An encrypted message to Edward Snowden

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/signed-bda0df3c/

by koenrh • 13 years ago

240 151 13 years ago

b_emery• 13 years ago

From http://www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual/x110.html

"A public and private key each have a specific role when encrypting and decrypting documents. A public key may be thought of as an open safe. When a correspondent encrypts a document using a public key, that document is put in the safe, the safe shut, and the combination lock spun several times. The corresponding private key is the combination that can reopen the safe and retrieve the document. In other words, only the person who holds the private key can recover a document encrypted using the associated public key."

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

In a world where the US government is scanning all your electronic communications, and (we'll next discover) searching your OS X- and Windows-based computers at will, how do you, as a practical matter, keep your private key "private"?

caycep2• 13 years ago

Obviously, hide it in the "garbage file". Even Angelina Jolie knows this!

mpyne• 13 years ago

Keep it public, but use a very good passphrase. That's not impossible to do.

I'm not a crypto type but I believe what you want is a password-based key derivation function such as scrypt, the output of which you can then use as the symmetric key to encrypt/decrypt the private key. (This might even be what GPG/SSH does for you; I'm not at all sure)

trotsky5• 13 years ago

If you want a realistic chance of not losing control of your private key the only real answers are hardware based - using a tamper resistant smart card, hardware security module, tpm or similar systems in which the signing is done inside the chip that contains your signing keys and no general purpose device ever sees the key at all.

Most people using software only solutions won't ever have their keys stolen, but that's because nobody tried to steal them. The compromise of a client os is inevitable if targeted by a competent actor, given enough time.

Smartcards and HSM's may not be infallible, but their rate of compromise appears to be negligable at best and an extremely rare capability for an offensive team to have access to.

Smartcards are surprisingly cheap and easy to work with, and due to their simplicity and long history are quite secure. The only real attack on them involves physical access and causes obvious physical damage that'd be impossible to miss.

jlgreco4• 13 years ago

Only use your private key with Tinfoil Hat Linux on an offline air-gapped computer: http://tinfoilhat.shmoo.com/

I recommend disconnecting your monitor and only receiving output by having it blinked out at you through your capslock light on your keyboard. Bonus points if you can get your hands on some TEMPEST hardened hardware, and/or tamper-resistant hardware.

Anything less will leave you vulnerable to the black helicopters!

Note: I'm joking obviously, but this is something to take seriously.

joeblau• 13 years ago

FIPS 140-2 hardware encryption module - Generate your keys on an IronKey.

drivebyacct25• 13 years ago

I don't get it, unless Snowden's published his public key somewhere and Wired has some really, really important information for him?

msandford• 13 years ago

More likely that it's a publicity stunt, raising awareness of strong encryption that the NSA (probably) can't crack yet.

caycep2• 13 years ago

yeah, I was wondering about how strong GPG was. Back in the day, i.e. the 90's, the assumption was it would take years for then-current NSA supercomputers to factor the keys. Nowadays, with all sorts of new attacks, analyses, and cheap as hell compute time, I would wager that time requirement has gone significantly down.

drivebyacct25• 13 years ago

Hm, unfortunate that those who know what it is will recognize it and not think that and the rest will be confused and close the tab and move on. And the comments (on the Wired article) aren't remotely helpful.

kyboren2• 13 years ago

Snowden called himself Verax[1]. Anyone who wants to send a message to Snowden* can just:

    $ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 79DEBE35
    $ gpg --encrypt --sign --armor --recipient 79DEBE35

and post it publicly; perhaps on Pastebin.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/code-n...

*assuming you believe the key is authentic

dthunt2• 13 years ago

The reason you would advertise a page like this is to get lots of people to visit it. It gives Snowden the ability to look like any of the other (tens?) of thousands of people who visit the URL in the next little while.

gasull10• 13 years ago

The Snowden could use Tor to access the website.

Also, there's no other way to get the message to Snowden unless you give it publicity. If he browses the Internet for news, he will find there's a message from Wired for him.

alanh• 13 years ago

Thanks for the comment. I saw this story’s presence on HN as a complete waste of space until now.

mikeash• 13 years ago

I imagine anything to do with Snowden pales in comparison to getting lots of people to visit it so they can get ad revenue.

CptCodeMonkey• 13 years ago

Let's see, carry the N, divide by P and "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine"

joeyh4• 13 years ago

Interesting, the encrypting key is "Verax (Informed Democracy Front)" and claims to have been created on May 20th.

