NSA's Inquisitive Look: What is the War for Internet Security (Part 2)

Original author: SPIEGEL
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The assumptions that intelligence agencies have outstripped us so much that it makes no sense to defend ourselves with encryption is incorrect. As one document from the Snowden archive shows, the NSA did not succeed in decrypting a number of communication protocols, at least in 2012. The presentation for the conference held that year contains a list of encryption programs that the Americans failed to crack. In the process of decryption, NSA cryptologists divided their goals into five levels according to the level of attack complexity and the result obtained, from “trivial” to “catastrophic”.

[ first part ]

Monitoring the movement of a document on the Web is classified as a “trivial" goal. Recording a chat on Facebook is a “simple” task, while the level of complexity of decrypting letters sent through the Russian Internet service provider Mail.ru is considered as a task of “moderate complexity”. But all three of these classification levels do not pose serious problems for the NSA.

Everything becomes more complicated at the fourth level. According to the presentation, the NSA is experiencing “significant” problems in trying to decrypt messages sent through email message providers using strong encryption methods - for example, the Zoho service, or when monitoring users of the Tor network, which was developed for anonymous web searches. Tor, also known as The Onion Router, is free, open source software that allows users to access the Internet through a network of more than 6,000 connected and voluntarily donated computers. The software automatically encrypts the data so that no computer on the network contains all the user information. Thus, it becomes very difficult for monitoring experts to track the whereabouts of a person visiting a particular website, or to attack someone who uses Tor to search the Internet. Truecrypt

causes “significant” problems for NSA, a program for encrypting files on a computer. Its developers stopped the development of the program in May last year, which raised suspicions of pressure on them from the state Agency. A protocol called Off-The-Record (OTR) for end-to-end encryption of instant messages also seems to cause significant difficulties for the NSA. The code for both of these programs can be freely viewed, modified and distributed. Experts agree that it is much more difficult for intelligence agencies to manipulate open source programs than many of the closed systems developed by companies such as Apple and Microsoft. Since everyone can view the code of such software, it is extremely difficult to implement a backdoor in it that would not be detected. Transcripts of intercepted OTR chats, provided to the Agency by its Prism partners, the NSA program for collecting data from at least nine US Internet companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple, show that in this case the NSA’s efforts were unsuccessful: “This message was not encrypted using OTR to be decrypted. " This means that the OTR protocol at least sometimes allows you to make communications inaccessible for viewing in the NSA.

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For the Agency, the situation becomes “catastrophic" at the level of “five”: when, for example, the subject uses a combination of Tor, another “anonymization” service, a CSpace instant messaging system and an Internet telephony system (VoIP) called ZRTP . Such a combination, as indicated in the NSA document, leads to "an almost complete loss of the ability to track the location and communications of the selected facility."

The ZRTP system, which is used to securely encrypt conversations and chats on mobile devices, is used in free, open source programs such as RedPhone and Signal.

“It's nice to know that the NSA considers the encryption of communications through our services to be truly opaque,” ​​says RedPhone developer under the pseudonym Moxie Marlinspike.

Die Hard for Fort Mead


The letter “Z” in the name ZRTP is a tribute to one of the system’s developers, Phil Zimmermann, who also created the Pretty Good Privacy system, which remains the most widely used encryption program for letters and documents. PGP was created more than 20 years ago, but, surprisingly, it is still "too tough" for the NSA. “This PGP-encrypted message cannot be decrypted,” the NSA’s document fell into the hands of Spiegel regarding letters sent via Yahoo.

Phil Zimmermann wrote PGP in 1991. An activist in ending the US nuclear weapons program wanted to create an encryption system that could allow him to safely exchange information with other like-minded people. His system quickly became very popular among dissidents around the world. Given the widespread use of the program outside the United States, the U.S. government in the 1990s began to prosecute Zimmermann for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act. Prosecutors agreed that creating an encryption system of such complexity and distributing it outside the country is illegal. Zimmermann responded by publishing the source code of the system in the form of a book - it was a manifestation of freedom of speech, protected by the constitution.

PGP continues to be developed, and today many versions of the system are available. The most common is GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG), a program developed by German programmer Werner Koch. One of the documents shows that representatives of the Five Eyes alliance sometimes use PGP themselves. It turns out that hackers who are obsessed with their own security and the US authorities have much more in common than one could imagine. Initially, the Tor project was developed with the support of the US Naval Research Laboratory.

