits, backdoors, and monitoring tools, and that it's unconscionable for companies to sell these things to dictatorships.

The story is perhaps clearer on exploit markets. The alternative to markets is publication, which burns the vulnerability by hastening its patch deployment. Dictatorships will inevitably acquire more exploits, but they are in a race against everyone in else discovering vulnerabilities.

rtaibah• 13 years ago

The problem here in Saudi is indifference. People take it as granted: "Of course its being intercepted" or "they know everything, don't even try." Its a decapitating indifference to the extent that people around me are mystified why I have a VPN connection 24/7 on my desktop and mobile phone; why do I even bother? Even many techies around me think I am naive to be taking all these precautions. Resistance is futile.

PS: Mobily is my carrier. Discomforting. Maybe resistance is futile after all. Sigh.

pessimizer• 13 years ago

It'll change plenty if we do. Oppressive regimes are taken down by conspiracies and secret communication. If they eliminate this ability to associate, with our assistance, there will never be any space for revolution, or even reform.

This logic reeks of the law of averages: "I might as well swim over Niagara Falls because I could die any day, even from crossing the street. If I die today, it was just my day to die."

Of course, I have less of a reply to "Even if I don't sell it to them, someone will." The middle class finds it very easy to rationalize behavior that will keep the consumption flowing.

peterwwillis3• 13 years ago

There needs to be an RFC for Postcard Key Encryption - send each other public keys on hand-written postcards to single-use P.O. boxes to avoid mitm of the initial key exchange. I don't understand why anyone trusts CAs any more.

tptacek18• 13 years ago

Nobody trusts CAs. There is a lot of work being done on layering more trustworthy authentication features on top of the TLS CA system, one good one being TACK:

http://tack.io/draft.html

The problem with simply abandoning CAs is that it creates a situation in which it's even easier for government sponsored agencies to mass-intercept traffic, at least for a window of time (probably several years), and all that window buys us is the ability for sites that don't really care about security to save $10-$100 dollars on cert costs.

runjake3• 13 years ago

> Nobody trusts CAs.

No. The problem is that pretty much everyone trusts them, at this point in time. That was Peter's point.

Sure, there are researchers and engineers who rightfully don't trust CAs. But we don't really matter. The users, the consumers, the parents, the grandparents, the activists do.

EthanHeilman2• 13 years ago

CAs solve a very specific threat model, governments or corporations are not included. It is purely designed to protect against Computer criminals with very limited resources. PKI is designed to be about as strong as the lock on your front door, experts and police could pick it or get a key from the manufacturer but many thieves will just break a window and run a small risk of being detected in the process.

If we want real security we have to build it separate from the CA model, but as you point out CAs do provide some security against government inception, just as a locked door does provide some security against police wondering into your house, and we should not abandon it wholesale.

sneak2• 13 years ago

> Nobody trusts CAs.

Hundreds of millions of consumers use devices that implicitly trust CAs today.

You're usually spot on, but in this case you're dead wrong. Most humans that use the internet use devices that trust CAs absolutely - which is exactly why they're being subverted for government interception.

peterwwillis3• 13 years ago

So, even though the government can snoop on us, we shouldn't stop using CAs, because then the government could snoop on us.

With TACK you depend on CAs to establish the initial connection, set up a "pin", and then no longer rely on the CA for future connections. That initial connection is fungible by a MITM, so it's not secure. We need a term for connections that are "probably" secure, but for which there is no complete assurance of security, which is what any connection based around a CA really is.

This is why the postcard method is superior. Unless someone spends the time to intercept every anonymous postcard with a secret code on it, rewrite the message with perfect imitation handwriting, and send it on to the unknown P.O. box, without more than a couple days delay, it's next to impossible to circumvent this initial key exchange. For those that need real privacy I would recommend this method; for those that just want to order Jolt Cola on an open wifi connection, CAs are good enough.

josephlord• 13 years ago

"In the US Department of Defense, a `trusted system or component' is defined as `one which can break the security policy'." [1]

This really gets to the crux of it. We might deem the CA's untrustworthy but we currently trust them anyway because there isn't really that much choice.

[1] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html - Ross Anderson (Trusted Computing FAQ - Q24)

anologwintermut• 13 years ago

To be fair, CA's and SSL in general were designed to protect e-commerce. As a risk-reword calculation, it probably works for that. The problem is, neither SSL or CA's are robust enough to protect against state-level actors.

mseebach• 13 years ago

You could also just email your certificate and text or call with the fingerprint. You'd have to be very directly and very actively targeted by a very competent government for that to fail.