I can't tell what key the message is encrypted for. They may have used --hidden-recipient

LoganCale4• 13 years ago

Verax is the recipient, not the sender. Messages are encrypted using the recipient's public key. You can confirm this yourself by encrypting a message to someone else and checking to see what which key it shows under "encrypted with".

joeyh4• 13 years ago

Thanks for that correction. Makes this all even crazier, if Wired is straight up trying to send him a message this way.

jevinskie• 13 years ago

What more is there to glean from this bogus message?

   $ gpg -vvv -d letter-to-snowden.txt
   gpg: using character set `utf-8'
   gpg: WARNING: using insecure memory!
   gpg: please see http://www.gnupg.org/documentation/faqs.html for more information
   gpg: armor: BEGIN PGP MESSAGE
   gpg: armor header: Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.19 (Darwin)
   gpg: armor header: Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org
   :pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 1, keyid 5B50940B79DEBE35
           data: [4096 bits]
   gpg: public key is 79DEBE35
   :encrypted data packet:
           length: unknown
           mdc_method: 2
   gpg: encrypted with RSA key, ID 79DEBE35
   gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available

reeses• 13 years ago

There's a 'secret' URL in there that anyone able to decrypt the message will be compelled to click on, at which time the creator can claim either to have contacted Snowden, or to have empirical evidence that the NSA can crack 4096-key RSA PGP messages and none of us are safe.

mvc• 13 years ago

Best rick-roll ever!

_bpo• 13 years ago

The target key was published on 5/20.

    # gpg --list-packets /tmp/snowden.asc
    :pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 1, keyid 5B50940B79DEBE35
        data: [4096 bits]
    :encrypted data packet:
        length: unknown
        mdc_method: 2
    gpg: encrypted with 4096-bit RSA key, ID 79DEBE35, created 2013-05-20
      "Verax (Informed Democracy Front)"

(79DEBE35 can be found on the subkeys.pgp.net keyserver)

kgo2• 13 years ago

Meanwhile, per the Washington Post article, he asked the guardian to setup PGP in Feb, and his contact finally did so in March, both before this key's listed creation date.

gasull10• 13 years ago

Snowden, just remember that Kevin Poulsen and Adrian Lamo helped the US Government in catching Bradley Manning.

EDIT: Also, a pretty safe way to carry an interview would be VPN + Tor + Bitmessage.

EDIT2: Users sneak and tlb claim Tor isn't safe because of timing attacks. Read below.

sneak2• 13 years ago

That's not safe at all, considering the organization tracking him.

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

If not that, then what? If anything?

gasull10• 13 years ago

When using Bitmessage, everybody receives all the messages in the blockchain. How is the timing attack going to identify him?

Maybe Bitmessage helps receiving messages anonymously, but the timing attack might still be possible when sending messages. I2P can mitigate the problem, but I don't think Bitmessage has any nodes in I2P.

I would say that, if you don't trust Poulsen, don't talk to him.

MysticFear• 13 years ago

He publicly stated he isn't trying to hide from authorities.

Mithrandir• 13 years ago

This seemed relevant from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Lamo#Greenwald.2C_Lamo....):

Lamo's role in the Manning case drew the ire of Glenn Greenwald, of Salon Magazine. An ardent supporter of WikiLeaks, Greenwald has been a passionate critic of Lamo, suggesting that Lamo lied to Manning by turning him in, and also lied after the fact to cover up the circumstances of Manning's confessions. Greenwald places the incident in the context of what he calls "the Obama administration's unprecedented war on whistle-blowers". Greenwald's critique of Wired Magazine has drawn a response from that magazine which suggests that Greenwald is writing disingenuously: "At his most reasonable, Greenwald impugns our motives, attacks the character of our staff and carefully selects his facts and sources to misrepresent the truth and generate outrage in his readership." In an article about the Bradley Manning case, Greenwald mentions Wired reporter Kevin Poulsen's 1994 felony conviction for computer hacking, suggesting that "over the years, Poulsen has served more or less as Lamo's personal media voice."

Greenwald is skeptical of an earlier story written by Poulsen about Lamo's institutionalization on psychiatric grounds, writing: "Lamo claimed he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a somewhat fashionable autism diagnosis which many stars in the computer world have also claimed." In his response, Poulsen accused Greenwald of "name-calling, bizarre conspiracy theories and ad hominem attacks".

Glyptodon• 13 years ago

Count me among those suspicious of Lamo and Poulsen. I don't care for them.

justin66• 13 years ago

Greenwald has been a passionate critic of Lamo, suggesting that Lamo lied to Manning by turning him in, and also lied after the fact to cover up the circumstances of Manning's confessions.