Today, as indicated in one of the documents, the NSA and its allies are doing their best to destroy the system that the US military helped create. “Deanonymization” Tor is obviously one of the NSA's top priorities, but the Agency is hardly successful in this area. One of the documents for 2011 even mentions an attempt to decrypt the results of Tor using the Agency itself - as a test.

Snowden's documents should, to a certain extent, arouse a sense of relief in people who believed that nothing could stop the NSA in its inexhaustible thirst for collecting information. It seems that we still have secure communication channels. However, the document also shows how far intelligence agencies have gone in their work to preserve and decrypt our data.

Internet security is carried out at several levels - and the NSA, together with its allies, are obviously capable of "using" (that is, "hacking") - some of the most widely used of them on a scale hitherto unthinkable.

Security of virtual private networks and indeed "virtual"


One example is virtual private networks (VPNs), which are often used by companies and institutions operating in several offices and locations. In theory, a VPN creates a secure tunnel between two points on the Web. All cryptographically protected data is routed to this tunnel. But when it comes to the level of VPN security, the word "virtual" is the best suited for its description. This is because the NSA is working on a large-scale project to use a VPN to crack a large number of connections, which allows the Agency to intercept information transmitted on VPN networks - including, for example, the Greek government’s VPN network. According to the document that fell into Spiegel’s hands, the NSA team responsible for working with Greek VPN communications consists of 12 people.

The NSA also targeted the Irish VPN service SecurityKiss. The following “digital fingerprint” for Xkeyscore, a powerful spyware program created by the agency, was tested and used to extract service data according to NSA reports:

fingerprint('encryption/securitykiss/x509') = $pkcs and ( ($tcp and from_port(443)) or ($udp and (from_port(123) or from_por (5000) or from_port(5353)) ) ) and (not (ip_subnet('10.0.0.0/8' or '172.16.0.0/12' or '192.168.0.0/16' )) ) and 'RSA Generated Server Certificate'c and 'Dublin1'c and 'GL CA'c;

According to the NSA document dated 2009, the Agency processed 1000 requests per hour from VPN connections. It was expected that this number would increase to 100,000 per hour by the end of 2011. The purpose of the system was to fully process “at least 20%” of these requests, which means that the received data had to be decrypted and transmitted to the addressee. In other words, by the end of 2011, the NSA had planned to continuously monitor up to 20,000 supposedly secure VPN connections per hour.

VPN connections can be built on the basis of various protocols. The most commonly used Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) and IPsec (Internet Protocol Security). These protocols do not present any particular problems for NSA spies if they really want to hack the connection. Experts have already called the PPTP protocol unsafe, but it continues to be used in many commercial systems. The authors of one of the NSA's presentations boasted of a project called FOURSCORE, which stores information including encrypted metadata transmitted over PPTP.

The NSA documents stated that, using a large number of different programs, Agency services penetrated many corporate networks. Among those who were tracked, there are: the Russian carrier Transaero, Royal Jordanian Airlines, as well as the telecom provider from Moscow, Telematics World. Another achievement of this program is the establishment of monitoring the internal communications of diplomats and civil servants in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey.

IPsec is a protocol that, at first glance, creates more problems for spies. But the NSA has the resources to conduct many attacks on routers involved in the process of creating connections, to obtain keys and more likely to decrypt rather than decrypt the transmitted information - this is evidenced by a message from the NSA department called Tailored Access Operations: “TAO got access to the router through which the main banking traffic passes, ”says one presentation.

Nothing to do with security


The supposedly secure systems that regular Internet users rely on all the time for financial transactions, electronic purchases, or access to email accounts are even less secure than VPNs. The average person can easily recognize these “secure” connections by looking at the address bar in the browser: with such a connection, the address will not start with “http”, but with “https”. “S” in this case means “secure,” “secure.” The problem is that these protocols have nothing to do with security.

Such compounds of the NSA and its allies are cracked effortlessly - one million a day. According to the NSA document, the Agency planned to bring the volume of hacked https connections to 10 million per day by the end of 2012. Intelligence services are particularly interested in collecting user passwords. By the end of 2012, the system was supposed to “monitor the status of at least 100 applications that use encryption and operate on the basis of a password” for each case of their use approximately 20,000 times a month.

For example, the UK Government Communications Center collects information about encryption using the TLS and SSL protocols - these are the https connection encryption protocols - in a database called “FLYING PIG”. British spies weekly report on the current state of the system to catalog services that most often use the SSL protocols, and save the details of these connections. Services such as Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, Yahoo and iCloud are distinguished by the particularly frequent use of such protocols, and the number of weekly connections recorded by the British connection service is billions - and this is only for the 40 most popular sites.