OGinparadise• 13 years ago

The reality is that they will eventually find a company or five that will do exactly what they asked. Thanks to their checkbook.

Moxie: Do not go to Saudi Arabia, you are probably persona non-grata by now.

ihsw• 13 years ago

The persona non-grata status isn't limited to the .sa region -- he will likely feel retaliatory measures implemented against him from within the safety of the West.

aw3c2• 13 years ago

> TextSecure and RedPhone could serve as appropriate secure replacements

sadly those are only available for Android.

sneak2• 13 years ago

...and, under these sorts of regimes, will likely get blocked should they gain any sort of real traction anyway. (Moxie's post is clear that they want to intercept, and block what they can't.)

Without jailbreaking or a dev cert, you can't ensure that an app you install from the App Store on iOS isn't backdoored anyway.

I'm an iOS devotee but even I'm going to buy a second phone specifically to support sideloading of crypto software for secure communications. My phone's primary function is to communicate (despite all the smartphone value-adds) and secure and private communications are a pipe-dream on iOS.

iMessage is great (and end-to-end encrypted) but if I can't control the list of keys to which it encrypts, it's only as secure as Apple (and presumably the DoJ by extension) allows it to be.

gbrindisi• 13 years ago

You can safely assume that mobile software has been already backdoored. If not by the vendors directly, it is by the companies that are selling "lawful interception" tools based on 0days and what not.

tomjen33• 13 years ago

With Android all you have to do is tick a checkbox to install apps that are not from the market, you don't need to root it and you don't need a special certificate.

Oh and if you want a dev user, it is a one time fee of 20 usd (or was, when I got mine).

moxie7• 13 years ago

iOS versions are in the works!

corywright• 13 years ago

Great news! Any ETA?

phunel• 13 years ago

Excited to try the iOS implementation. Is a desktop client (OSX, Linux, etc) for RedPhone feasible? I understand (I think) that RedPhone doesn't use usernames, but instead uses your phone number as the identifier - but I'm curious if that's a structural restriction at this point. Every time the issue of secure communications comes up the issue of what program to use comes up as well. There aren't a lot of good options at this point. Jitsi seems to be the best people can suggest.

creationary• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, this is the world we live in now. Its only going to get worse, and sooner or later will self-destruct.

Bliss.

knowaveragejoe• 13 years ago

As long as so many people are still willfully ignorant of such things, maybe.

luser001• 13 years ago

I'm very curious what aspect of Twitter's TLS code makes hard to intercept whereas other websites can be easily intercepted? I'm also very curious about how they intercepted Whatsapp. Does it do something stupid like eval'ing code received over regular HTTP?

Quoting the paragraph, in case my paraphrasing is inaccurate: "What’s depressing is that I could have easily helped them intercept basically all of the traffic they were interested in (except for Twitter – I helped write that TLS code, and I think we did it well). They later told me they’d already gotten a WhatsApp interception prototype working, and were surprised by how easy it was. The bar for most of these apps is pretty low."

moxie7• 13 years ago

WhatsApp doesn't use TLS, and their protocol has a fairly long history of criticism.

josh26003• 13 years ago

http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1148702-realized-that-what...

I seem to remember their authentication was a combination of your phone number and the IMEI of your handset, which is woeful security through obscurity at best.

spyder• 13 years ago

and it seems somebody got so angry about they security that he made this site: http://www.whatsappsucks.com

tptacek18• 13 years ago

They pin the TLS certificate: to successfully create a connection to Twitter, their mobile apps will check not only the validity of the certificate the server presents, but also a hardcoded digest of the correct certificate, so that a "valid" certificate for Twitter from a CA Twitter has no relationship with will be rejected.

tomjen33• 13 years ago

Wouldn't that break when they need to update the certificate, due to expiration?

ck2• 13 years ago

I suddenly had a realization why someday in the future everyone is going to want their own personal satellite.

Government interception/manipulation (or any other party) would become rather difficult.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

Until hunter-seeker satellites intercept other people's micro satellites and destroy them, or worse 'wiretap' into their internal computers without their knowledge.

josh26003• 13 years ago

To be fair, is there anyone that doesn't want their own personal satellite? C'mon, that's pretty cool, right?

And I don't think owning a satellite makes your communications secure simply by virtue of owning a satellite. I'd argue that you'd need to own the methods of communication to and from the satellite, which probably isn't realistic.

DanielBMarkham• 13 years ago

"... insecurity predominately tended to be leveraged by a class of people that I generally liked against a class of people that I generally disliked..."