Not sure about the second part, but the fact that Lamo lied to Manning isn't controversial. He's talked about it in a few interviews.

This one was a little odd: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/03/adrian-lamo-brad...

tlb2• 13 years ago

Not safe at all. Timing analysis can detect correlations between data arriving at the interviewers computer with data sent by the suspect's computer.

Encryption is good at keeping the contents secret, but not the source of traffic.

gasull10• 13 years ago

I2P has protection against timing attacks.

Bitmessage has deniability, but if the receiver end is compromised or untrustworthy, then the deniability is gone, and the timing attack might be possible.

Combining Bitmessage and I2P would be solution, I think, but I don't know of any Bitmessage nodes on I2P.

rdl3• 13 years ago

Snowden isn't "in hiding" from intelligence agencies, only from the news media. I assess with virtually nil probability that US and Chinese/HK intelligence don't know where he is right now (the only way one intelligence service wouldn't know details is if the other has already taken him into protection or custody).

He doesn't need to use anonymity systems now; he just needs to use a service which doesn't report IP address to the other end. A simple VPN or whatever would be fine.

If I were seriously on the run, I'd be using a system with days of latency (variable over 1-5 days), which blended in with a widespread current system. Essentially Len Sassaman's old mixmaster remailer system, which interfaces with the world over SMTP. The problem is there aren't enough mixmaster nodes to be really enough now, so you'd want to use a fairly anonymous sender too, and the old "USENET message pool" style systems don't work now that "USENET" basically means "http access to one of a few big providers", too.

Kind of a step back from where we were in 1999, which is bullshit :(

enoch-root2• 13 years ago

isn't safe because of timing attacks

What about that it isn't safe because of who is running many of the exit nodes?

ohazi• 13 years ago

It has more to do with the structure of the public internet. A fully passive observer in a few key locations has a surprisingly high probability of being able to perform correlation attacks.

This is a pretty interesting "where do I start?" paper if you want to know more but don't have much background on the subject:

http://www.syverson.org/tor-vulnerabilities-iccs.pdf

foobarqux3• 13 years ago

Pond would be the thing to use if it were ready.

https://github.com/agl/pond

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

Snowden, just remember that Kevin Poulsen and Adrian Lamo helped the US Government in catching Bradley Manning.

I posted something to that effect in the article's comments. It was moderated and comments are now closed (at least for me).

gasull10• 13 years ago

I did too. All comments are gone right now, including mine.

"Commenting has been disabled for this article"

klpwired2• 13 years ago

This is Kevin Poulsen. Just popping in to correct this. Adrian Lamo turned in Bradley Manning. All I did (being a reporter) is break the news.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/conscience/

humanspecies• 13 years ago

My guess is more people liked you when you were just a hacker that almost got in Bradley Manning's shoes.

pvnick2• 13 years ago

I'm sorry you've found yourself in the crossfire. How do you feel about Snowden?

EvilLook• 13 years ago

Hey there Kevin, how does US Attorney cock taste?

Anybody with any sense knows you're a plant, not a hacker, and your hacking charges were laid there by the US Attorney to give you cover to turn on real hackers. Wired has been part of the compromised media from the day they published anything written by you.

gasull10• 13 years ago

There's no way to know if you're really Kevin Poulsen. Your account was created an hour ago. It could be someone trolling. If you want to prove this is you, you could link your comment from a tweet.

I've read more about your involvement in the Lamo-Manning conversation, and I've changed my mind. Lamo turned in Manning. But you knew Lamo was planning to deceive Manning to make him confess more leaks in a second chat:

http://www.salon.com/2010/06/18/wikileaks_3/

I can't edit nor delete my original comment since the edit link has expired.

As an important actor in the Lamo-Manning story, I would like to ask you some questions.

- Do you think Adrian Lamo acted ethically?

- What's your opinion on whistle-blowers and their role in democracy?

Thanks.

einhverfr• 13 years ago

I think he will keep things to sporadic in-person interviews and frequent changes of where he stays. But I don't think he will stay hidden. I bet as soon as an indictment is handed down, he will turn himself in to the Hong Kong authorities and start fighting extradition.

rdl3• 13 years ago

It's reasonable to not trust Lamo, and maybe even Kevin Poulsen (although IMO he's just reported the news in the PFC Manning case; it's Adrian who turned PFC Manning in. OTOH, if I'd been in Lamo's position (convicted felon!), I probably would have turned him in, too, thinking the whole thing was a sting or otherwise a setup since it was so fucking brazen. The only other safe option is "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE SAYING, NEITHER AGREE NOR UNDERSTAND, AND DON'T EVER CONTACT ME AGAIN.").