Hockey Sites Monitoring


The Canadian Communications Security Center even monitors sites dedicated to the most popular national pastime: “We tracked a significant increase in chat activity on hockey discussion sites. This is probably due to the start of the playoff season, ”says one presentation.

The NSA has also created a program with which, it claims, the SSH protocol can be decrypted. It is usually used by system administrators to remotely access employee computers, mainly for use by Internet routers, business infrastructure systems, and other similar services. The NSA combines the data thus obtained with other information to control access to important systems.

Weak cryptographic standards


But how does the Five Eye Alliance manage to break into all of these standards and encryption systems? Short answer: they use all available features.

One of them is a serious weakening of the cryptographic standards used to create such systems. Documents made available to Spiegel indicate that NSA agents attend meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which develops such standards, to collect information and, presumably, to influence the discussions held at the meetings. “A new session of policy expansions can improve our ability to passively track bilateral communications,” reads a brief description of the IETF San Diego meeting in the NSA’s internal information system.

This process of weakening cryptographic standards has been going on for quite some time. A compendium of classifiers, a document explaining how to classify certain types of classified information, is marked “the fact that the NSA / Central Security Service is making cryptographic modifications of commercial devices or security systems for their subsequent use” with the heading “Top Secret”.

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Collection of NSA classifiers: “Cryptographic modifications”

Cryptographic systems, thus greatly weakened or malfunctioning, are then processed using supercomputers. The NSA has created a system called Longhaul - “End-to-end attack and key recovery orchestration service for Data Network Cipher and Data Network Session Cipher traffic.” In fact, Longhaul for the NSA is a source of searching for opportunities to decrypt various systems.

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According to the NSA, the system uses the power of the Tordella Supercomputer in Fort Meade, Maryland, and the Oak Ridge data center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The service can transmit decrypted data to systems such as Turmoil, which is part of a secret network that the NSA has deployed around the world to intercept data. The code name for developments in this direction is Valientsurf. A similar program called Gallantwave is designed to "crack tunnel protocols and session protocols."

In other cases, spies use their infrastructure to steal cryptographic keys from router configuration files. A repository called Discoroute contains "router configuration data obtained in an active and passive manner." Active collection means hacking or other penetration into computer systems, passive collection means receiving data transmitted over the Internet through secret computers controlled by the NSA.

An important part of the Five Eye Alliance's decryption effort is simply to collect huge amounts of data. For example, they collect the so-called SSL handshake messages - information that computers exchange to establish an SSL connection. A combination of connection metadata and encryption protocol metadata can help you obtain keys, which in turn allow you to read or write decrypted traffic.

Finally, if other methods do not help, the NSA and the Allies rely on brute force: they organize a hacker attack on the target computer or router to obtain secret data - or intercept the computers themselves on the way to the delivery place, open them and inject bugs there - this process called "obstruction of the enemy."

Serious security risk


For the NSA, decryption is a constant conflict of interest. The agency and its allies have their own secret encryption methods for internal use. But the NSA is also required to provide the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with “guidelines for choosing reliable technologies” that “can be used in cost-effective systems to protect sensitive data.” In other words, checking the quality of cryptographic systems is part of the NSA's work. One of the encryption standards that NIST recommends is the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). It is used in various systems, from encrypting the PIN code of a bank card to encrypting the computer’s hard drive.

One of the NSA documents indicates that the Agency is actively looking for ways to break into the standard that it itself recommends - this section is marked with the “Top Secret” heading: “Electronic code books, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard, are both widespread and well protected from crypto attack. The NSA owns only a small number of internal hacking techniques. The TUNDRA project is exploring a potentially new technique to determine its usefulness in analyzing electronic code books. ”

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The fact that a huge number of cryptographic systems that have flooded the Internet are intentionally weakened or hacked by the NSA and its allies poses a huge threat to the security of everyone who relies on the Internet - from users who rely on security on the Web to institutions and companies working with cloud computing. Many of these "holes" can be used by anyone who finds out about them - and not just the NSA.

The intelligence department itself is well aware of this: according to a 2011 document, 832 employees of the Government Communications Center themselves became participants in the BULLRUN project, whose goal is a widespread strike on Internet security.

The two authors, Jacob Appelbaum and Aaron Gibson, work on the Tor project. Appelbaum also works in the OTR project and is involved in the creation of other data encryption programs.

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