This, this, a thousand times this. We cannot look the other way because the "good guys" are benefiting. Not any more.

The person that reads an article about the USA implementing some automated service to monitor foreign communication must realize that other governments are now doing the exact same thing. We no longer have the luxury of pretending that as long as the outcome is good the means do not matter.

mtgx• 13 years ago

How do the people at Viber, Line and WhatsApp plan to respond to this? Should they implement OTR?

dguido2• 13 years ago

The easiest thing they can do is use HTTPS and implement cert pinning.

rdl2• 13 years ago

Mobily should presumably be shipping "special" loads on their phones, which would bypass cert pinning.

junto• 13 years ago

SA are just trying to catch up with the technology that countries in the west, such as the USA and UK, and other technology adept countries such as China have had for a considerable amount of time.

dguido2• 13 years ago

Hm, I'm surprised more people aren't angry at the lack of adoption of cert pinning in mobile apps. It seems like no one cares to prepare for attacks like this, despite widespread knowledge that they occur?

pmcmahon• 13 years ago

Dear Y Hackers, Please know that there are dumb, non-technical, readers that sit on the sidelines of this site and stare in awe of your courage and abilities. The fact that this article is atop the leaderboard speaks volumes about the community's character. Moxie Marlinspike you are a hero. You are a wonderful writer, and your adventurous spirit is incredibly inspirational. Thank you for sharing your stories. To me this site is a beacon of hope, a daily reminder that remarkably talented people are out there fighting for good.

guelo• 13 years ago

We all supposedly know how totalitarian Saudi Arabia is compared to the free United States, so giving Saudi Arabia eaves dropping and decryption tools is something we all obviously dislike. But we are all bathing in American propaganda, so many people, like those "patriotic hackers", support the Feds having the same power that Saudi Arabia is seeking. In fact, the US government is doing much more sophisticated eavesdropping of all our communications and storing it for later perusal. And they use the same "terrorism" justification as the dictators. And what is a terrorist? Whoever they say is a terrorist. Which can include anyone advancing any political ideology that is frowned upon by the bipartisan "washington consensus" of what is acceptable debate. From libertarians to environmentalists to any kind of anti-authoritarian that doesn't serve the interests of the establishment.

michael_h2• 13 years ago

  ...so many people, like those "patriotic hackers", support the Feds having the same power that Saudi Arabia is seeking

They do? I'm not sure I can name a single hacker that wants the US, or any other govt, to have the same power.

jghrng• 13 years ago

Here's the link from TFA: http://erratasec.blogspot.de/2012/08/who-will-fight-for-me.h...

GHFigs4• 13 years ago

From libertarians to environmentalists to any kind of anti-authoritarian that doesn't serve the interests of the establishment.

Who do you mean? Who is being called a terrorist?

pyrocat• 13 years ago

Kids who post youtube videos of themselves rapping: http://news.yahoo.com/teenagers-social-media-terrorism-threa...

The Methuen, Mass., high school student was arrested last week after posting online videos that show him rapping an original song that police say contained “disturbing verbiage” and reportedly mentioned the White House and the Boston Marathon bombing. He is charged with communicating terrorist threats, a state felony, and faces a potential 20 years in prison. Bail is set at $1 million.

And lots and lots of other ridiculous examples, if you search.

wfunction• 13 years ago

There's no reason to believe Saudi Arabia is alone in surveillance like this.

Meet the United States:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephon...

adamt• 13 years ago

Furthermore - the US has a big advantage. Many of the companies that handle digital communication services (Facebook, Twitter, Google etc) are US based and have to by law co-operate with the US law enforcement agencies. So if the FBI (or other three-letter agency) wants access to your Facebook or gmail, they can get it via those companies.

In countries like Saudi Arabia they don't have the same level of power/control so they have to look at intercepting & blocking the traffic.

orokusaki• 13 years ago

At the risk of sounding paranoid, if I were Moxie, I'd be on the lookout for sure :/ when you get into this sort of thing, not to mention the money involved, you're running serious risk of being "cancered" to death.

RRRA• 13 years ago

So according to a comment in that article, Taher ElGamal would be working in KSA doing interception... Anyone has a source? We need to modify wikipedia, this is shameful if true.

icambron• 13 years ago

I'm a total outsider to the security community. Of course I understand that are plenty of hackers selling exploits to shady government actors, but I'm to understand from this article that the practice is generally not considered abhorrent and immoral? Like, there's a real debate to be had here?

A Saudi Arabia Telecom's Surveillance Pitch

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