However, I'd trust Declan McCullagh more than any other journalist I know. He also writes for Wired. He's not uncritical of the PRISM story, but I'd trust him to be fair, and he wouldn't himself become part of the story.

dfc3• 13 years ago

I miss politechbot. I will never understand why so many discussion venues transitioned to forums from mailing lists.

teeja2• 13 years ago

A couple of days ago I read that 'As of 2012, 80% of the Tor Project's $2M annual budget comes from the United States government.'

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732467720457818...

That might be another reason that TOR isn't safe. You don't ever know who any of the other servers belong to ... and the staff at the Exit Node can (and has) read anything. I wouldn't bet my life on software 'originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory'.

hnha• 13 years ago

you can simply run a node yourself and make your client use it.

tekromancr2• 13 years ago

So that they could conduct cyberwarfare ops and maintain deniability. Math is math. All of the cards are on the table, the code is entirely open. The protocol is designed in such a way that any of the in-transit nodes know fuckall about the messages source, destination, or content. There is no "the" exit node, anyone can operate one. Not to mention that there is nothing stopping you from encrypting the data going into the network in the first place. And If you think for a second that the military has some magical insight into information-theory that allowed them to hide a backdoor in a god damn protocol spec, then shit, they can probably factor large primes too, in which case modern crypto is broken.

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

The State Department has had a strong interest in enabling communications particularly from dissidents in various countries (China, Arabian states, possibly others). I'm aware of some projects they've backed or considered. I'm also aware that State is frequently a cover for intelligence operations. And that there's been a fair bit of cooperation between various intelligence organizations and Free Software projects (Salon's got a long piece on Hadoop up at the moment).

peripetylabs2• 13 years ago

I hope Snowden realizes that none of this matters if an FBI agent is sitting beside the reporter as they communicate.

im3w1l• 13 years ago

Presumably the contents of the conversation will not be secret. Only the location of Snowden.

fckthensa• 13 years ago

I am not sure about Bitmessage. It is a very new project and has not been subject to any deep security test. Also, VPNs are as safe as long as the VPN provider is on your side. Tor is your best option.

gasull10• 13 years ago

I was talking about combining all them three: Bitmessage through Tor through VPN.

cdjk2• 13 years ago

If Edward Snowden does have a pgp key (I can't find one online), it hasn't been revealed in this message. It looks like the signing and encryption keys are the same:

  gpg: armor: BEGIN PGP MESSAGE
  gpg: armor header: Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.19 (Darwin)
  gpg: armor header: Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org
  :pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 1, keyid 5B50940B79DEBE35
          data: [4096 bits]
  gpg: public key is 79DEBE35
  :encrypted data packet:
          length: unknown
          mdc_method: 2
  gpg: encrypted with RSA key, ID 79DEBE35
  gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available

Of course, they could have used --hidden-encrypt-to, but I think it's more likely a publicity stunt.

Oh, and if you do find a key claiming to be for Edward Snowden online, verify that it's actually him, ideally through the web of trust, and that it isn't just a key that was created after the news was leaked. I'd be wary of any keys on keyservers claiming to be him that have been uploaded after he went public with this.

sneak2• 13 years ago

There's no way to tell when a key was uploaded to a keyserver without the keyserver's logs.

kefka• 13 years ago

But that's metadata. You dont need a court order for THAT!

Oh wait. That plan only works for federal agencies and secret courts. Never mind.

unsignedint• 13 years ago

If --hidden-encrypt-to is used, there still will be signs of that. Specifically, the message addressed to 0x0000000 and the recipient will basically brute force it uses every key he/she has.

Having said, that, according to PGP Dump

  Old: Public-Key Encrypted Session Key Packet(tag 1)(524 bytes)
        New version(3)
        Key ID - 0x5B50940B79DEBE35
        Pub alg - RSA Encrypt or Sign(pub 1)
        RSA m^e mod n(4096 bits) - ...
                -> m = sym alg(1 byte) + checksum(2 bytes) + 
  PKCS-1 block type 02
  New: Symmetrically Encrypted and MDC Packet(tag 18)(4096 
  bytes) partial start
        Ver 1
        Encrypted data [sym alg is specified in pub-key 
  encrypted session key]
  
                (plain text + MDC SHA1(20 bytes))
  New:    (1024 bytes) partial continue
  New:    (18 bytes) partial end

It looks like we can merely see that the message is destined to 0x5B50940B79DEBE35. We won't be able to tell who's signer until it is decrypted.

cdjk2• 13 years ago

Ah, thanks. I learned something new today.

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

Well, there's now a key matching that ID on subkeys.pgp.net:

    $ gpg --recv-key '0x5B50940B79DEBE35'
    gpg: requesting key 79DEBE35 from hkp server subkeys.pgp.net
    gpg: key 2BE0BC29: public key "Verax (Informed Democracy Front)" imported
    gpg: Total number processed: 1
    gpg:               imported: 1  (RSA: 1)

Claims to have been created May 20, 2013, though it's only self-signed:

    $ gpg --list-sigs 2BE0BC29
    pub   4096R/2BE0BC29 2013-05-20
    uid                  Verax (Informed Democracy Front)
    sig 3        2BE0BC29 2013-05-20  Verax (Informed Democracy Front)
    sub   4096R/79DEBE35 2013-05-20
    sig          2BE0BC29 2013-05-20  Verax (Informed Democracy Front)

trotsky5• 13 years ago

Every now and then I start thinking that Poulsen is starting to get the hang of honest journalism and some amount of professionalism, and then something like this comes along that makes it obvious he's still the same pathological attention whore whose primary hacking talents amounted to getting caught a lot.

outworlder• 13 years ago

What's with the posted image? Is that just for illustration, or is there steganography going on too?

I couldn't find anything running a couple of programs on it, but then again I don't have the contents of the attached message.

jmyc• 13 years ago

It's a picture of the NSA headquarters at Ft. Meade. That may be all there is to it.

EGreg• 13 years ago

http://xkcd.com/1181/

"If you want to be extra safe, check that there's a big block of jumbled characters at the bottom."

tzury• 13 years ago

There is more to it than what you see.

The NSA is known[1] to be able to take advantage of weaknesses found (or planted) in crypto algorithms, however, not in PGP[2] and other strong ones.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography#NSA_involvement

2. http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/faq/faq.html (3rd question)

LoganCale4• 13 years ago

There are a few things about this that seem odd to me. From elsewhere in the comments, the key is encrypted with 79DEBE35, which, if you look it up on your keyserver of choice, belongs to "Verax (Informed Democracy Front)", created on May 20, 2013.

Verax was the name used by Snowden to communicate with Laura Poitras (and perhaps others as well), but the story didn't break until June 5 and his identity wasn't revealed until days later.

So why is Wired encrypting a message with a key using that name that was generated before the name was publicly known in association with Snowden?

EDIT: Disregard the above—the "encrypted with" key is the recipient's key, not the sender/signer. 79DEBE35 may well be Snowden's key (but that's not proven either).

aaron695• 13 years ago

So at a guess basically they've encrypted a message that is not Snowden's key that somehow calls back when decrypted (link, exe or something) so they know if the NSA is listening in.

antocv2• 13 years ago

That would be damn interesting if during decryption it could exploit the decryptor software, PGP, and ping a server or two.

Is that possible? To epxloit a decryptor software while it is decrypting something.

j2labs• 13 years ago

painfully cheesy

edgesrazor• 13 years ago

I was hoping to find something in the EXIF data of the image of NSA HQ on the page, but I think I'm trying way too hard...

marshray3• 13 years ago

If you look closely, about halfway down, in the ciphertext you can almost make out some non-random parts:

http://pastebin.com/q7mxqRn7

kyberias• 13 years ago

This made my day. Thank you! :)

rlwolfcastle• 13 years ago

Honestly, who do they think he is, John McAfee?

AKifer• 13 years ago

Is this just another way to locate him as if it's really serious, only his private key can be used to decrypt it, and his former employer have the public key they use to exchange crypted messages before. In this case it's really stupid

motters• 13 years ago

My guess is that this message is Wired asking Snowden for a chat so that they can get some kind of exclusive story. However, as others have pointed out, Wired magazine doesn't exactly have a good reputation when it comes to defending whistle blowers.

peripetylabs2• 13 years ago

An open message to Snowden: this reporter would hand over his private key in a second.

piratebroadcast• 13 years ago

Lets say I wanted to send an encrypted message to Poulsen. (I do NOT, just figuring out the tech) How would I find his public key? Ask him for it? Is there, like, a directory?

An encrypted message to Edward Snowden

Related Stories